Todays environmental crisis is perhaps the most contemporary issue we face this century. It is big in terms of the size of the problems faced and solutions required; global warming, the depletion of the Ozone layer, acid rain, deforestation, toxic was...
Todays environmental crisis is perhaps the most contemporary issue we face this century. It is big in terms of the size of the problems faced and solutions required; global warming, the depletion of the Ozone layer, acid rain, deforestation, toxic waste, desertification, food scarcity, resources, energy exhaustion and so on. It is the most crucial issue we have to deal with to ensure our continued existence.
Ever since we realized the magnitude of this environmental crisis, there have been many attempts to seek out the root of the problems and to find their solutions. The philosophical view is that the fundamental root of the crisis is the result of man's anthropocentric conception of value, his dualistic conception and his mechanistic conception of nature.
Based on our anthropocentric views, we have taken both a dominative and exploitative attitude to the nature and hence brought about current environmental crisis. Furthermore, such views dominate most areas like politic, economy, society, jurisprudence, and culture. The discourse of justice as the existing idea of jurisprudence also premises such anthropocentric conception of value, and deals only with the relationship between humans. And so the nature, our planet, has been seen only as the object to be distributed among us for our benefit.
Examining classical theories of justice such as utilitarianism, liberalism, contractarianism (justice theory by Rawls), Marxism, communitarianism and so on, it appears that such theories of justice cannot explain the relationship between human beings and the environment well as its scope is limited to the relationship between human beings. Therefore, classical theories of justice are not appropriate solution for our current crisis. Furthermore, in relation to the problem of environmental inequality, the aforementioned theories do not provide suitable theoretical approaches to the crisis and possible solutions.
The environmental crisis is a matter for all of us on this planet and the way of approaching to this matter tends to be universal, hence it appears that we may neglect discriminatory effects of environmental destruction which impact on the socioeconomically weaker groups of people such as lower class people, minority and so on. Such concerns of environmental inequality shows that it is worth paying attention to the environmental justice. The environmental justice is the spatiotemporally expanded concept to show and deal with environmental inequality between classes, region, races and so on, its inequality between nations, and its inequality between generations. Therefore, the discourse of justice in the environmental crisis must be able to overcome such problems of inequality.
However, environmental justice itself is not enough in determining fundamental solution to the problems. As long as we adopt anthropocentric discourse of justice as the premise of idea of jurisprudence, we will not be able to provide appropriate solutions to the environmental crisis. Therefore the main objective of this dissertation is to undermine anthropocentric conceptions of the environment and to seek ecological justice as the new level of justice based on ecological consideration.
Ecological justice is a definition given taking into consideration the relationship between human being and nature. Ecosystem are interdependent and able to restore and balance itself in case of destruction up to a certain limit. However, continuous destruction and contamination of nature will exceed this limit causing the ecosystem not to be able to restore itself, hence making it vulnerable. It may well result in the total destruction of our planet eventually. Furthermore, if we accept the fact that even morality, law, justice are set up for adaptation, and "stability and balance of the ecosystem." is necessary requirement for our continuous existence in this planet, then it should lead us to seek a new definition; the ecological justice aimed on stability and balance of the ecosystem.
Then it covers the theoretical possibility and practical necessity of considering nature as a legal rights holder so as to establish distributive justice between nature and human beings based on stability and balance of the ecosystem, and to consider nature(or ecosystem) as the equal subject in the argument of justice.