This is Environmental Ethics: An Introduction

6 ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: ECOLOGICAL FEMINISM, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND ANIMAL RIGHTS

6.1 Climate Change and Environmental Justice

Among the questions that have guided this introduction to environmental ethics has been “When is a planet a world?” My hope is that it’s clear that what makes a planet a world has to do with all of the ways living and nonliving entities interact on its surface, dwell its depths, inhabit its inclines, canopies, and atmosphere. Like all living things, we human beings are dependent on the planet, its resources and its atmosphere. But the ways we navigate that dependence, creating a multitude of worlds, that is, cultures, religions, forms of government, and systems of moral decision-making, as we go, vary greatly. Geography, proximity to potable water, food security, exposure to heat, cold, disease, and the potential for conflict, as well as factors like sex, gender, race, and class, all play a role in the making of worlds whose benefactors and beneficiaries, winners and losers, impact not merely the future of these worlds, but that of the planet that sustains them. The one thing that binds us all, human and nonhuman, is a planetary environment jeopardized not only by reckless actions, but by inaction, inertia, and denial, especially of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions for the planet’s atmosphere.

Worlds are more than planets and, at least according to the ideas, theories, and arguments we’ve considered thus far, more than human entitlements. We have ...