International Women's Rights Law and Gender Equality: Making the Law Work for Women by Ramona Vijeyarasa

Author:Ramona Vijeyarasa [Vijeyarasa, Ramona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000401752
Goodreads: 56364857
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Moving towards more just environmental laws

Another way that environmental law in Australia could be reformed using ‘the master’s tools’ approach would be to introduce an environmental justice framework. The theory of environmental justice has been used to address injustices facing communities of colour in the United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK) and European Union. Scholars are now starting to think about how this framework could be used to address gendered issues associated with environmental degradation (McGregor 2020). Environmental justice theory recognises that multiple intersecting factors, including race, class and geographical location, mean that certain groups are more vulnerable to environmental degradation.

Unlike the concept of ESD, which emerged from international environmental law, an environmental justice movement emerged during the 1980s as a result of protests seeking to prevent hazardous waste facilities being built in areas with high numbers of African-American and people of colour communities. The movement sought to highlight the unacceptable risk faced by communities of colour arising from environmental management and laws, eventually resulting in the creation of an environmental justice mandate within the United States Environmental Protection Agency (United States Environmental Protection Agency 2018). The mandate requires the federal government to consider environmental justice when setting standards, permitting facilities, awarding grants, issuing licences and when regulating and reviewing proposed actions by federal agencies.

Environmental justice scholarship identifies four aspects of environmental injustice: (1) distributive injustice arising from disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards; (2) procedural unfairness caused by lack of participation rights and exclusion from environmental decision-making; (3) corrective injustice due to inadequate enforcement of environmental standards and legislation; and (4) social injustice, on account of the interconnectedness between environmental degradation and deeper structural issues such as poverty and racism (Gonzales 2015). The language of human rights is often employed to make the case for environmental justice concerns, with rights to a healthy environment, cultural rights or the human right to life, health, food and water being utilised in environmental justice-related litigation or policy change campaigns. Gonzales (2015) explains that the language of human rights provides a powerful frame for conceptualising social injustices arising from environmental regulation and creates a human face of the environmental degradation.

Carmen Gonzales’s work (2015) shows that the roots of environmental injustice stem from colonialism. Colonisation in Australia has completely disrupted and destroyed the landscape of the country, through a combination of logging, mining and industrial agriculture. This process displaced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders from their ancestral lands, enslaved individuals and communities and destroyed family relationships through forced separation policies – all of which arguably amounted to the international crime of genocide. The introduction of the British colonial system in Australia has resulted in the development of a land management regime which prioritises private property rights over broader collective interests in land, water, biodiversity and resource management. Reforming Australian environmental law to reflect environmental justice principles has an important role to play in correcting this colonial injustice within Australia. The adoption of environmental justice opens up an opportunity to consider how race, gender,

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