Multivalent Environmental and Ecological Justice Reimagined

Climate change and worsening environmental degradation remain the greatest threat of our time. How to address the environmental crisis ethically and equitably is one of the most important questions facing the global community. Conceptions of environmental justice and ecological justice are key sources of guidance on this matter. Yet these conceptions are ill equipped to guide global action. They identify four core dimensions of environmental justice and ecological justice: distribution, recognition, inclusion, and well-being. In this paper, I argue that different ontological (e.g., holism) and experiential (e.g., colonization and coloniality) starting points in the Global South identify additional dimensions-harmony and power-and additional aspects of the recognition dimension that are largely missing from dominant multivalent concepts. I next offer three epistemic reasons why excluding the additional dimensions and aspects from our conception of environmental justice and ecological justice is problematic. I then apply relevant theory from the Global North and South to propose how the power, harmony, and recognition dimensions might be understood or reimagined. I demonstrate that a broadened environmental justice and ecological justice concept identifies certain issues voiced by people from the Global South as injustices, where current mainstream concepts do not. I conclude by considering important objections to the ideas proposed in the paper.