Ecocentric Environmental Justice: Why We Should Go There and How We Can Get There

Environmental justice is necessary. It forces us to grapple with the fact that environmental burdens and benefits have been disproportionately divvied up across arbitrary race- and income-based lines, asks “what are you going to do about it?”, and offers solutions and answers to the problems it identifies. Everyone benefits from environmental justice. At the same time, environmental protection is necessary. Not only does environmental protection, by definition, protect the biotic and abiotic components of the natural world, but it further serves to protect humans, who unequivocally rely on the natural environment to sustain their collective life. Everything – living and non-living – depends on a functioning and protected natural environment. This piece, recognizing the above, explores how to marry environmental justice and ecocentrism. The environmental justice movement is presently and predominantly anthropocentric, and because anthropocentricism garners the capacity to be harmful when left unchecked, the movement ought to peel away from its human-centered lens and embrace the nature-centered lens of ecocentrism. The marriage proposed herein is simple: a new definition of environmental justice.