Trajectories of Environmental Justice

Abstract

Before the last state election, the current Victorian government promised from opposition to develop an Environmental Justice Plan if elected. It acknowledged international best practice as a benchmark for such a plan, though it did not recognise the legacy of environmental justice activism and scholarship locally. With the plan still in progress, this article considers the global histories and future directions of environmental justice and a literature-based framework for curating a Victorian plan. It breaks with the common understanding, including that held by government bureaucrats in Victoria, of environmental justice emerging from the United States in the 1980s. The article situates Victoria within that past, the current and future of the concept of environmental justice. Two notable recent legal events affirm the need for, and suggest the shape of, a Victorian environmental justice approach – the housing estate gas leak in outer suburban Melbourne and the Hazelwood coal mine fire in regional Victoria.

Insights from Antipodean legal geography: Building an environmental legal geography scholarship

“…Antipodean legal geography scholarship also offers distinctive insights into the scalar aspects of environmental law's impact, and much ALG work is inflected with an environmental justice focus. For example, Jessup (2013Jessup ( , 2015Jessup ( , 2017, in work that provides a nuanced analysis of environmental justice, invites us to both challenge and critique the application of environmental laws in their local contexts and to think carefully about the dominant US-inspired environmental justice framing. Jessup's work explores a range of local issues occurring across Australia, including the Victorian (state government) 'Environmental Justice Plan' (Jessup, 2017), forest conflicts in the state of Tasmania (Jessup, 2015) and rubbish (tip) placements in the state of New South Wales (Jessup, 2013).…”

“…For example, Jessup (2013Jessup ( , 2015Jessup ( , 2017, in work that provides a nuanced analysis of environmental justice, invites us to both challenge and critique the application of environmental laws in their local contexts and to think carefully about the dominant US-inspired environmental justice framing. Jessup's work explores a range of local issues occurring across Australia, including the Victorian (state government) 'Environmental Justice Plan' (Jessup, 2017), forest conflicts in the state of Tasmania (Jessup, 2015) and rubbish (tip) placements in the state of New South Wales (Jessup, 2013). Each study provides a grounded, critical environmental legal geography with an enticing scalability (a useful insight for scholars with a geographical leaning).…”

“…Adding to this work, ALG perspectives also articulate the need to centre the more-than-human in law and place-making analysis (see e.g. Bartel, 2020;Charpleix, 2018;Carter and Paterson, 2021;Jessup, 2015;O'Gorman, 2016). Further, and by way of example, Lange and Gillespie (2022) use legal geography as both a method and praxis (following O'Donnell et al, 2020; and akin to Jacobsen, 2021) as they analyse prescribed burning legislation and policy to assess to what extent more-than-human concerns are given priority in wild or bushfire management practices.…”

Bushfire, prescribed burning, and non‐human protection

“…This line of legal geography scholarship has proved useful in examining human-nature relations and the impact of regulatory regimes on the non-human world (Bartel et al, 2013;Gillespie, 2020;Jessup, 2015). By way Jessup (2015) has drawn attention to the case of Brown v Forestry Tasmania [No4], and a ruling in favour of non-human nature that logging should not go ahead due to the detrimental impacts it would have on the survival and capabilities of several endangered species, legally protected under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (1999) (C'th). While this judgement was subsequently overturned on appeal, the first instance judgement considered and gave voice to non-human nature rights.…”

A future agenda for environmental restorative justice?

“…Environmental justice as a normative ideal is achieved when communities have the right and capacity to participate meaningfully in environmental decisions affecting them, and when no individual or group is disproportionately impacted by the outcomes of such decisions, including future generations (Jessup, 2017;Lukasiewicz, 2016). Environmental justice scholars analyse resource conflicts, pollution distribution and decision-making through this lens, whilst activists aim to create an environmentally just world (Bullard, 1994;Holifield, Chakraborty & Walker, 2017).…”