Toward eco-justice for all - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 160

dogs, hunting dogs). Their 'essence' (as with the essence of humans) is
a social and historical product.
Supported and enhanced functioning requires the material necessities
that allow for both subsistence and more-than-subsistence. This basically
rests upon having an adequate habitat within which to flourish. Again,
this is about the nature of home (that is, quality of living) as well as
finding a home in nature (that is, being embedded in life sustaining
environments). Agency and structure, choice and necessity, are always
intertwined and contingent upon local conditions and circumstances.
Justice is about enhancing opportunities within the limits of what is
possible to achieve within certain spaces.
Proposition 3: Justice deals with issues holistically
Acknowledgement of 'victim' status is crucial to understanding the
ways in which environmental harm affects both human and the
nonhuman. This means locating creatures and environments within
their unique ecological niche and context. It also means examining
events and contemporary human practices from the vantage point
of history and geography. Jacoby (2001), for example, describes how
traditional users in the Adirondack Mountains responded to their
exclusion and criminalisation by turning to arson and burning the
forests that previously had sustained them. Certain types of offending
are directly attributable to changes in the definition of culturally
embedded practices (for example, using snares to hunt, gathering wood
from forests), rather than being harmful in and of themselves. They are
malum prohibitum , acts that are criminal not because they are inherently
bad, but because the act is now prohibited by law. Responding to this
criminalisation of particular practices may, in turn, take the form of
behaviour destructive to various stakeholders.
Those who kill others include animals that hunt other animals for
food. Are those animals that are devoured 'victims'? Humans also kill
animals for food. Under what circumstances ought these food animals
to be considered 'victims'? In the first instance, death can be cruel, slow
and agonising. The same can happen in regards to the second type of
killing. Humans are animals, thus predation upon other animals in one
sense may be seen as perfectly 'natural', simply part of the human-nature
(human in nature) nexus. What rules should determine whether or not
the killing of animals by humans is legitimate or not? Can 'respect' for
an animal be maintained in the act of killing that same animal? A holistic
approach to justice asks these kinds of questions and attempts to locate
the answers concretely by reference to culture, history, geography and