Toward eco-justice for all - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 161

need - and by comparing what happens between and within diverse
eco-systems, and between different species.
A holistic approach is also needed in order to ensure clarity over
purpose. Human intervention premised upon restorative justice, while
laudable in its intent to redress environments left in a degraded state,
may in fact reproduce narrowly conceived instrumental views of nature.
As Besthorn (2013: 240) points out:
[T]he argument is that restoration based on human
benefit and interests alone fails to provide an adequate
ethical justification for the restoration of ecosystems.
The moral dilemma is the fashioning of environmental
responses purely on human grounds. The real temptation
is that environmental restoration becomes an unassailable
justification for degrading ecosystems in the first place
because humans can restore them to their original,
untrammeled perfection.
The philosophical argument about human benefit and interests is worth
unpacking and subjecting to critical scrutiny, given the anthropocentric
nature of 'justice' and institutions such as courts to begin with.
Nonetheless, if restorative justice translates into 'business as usual' or
simply assists in assigning value to the 'costs of doing business', then it
will not contribute to the kinds of fundamental changes that underpin
an eco-justice perspective.
Proposition 4: Justice has temporal and spatial dimensions
The world - including natural and human - is ever changing. So too,
it is important that decisions made yesterday be reviewed today, and
that today's decisions be reassessed in the light of future knowledge.
Plantation forests may serve to diminish the amount of clearfelling of
old growth forests, but the reduction in biodiversity represented in
monoculture plantings bears with it new implications for ecological
health and wellbeing. Everything we do to and for eco-systems, human
populations, and animals and plant species reverberates and impacts
upon everything else. The butterfly effect has real consequences.
Environmental harm originates in particular places, and affects
somebody or something in particular places. The harm may not
always be apparent immediately, but only surface much later. Harm
accumulates. Harm moves. Harm stays for long or short periods of
time. To forestall harm we need to have a sense of risk of harm. To act