Justice-based approaches to environmental harm - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 9

by normatively sanctioned forms of activity (such as clearfelling of
Australian, Brazilian and Indonesian forests). The first is deemed to
be 'criminal' or 'harmful', and thus subject to coercive social control.
The second is not considered a criminal matter, although subject to
regulation. The overall consequence is for the global environmental
problem to get worse, in the very midst of the proliferation of a greater
range of regulatory mechanisms, agencies and laws. This is partly an
outcome of the way in which environmental risk is compartmentalised:
specific events or incidents attract sanction, while wider legislative
frameworks may set parameters on other ecologically harmful practices,
but nevertheless still permit them to continue.
The critical questions - applicable to each of the justice-based
approaches offered above - is what criteria can be used to substantiate
specific claims that something is harmful, and whether it is harmful
to the extent that warrants application of the label 'criminal'. These
are questions of measurement in terms of the scale and seriousness of
the harm.
Harm has been described as a 'normative concept that reflects
underlying social judgements about the good and the bad', and
environmental harm specifically has been defined as 'a setback to human
interests that community norms have deemed to be significant' (Lin,
2006: 901). The varied dimensions of harm are demonstrated in the
contemporary proliferation of information about chains of causation
that generate direct, indirect, immediate and cumulative harms (Lin,
2006; Heckenberg, 2010). Harm is complex and transferable.
Given that harm is a normative concept, specific forms of harm
need to be analysed in ways that offer specific facts about their nature
and extent, the uncertainties associated with their occurrence and the
societal priorities that exist in relation to them. This is both a technical
and philosophical exercise that requires tools for the measurement and
evaluation of harm in specific contexts, circumstances and situations.
For instance, how do we distinguish between a minor harm and a major
harm? How do we reconcile situations in which two different forms
of harm are at play involving risk tradeoffs? For example, public health
in regards to the West Nile virus, which is spread by mosquitoes, may
be advanced by an aerial spraying campaign using chemical pesticides,
but this may, in turn, generate harm to the environment and to people
(see Scott, 2005a).
Harm can also be defined, negatively, in terms of loss or diminishment.
A key concept here is that of sustainability, which refers to notions of
ongoing ecological and environmental balance over time (Merchant,
2005; Al-Damkhi et al, 2009). A loss of environmental resources or