Justice-based approaches to environmental harm - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 13

life, and accordingly fewer legal, social and economic resources are
put into acknowledging, supporting and respecting the nonhuman.
• The need for participation is also defined as an important component
of justice. Participation generally refers to a person's membership
and engagement in the greater community, and is supported by
the institutionalisation of democractic and participatory decision-
making procedures. As applied to the nonhuman world, participation
involves human advocacy, where the voice of animals or trees or
eco-systems is 'heard' via the human third party. Humans speak 'on
behalf of ' that and those which cannot participate directly in human
affairs that affect them.
• Capability is important to justice as well. This refers to the ability to
achieve valuable functionings within the context of one's essential
character and setting. For humans, capabilities are about a person's
opportunities to do and to be what they choose in the context of
a given society. Wellbeing is about 'doing' (activities) and 'being'
(states of existence). Enhancing capability means concentrating on
the opportunity to be able to have combinations of functionings
and for the person to be free to make use of this opportunity or not
(Schlosberg, 2007). Translated into an eco-justice context, capability
means that each thing should be able to flourish as the thing it
is. It is argued, for example, that 'Every component of the Earth
Community has three rights: the right to be, the right to habitat,
and the right to fulfil its role in the ever renewing processes of the
Earth Community' (Berry, quoted in Cullinan, 2003). What this
means in practice is difficult to determine, however, since nature by
definition is complex, uncertain, interconnected and ever changing.
Capabilities (as possibilities) are therefore changing, open-ended,
dynamic and subject to ongoing deliberation.
The close association of justice principles with conceptions of harm is
not without controversy (see Pemberton, forthcoming). Social harm
accounts tend to view harm as reflective of 'what is' in the context
of 'what ought to be' (a fusion of 'fact' and 'value'), especially since in
this framework the criteria for determining harm necessarily includes
extra-legal criteria and informed opinion regarding what is deemed
to be 'wrong'. Analysis proceeds on the basis of acts and omissions that
are generative of some type of negative consequence and these are
deemed to be morally wrong on the basis that someone or something
is thereby harmed. Justice is not only concerned with 'what is/what
ought to be', but 'what could be'. In other words, as described above,
it encapsulates, as well, the idea of potentials - potentials that in many