Environmental justice and harm to humans - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 35

Principle 1 :
Man (sic) has a fundamental right to freedom, equality and
adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality
that permits a life of dignity and well-being, and he (sic)
bears a solemn responsibility to protect and improve the
environment for present and future generations.
This principle encapsulates two key obligations: first, intergenerational
responsibility such that present generations do not act in ways which
jeopardise the existence of future generations (intergenerational equity);
and second, environmental justice in the here and now such that
access to and use of specific natural resources in defined geographical
areas, and the impacts of particular social practices and environmental
hazards are 'shared out' on an equal rather than discriminatory basis
(social equity). Environmental harm is thereby constructed in relation
to perceptions of 'value' that place humans at the core.
As such, the point is to protect and preserve particular environments
and/or species for the 'greater good' of humans . Should, however,
environmental rights be seen as an extension of human or social rights
(for example, related to the quality of human life, such as provision of
clean water), or should human rights be seen as merely one component
of complex eco-systems that should be preserved for their own
sake (that is, as in the notion of the rights of the environment) (see
Thornton and Tromans, 1999; Christoff, 2000)? For present purposes
we need simply to acknowledge that a narrow conceptualisation of
environmental justice focuses predominantly on human welfare and
interests. This translates into propositions such as, for instance, that
present generations ought to act in ways that do not jeopardise the
existence and quality of life of future generations. As discussed in the
next chapter, other conceptions of environmental rights are broader
than this, being premised on the idea that we ought to extend the
moral community to include nonhuman nature.
Within an EJ framework, environmental issues are thus examined
in terms of effects on human populations, including the ramifications
of certain practices on competing industries (for example, negative
impact of clearfell logging on tourism). The use of pesticides, to take
another example, may have dramatic impacts on animal species (in
that they seem to have coincided with the spread of a fatal tumour
disease among the Tasmanian devil population in recent years) and on
specific environments (the pollution of coastal waters in north eastern
Tasmania). The damage, however, is often framed in terms of human loss