Environmental justice and harm to humans - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 48

environmental rights (Clark, 2009). This is not without its ironies. For
example, while western (northern) companies dump toxic waste and
exploit people and resources in the South precisely because of the
differences in environmental (and labour) regulation in the advanced
developed countries compared with the peripheral nations, the reverse
can also happen. For example, in part due to pressure from NGO
activists (among other factors), China's environmental related practices
in some regions of the world are better than those at home in China.
To put it differently, 'China's global operations may be governed by a
social and environmental commitment that is greater than even their
domestic practices, unlike northern corporations whose standards slip
when operating abroad' (Widener, 2011: 176). Again, this is related to
political and economic considerations that relate directly to specific
regions (for example, South America compared with Africa) in which
Chinese corporations are operating. Different political regimes and
local social conditions thus shape the contours of environmental and
human rights, and respect or otherwise for these, depending upon
place and time.
Certain groups of people have experienced histories of victimisation
relating to the imposition of colonial power. This is intrinsically a
matter of resource colonisation, a phenomenon that affected many
different indigenous peoples in places such as South America, North
America and Australasia, as well as the native inhabitants of Africa,
Asia and beyond. In countries such as Australia, indigenous territories
were considered frontier lands that were un-owned, under-utilised and
therefore open to exploitation. The prior ownership rights, interests
and knowledges of indigenous inhabitants were treated as irrelevant
by the European invaders. Such disregard for the physical and cultural
wellbeing of indigenous people and their connection to 'country' was
also evident in how they and their lands were treated when it came to
nuclear testing, as well as in establishing mining interests (White and
Habibis, 2005). Environmental victimisation is central to dispossession
and maltreatment of indigenous peoples across many continents and
over a period of several centuries.
The resource wars against indigenous peoples are significant in regards
to scope, scale and impact.
Forty percent of the world's countries (72 of 184) contain
peoples defined as native or indigenous. Worldwide, there
are over 350 million indigenous people representing some
5,250 nations. The invasion of these resource frontiers by
multinational corporations and nation-states has resulted