Environmental justice and harm to humans - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 50

In summary, there are different types of environmental victimisation.
Environmental victimisation may be direct or indirect, immediate or
long-lasting, local or regional. It may involve lead in soils, dioxins in
water, radioactivity in the atmosphere. It may be based upon routine
industrial practices or stem from specific events such as climate-related
disasters. The threat may be realised (due to actual presence or absence
of something in the environment) or be potential (for example, the
proposed privatisation of drinking water, or development plans to build
a dam or pulp mill). Children are much more vulnerable to some types
of environmental harm (for example, toxic chemicals) than are adults.
In other cases, victimisation is more a question of proximity to the
harm (for example, death and maiming related to explosions, poisoning
related to industrial emissions).
To fully gauge the nature, extent and dynamics of environmental
victimisation would demand systematic data collection and analysis. For
example, it has been suggested that an annual list should be compiled of
countries and transnational corporations engaged in the illicit dumping
of toxic and dangerous wastes in Africa and other developing countries,
and an annual list of persons killed, maimed or otherwise injured in
the developing countries through the illicit movement and dumping of
toxic and dangerous products and wastes (see Gwam, 2010). Similar lists
could be prepared with respect to other types of environmental harms.
Harm, place and the local
To appreciate fully the nature of environmental social injustice it is
essential to consider the physical location and scale of the harm within
particular geographical contexts. There are myriad different types of
harms, some of which are common across the world, while others are
specific to particular locales, regions and countries. The production
of global environmental harm is partly determined through complex
processes of transference (Heckenberg, 2010). Harm can move from
one place to another. The recent toxic incident in Hungary provides a
tragic illustration of this, when a thick red torrent of sludge burst from
a reservoir at an aluminium plant 100 kilometres south of Budapest in
early October 2010. At least nine people died as a result of the sludge
surge, some went missing and over one hundred people were physically
injured as the toxic substance flowed into nearby villages and towns,
subsequently threatening the Danube and the countries that border it.
The transformation of environments, and the interplay between
water, air and land, provides interesting challenges for interpretation
and analysis of environmental risk. For a start, it is essential to conceive