Indigenous Struggles, Environmental Justice, and Community Capabilities

David Schlosberg, David Carruthers, Global Environmental Politics vol. 10
no. 4 (November 2010)

Environmental justice is often defined in terms of the distribution (or
maldistribution) of environmental goods and bads. Activists and scholars
have also focused on issues of cultural recognition and political
participation. Positing a capabilities-based conception of environmental
justice, this article argues that the environmental justice struggles of
indigenous peoples reveal a broad, integrated, and pluralistic discourse of
justice - one that can incorporate a range of demands for equity,
recognition, participation, and other capabilities into a concern for the
basic functioning of nature, culture, and communities.

The authors focus on the ways these movements conceptualize and articulate
justice. They first examine various discourses of justice that have emerged
from, and been employed by, activists in the US movement for environmental
justice. Next, they examine a capabilities-based approach to justice and
explore how it addresses communities. They then offer two emblematic
indigenous battles from North and South America to illustrate the elements
of justice articulated by the groups involved. One case from northern
Arizona and another from southern Chile show how indigenous environmental
justice claims are embedded in broader struggles to preserve identity,
community, and traditional ways of life. These studies confirm that
indigenous demands for environmental justice go beyond distributional equity
to emphasize the defense and very functioning of indigenous communities -
their ability to continue and reproduce the traditions, practices,
cosmologies, and the relationships with nature that tie native peoples to
their ancestral lands.

More at: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GLEP_a_00029