Book Review: Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political Ecology
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | John Barry |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900407 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
N. LOW AND B. GLEESON, Justice, Society and Nature: An Exploration of Political
Ecology. London: Routledge, 1998, 257 pp., £.15.99 (pbk).
This book is destined to become a ‘landmark’ publication in environmental politics
and the relationship between theories of justice and environmental issues in particu-
lar. The authors begin by distinguishing ‘environmental’ from ‘ecological’ justice.
Environmental justice concerns the distribution of environments and environmental
goods and bads between people, while ecological justice concerns the justice and
injustice of the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. The
two of course are linked (p. 19).
The authors propose a ‘realistic’ green political agenda, one that focuses on the
global/international level, and are against attempts to create ‘greenprints’ for a global
sustainable society. Of particular interest to readers of this journal is the emphasis they
lay on the necessity and desirability of an international legal approach to creating a
less globally unjust society. For them, ‘[t]he pursuit of environmental objectives
exclusively through pressure-group politics has reached an impasse. We argue for a
new rule of law within which the world’s corporations conduct business with the
security that, in doing so, they are not destroying the planet’ (p. 22, emphasis added).
After discussing some common political objections to the centrality of justice –
Marxism, Weberian rationalism, communitarianism, feminist care ethics and post-
modern relativism – the authors move on to establish the essential link between
environmental problems and aims and justice. They then discuss some common dis-
tributive principles of social justice in relation to human-nature relations: desert,
rights and need. Adopting a broadly Kantian perspective, they note that the goal of
establishing the intrinsic value of nature (a very common position within environ-
mental philosophy and ‘deep’ or radical environmental politics) is that if the natural
world had intrinsic value or merit, then as an end in itself it deserves to be ‘treated
justly’ (p. 53), though as pointed out below, ‘treating nature justly’ is not without its
problems. They pose an excellent question: ‘[t]he ethic of need has emerged out of the
class struggle. The question today is: what ethic will emerge from the environmental
struggle?’ (p. 66). They conclude that the west needs a less Promethean (and arrogant,
I would add) view of ‘the human condition’ in order to extend the bases of justice to
include the non-human world within an ethic of justice.
A noteworthy character of the book is how the authors place the sometimes abstract
‘discourse of justice’ within what can be called a ‘political economy’ perspective, that
is seeing justice as affected by real world economic and political forces, struggles and
forms of resistance. As they put it, ‘[d]ebates about justice cannot be detached from
political debate in general, which in turn cannot be isolated from power struggles in
society. There is no Archimedean point outside the world from which to change the
world’ (p. 97). This is particularly the case, as it ought to be, when discussing justice at
the international level and within the context of globalization. The authors correctly,
in my view, emphasize how within the international political and economic system it
is (private and corporate) property rights and sovereignty that decide conflicts over the
environment. A particularly interesting part of the book concerns proposals for the
future evolution and reform of the international political and economic systems. For
them, an essential part of regulating global, centralized, corporate power is through a
reformed UN system developing into a cosmopolitan democratic order, an essential
part of which is to transform world governance into world government.
Perhaps the most contentious area of the book is the attempt to flesh out ecologi-
cal justice, that is extending (and in the process rethinking) norms of justice to
human–nature relations. The authors begin by noting that ‘[t]he question of ecolog-
ical justice arises from our treatment of the non-human world which is in turn derived
from a view about how we are connected to it’ (p. 139). Nature depends on our
BOOK REVIEWS 587
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