Environmental Justice and “The State of the Earth in 2050″

One of the biggest problems in talking about the reality of climate change is that we often talk about what will happen as opposed to what is already happening.

It’s not uncommon to see people argue what our world will be like by the year 2050 if we do not begin to take environmental ethics more seriously than we have in the past. Whether it is about how much potable water will be available to us, how arable the land will be, what our atmosphere will be like, the rising sea levels or composition of oceanic population and waste/pollution. We present these factors of environmental concern as how drastic they will become at some point in the future. But in doing so, we often set this future date just far enough out of the scope of our basic comprehension that we undermine the urgency of the message: by saying “things will be THIS bad by 2050!” we may unknowingly impart to many readers the idea that the world will be perfectly fine until that date - and even that the world is in no state of environmental decay as it currently stands.

This is patently false - we have already been enacting ecological damage as a species for decades, and it is foolish to believe that anything that will happen by 2050 hasn’t already begun to take shape. Potable water is already unavailable to people, land that cannot be used for farming crops already surrounds them, dangerous air quality already plagues them, the sea rampant with plastic and garbage already threatens to engulf them. If you don’t feel like you’re living in this kind of already destroyed world, it’s because you probably aren’t - the impacts of carelessness concerning the environment and climate change can be staved off by privilege and wealth. Move toxic waste to a poorer community, pay to have fresh produce from whatever season whenever you want it, and surround yourself with technology that provides clean air, water, and electricity to your heart’s content. Pay your way to a greener, cleaner slice of earth, and everything else fades away.

What we are saying when we make claims like “climate change will have devastating effects by 2050” is climate change will only then have effects that can no longer be ignored using a shield of wealth and privilege. By that time, the majority of the human population will not be able to afford environmental ignorance. The walls that divide our perfect green world from the reality of climate change and environmental decay will be too costly to maintain.



One of the best texts to explain the issue is Kristin Shrader-Frechette’s Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy published by Oxford University Press, which discusses how the burden of climate change and environmental negligence is passed down through society, and examines this inequality through “fundamental ethical concepts such as equality, property rights, procedural justice, free informed consent, intergenerational equity”.

A similar critique of how our sociological and psychological beliefs impact our views and interaction with the environment was composed by philosopher Val Plumwood in Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Plumwood is well-known for using a feminist framework to understand our disconnect with the state of the environment.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also has a video series “featuring federal and local government officials, non-profit leaders, and students, who tell stories about the lessons they have learned over their time working on environmental justice” and the experiences in their lives that have led them to take up the discussion of how environmental damage is relegated in a global society.