Environmental sustainability and distributive justice: Are the two compatible?

Abstract

Although environmental sustainability offers a vision to preserve the earth's resources while sustaining life on earth, there tends to be injustice and disparity in how resources are allocated across the globe. As such, the question that arises is whom will environmental sustainability benefit? Will the rich grow richer and the poor become worse off? Is there a way to find balance between environmental sustainability and still implement and achieve success with distributive justice theories? One of the facets of justice is distributive justice; the idea of balancing benefits and costs associated with the way in which we disseminate and consume goods. Distributive justice relies on how the cost and burdens of our resource allocation can be done reasonably and equitably and spread across a number of societies, and within each society spread across diverse groups and communities. In the end, the question is how to interact with the environment and diverse communities of today and of those communities of the future. © 2009 WIT Press.