In the US, there are two primary environmental justice arenas. One is the activism, which draws on the skills of a wide range of community, academic and professional actors. This partnership draws on the Civil Rights Movement and organises through the internet. The other arena is the courtroom where environmental justice lawyers try to prove 'racial intent'. In the UK, there is an emerging call for environmental justice, but there is no comparable Civil Rights movement, just a well organised if (...) very unrepresentative environmental movement. However, in the UK, it is possible to discern at least three 'constructions' of environmental justice: access to the countryside amongst those from ethnic minority groups; Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland's 'Pollution Injustice' campaign and Friends of the Earth Scotland's 'Campaign for Environmental Justice'. In the absence of a UK Civil Rights framework, there are indications that environmental and sustainability policy discourses are beginning to be re-framed around notions of justice, rights and equity. This is beginning to form a platform around which an embryonic environmental justice network is mobilising. (shrink)

Degrowth is identified as a prospective turning point in human development as significant as the domestication of fire or the process of agrarianisation. The Transition movement is identified as the most important attempt to develop a prefigurative, local politics of degrowth. Explicating the links between capitalist modernisation, metabolic throughput and psychological individuation, Transition embraces ‘limits’ but downplays the implications of scarcity for open, liberal societies, and for inter-personal and inter-group violence. William Ophuls’ trilogy on the politics of scarcity confronts precisely (...) these issues, but it depends on an unconvincing sociology of individuation as a central process in modernity. A framework is advanced through which to explore the tensions, trade-offs and possibilities for a socially liberal, culturally cosmopolitan and science-based civilisation under conditions of degrowth and metabolic contraction. (shrink)