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Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature, David Schlosberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 256 pp., $99 cloth.
Environmental issues have loomed large in domestic and international politics for decades, but only over the past twenty years have they caught the attention of political theorists. Environmental political theory is now extending the boundaries of the political to include the natural world and our relations with it. Some environmental political theorists are integrating ecocentrism - that is, moral consideration for nature itself - into conceptions of political community. They are thus bridging a theoretical divide between nature and politics that goes back at least to Aristotle. Meanwhile, the environmental justice movement has bridged the divide between nature and society in another way, urging that environmentalists pursue not just the protection of wilderness and natural systems but also the ecological health of human communities, specifically poor, minority, and indigenous communities.
David Schlosberg's Defining Environmental Justice is political theory at its best, providing an invaluable review of the contemporary literature, subverting traditional political categories and distinctions, and suggesting new directions for politics and policy. This volume will be of immense value to scholars and practitioners of domestic and international environmental politics, environmental political theorists, and political theorists in general. Defining Environmental Justice breaks important ground not only in advancing political theory's engagement with nature but in crafting a theoretical and political framework that draws together moral consideration for nonhuman nature with environmental justice concerns. In fact, Schlosberg builds from die discourse of the environmental justice movement to extend justice to our relations with the natural world - in his own terminology, he moves from environmental to ecological justice. He also offers a powerful critique of...