Breena Holland

Justice and the Environment in Nussbaum's "Capabilities Approach" Why Sustainable Ecological Capacity Is a Meta-Capability

What principles should guide how society distributes environmental benefits and burdens? Like many liberal theories of justice, Martha Nussbaums “capabilities approach” does not adequately address this question. The author argues that the capabilities approach should be extended to account for the environments instrumental value to human capabilities. Given this instrumental value, protecting capabilities requires establishing certain environmental conditions as an independent “meta-capability.” When combined with Nussbaums nonprocedural method of political justification, this extension provides the basis for adjudicating environmental justice claims. The author applies this extended capabilities approach to assess the distribution of benefits and burdens associated with climate change.

Ecology and the Limits of Justice: Establishing Capability Ceilings in Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach

Human impacts on large‐scale ecological interactions effectively confer fundamental advantages of wealth and power to some members of society and not to others. As illustrated here by reference to a 1993 cholera outbreak resulting from degradation of aquatic ecosystems, these impacts can pose barriers to the normal channels through which one might pursue individual advantage, thereby raising tensions for liberal theories of justice that are committed both to basic liberties and to distributive fairness. I first illustrate these tensions by reference to John Rawlss theory. I then argue that although Nussbaums theory, which emerged in dialogue with Rawlss, improves upon it in this regard, it remains subject to the same basic tensions. Instituting ‘capability ceilings’ that impose a limit on the set of basic opportunities available to people would help resolve this tension. Thus, in addition to Nussbaums proposal for establishing capability thresholds, I defend capability ceilings as a friendly amendment to her theory.

Procedural justice in local climate adaptation: political capabilities and transformational change

ABSTRACT Climate adaptation politics presents both obstacles and opportunities for correcting inequities that leave some communities especially vulnerable to climate-related environmental harms. By revealing these obstacles and opportunities, theories of procedural justice can help to identify procedural reforms and political strategies that advance the interests of vulnerable populations. An account of procedural justice is proposed that foregrounds the capability for political control over one’s environment, defined as having the political power to influence adaptation decisions. While the variables shaping this capability in the politics of environmental injustice often interact in ways that reproduce environmental inequities, adaptation politics has the potential to produce more transformational outcomes. To illustrate this potential, differences between the politics of environmental injustice and the politics of climate adaptation are drawn on to sketch the basic features of a typology of vulnerable populations’ political capabilities in the politics of climate adaptation, before highlighting the potential points for intervention.

Cultural Killing and Human–Animal Capability Conflict

Abstract The capabilities approach provides a promising basis for developing a theory of interspecies justice grounded in the inherent dignity of all sentient striving beings. As currently formulated, the approach provides guidance for identifying the entitlements of each being, but not for managing tradeoffs between the capabilities of humans and nonhumans. Through considering cultural practices that put human capabilities in conflict with the capabilities of animals, we propose and defend two criteria for evaluating practices that harm animals for human purposes. The adaptability criterion, derived from Nussbaum’s work on capabilities for humans, distinguishes practices that preserve the ability of people to exert ethical agency in a context of changing values and material circumstances. The regulatory criterion, derived from consideration of the interdependence of human and animal capabilities, distinguishes practices that foster the skills and habits people need to create an ecologically just social order. In applying these criteria to cases of human-animal capability conflict, we demonstrate their potential to resolve such conflicts in a way that redresses the effects of colonization and domination, while appreciating – but not romanticizing – the knowledge and ecological respect of people who once lived in less destructive relationships with other species.

Working With and For Animals—A Response to Nussbaum

Professor Nussbaum’s argument for why and how the capabilities approach is a useful corrective to the “so like us” (SLU) approach to establishing legal protection for animals advances theoretical tools that can move society toward a more just relationship with non-humans. In responding to her argument, my comments will first situate the SLU approach that Professor Nussbaum challenges within the broader study of animal behavior as an empirical science. I will then turn to some challenges raised by her more general proposal to push contemporary legal reasoning and analysis toward thinking about animals in terms of their capabilities to function and flourish, and as subjects of political justice. In a recent book, the renowned ecologist Safina (2015, 25–27) describes the study of animal behavior as a young science. It emerged in the 1920s and was originally plagued by the need to purge itself of centuries of folklore, superstition, and fables in which animals were presented as caricatures of human impulses. To strip the budding field of these metaphorical projections, behavioral scientists insisted on creating an area of study built entirely on observation. They sought objective knowledge about animals, devoid of speculation and messy guesswork about how and what animals feel. Some experts in animal communication, for example, describe themselves as trained to view non-human animals as lacking any conscious thought or intention. In this context, it was acceptable to describe what an elephant does, how long it nurses its offspring (for example), but not why the elephant would act in a particular way. For the emerging science of animal behavior, the feelings or thoughts that might motivate animals were off-limits, largely to avoid attributing human thoughts and emotions to animals. Unfortunately, as Safina (2015, 27–29) explains, by banning the problematic tendency to attribute human qualities to animals, the early behavioral scientists helped to entrench the idea that it is only humans who are conscious and have feelings that are significant to their choices and quality of life. And, as this field evolved to deny the possibility that non-human animals have any thoughts or feelings, it reinforced the notion that we humans are utterly different from animals, that we are better, and the best among creatures of the earth. While some contemporary scientists, such as Frans de Wall, Gay Bradshaw, Hal Whitley, and Luke Rendell have conducted rigorous and exceptional research on animal cognition, emotion, and communication that counters this problematic trend in animal science, it is nonetheless important to understand the SLU approach to legal reasoning about animals as a productive response to the more dominant belief that humans have a monopoly on

“You know you can do this, right?”: developing geospatial technological pedagogical content knowledge and enhancing teachers’ cartographic practices with socio-environmental science investigations

ABSTRACT Many barriers exist to K–12 classroom teachers’ adoption and implementation of geospatial technologies with their students. To address this circumstance, we have developed and implemented a geospatial curriculum approach to promote teachers’ professional growth with curriculum-linked professional development (PD) to support the adoption of socio-environmental science investigations (SESI) in an urban school environment that includes reluctant learners. SESI focus on social issues related to environmental science. The pedagogy is inquiry-driven, with students engaged in map-based mobile data collection and subsequent analysis with Web-based dynamic mapping software to answer open-ended questions. Working with four science and social studies teachers, we designed and implemented a sequence of three locally oriented, geospatial inquiry projects that were implemented with 140 9th grade students. We investigated how the geospatial curriculum approach impacted the teachers’ geospatial pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), their cartographic practices, and promoted geospatial thinking and analysis skills with their students. Findings revealed strong growth in teachers’ geospatial PCK, increased map use by teachers, use of maps as media for inquiry and not didactic instruction, and modeling to guide students’ geospatial analysis using GIS. Implications for PD to promote teachers’ geospatial PCK and in-class cartographic practices are discussed.

Recognition, participation, and power in the global struggle for environmental justice: the emerging politics of environmental rights and opportunities

In April of 2014, Purdue University’s “building sustainable communities” initiative hosted an international workshop on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Access to Resources. Commenced with a keynote lecture by Julian Agyerman just two days after the global celebration of Earth Day, the workshop drew together scholars, activists, and practitioners from around the world to grapple with challenges related to the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, and the barriers to access and participation in environmental decision-making processes. Participants in the workshop author the essays in this Dialogues section. Collectively the essays display the environmental justice movement’s status as a muscular, diverse, and truly global political movement. By variously documenting particular struggles in this movement, critically reflecting on the movement’s implications or potential, and strategically engaging and fostering the movement’s agenda, the essays bring together a wide range of ideas and practices relevant to the study of contemporary politics. First, several case studies documenting responses to instances of environmental injustice lend legitimacy to Schlosberg’s (2004, 2007) argument that the demand for environmental justice as articulated in a global context connects and integrates issues of distributive equity, recognition, and political participation. In drawing attention to the gap between liberal theories of justice that focus predominantly on matters of distribution and the concerns of communities making claims that justice has in fact been violated, Schlosberg’s work has pushed political theorists to expand theories of environmental justice beyond a narrow focus on inequity in the distribution of environmental risk. In particular, individuals and communities suffering from environmental injustice also call for recognition of individual or group identity. Recognition is central to achieving environmental justice because identity is often bound up with specific environmental relationships and is therefore increasingly threatened by the exploitation of resources for profit. Schlosberg argues that an ongoing failure to respect and value selfand communally-defined relationships of people to the natural environments in which they live may indeed lead to the kind of distributive injustice that liberal theories of justice commonly address. However, following Young (1990) and Fraser (2000), his central point is that lack of recognition in the struggle for justice cannot be reduced to a mere failure of equitable distribution. Lack of recognition is an independent harm, and it does a different kind of damage to one’s self and one’s community (see Figueroa 2005, 2006; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Whyte 2011).