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by Hemantha Withanage, Executive Director, Environmental Foundation Ltd.

An important and growing area of environmental activism is known as environmental equity, environmental justice, or environmental racism. The basic premise of this facet of environmentalism is that certain elements of the population face greater risks from exposure to environmental hazards than do others.

The air, the water, the biological diversity, the forests or the aesthetic values of the landscape, are basic goods of the not alone survival human but of the biosphere that, as bases of the collective life. The rules of access to the environmental services and benefits of the environmental offering should guarantee their public condition of goods as well as the equity of their distribution.

However, the tradition individualistic of the Right in West has privileged the private appropriation of public goods to satisfy private interests, many times in detriment of the public or collective. The private appropriation of natural goods is being widely involved in present privatization programmes of the recent regimes. Water, forest, coast, rivers are some common goods which are going under this threat.

Environmental justice and classism

Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, colour, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.

Fair treatment means that no group of people, including a racial, ethnic, or a socio-economic group, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, governmental and commercial operations or the execution of local or national programs and policies. Environmental justice is the goal to be achieved for all communities and persons across Sri Lanka.

Environmental justice is achieved when everyone, regardless of race, culture, or income, enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn and work.

The environmental justice operates in the collective rights recognition space and fulfilment of rules for the fair distribution of the environmental benefits. But the environmental justice goes beyond the legal security in the rights and the exercise of the distributive rules, beyond the Positive Right, aiming toward a reinvention of the social pact as new alliance nature culture against the secular association of the Right and the violence, toward a reinvention of the politics.

Environmental injustices and iniquity

The unfair distribution of water resources in Sri Lanka is enough to understand what environmental classism is. While millions of people in Hambantota, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa area suffer from the lack of water for their basic needs, people in urban areas use the chlorinated water for washing cars, flowering and even for swimming pools. Thousands of profit-making industries use free surface water, while many poor have no access. Those same industries pollute public rivers and streams and even fresh water aquifers blocking the access to thousands of people to have safe river and aquifer waters.

Over extraction of river sand, mining of clay and other mineral resources, shrimp cultivation around lagoons, establishment of industrial estates in the residential areas are few examples for which the negative impacts badly affect the poor disadvantaged groups living around.

This environmental classism is also visible in Sri Lanka in the so-called development. The development which of course the development of infrastructure such as expressway network, expansion of the International airport, power generation projects clearly shows how the majority of the society ask the minority affected families to vacate their native lands in order to allow the construction of these facilities.

Injustice in the decision-making

The results of the process by which implementation of environmental policy creates intended or unintended consequences which have disproportionate impact (adverse or beneficial) on lower income persons, populations, or communities.

These disparate effects occur through various decision-making processes, program administration (e.g. Superfund clean-up schedules), and the issuance regulatory actions such as compliance inspections and other enforcement measures such as fines and penalties, and administrative and judicial orders. Flawed policies formation processes coupled with agency norms, priorities, traditions, and professional biases often make implementation subject to these disproportionate consequences.

The information related to these issues is in English which majority Sinhala and Tamil people cannot understand. Therefore in most cases lower income persons or the under-educated persons cannot participate in the administrative decision-making such as EIA process which creates an injustice. For example majority of the Sinhala and Tamil people could not participate in the upper Kotmale decision, which was controversial among certain groups.

Justice for nature

Justice for nature is a missing element in most environmental justice programmes. The animals, trees, forests, ecosystems, nature and the natural resources/heritage are alarmingly discriminate by the human.

The forest cover is going down rapidly, the habitat destruction contributes to the destruction of animal population. The ecosystems and land have become under the prime control of man. Unless human represent them to achieve the environmental justice and equity, those components of the globe will not have their fair share.

Enabling disadvantage groups

To enable the disadvantage people, communities or victims need to address following major issues.

. All should have the correct information about the environmental status around them.

. Any change in their surrounding environment should be done through the proper consultative process.

. No matter what the subject is, environmental justice means that people have a right to participate, regardless of their level of education.

. Justice in Decision-Making and Public Participation is vital.

All groups underscored the notion that environmental justice and social equity begins by including citizens in the planning process from the very beginning before any of the decisions have been made. Some of the obstacles to attaining justice in public participation includes the lack of resources, paternalism, institutionalized racism and the lack of attention paid to the impact of policies and investments on communities.

People must be viewed as full partners during every stage of policy development, and there should be mutual trust between government and the community. Too often, officials believe they know what would be best for a community and the community feels that officials have the correct solution.

The two groups end up never jointly identifying the problem, and then address two different issues with two different sets of resources. Decisions should be made from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

Giving more power to public decision-making bodies (citizen advisory committees, civil society organisations etc.) so long as those bodies accurately represent the communities they are serving is vital. To avoid disproportionate exposure, communities, elected officials and agency representatives should consider many factors as they site any facility.

Those include; What will be the impact in the community regarding health, aesthetics, mobility, noise? Will the system provide access to members of the community? Has there been meaningful involvement of the community? What other facilities are straining the community? What would be the aggregate pollution impact?

Compliance monitoring for environmental justice

One of the largest demands is for agencies to evaluate the aggregate burden to the community from all of the polluting facilities, before they even consider siting new facilities. There is an overwhelming feeling that to end this sort of persistent racism and classism, communities must be given some power of self-determination.

A key factor to providing environmental protection is assuring compliance by the regulated community with environmental laws/regulations through effective monitoring and compliance assessment.

Unless there is compliance with the requirements that are designed to provide the necessary environmental protection, the promulgation of laws and regulations have little impact. Compliance monitoring consists of actions to:

. Determine compliance with applicable laws, regulations, permit conditions, orders and settlement agreements;

. Review and evaluate the activities of the regulated community; and

. Determine whether or not conditions presenting imminent and substantial endangerment may exist. This action lies with the regulating agencies as well as with the communities. Therefore everybody should involve in such monitoring.

There is no question that the activists, community leaders will motivate the people to redress environmental inequities and injustices as in the past. But the history has shown that the forwardness of the public is not fair enough to get the justice and equity. Therefore you need to fight for environmental Justice for all.

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