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Environmental justice has universal relevance, but it requires translation and integration into different legal systems and geographies. This presentation discusses how environmental justice has been brought into Australian environmental laws. It identifies a gap in how the law understands and responds to communities of and for environmental justice.
Environmental justice cannot be realised if the law fails to recognise the existence and interests of communities on the terms of the communities themselves. This presentation deliberately challenges the law relating to standing and human rights, arguing those aspects of law are deficient in achieving an increasingly multi-faceted concept of environmental justice, and suggests a broader role for, and a wider understanding of, communities in environmental law, grounded in ideas of place-based connection. Approaching the question of achievement of environmental justice with community interests at its centre, the environment of environmental justice also broadens to encompass places of shared value.
Dr. Brad Jessup, Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, will focus on learnings from case studies regarding: development of places of worship; proposals to locate nuclear waste on land traditionally owned by Aboriginal People; landfill pollution in suburbs of socio-economic disadvantage; and the demolition of queer night-time venues. This event is brought to you by the California Environmental Law and Policy Center and the California International Law Center.
Please contact Andrea Gardner with any questions.