Is environmental justice the missing link between ecology and sustainability science?

Background/Question/Methods

Environmental justice has become part of mainstream ecology’s vocabulary. Most ecologists recognize that environmental justice deals with the fair distribution of ecological costs and benefits and many understand that fairness is a component necessary for sustainability. However, it is not clear that ecologists routinely incorporate environmental justice scholarship into the development of their study questions, how they conduct their research, and how they use and apply their research. Similarly, it is unclear how ecological research that deals with environmental justice themes has influenced the scholarship of environmental justice. Answers to both of these questions are important in integrating ecology into justice and sustainability issues. This paper examines how ecological research incorporates environmental justice concepts and in turn, how environmental justice research incorporates ecological concepts. Because we were most interested in recent examples of this integration, we searched the Scopus database for peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2012 that included the keywords “environmental justice”, and “ecology / ecological”, and/or “environmental science.” Using a content analysis approach to identify and code key words in the abstract of each article, we grouped the key words into code categories or themes to characterize how the articles treat ecological and environmental concepts.

Results/Conclusions

Between 2010-12, only 18 articles in 13 journals were located that contained keywords from the two conceptual areas: ecology/environmental science and environmental justice. We reviewed the article abstracts and identified 9 themes: ecology, justice, about people; people's roles, theory, disciplines, results, and places. Of these, justice, ecology, and about people were common to most of the abstracts.. Themes dealing with justice and ecology showed very little overlap in associated keywords. The keywords associated with the justice theme described quality of life, sustainability, poverty, and inequality, whereas keywords associated with ecology described habitat, conservation, ecosystem services, and sub-fields of ecology including urban ecology and industrial ecology. Themes dealing with justice and people showed much more overlap with keywords describing vulnerability, income, and activism. Our results suggest that neither ecological nor environmental justice researchers have fully integrated the other area. We suggest that ESA members need to consider how they choose keywords, as well as examine how they might expand their research approaches to incorporate environmental justice issues. Discussions by ecologists about sustainability and justice need to incorporate both environmental justice researchers and practitioners if the goals of addressing justice and sustainability are to be met.