https://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/wordpress/?p=788 Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:58:49 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 https://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/wordpress/?p=788&cpage=1#comment-50972 Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:58:49 +0000 http://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/wordpress/?p=788#comment-50972 I’d like to add a comment to Merle’s train of thought. Though ambiguous concepts may lead to positive action, I am inclined to think the opposite is more likely – ambiguous concepts facilitating negative actions. For example, a whole host of ambiguous concepts have been invoked by politicians, corporate executives and policy-makers in general, to justify decisions with extremely negative consequences. Think of ‘sustainability’, ‘justice’, ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’. Now think of all the harm that has been done in the name of these concepts. Why? I think because people, when a concept is highly ambiguous, can define it anyway that they like, using it to achieve a desired end, regardless if that end is ultimately harmful or not.

]]> https://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/wordpress/?p=788&cpage=1#comment-48976 Thu, 22 Nov 2007 23:03:16 +0000 http://rose.geog.mcgill.ca/wordpress/?p=788#comment-48976 Just a thought on the problem of scale for environmental justice:
I think that Culture Kid is right to say that the concept of “environmental justice” is quite ambiguous and can be used to refer to many issues. Not only does the concept of “environment” is hard to define and seems to refer to something more or less precise as long as we don’t focus on it and do not try to define it, but the same is also true (if not even more) of the concept of “justice”. But nonetheless, I think that most persons agree that these concepts are useful and maybe even because, not in spite of, their ambiguity.
Contrary to what Culture Kid said, I think that their ambiguity, once recognized, may help to connect issues happening simultaneously or consequently at different scales. Recognizing that issues of “environmental justice” do happen at the local and global scales, in different contexts and affecting different actors, whether they are discriminated against for racial or sexist questions, or for questions of wealth or classes, may help realize that those issues are in fact interconnected and should therefore not only be examined in isolation. To show this interconnection by regrouping all those cases under one concept, it might be necessary to have some ambiguous and very broad concepts like “environmental justice”.

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