Justice for All? Factors Affecting Perceptions of Environmental and Ecological Injustice

Moving beyond the typical focus on individual injustices, we examine individual-level and contextual factors affecting perceptions of justice with regard to the environment. Specifically, we examine decision-making procedures pertaining to environmental resource use and harms across groups of people; the distribution of environmental harms; and the direct treatment of the natural environment (i.e., procedural environmental justice, distributive environmental injustice, and ecological injustice, respectively). To test our hypotheses, we use data from a survey administered to a cohort of first-year college students at a southeastern university. Results demonstrate that environmental identity and perceptions of the extent to which the university context encourages sustainability consistently enhance perceptions of all three types of justice. Other factors differentially affect each type of justice. We discuss the importance of the patterns that emerge for environmental and sustainability education and speculate on the implications of moving from thinking about (in)justice related to the environment as an individual issue to one of the collectivity.