雅思阅读

📖 Reading Passage

The concept of 'environmental justice' has evolved significantly over the past three decades, moving beyond a narrow focus on the disproportionate siting of hazardous waste facilities in low-income communities. Contemporary scholarship now emphasizes a broader framework that includes distributional equity, procedural fairness, and recognition justice. Distributional equity concerns the fair allocation of environmental benefits and burdens across all social groups. Procedural fairness demands that affected communities have meaningful participation in environmental decision-making processes. Recognition justice, a more recent addition, addresses the need to acknowledge and respect the diverse cultural values and knowledge systems of marginalized groups. Critics argue, however, that the expansion of the concept risks diluting its original political force, as it becomes increasingly abstract and detached from the concrete struggles of frontline communities. Nevertheless, proponents maintain that this multidimensional approach is essential for capturing the complex realities of environmental inequality in a globalized world.