Environmental Ethics. Assignment 7 - Essay Example

Although there are significant improvements in environmental protection, there still exist communities that continue to live in an unhealthy and unsafe environment. This is because of the discriminatory environmental policies enacted by the government, causing adverse impacts on the poor people and communities. It is evident that the current environment protection regulations have produced unfair outcomes, such as exposure to harmful substances, promotion of ‘risky’ technologies, economic and political exploitation of communities, as well as subsidized ecological destruction.

Furthermore, the contemporary protection paradigm has enforced unequal environment controls by trading human health for economic profit. This tendency has placed a sense of responsibility on the part of the victims rather than the polluting industry. As stated by Bullard, procedural, geographic and social inequities has to be eliminated for ensuring just and fair outcomes from the environment protection policies. Firstly, governing rules, regulations and enforcement of environment policies has to be applied uniformly, without any discrimination.

The environmental decision-making has to be reinforced with scientific and democratic opinions through effective communications. Secondly, geographic locations and its proximity to environment hazards have to be taken into account, while formulating the policies and regulations. Thirdly, sociological factors like race, ethnicity, class, culture, political power, etc., and their role in environment protection have to be assessed while making environmental decisions. Thus, the solution for this unequal environmental protection relies on enforcing nondiscriminatory way of environmental policies that includes “the right to protection, prevention of harm, shifting the burden of proof, obviating proof of intent to discriminate, and targeting resources to redress inequities.

” (Bullard, 1994,