Beyond fairness: the COVID-19 pandemic as an expression of environmental injustice

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper sets out to explore the significance of the concept of environmental justice for a critical study of the Covid-19 pandemic. This task involves questioning the prevailing equation of justice with fairness, the limits of which have become manifest during the pandemic. In its place, a more holistic conceptualization is required, which registers the material environment as a constitutive dimension of the actuality of justice. It is toward such a holistic conceptualization that environmental justice discourse points. Yet, to fully meet its critical potential, the notion of environmental justice needs to widen its scope beyond problems of unequal distribution and disproportionate exposure of disenfranchized groups. Moreover, it must confront its own distributional logic, which ends up reducing the concept's potency and actuality to an ethical judgment on the current state of the world, whose failure to live up to a set ideal is seen as leading to environmental disaster. This critical confrontation will be accomplished through a materialist theorization of justice as a diagrammatic process of environment-making. Looking at the Covid-19 pandemic through this theoretical lens, it will be conceived as an ‘ethological accident’, which expresses in its very contingency an injustice that is integral to capitalist environments.