The Three Pillars of Environmental Justice
Environmental justice is concerned with how
communities of color and low-income groups
are disproportionately burdened by environ-
mental hazards and/or experience inequitable
access to environmental benefits. Environmental
justice (and its flipside, environmental injus-
tice) includes three intersecting pillars:
distributional, procedural, and recognitional.
Distributional injustice is the physical manifestation
of recognitional and procedural injustices, where
certain groups lack access to an environmental good
and/or live in proximity to environmental harm. The
uneven investment by municipalities in tree planting
and maintenance, as well as the inequitable patterns
of tree canopy cover, are considered a distributional
injustice (Nesbitt
et al., 2019). The Tree Equity Score
tool from American Forests enables local stake-
holders to map tree canopy inequities throughout
the US, and massive new investments from the
USDA Forest Service through the Inflation Reduction
Act are oriented around funding for underserved
areas (US
Department of Agriculture, 2023); both of
these strategies are tied to distributional justice.
Procedural injustice, on the other hand, refers
to a lack of fairness, access, and transparency in
decision-making processes that shape distribu-
tional outcomes. Elements of procedural justice
include ensuring that residents have access to
accurate information and resources, such as those
regarding the benefits and burdens of trees, main-
tenance responsibilities, and location/time of
tree stewardship events (Nesbitt
et al., 2018).
Lastly, recognitional injustice directly influences pro-
cedural and distributional outcomes, and refers to
insufficient inclusion and prioritization of varying
perspectives, experiences, preferences, values, and
knowledge of disadvantaged and neglected groups
(Campbell
et al., 2022; Grant et al., 2022). >>
Community engagement process during the development
of the Philly Tree Plan. Photo by Sahar Coston-Hardy
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