Environmentalism for the next economy

For environmental law to contribute to a more egalitarian and cooperative economy, it will have to be recast in a way that gives a central place to the organizing concerns of environmental justice: the distributive effects of environmental law and policy, and the constitutive question of which problems count as environmental, and whose conception of a good life in the natural world environmental law advances. This chapter locates that goal within two developments that have shifted the field more generally: the renewed recognition of the depth and importance of inequality and the emergence of “the Anthropocene†as a characterization of a transformed relationship between human beings and the rest of the planet.