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PEA's environmentalism is
not about saving whales, flowers or birds. At a pragmatic
level, PEA's current environmental justice campaign has
involved an engagement with the relevant Mines and Government
- either for immediate relief from, or mitigation of,
extreme conditions of injustice or to achieve tactical
gains aimed at changing the mechanisms through which environmental
injustice is produced. These mechanisms include:
The externalisation of costs incurred in mining processes
but not accounted for within the market price. On the
one side, they constitute free benefits to the Mines.
On the other, they appear as uncompensated costs to communities
and the environment, through the loss of resources damaged
by pollution or through their health, or to the broader
public who must usually bear the remediation costs.
Exclusion relates to decision-making power in the market
and in society and hence to governance. Given the weight
of economic forces in shaping broader social institutions
and relations, these two aspects of exclusion frequently
reinforce each other. The institutions of the market are
specifically designed to remove decision making from the
public sphere and so exclude all who do not have an interest
in profit. Thus, those who are dispossessed or who carry
the externalised costs of production, are prevented from
contesting the theft or contamination of their resources.
The call for corporate accountability is precisely about
challenging this exclusion.
PEA's activism is therefore primarily focused on these
mechanisms of environmental injustice. |
Environmental Justice Enforcement 
