Environmental Justice: Pathways to Environmental Protection in Nigeria: Gaining from the American Experience - Paperback

by Festus Terver Nyiwo (Author)

This is an effort to critique the ideological basis of the climate change scientific analysis, the brainchild of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others. The book profers a unique socio-political, econo-cultural and legal perspective on the larger subject of the environment. Of major concern is their policy implications to the developing world's quest to industrialize in the 21st century or so soon thereafter. A greater premise of the thesis in this book contends that environmental advocates are far more effective if they understood the actors, events, milieu; the underlining cultural dimensions, the motivating ethos, alien ideologies and programmes, cleverly strewn around the globe under the guise of sustainable development, instead of rapid and affordable industrialization. it is contended that many of the major actors of the climate change movement lack the credibility, credentials, and expertise in any related field to the environment or climate science, as the case may be. Yet, they seek to pursue and promote energy policies for global consumption. Therefore, I posed many comparative and empirical alternatives aimed primarily at eliciting or deducing the diversity of viable solutions to better equip policymakers with multiple, alternative and/or base-loaded perspectives. I then attempt to explain how environmental justice benefit communities of individuals in many different ways in advancing sustainable industrialization, in deliberate preference to just sustainable development. In this regard and in furtherance of true democracy, government at the several and various levels must ensure the patronage and engagement of their very best for sustainable development. Therefore, in the broader sense of environmental justice, especially in the developing world's context, renewable energy should not be limited to natural (energy) resources alone, but also extended to the efficient human resources' energy use and sustainable living or development. Topics are carefully selected and succinctly dealt with in this book to cover as much interrelated grounds as possible, while staying true to the very essence of the thesis: Environmental justice. Accordingly, this book takes on an interconnected, the multi-disciplinary and integrative approach to environmental issues to finding Sustainable solutions to the myriad of problems facing humanity and communities today. Contrastingly, Sustainable development mostly concerns itself with the preservative interrelationship between humans and nature's environment including natural resources, in such manner as not to jeopardize the chances of future generations to also enjoy these resources. Therefore, sustainable development would also entail the concept of sensible land use and the efficient consumption of natural resources, so as to avoid its depletion. For instance, throughout America's history, federal land laws have reflected two visions of public and private land ownership. The American experience showed the tension between private ownerships and public interests in lands needing a multi-disciplinary approach to resolve the conflict. Unsurprisingly, the management of common resources occupied the center stage in the 60s and 70s. It may be safe to presume that leaders of the environmental movements of this era were understandably preservationists and conservationists: They were not profiteers. We must, therefore, be able to differentiate between the environmental conservatism that bothers on nature's environmental protection in reverence to its Creator, and the post-modernist (liberal) elements of environmentalism. The former is clearly advocated for in this book. Environmental conservatism concerns itself with the cultural, ethical and spiritual attributes of and to nature, in spite of scientific considerations or validations.