To Live in Our Damaged Worlds, a Proposal for Ecological Justice through Inquiry

The question of how to inhabit our damaged worlds becomes pressing and the notion of environmental justice, which emerged in the 1980s, is an attempt to respond to this situation. But this concept has been essentially thought around the notion of fair distribution of environmental risks among humans. Today however, the ecological upheavals and destruction of refuge for living beings increasingly mark the end of risk-based management toward the recognition of sustainably damaged worlds and the obligation to adapt. Based on a critical analysis of literature, this article argues this shift to adaptation shows the limits of the normative approach of environmental justice and forces us to propose complementary ones. A first move exists in literature to develop multispecies or socio-ecological justice by insisting on the importance of a relational approach to justice with other living species. Following this, we propose to go further by including inquiry approaches in ecological justice issues. These inquiries—led by publics who try to respond to their troubles—allow us to think of justice with precariousness, in a situated and relational approach, as already being a means and not only an end to inhabiting our damaged worlds. This leads us to propose a version of ecological justice enriched with four dimensions: epistemological, relational, temporal and responsibility.