| Environmental justice movement, which begins with the protest of Warren County of America 1982, profoundly delineates the problem of environmental justice that concealed in the ordinary environmental problems for the first time. The environmental justice problem is the kind of social justice problem that either related to the environment or triggered off by some environmental affairs, the essence of it is the unequal distribution of rights, obligations and duties between the strong and weak social groups in environment protection. Although environmental justice movement took place in the U.S. and acquired initial legal response, this kind of social problems disclosed from the Protest exist worldwide. Facing with the old international economic order and unbalance development in national economy at the same time, there exists an environment that give rise to domestic and external environmental justice problems in China, which is now in the social transitional process. In fact, the existing environment problems have showed some social justice feature. The unjust phenomena in environmental sphere put new questions before the contemporary legal philosophy, "legal philosophy is a theory of justice", and so this article made an analytical study on the concept and structure of environment justice from a prospective of legal philosophy. The dominant idea of the whole article is that environment justice should be converted into a kind of legal justice, and environment justice should be the kernel of environmental policy and legal institution. This thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter introduced the origin and main claims of environmental justice movement and point out that the environmental justice problem is a pervasive problem. In this chapter, the meaning of environment justice is defined as the just distribution of environment benefits and burdens. It is stressed that the so called "environment justice"is not "justice to the environment", but the distributive justice of environment benefits and burdens among people. As for the nature and location of environment justice in the theoretical system of justice classification, this thesis maintains that the essence of environment justice is distributive justice of social goods. Not all kinds of justice could be converted into legal justice appropriately, but by analysis the thesis thinks that environment justice should be converted into legal justice. The reason is that the social relations building on environment benefits have been some kind of fundamental social relations in contemporary world; as contract with ordinary environment ethics, environment justice is a specific ethics as a bottom line; and it is necessary to design institutions and procedures to embody the idea of environment justice if considering the problem arise in the patent of gene and protection of biodiversity. Because the social justice problems usually focus on three questions, that is "among whom it is distributed", "what is the nature of social goods to be distributed", and "how to distribute", also because to make answer to the above three questions is helpful to limit the scope of this study, the thesis discussed them one by one. Chapter two "the community of environment justice"is to limit the scope of environment goods distribution. Affected by ecocentrism, there is a widespread viewpoint in ethics circle, i.e. those can be recipient of the distribution of environmental goods and burdens should be included in the community of justice. So the future generation, other species and even some natural body are all in the community of justice, the concept of intergeneration justice and interspecies justice is the result of that thought. From the perspective of legal philosophy, this thesis refuted that argument. Firstly, the thesis pointed out that there is a complexity in the levels of ecological community. There exists conflicts and identification of interests between the members of a community and between communities. The contradictions should not be treated as the same. The principal contradiction of the key community should be grasped. The community of legal justice is not the same as ecological community and ethical community. The community of legal justice must be built on the reciprocal relations of rights and obligations. Secondly, the thesis maintains that the construct of distributive justice cannotbe comprehended only in the recipients' perspective. The mechanisms of social distribution that influenced by basic social structure are not simplistic. Besides the vertical distributive structure that we usually directly perceived, there also exists a kind of horizontal distributive structure, the typical of which is market transaction. Many unjust phenomena are just related to the latter one. Thirdly, also most importantly, this thesis point out that justice is not only a value, it also means a relation. The problem of community of justice is not only a normative question, but also a constructive question. The structure of justice is not only related to one-way relations, that embodied in the above two kinds of structure, it must included a two-way, highly reciprocal relations, what is called "exchange of equal gains and losses". This means justice, whose feature is conditional and reciprocal, is distinct from benevolence. The different answers to the scope of environment justice have become the watershed of jurisprudence and ecological ethics. Chapter two also discussed the thoughts of ecocentrism and sustainable development, and their relations with environment justice. The thesis point out the ecocentrism' divergence with environment justice, and the idea of sustainable development's correspondence to the environment justice. What Chapter three "Environment: new sphere of justice"want to answer is that the social features of environmental goods as goods to be distributed. The sphere of social justice and legal justice are open-ended, the increased consensus on the value of environment has made the environment not the things that unrelated to the justice theory. And according to the theory of "the circumstance of justice"raised by Hume and Rawls, the scarcity of environmental resources has met the natural conditions of environment justice, and some kind of dual-level economical society pattern is the social condition of environment justice. After illuminating the presence of environment justice in logics, this thesis begins an overall analysis on environmental goods in economical, legislative and social respect, for that it is the nature of social goods that determine its distribution. Through analysis, the thesis thinks that the economical nature of environment goods cannot be generalized by public goods or private goods, its nature has been changing between the two extremes. The environment goods is on one hand reflected in some legal arrangement in international environment statute, where thefocus is the whole humankind, for example, "common heritage"; on the other hand, it is also reflected in the rules that protecting private rights in civil legal system, where the focus is the individual, for example, "the right of environment personality ". The essential part of environment justice is the social distribution of environment benefits and burdens, so the thesis centers on the social peculiarities of environment goods as social burdens and as social benefits. In detail, environment benefits are related both to property and to personality, and they are also un-produced, non-substitutive and prima goods as living resources; environment burdens are composed of LULUs and many uncertain and irreversible environment risks. Above conclusions are the bases of the following three chapters. The chapter four "the distributive justice of environment goods"tries to answer the question of "how to distribute". Based on historical materialism, the formation and development of the ideas of justice are influenced by specific production mode and detailed circumstance of the different social stage. So the legal system in order to achieve environment justice should based on the specific principles of environment goods distribution that determined by specific social circumstances. Theoretically, the theory of justice can be classified into two categories, i.e. the universalism and particularism. The particularism theory of justice is built on the full comprehension of diversity of social goods, varied distributive mechanism and different distributive criteria. Through the analysis in proceeding chapters, this thesis draws on the ways of particularism, thoroughly examined some main points of liberalism theory, equalitarianism theory and utilitarianism theory which had tremendous influence in modern society, and pointed out their unfitness with the needs of solving the problems of environmental justice. In conclusion, the thesis maintains that dialectical point of view is appropriate in solving the distribution of environment goods. The universal relation between human and nature should be returned to detailed relations between every human groups or individual and their specific nature. The environment goods as a desire or as a need should be treated differently. In studying the principle of distribution of environment goods, both the viewpoint of humankind and the individual are all necessary. In addition, the market and the states are both important mechanism. In a word, a compound ofmulti-equalitarianism i.e. equal in opportunities of development, equal in meeting the basic needs, and equal in the freedom and political rights of citizen is a suitable principle. The last two chapters deal with the procedures of environment justice, and international environment justice. The fifth chapter is "the procedural dimension of environment justice". The thesis thinks that in the legislative process of environment justice, the designing of procedures is most prominent, which is visible in the first legislation of environment justice i.e. The Environment Justice Executive Order 12898. Firstly in order to provide a panorama, the thesis analyzed some theoretical patterns linking the justice theory to procedure. In addition, the context of environment problems must be integrated in the analysis. Two factors are significant in the decision-making concerning environment problems, one is the presence of different stakeholders and different kinds of interest, the other is the "decision in ignorance". Whether the relativity of public interests or the uncertainty of environment risks needs some procedures to justify the decision-making system. So the thesis understands the principle of public participation in a new procedural legal paradigm. That means the principle of public participation in environment law is a construction of justice through procedures. Later the thesis explains the decline of the theory of environment right, and the transition to procedural right of environment. Finally, the thesis made study on the relations between procedural justice and distributive justice through three typical cases in international environment law. The conclusion is that the functioning of pure procedural justice depends on some external circumstance. If lacking a just basic social structure, there is only the justice of the strong. The sixth chapter is on international environmental justice and international environmental law. The thesis point out the trend and manifestations of the internationalization of environment justice problem at first. Then aimed at the David Miller's position of refuting global justice, the thesis made comment in environment justice perspective. Finally, the thesis compared two important concepts, i.e. Obligation Erga Omnes and Common but Differentiated Responsibilities, and point out that two angels represented by the two concepts are both reasonable, but the latter should be stressed more for its suitability to the urgent needs in realizing the environment justice.
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