Environmental Justice in African Philosophy

This book focuses on environmental justice in African philosophy, highlighting important new perspectives which will be of significance to researchers with an interest in environmental ethics both within Africa and beyond.

Drawing on African social and ethical conceptions of existence, the book makes suggestions for how to derive environmental justice from African philosophies such as communitarian ethics, relational ethics, unhu/ubuntu ethics, ecofeminist ethics and intergenerational ethics. Specifically, the book emphasises the ways in which African philosophies of existence seek to involve everyone in environmental policy and planning and to equitably distribute both environmental benefits (such as natural resources) and environmental burdens (such as pollution and the location of mining, industrial or dumping sites). This extends to fair distribution between global South and global North, rich and poor, urban and rural populations, men and women and adults and children. These principles of humaneness, relationships, equality, interconnectedness and teleologically oriented existence among all beings are important not only to African environmental justice but also to the environmental justice movement globally.

The book will interest researchers and students working in the fields of environmental ethics, African philosophy and political philosophy in general.

Munamato Chemhuru is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Great Zimbabwe University and a Senior Research Associate in Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. Munamato is a Georg Forster Research Fellow under the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany (2020-2022).