Conflicts around sustainability decisions are driven by at least eight forces. The distribution of risks and benefits is uneven, creating winners and losers. Facts and values, while logically distinct, are often confused. Facts are uncertain. The value implications of emerging issues are not clear. Decisions bring about permanent, concrete changes making compromise difficult. Those disadvantaged by a decision often have little say in it and did not generate the problem, raising concerns about harm to innocents. The boundaries between what is public and what is private are often confused and contested. Competence about some aspects of decision-making, such as assessing facts, can be confused with competence about other aspects of decision-making, such as assessing values. In addition, major long-standing controversies about transforming political economies and ecosystems are part of the background to most sustainability decisions.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

This chapter probes the short- and long-term costs of blunt force regulation. Case studies and local news reports show that workers do protest, businesses do resist, and local bureaucrats do publicly criticize the short-term nature of blunt force solutions. How does the state guard against the political risks of blunt force regulation? Using two cities as case studies – one wealthy and developed, and the other poor and industrial – this chapter shows how the state concentrates the costs of blunt force pollution reduction on the groups that are the least able to push back. It targets smaller, private firms or industries that rely on temporary, transient labor. These strategies are effective at preventing unrest, but exacerbate inefficiencies in the economy and may complicate efforts to reduce pollution in the future.

The chapter explores two major reorientations for environmental politics since the 1960s through literature that influenced and was influenced by these politics. With the ‘New Environmentalism’ of the first ‘Earth Day’ (1970), a younger generation broke with a long tradition of wilderness preservation to meet the urgent new challenges of ecological crisis – a shift in genre from the Romantic resistance to modernity in the nature writing of John Muir and Edward Abbey to the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and Ernest Callenbach, who were struggling to think towards possible futures at a planetary scale. The second reorientation also grapples with scale, emerging out of the tensions between the Global North and South in the wake of the first UN Conference on the Human Environment (1972). Sceptical of an environmentalism preoccupied with ‘Nature’ alone, what has been called the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ has refused to see social justice and the environment as separate, as, for example, in Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, whose island home – subjected to US nuclear weapons testing in the mid-century – is now inundated by rising sea levels.

Socio-environmental research has a rich legacy. Scholarship has evolved to be more interdisciplinary, as long before. Sustainability science builds on von Humboldt, Marsh, and Meadows. Research on social–ecological systems research is informed by Ostrom; resilience by Holling; vulnerability by White, Sen, and Beck; and CHANS by Marsh and Moran. Ecological economics emphasizes the economy as a subset of the Earth, leveraging Ricardo, Jevons, and Daly. Ecosystem services research, informed by Ehrlich and Odum, quantifies benefits from ecosystems. Industrial ecology views industrial systems ecologically, as done by Graedel, Ayres, and Kneese. Political ecology focuses on power relations, as did Marx, Polanyi, Shiva, and Blaikie and Brookfield. Environmental justice, pioneered by Bullard, considers unequal benefits and harms. Other systems research focuses on a given context, as on cities (Childe, Mumford, and McDonnell and Pickett), land (Melville), and food (Liangji, Malthus, Boserup, and Ho). Integrated assessments build on Meadows. Planetary and Anthropocene perspectives focus on the global scale (see Hutchinson, Boff). Legacy readings can help frame socio-environmental relationships and enrich collaborations.

A confluence of crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, is exacerbating inequalities in many countries around the world, leaving Africans particularly vulnerable to hunger, unemployment, and worsening poverty. The climate emergency reinforces these inequalities and vulnerabilities. Globally, the need for an environmental rights-based approach to sustainable development, founded on principles of equity, has received increasing attention. In Africa specifically, more work needs to be done to integrate rights into environmental and climate frameworks and support communities in protecting their territories and stopping violations. Climate cases, supported by international human rights frameworks, have increasingly asserted environmental rights, in response to the need for intergenerational justice and to protect communities from the threats of climate change. Three court cases from Kenya and South Africa, Save Lamu, Earthlife Africa, and PHA Food and Farming Campaign, all driven by grassroots campaigns, illustrate how climate change concerns have been successfully brought before the courts and how these judgments set a hopeful precedent for other communities.

This chapter reviews potential concerns of green building, including the environmental impact of the buildings, equity impacts, and environmental justice implications of ecolabeled buildings. These concerns typically revolve around the ultimate environmental impacts of green buildings and the equity implications of how we transition to a greener built environment. Green buildings may not be as green as we expect or want, and price premiums for green buildings work against affordability. Our green market transformation story is not a naïve, romantic, idealized story of perfectly sustainable practices overtaking our foolish old ways. This transformation story is messy, fraught with imperfections, and leaves ample room for improvement. In fact, that is part of the essence of this story: Iterative, ongoing improvements, building momentum toward a more sustainable system. Openly drawing our attention to these concerns and shortcomings can help us turn them into opportunities for continued gain and building on that momentum. Market transformation does not happen overnight, and it does not stop after a singular change. It is an ongoing evolution. This chapter reviews some of the shortcomings and concerns about this otherwise positive evolutionary path for green buildings.

The past decade has brought on some of the worst cases of flooding due to natural disasters and the resulting leaching of some of the most hazardous environmental contaminants back into nearby, often low-income, communities. There is also a serious inequity when it comes to access to recovery based on average income levels of neighborhoods. As cities assess modifications to zoning, land use, and real estate development, it is critical to acknowledge climate science, however inconvenient, and take measures to address disaster preparedness, aimed particularly at helping the most vulnerable communities. Instead of waiting for changes to federal environmental laws, this chapter argues that state legislators and planners should be planning and executing rules that acknowledge climate data, actively engaging community leaders and businesses to assist low-income communities, and enhancing, not suspending, the oversight process of industries capable of leaching environmental contaminants during and after a hurricane.

This chapter explores the relationship between human rights and the environment. It begins by asking ‘who we think we are’ to understand the forms of subjecthood and subjectivity produced by human rights. It argues that human rights normalize a series of false conceptions about our collective self that have detrimental social and ecological consequences. The chapter next examines the question of ‘where we think we are’, probing the ontological rift between humans as subjects of rights and ‘the environment’ as the repository of resources with which to satisfy human entitlements. The chapter challenges human rights as a hubristic organizing category and observes that the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions, artificially separated in the chapter, serve to show that the way humans treat each other is inextricable from the way we treat nature. To undo relationships of mastery, ownership, and violence between the subjects and objects of human rights law, projects for human wellbeing and environmental struggles need to engage with and understand each other outside the unproductive rubric of rights discourse.

Can territory be decolonised? In one crucial sense, the answer is yes. In a moment when the ‘threat of recolonisation haunts the third world’, the battles fought by the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century for official recognition of political independence should not be disremembered, or their gains underestimated. But can the concept of territory be decolonised? Building on TWAIL, Indigenous and decolonial scholarly interventions, this chapter revisits the international law of territory to argue that there are two senses in which the question must be answered in the negative. The concept of territory is a Eurocentric construction of the rightful relationship between community, authority, and place. Not only does that construction rely on the ontological rupture between human subject and natural object that characterises European Enlightenment philosophy; it erases the physical Earth itself, replacing it with an abstract object over which sovereignty is exercised or space within which jurisdiction is asserted. The concept of territory in international law thereby presumes the objectification of ‘nature’ necessary for the propertisation and commodification of Earth.

This edited collection takes initial steps in a journey to understand better the relationship between international law and nature. We discover how international law systemically reproduces ecological injustice, and we explore the potential for equitable and sustainable disciplinary remakings. Specifically, we identify the inaccurate and harmful assumptions about nature underpinning conceptualizations of sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development, labour and human rights. To productively reimagine our discipline, we turn to Indigenous legal traditions, TWAIL, postcolonialism and decoloniality; to political ecology and ecocosmology; and to mythmaking, storytelling and song lines for inspiration. We hope other concepts and traditions will inform this ongoing endeavour. Even as international law continues to structure ecological harm, we see hope in growing transnational solidarity and alliances between the poor and subaltern classes that are challenging legal systems with better understandings of the relationship between nature and law.

Disaster recovery is challenging in any geographic region. However, rural communities differ in several key ways from urban ones, which can make rural disaster recovery uniquely difficult. This chapter walks through the cycle of a rural community’s theoretical experience with natural disaster by breaking the cycle down into two phases: disaster preparedness before disaster strikes and disaster response/recovery afterward. The chapter first examines several factors contributing to under-preparedness. First, rural land use planning has historically been less regulated and more haphazard that urban land use planning. This means that rural communities may face issues with disorganization, sprawl, and physical dangers that are less common in the average city, in addition to being less likely than urban communities to have high-quality Hazard Mitigation Plans. More limited planning also contributes to less-diversified and more vulnerable economies that are less resilient in the face of stresses. Second, the related problem of limited rural floodplain management exacerbates these issues. And third, rural environmental injustice receives relatively limited attention, but is an important factor in placing low-income and minority communities in rural regions at a higher risk of vulnerability to natural disasters. The chapter then turns to two issues illustrating rural communities’ disadvantages in disaster recovery. First, approaches to disaster recovery often fail to serve rural needs effectively. In general, “[h]istory and current experience have shown that [FEMA] aid, subsidized insurance, local long-term rebuilding programs, and even charitable giving” tend to flow to those who already have more resources. Rural residents and communities have less capacity and support even to navigate application processes for relief. They also have more limited access to necessary amenities like homeless shelters in the aftermath of disasters. Second, the idea that all rural residents vote against environmental regulations that would offer better protections serves to mask rural regions’ most vulnerable populations. For example, some commentary after hurricanes in the South declares these natural disasters to reflect “hurricane karma,” or punishment for regional voting patterns. Such a stance is problematic in a variety of ways, and serves to obfuscate the needs of high-risk groups in regions represented by conservative legislators. The following discussion addresses each of these challenges in the preparedness phase and recovery phase in turn. The chapter concludes with thoughts for potential reforms.