Bridging social and environmental risks: the potential for an emerging environmental justice framework in South Africa

In South Africa, the constitutional and statutory framework seemingly establishes a strong synergy between environmental rights and environmental justice. A prevailing notion of transformative constitutionalism additionally positions law as the foundation for large-scale social change through non-violent political processes. A case study of the Tudor Shaft Informal settlement on the Witwatersrand goldfields elucidates the ambiguities in the notion of environmental justice and the tensions between claims based on the environmental right and socio-economic rights. By highlighting the existence of local moral orders—political alliances based on access to resources that frequently employ violence to achieve political ends—it also suggests the limited reach of the constitutional order and the project of transformative constitutionalism.

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Ecological and Economical Innovations in the Automotive Sector. Part II: Systems Integratedin the Engine Work

AUTOBUSY – Technika Eksploatacja Systemy Transportowe ◽

10.24136/atest.2019.005 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (1-2) ◽

pp. 47-52

Author(s):

Marta Wójcik

Keyword(s):

Economic Analysis ◽

Fuel Consumption ◽

Annual Cost ◽

Construction Materials ◽

Environmental Risks ◽

Automotive Sector ◽

The World ◽

Ecological Construction ◽

Sector Part ◽

Social And Environmental Risks

Nowadays, the fast growing of the automotive sector is one of the main social and environmental risks in the world. “Green” solutions in an automotive sector are included in designing, production, exploitation and the final utilization of vehicles. The reduction of harmful impact of vehicles on the environment might be achieved by the use of ecological construction materials or by the assembly of systems which influence the fuel consumption. Construction innovations, especially the application of biodegradable and recycled materials in an automotive sector, were showed in the first part of article. This paper presents the technologies which influence the operation of the engine. The aforementioned solutions in conjunction with the eco-driving can limit the harmful impact of the automotive sector on the environment. The initial economic analysis associated with the application of ecological innovations in vehicles and their impact on the annual cost of the acquisition of fuel was also presented.

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The Smell of Risk

10.18574/nyu/9781479807215.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Hsuan L. Hsu

Keyword(s):

Environmental Justice ◽

American Literature ◽

Detective Fiction ◽

Settler Colonialism ◽

Environmental Risks ◽

Critical Race Studies ◽

Indigenous Plants ◽

Material Ecocriticism ◽

Environmental Materials ◽

Racial Discourses

The Smell of Risk considers the capacities of olfaction as a tool for sensing and staging modernity’s differentiated atmospheres and their associated environmental risks. Focusing on American literature and art from the 1890s to the present, the book considers how smell stages the pathways through which environmental materials enter and interact with bodies in detective fiction, naturalist novels, environmental illness memoirs, environmental justice narratives, and olfactory art. These texts reframe modernization as a regime of differential deodorization that relocates bad air and its associated noxious odors to vulnerable spaces and populations even as it derecognizes olfaction as a mode of embodied knowledge. The Smell of Risk brings insights from the fields of material ecocriticism, sensory studies, atmospheric geography, and critical race studies to bear on diverse contexts of atmospheric disparity, including Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ responses to racial discourses about Asiatic odors, and writings that explore the atmospheric devastation of settler colonialism and the olfactory capacities of Indigenous plants.

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