Robert Figueroa

This paper presents an overview of the goals, structure, and results of an annual, week-long, summer philosophy institute for high school students. Inspired by other similar programs, the Summer Philosophy Institute of Colorado (SPI-CO) was designed for a culturally diverse group of students, aiming to expose college-track high school students to philosophy, to encourage students in lower-track classifications to pursue college, to offer advising to students on how to make college a reality, to expose both groups of students to critical thinking skills, and to promote cultural diversity in philosophy as a discipline. After explaining why philosophy encourages students in education and why high school students are so well-primed to study it, the authors give a detailed overview of the structure of the institute, including schedule, lesson plan, texts and themes studied, funding, and student demography. The authors conclude by discussing an outreach program that grew out of the SPI-CO and a summary of the initial results of the program.

Environmental justice addresses social justice related to human activities that affect both human and natural environments, including the impact of human activities upon human health and values, immediate living and working conditions, natural resources that humans depend upon, cultural values intimately tied with the natural environment, and the ways in which the institution of environmentalism affects human relations. This description reveals that social problems are intimately connected with environmental problems. The causal connection between social problems and environmental problems may point in either direction: the social problem may be the cause of the environmental problem or vice versa. ;Recent justice theory is spliced by several general perspectives such as distributive theories, theories of political recognition, identity politics, and non-western alternatives. I consider these various perspectives with a particular emphasis on the ways in which environmental justice affects the debate between distributive justice and justice in the politics of recognition. Distributive justice theories focus on the fair distribution and redistribution of material goods in a society. On this account, the cultural characteristics of the society are ultimately explained by virtue of material distribution. Justice in the politics of recognition emerges from principles of self-determination, cultural identity, and political recognition. According to this viewpoint, cultural institutions and habits determine the conditions for social status which then guide the distribution of material goods. Contemporary justice theory seems gridlocked into this dichotomy. ;As a means to analyze this dichotomy, I draw upon the work of Nancy Fraser, who uses four key contrasts to distinguish the fundamental conflict between the two paradigms. Fraser identifies the conflict as the redistribution-recognition problem: a problem that must be addressed if we wish to achieve progress in social justice. I argue that environmental justice is plagued by the same redistribution-recognition problem. ;Using a bivalent conception of participatory parity as the bridging criterion for a theory of justice, which requires the operation of both paradigms simultaneously, I discuss the merits of Fraser's approach in the context of environmental justice. The dissertation concludes with a bivalent solution for environmental justice, which I argue has not heretofore been fully established

The authors' aim is to provide a more complete picture of a non-anthropocentric relational ethics by addressing the failure to account for environmental justice. They argue that environmental ethics is always more than how discourses are layered over place, by situating moral agency through the body's affective repertoire of being-in-the-world. Empirical evidence for their argument is drawn from self-reflexive accounts of young Americans travelling to Ulu r u-Kata Tju t a National Park, Northern Territory, Australia as part of a study-group. These reflexive travel narratives illustrate the dilemmas that even well-prepared visitors have in negotiating moral pathways invoked by the policy of reconciliation

Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous jointmanagement structure of Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Usinga framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock, Uluṟu. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park’s traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for overcoming these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage.

Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous jointmanagement structure of Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Usinga framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock, Uluṟu. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park’s traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for overcoming these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage.