Biodiversity and Conservation 12: 617–619, 2003.

Book review

Environmental Justice in South Africa

Edited by David A. McDonald, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio and CapetownUniversity Press, Capetown, 2002, ISBN 0-8214-1415-1 and 0-8214-1416-X, 341 pp,Cloth $59.95; paper $26.95

Uncertainty and the Environment: Implications for Decision Making and Envi-ronmental Policy

Edited by Richard A. Young, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2001, ISBN 1-84064-626-8, 249 pp, £59.95

Environmental justice is a major political movement in the USA and is fast securingthe attention of policy-makers in Europe and elsewhere. The concerns of the move-ment stem from the apparent observation that poor and ethnic minority householdstend to be exposed to higher levels of environmental risk than richer households.Parts of the movement appear to believe that risks should be equalised, a self-evidentimpossibility, but the more practical adherents suggest that (a) efforts to clean up theworst excesses should be targeted at poorer communities, (b) compensation might begiven, and (c) all new policies should be carefully screened for their social impactsaccording to income or racial group. These are evidently sensible suggestions, but theproblem with the literature surrounding environmental justice is that is has become amix of well-reasoned attempts at empirical observation of inequality in environmentalrisks, and verbose ideologists who hardly appear to have time to inspect the empir-ical literature. The literature is, for example, almost exclusively American and itsextrapolation to other countries is not always justified. Moreover, the early literaturethat generated the inequality hypothesis has more recently been exposed as lackingin analytical rigour. At the cross-country level, of course, inequality to environmentalrisks is far more established. Few would argue that health risks from lack of sanitationand water are anything but unequally distributed to the detriment of the poor. Indoorand outdoor air pollution risks also fit this hypothesis.

There are also distinct elements of a failure to think issues through in the environ-mental justice literature. For example, if inequality of risk exists, it is not surprisingthat the rich can avoid pollution because they can buy their way out of it by movingor investing in avoidance measures. But one effect may be to lower the price of otherassets, e.g. housing, in the more polluted areas. If the poor are not free to move,then this is small consolation. If they are, then there is a compensation mechanism

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already implicit in the way markets work. Such observations are destined to irritatethe ideologists, but their own failing lies in an inability to set up any form of modelof locational choice and transfers of wealth and well-being.

David McDonald’s book contains a mix of the good and the bad in the envi-ronmental justice literature. It is good that it focuses on a country where generalinequality is rife – South Africa. It has several interesting case studies, for exampleof the Lesotho Highland Water Project, a major dam that Patrick Bond regards asa conspicuous economic, ecological failure that also harmed the poor. Anyone whowants a documentary of corruption and indifference to the poor could start with thisessay. But two things mar the essays in this book. The first is a distinct avoidance ofanything quantitative. Narrative discourse is fine, but the reader is left with a desireto get issues in perspective. There is no tabular material in this book at all, so thereader has no real idea of how environmental risks are generally distributed in SouthAfrica. Maybe the data are not there, but we could have been told that. The secondproblem lies in the unproductive and incommunicable language used by several ofthe authors, who content themselves with global generalisations of dubious validity.What are obviously heartfelt concerns about injustice sadly spill over into rants andraves that presume the facts rather than demonstrating them. However, the essays areworth reading because they do illustrate the potentially biased power of discourseover analysis, and, more usefully, because they represent one of the first attempts toassemble issues of injustice in the context of a still deeply divided society.

Richard Young’s book is a wholly different enterprise. Everyone knows that un-certainty pervades all decisions, but especially so in the environmental context. Wecannot know for certain how environments will react to continuous stresses and oc-casional shocks. We cannot know the implications for human well-being. The furtherwe look into the future, the greater the uncertainty is. It follows that decision-makingmust make recognition of the uncertainty quite explicit. In more conventional cir-cles, this is done by assigning probabilities where we think we know them, or, morevaguely, by invoking the ‘precautionary principle’, the meaning of which has neverbeen very clear. Young’s approach is different. He invokes the uncertainty analysisof George Shackle, whose work is likely to be known only to an older generation ofeconomists. What Shackle dealt with was uncertainty in contexts where we cannotassign probabilities: we simply do not know much at all. We may know outcomes butno probabilities, or we may know neither. One decision rule immediately emergesfrom such contexts: if what we do not know could be clarified by waiting, then itwill pay to be far more cautious about destroying the asset that generates the infor-mation. The value of information generated by delay – so-called quasi-option valuein environmental economics or option value in the financial literature – provides apowerful justification for slowing deforestation rates, for example. But Young focuseson Shackle’s notion of the degree of surprise as a measure of uncertainty: most ofus form such expectations about the world we live in, and we are surprised or notas the case may be when events occur. Chapter 5 of Young’s book is an excellent

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exposition of Shackle’s theory and one can hope it will help to revive this approachto uncertainty. Most interestingly, Young then applies the approach to the SouthernHighway in Belize. Uncertainties are listed. A questionnaire was used to elicit atti-tudes and responses to various scenarios about gains and losses. The only deficiencyhere is the use of spurious figures taken from a famous but badly informed articlein Nature several years ago. But the focus of interest is the methodology rather thanthe numbers, so this ill-advised element can be forgiven. The end results amount to areasonable, though not wholly satisfactory, validation of the Shackle model. Finally,Young briefly reviews the ways in which uncertainty is modelled in actual guidancefrom international institutions. As practitioners know well, only lip service is paid tonotions of uncertainty in many such evaluations. By placing ‘hard’ uncertainty at thecentre of the analysis, Young has shown that we still need to sort out the basics beforewe apply the theory, but that a first step is to put some of the theory into practicerather than ignore uncertainty altogether.

David PearceUniversity College LondonImperial College LondonLondon WC1E 6BT, UK

E-mail: d.pearce@ucl.ac.uk