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Researchers have found that many contemporary movements, including the environmental justice movement, offer multidimensional conceptions of justice that extend beyond the distribution of societal benefits and burdens. In an effort to understand the role of justice in environmental politics more broadly, we ask (1) how environmental activists throughout the movement understand social justice and (2) whether and how environmental activists vary in the kinds of justice claims they make. Drawing on interviews with samples of environmental activists in British Columbia, Canada, and the U.S. states of Oregon and Washington, Q methodology is used to examine how environmental activists understand justice. We find, within the mainstream of the environmental movement, varying and elaborated understandings of social justice in the environmental context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics of the environmental movement point to its narrowness, conventionality, and sectoralism. Analysis of environmentalist discourses offers a means to assess these criticisms. Furthermore, examination of these discourses offers insight into the political ideas that link environmentalists with other progressives and those that divide these sectors. Drawing on a sample of 42 environmental activists in the United States Pacific Northwest, Q methodology is used to reconstruct 4 discourses: civic republican, liberal ecocentric, green justice, and global ecocentric. Analysis of these discourses reveals several key findings. First, issues related to racial and economic justice are the most divisive for environmentalists in the region. Second, the strongest areas of agreement across the discourses relate to the balance of nature and the importance of active, democratic citizenship. Third, the green justice discourse reflects the perspectives of activists from all sectors of the region's environmental movement, suggesting an absence of sectoralism and the existence of intramovement learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]