Introduction
There are environmental risks which affect only individuals or specific groups, such as uranium mine workers, people who live near nuclear power plants or hazardous waste landfills, fishermen who fish in bays with high-frequency oil tanker traffic.
Are these cases of discrimination or the calculated decisions of those who will bear a certain environmental risk? The industrial development of modern society inevitably leads to the occurence of these examples, and there will always be individuals or groups exposed to a higher degree of environmental risk. Environmental justice does not refer to the question of how to achieve a risk-free environment. The focus of environmental justice is the matter of ensuring equal distribution of environmental values and risks and eliminating the possibility that certain individuals or groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks.[1023]The first part of the chapter analyses how the definition of the term “environment” influences the definition of the term “environmental justice”. In this sense, I will introduce anthropocentric, ecocentric and economic understandings of the environment and the influence that theories about justice have on the definition of environmental justice. By means of comparative analysis of the constitutional and legal regulation of environmental protection, in the second part of the chapter, i will try to reach a conclusion as to which approach is used in contemporary law.