Environmental Justice for Future Generations: An Alternative Discourse to the Sustainable Development.

The idea of Sustainable Development enshrined in most international environmental instruments of soft law and most western constitutions has framed the body of environmental law. The relation and interactions between environment and society has been guided by the idea that the economic social reproduction could still being unchanged if the hegemonic idea of development was “sustainable”. However, while the economic benefit and development, which understands nature as an asset in hands of the human, still in the centre of the public policies, the sustainability cannot be understood as any alternative to face the current environmental crisis. The present contribution seeks to critically map the role of sustainable development in the idea and further development of the meaning of environmental justice, taking into consideration the physical limitations of the earth in the continuous exchange between the society and its biophysical base; the obstinate faith to technical advances in facing the increasing environmental damages; and the responsibility in terms of justice from an intergenerational and global perspective, taking into special consideration the climate crisis in terms of justice with generations to come. This approach seeks to understand other burdens of environmental justice, beyond the conceptual framework developed during the 80s, seeing it as the alternative to the sustainable development discourse.