Oldal 218 [218]
OCR
216 GYULA NAGY decisions, and even more so to their change, also depend on the local and central 8 power practices, which may administer pressure or may at times employ deliberate manipulation. This can be illustrated with the case of Bátaapáti, where the geology of the area with an ancient granite rock made it possible to create subsurface waste storage for low- and medium-activity radioactive waste from the Paks Nuclear Power Plant in the area of the settlement. When the project was announced, only 80 settlements suitable for such a nuclear waste storage were found in Hungary and only a single one, Bátaapáti, volunteered to give room for the installation. As a small village, the municipality’s financial means were limited and unemployment was relatively high. Both the aldermen and the inhabitants regarded the hazardous waste repository as a means of developing the settlement on the compensation they would get. Before the realization of the storing facility, TETT (the Association for Social Control and Information) was founded in 1997 to provide information and carry on supervision about the National Radio-active waste repository (NRHT). The eight members of TETT received 64 — 197 million HUF / village (the amount depended on their distance from the repository) for supervision and informative work. On 10 July 2005, a referendum was held about the investment; 75% of the population took part, 90% voted for it. The villagers themselves opted for the project, but the context, the socioeconomically helpless position of the settlement and its inhabitants, must not be overlooked. To achieve environmental justice, it is necessary that the community living in the affected area should perceive and recognize the unjust, inequitable processes. Without the perception and recognition of the problems it is actually impossible to manage them, but both the perception and its recognition might be mistaken or misinterpreted. In Bourdieu’s view, the terms misinterpretation and misrecognition allude to the acts, value judgments, discourses, and practices that we adopt in theory, in compliance with the system of norms held by the majority of society, but in actual fact we act — pass judgment — in another discourse (James 2014). It follows that injustice is not only the outcome. It may engender the process anew, unintentionally or intentionally. In the latter case, injustice receives a discriminative hue. The lack of recognition, participation and subsidiarity may often reinforce the conflicts between decision-makers and real stakeholders. The rise of the environmental justice movement in recent decades has brought to light numerous cases across the globe where polluting investments were approved by organizations and political decision-makers who showed little interest in considering the perspectives of the local population. In many instances, these decision-makers came from (upper) middle-class backgrounds and non-minority origins, setting them apart from the affected local communities. This lack of meaningful engagement with the impacted residents has led to situations where environmental injustices disproportionately burden marginalized and vulnerable communities. As a result, the local people often suffer disadvantages due to the degradation of the environment caused by diverse investments. An exclusive or one-sided approach to environmental injustices oversimplifies the complexities involved. It becomes challenging to categorically declare whether environmental disadvantages are just or unjust solely based on their geographical distribution. Instead, it is crucial to first clarify the underlying concept of justice
