1. Introduction

The environmentalism for the poor dissects the geneses, discourses, tactics of steps taken by the Cult of the Wilderness pegged on its love of untouched nature and the acknowledgments of issues concerning nature’s contamination that is outside its purview of social, economic, and cultural structure. Additionally, the defense of the prudent utilization of natural resources, improvement in technology, modernization of ecology, sustainable development, and smart cities without losing sight of the importance of mandatory environmental health effects of fast industrial development and at the same, the environmentalism of the poor of the indigenous people who have an inherent attachment to the environment as a source for materials and the essential requirement for their sustenance in the contemporary marginalized populations. Indigenous communities started to resist the invasion of their rural territories between 2002 and 2014, including peasants’ poor farmers, within the marginalized urban areas that have taken the world stage with a storm. Latin America has taken the forefront in this struggle and has the most extended outstanding history of environmental injustices. Many mining firms, oil extraction companies, land grabbing for biofuel, or artificial tree plantations have violated many residents’ rights in the Andes, Amazon, and Central America parts. Urban turmoil has been escalated by exposure to harmful dumping, poor access to environmental goods and services. Any global organization has not recognized all these injustices; instead have been left at the mercy of local outfits such as local leaders, residents unions, and Non-governmental organizations that support them. Latino and Blacks living along the Mississippi river are exposed to highly dangerous fumes from the petrochemical industry that endanger their right to clean air and water. Even though environmental justice struggles, indigenous communities struggle to affirm their place and identity and identity in sustainable livelihoods’ general values. Environmental Justice centers on four critical components regarding ecological Justice. Description of the term environmental justice is utilized to report environmental inequities across the global south and the dawn of environmental human rights activism.

Additionally, the prerogative of the global guidelines abetting the destruction of the environment and the subservience of this law away from citizens outside of Europe. Furthermore, the inadequacies of environmental Justice as an instrument to combat off environmental injustice and mounting a road map to address the blatant flaws. Environmental Justice must be integrated into universal decrees and trickle down to national structures that will give preferential treatment to indigenous people while evaluating political and economic sway by the global world to stem out any inconsistencies in the system (Shiva & Ahluwalia 2020). Environmental specialists and advocates should grasp ecological pressures to deliver the much needed environmental Justice and shield indigenous people and their fundamental human rights.

2. What is Environmental Justice

The term environmental justice was first used in the United States though currently, the term refers to all mushrooming organizations across the globe that agitate for environmental Justice in any part of this globe (Schlosberg 2007). These organizations engage in activities such as resisting industrial waste dumping in the environment, advocating for clean earth by avoiding environment contamination, relocating hazardous materials to other regions, climatic interferences, privatizing water bodies, and continuously conflicting over habitable marginalized areas.

Currently, the Environmental Justice movement terminology has incorporated what is now popularly known as the Environmental Justice for the poor that was first recognized in early 1980 and is steadily growing in leaps and bounds across the global south. Environmentalists and scholars who are proponents of the concept of the environmentalism for the poor have changed tact and are now alluding to economic assessment. In the same spirit, the locals/indigenous people who are, in most cases, poor have, on numerous occasions, tried to defend their environment from dilapidation through their inherent territorial rights or the God-given sacred duty to their lands.

3. Indigenous Peoples Rights, Place Value, and their Gross Domestic Product

Environmental must be comprehensive in the area of obligation, recognition, and full participation of the local people in the conservation program. To ensure interrelation, integration, and commitment require a deep reflection to bolster universal engagements and indigenous rights given the political rights and the much sacred cultural preservation.

Environment Justice must be all-inclusive in identifying and total participation of the native community in any enterprise that may take place. Deep introspection of harmony in light of bringing together global movements and indigenous rights in the bigger picture of political rights and, at the same time, cultural preservation. In 2007 the United Nations ratified and Adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People to protect their boundaries against any form of dumping wastes (Sandler & Pezzullo 2007), exploitation of natural resources with prior written consent from the local community.

Over time, it has been scientifically established that most minerals and natural resources such as fossil fuel, biomass, and minerals are dominantly found in frontier regions. So, this declaration by the United Nations is key to the indigenous communities to have a final decision and control over their natural resources. Many years have been characterized by continued tensions between territorial rights and environmental rights that have culminated into pleadings by the indigenous people to human rights activists, local, territorial rights bodies, human livelihoods and sustainability, the purity of imperiled water bodies, mountains, and other natural resources that can not be liquidated or regenerate monetary advantage the local community.

Indigenous people attach very high supernatural value to their land that they term as territory. A territory is more important than just ordinary land, a territory as an ancestral land that has meaning attached to tradition and culture. As a result, territory land or ancestral land cannot be traded, sold, or compensated because their connection to the community is intricate. Indigenous people do not value land as a commodity or product that can be converted into wealth or possessions. Some indigenous communities worship some mountains, while others have sacred trees that they usually gather under to make sacrifices to their gods and chant various cultural words that significantly impact their lives and culture. Ignoring such rich history in conservation is a fundamental violation of a communities’ rights.

4. Shortcomings of Environmental Justice

The Cult of the Wilderness Movement is criticized for failing to recognize the local people to conserve the environment. Many local people have decried the continued marginalization and alienation from the daily running of activities within national parks and reserves by international organizations, terming them as non-qualified and worse that indigenous people are non-committed to preserving natural resources. In this view, national parks were taken up. Their budgets funded by international agencies and local people are automatically and forcefully fenced out of their localities’ natural resources.

Locals with native indigenous knowledge of conserving the environment are never appreciated, and most of the time are ignored by decision-makers when it comes to maintaining mother nature (Escobar 2008). Furthermore, in most cases, environmental preservationists disregard the impending social effects of protected regions to the local community. Thus the loss and human displacements are the common phenomena while designating parks and national reserves. Local people lose their crops, domestic animals, land, heritage sites, life, and many more, but this is done by organizations like The Cult of the Wilderness Movement in total disregard of human rights.

Currently, The Cult of the Wilderness Movement has steadily transitioned into a serious business venture that is causing much harm to the locals in the global south. The global south is being blamed for the environmental atrocities caused by the northern cities, and no ecological conservation statute is taking cognizance of this glaring scenario. If the cities in the North are put under mandatory obligation to limit their general environmental waste, then definitely the global south will not suffer the untold human problems since they rely on the natural resources for sustenance.

A cry for environmental Justice is loud in the air, but this movement is pushing a subtle economic benefit discourse. This has moved away from nature conservation to issuing permits to preserve endangered species of animals and some wetlands with aesthetical values. The main scope and schedule of The Cult of the Wilderness Movement are thinking about the rich in the developed world in the sense that they have completely lost touch with nature; as a result, they put more efforts and resources to maintain this places, not for the sake of the locals but the sake of the rich westerners.

Environmental justice movements have failed to safeguard the very mission they founded (Agarwal, 2001). From our case study of The Cult of the Wilderness Movement, we can easily infer that although they focus on environmental conservation, they end up marginalizing the community, hence creating more conflict and further destroying the environment. Many forests have been burned in retaliation moves by indigenous communities, many losses have been realized even in the national parks when human-wildlife becomes rampant. These movements fail to understand that the indigenous communities have lived in a state of peace and tranquility with the natural resources for a long time without depleting them.

5. Conclusion

Environmental Justice has juxtaposed institutions; first, the discourse on human rights opines for the great emancipatory prospect undertaken by grassroots organizations to agitate for a sustainable and equal society. Conversely, human rights laws and global institutions are entrenched in power correlations that are pegged on the foundations of colonial approach and outdated narrative of the savior versus the savage, that has for a long time aided the Northern governments and international firms to prevaricate responsibility in their daily mutilation of the environment, marginalized people and their State. A non- Eurocentric approach to the human rights programs, magnification of the voice of the voiceless indigenous people to have a positive impact in environmental activism by the proper interpretation of ecological human rights law, and further develop statutes that defy structured violations of the universal economic structure instead of merely bettering the most apparent indicators should be at the heart of environmental scholars and practitioners. Furthermore, environmental human rights lawsuits should not only target the victims. Still, they should target the greatest blunders of the Northern States’ environment that brandish enormous authority over programs and strategies of the Southern governments. Human rights decrees must take cognizance and vigorously execute communal human rights, such as the rights to mother nature and the coming generations’ unalienable rights. This should emerge in a rejoinder to the aspirations and needs of indigenous communities’ social justice organizations, and without fail, integrate native home-grown theories of human dignity. Human rights law should not be treated as a remedy for the universe’s environmental evils; instead, it is a vital tool in the broader promotion for worldwide environmental Justice that should complement but should never act as a de facto replacement for local environmental policies. The discourse and execution of ecological accords, environmental Justice needs some more concerted efforts in terms of extra-legal overall enrolment for a humane, just, and ecologically sustainable economic structure.

6. References

Isabelle, A. & Martínez A. (2014), The Environmentalism of the Poor’ revisited: Territory and Place in Disconnected Global Struggles. Ecological Economics, Elsevier, Vol 202, pp. 167-176.

Shiva, S. & Ahluwalia, U. (2020), Ag One: Recolonization of Agriculture, New Dehli: Navdanya/RESTE

Agarwal, B. (2001). Participatory exclusions, community forestry, and gender: an analysis for South Asia and a conceptual framework. World Development. 29, 1623–1648.

Escobar, A. (2008). Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham: Duke University Press.

Sandler, R.& Pezzullo, P. (2007). Environmental Justice and Environmentalism: The Social Justice Challenge to the Environmental Movement. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Schlosberg, D. (2007). Deﬁning Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. New York: Oxford University Press.