With the help of authors such as Wolfgang Sachs (1999 and 2002), this paper examines the possibility of expanding the US concept of environmental justice to a global scale. Through the body of literature reviewed, the paper concludes that the US environmental justice concept can be applied outside its borders. However, the concept will need to be molded into new forms that are tailored to the countries in which it is applied. The elements, which promote a critical, community-concentrated and bottom-up approach are those which will be most useful when expanding environmental justice beyond the US borders. In addition, as referred to in Wolfgang Sachs’ 2002 article, a focus on “lowering the top” to bring resource-usage to more sustainable levels is something which will only benefit environmental justice and its success in the future.

Regulations to protect Brazil's rainforest have moved in recent years from broad global development strategies to certain consideration of local specifics. One expression for this change is the upcoming term of environmental justice as new paradigm in politics and social sciences. In opposite to the sustainable development concept, environmental justice emerged on the basement of municipality and therefore highlights social and cultural questions more than sustainable development does. In the present case study, existing discourses on an environmental protected island in Brazil's Amazon has been used as an example to discover discourses of environmental inequality pattern. Due to the fact, that environmental legislature on the island still fails to answer this problem set and pressing social problems remain, main discourse differences are assumed to have it in it to reveal most pressing unresolved issues as perceived by the involved stakeholders. Q Methodology and free unstructured participant observation have been used within the frame of Elvers’s process related research paradigm to survey traceable and comparable data of environmental problem perception. This tool could provide evidence for three main problems that could be outlined as main causes of environmental inequality in the field: Instead of waste problems, power inequality of migrants versus native population on the island and distance related knowledge divide emerging in the shape of cultural and educational differences, both framed by a landownership pattern created by illegal land purchase. As consequence, misdirection of institutional agents, failure of a development plan and low activity of local (native) civil society lead to failure of well- intended environmental legislature.

In the Environmental Justice (EJ) discourse justice of the distribution of environmental goods und burdens is discussed by means of different attributes. While race has been thoroughly examined, gender has rarely been the focus of the debate. However, environmental burdens as well as environmental decision- making are often distributed to the disadvantage of women. Though many EJ movements have, to a high degree, been supported and shaped by women, they are still mariginalized in public codetermination. In this article I will show that prevailing socially constructed identities (e.g. a motherhood identity) and the attribution of roles to certain spaces (e.g. the public sphere and the private sphere) are responsible for the occurence and persistance of such injustices. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that those who currently benefit from the system (consciously or unconsciously) perpetuate exisiting power structures, but that through operating in an interspace beetween private and public, the activists of EJ movements create possibilities to emancipate themselves from strict roles. To achieve environmental justice social power structures and role models have to be broken down. This will enable those suffering injustices to alter the social conditions according to their requirements and to mold the public sphere, which is currently predominatly male, into a gender-neutral sphere.

The presented work shows the results of a field research on two concepts in Brazil's Amazon: Environmental Justice (EJ) and Sustainable Development (SD). These contain different problem sets within the field of environmental sociology. Closely bound to the distinction problem of the two concepts, the research assumes less degree of discourse differences for the SD concept than for the EJ concept as first hypothesis. The research also based on a second hypothesis. Researching the concepts' discourses will reveal evidence for the environmental legislation failure: The difference in perception of the local environmental problem set due to the 'distance problem'. This problem consists in terms of geographic location and cultural background. Non-consideration of these, distance based, discourse differences in the process of law implementation increases chance to fail. Conducted on an island sibling called Algodoal-Maiandeua, declared environmental protection unit since 20 years, two Q methodology studies have been realized at the same time and compared in order to prove the hypotheses.