by Dina Lupin<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Each year, final-year students on the Environmental Justice and the Law<\/em> module at the University of Southampton are asked to find a real-world case study of environmental injustice, and to interrogate honestly what the law does (and does not) do about it. They are not asked to find tidy answers but rather to sit with the gap between what legislation promises and what communities actually experience, with the slow accumulation of harm that never quite makes it into a courtroom, and with the uncomfortable possibility that law can be complicit in the very crises it claims to address<\/p>\n\n\n\n This teaching and learning is intimately connected with Home in Crisis. <\/em>Home is where environmental injustice is felt most intimately, in damp bedroom walls, in rice terraces tended by generations, in farmland waterlogged by a returning species, in land cleared by violence and replanted for export, in apartments where the air indoors is no safer than the smog outside. Crisis is what happens when the systems meant to protect that home fail, falter, or are quietly redirected to serve other interests. The five posts in this symposium each take up that relationship in a different way, considering the cultural, ecological, economic, respiratory, and domestic dimensions of crisis and of environmental injustice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grace Rymell<\/strong> takes us to Bali, where the UNESCO-recognised irrigation practice of Subak<\/em>, and the philosophy of harmony between people, land and the divine that underpins it, is being eroded by unregulated tourism development. Her post traces both the visible harms of that erosion, including the 2025 floods that killed at least eighteen people, and the invisible ones: the solastalgia of generations watching their home become unrecognisable to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maddy Nicholl<\/strong> turns to the English countryside and the licensed reintroduction of beavers, asking what happens to environmental law\u2019s promise of justice when ecological repair creates new burdens for farming communities. Her post argues that recognition, not just consultation, is what current licensing frameworks are missing for both the humans and the non-humans caught up in rewilding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jake Ellis Aurora<\/strong> exposes the human cost hidden behind the language of \u201csustainable\u201d palm oil in Colombia, tracing a direct line from the 1997 Mapiripan massacre to the RSPO\u2019s certification regime today. His post asks a question that runs through the whole symposium: sustainable for whom, and on whose terms, and shows how greenwashing can turn law into a tool of erasure rather than protection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chloe Wong<\/strong> writes from personal experience of Hong Kong\u2019s haze, asking what \u201chome\u201d means when the air itself becomes a threat and staying indoors is no longer a reliable form of protection. Her post shows how air pollution regulation, however well-intentioned, can quietly deepen intergenerational and distributive injustice for the city\u2019s children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Omolola Osinowo<\/strong> confronts the UK\u2019s ongoing mould crisis through the death of two-year-old Awaab Ishak, arguing that the harm caused by damp housing is a form of racialised \u201cslow violence\u201d, one that recent legal reforms like Awaab\u2019s Law have only partially addressed. Her post is a reminder that home can be the site of injustice as easily as its remedy, and that legal victories on paper do not always translate into safety in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Across all five posts, a pattern emerges. Law is rarely wholly absent from these stories of crisis but all too often, law is concerned with managing, translating, and administering harm rather than confronting its causes. As a result, addressing injustice is not a question of mere law reform but of recognising communities – the human and more than human – beyond the narrow categories that are convenient to regulate and in reckoning with the specific experiences and dimensions of crisis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n