Both attitudes and behavior toward the environment are affected by the perceived justice of an environmental position. However, both sides in an environmental conflict will usually claim that justice favors their position. Preference for one outcome over another may thus depend on the type of justice that each outcome represents. The author argues that macrojustice principles, such as equality and responsibility, lend themselves more easily to an environmentalist position, whereas microjustice principles, such as equity and procedural justice, are more congenial to an antienvironmentalist position. In the present study, participants were presented with three scenarios in which conflicts had been resolved in either an antienvironmentalist or a proenvironmentalist way. The positions were presented either as promoting individual concerns or based on the concerns of the wider society. Overall, macrojustice arguments were more successful for proenvironmentalist decisions and microjustice arguments were more successful for antienvironmentalist decisions.
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