Biodiversity, justice, and animals

Abstract

This chapter begins by showing why biodiversity conservation raises very important questions of global justice: because global inequality drives biodiversity loss, because biodiversity loss causes global injustice, and because responses to biodiversity loss will produce further global injustice unless formulated carefully and with clear normative guidance. For all of those reasons, the biodiversity crisis should play a much more central role within debates on global justice than it has to date. The chapter then goes on to sketch several prominent views on justice towards non-human animals. Rather than choosing between them, the aim is to show that, on any of these views, we have further reasons for caring about the biodiversity crisis. For the crisis threatens not only human interests, but those of the many other animals with whom we share the planet.