Climate Action, Distributive Justice & The Rest of Nature
Hope & Justice Series, Distributive Justice Subseries #6.5
What does distributive justice have to do with the rest of nature (i.e. “non-human” nature)? Some may think these categories don’t mesh. More broadly, discussions about the rest of nature and justice can stir powerful emotions and intense, complex philosophical, ethical, and legal arguments and debates.
For those of us in the Climate Movement, this issue is a matter for our Ten Movement Values, especially the relationship between justice and sustainability. Our other values of love, creativity, wisdom, and pragmatism must inspire and guide us in this discussion.
So how should we combine justice and sustainability?
Can human beings act unjustly towards the rest of nature?
Let’s start with the classical question of justice: what is the rest of nature due?
Our Movement Value of sustainability provides an answer: we should seek to be in balance and harmony with the rest of the natural world so that it can have the existence it was meant to have. For us to take what the rest of nature is due is to treat it unjustly.
The land and the waters sustain all life. To degrade their ability to do so is unjust.
To extinguish another species from the face of the earth is a profound injustice, the furtherest from balance and harmony we can go — indeed, the obliteration of balance and harmony.
And so, we must do for the rest of nature the three actions of justice: stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better.
What guidance does distributive justice offer as we do all three?
As I have argued, in the climate context distributive justice concerns: a just distribution of both resources and opportunities; the elimination of unequal burdens related to consequences, and; shared benefits from solutions that enhance wellbeing for everyone, and, in this case, everything.
So what does distributive justice and sustainability mean for the rest of nature in the climate space?
For the rest of nature, a just distribution of resources, opportunities, consequences, and benefits, in keeping with sustainability, means that in stopping bad stuff we don’t take from them what allows them to thrive, a healthy habitat, i.e., their homes and livelihoods. Stopping bad stuff includes: climate impacts; over-harvesting; other forms of damaging and toxic pollution; the introduction of exotic invasives and disease, and; habitat fragmentation, degradation, and destruction.
In short, we must not steal their blessing.
Instead, by setting wrong right and making things better we work to ensure the health and fecundity of all the ecosystems of the planet, sharing with them the benefits as we create a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
This is a profoundly tall order, which is why in doing so we must live out our other Movement Values of love, beauty, creativity, freedom, wisdom, pragmatism, non-violence, and success. Together, we will continue to make the impossible possible and the possible actual and the actual beautiful and our future come faster. Join us!
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“For the rest of nature, a just distribution of resources, opportunities, consequences, and benefits, in keeping with sustainability, means that in stopping bad stuff we don’t take from them what allows them to thrive, a healthy habitat, i.e., their homes and livelihoods. Stopping bad stuff includes: climate impacts; over-harvesting; other forms of damaging and toxic pollution; the introduction of exotic invasives and disease, and; habitat fragmentation, degradation, and destruction.
In short, we must not steal their blessing.”