Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis

I have not read the book, of course, and therefore it may not be surprising that I am puzzled by this post. I generally understand “climate justice”, despite the misnomer “justice”, which strongly implies that somebody has had a crime committed against them and now seeks redress in front of a court, to be about the unequal effects of climate change: poor people are much more badly and immediately affected despite having contributed less to carbon levels, e.g., because they are the first to find food unaffordable, have no air conditioning, may even be exposed to heat as they live on the street or in a refugee camp, etc.

What is the equivalent in the area of biodiversity loss? If a species of beetle dies out, or even a species of whale, how does that affect a poor Somali citizen unjustly more than a wealthy Norwegian citizen?

There is mention of mitigation measures, but the same problem arises. If we have a species recovery program for a rare plant, perhaps involving ex situ conservation and seed orcharding, how does that unjustly affect a poor person negatively? Or is this is about setting aside nature reserves on land that poor subsistence farmers would like to occupy and clear to grow food for their families? Without further information, it just isn’t clear to me in what sense biodiversity ‘justice’ parallels climate ‘justice’, because nobody is as directly affected by the extinction or conservation of an orchid as by dying from heat stroke or by being unable to insure their home against flood.

I see, thanks.

Must honestly say, however, that despite being a biodiversity researcher with extinction grief myself, rationally, I don’t see how biodiversity loss is anywhere on the same civilisational level of threat as global warming and resource depletion (e.g., freshwater overuse or arable soil erosion and salination). If Bangladesh is underwater, the home of hundreds of millions of people is just gone. If heat waves create conditions where the planet can grow food only for 70% of its population, or if Spain entirely runs out of freshwater to irrigate and to provide household water and drinks for its people, those are society-ending events.

Conversely, outside of a few narrow ecological groups like soil biota and pollinators, I find it difficult to understand how even biodiversity loss that I would describe as catastrophic from the perspective of evolutionary biology would significantly affect the amenity of humans who simply don’t care about biodiversity. For example, if tomorrow a quarter of all wild plant and animal species on the planet disappeared, and if they are randomly chosen as opposed to e.g. coincidentally all pollinators disappearing in one go, would that really significantly affect food security, livelihoods, health, and quality of life except for, well, nature lovers like myself?

Emotionally, I would like to respond with yes, because I believe we have a moral duty to preserve biodiversity, but I am not certain that is actually the case. Apart from fish, we pretty much only feed on domesticated or cultivated life forms, and there is presumably some redundancy and fungibility in ecosystem services such as pollination and decomposition, where one species of fungus can take over the role of another that went extinct.

Alex – a couple of concrete examples. Loss of biodiversity is likely to hurt predator animals sooner than prey animals. Higher on the food chain, so more possiblities for things to go wrong that drive them into extinction or cut their numbers. That leaves room for a profliferation of plant eaters and plant disease carriers, and plant destroyers for the sake of nesting or whatever. Yeah they get hurt by poisions and wilderness fragmentation and climate change too. But lower down the food chain you have more variety. With animal predators reduces, at least some plant predators will thrive. That affects agriculture a lot – food production gets hurt. And if food gets scarcer who loses access first, and how keeps access the longest? And, as with climate change the rich are probably responsible for a lot more of the poisons, the agricultural and industrial pollution. Just one of a million ways that loss of biodiversity is a real threat to humans, and threat hits the poor first. Threats to biodiversity also lead to destruction of mangroves and other storms. So while climate change creates stronger, longer lasting and wetter storms. loss of biodiversity exacerbates this and ensures the storms will do even more damage because some of the protection is gone. In other words given two storms of equal intensity duration and wetness, you still get worse results if the plant life that would hold soil in place, aborb some of the water is gone. I think in the case of the mangroves, where what amounts to mangrove forests are gone, you actually lose something even tempered wind speed a bit. So loss of biodiversity makes storm damage worse. And again while that hurts everyone in the path of the storm, it hurts wores the poorer you are. (And yes that can be died to race and even gender as well, though the latter would be too long to go into in a short comment.) I really am putting the book high on my list to read; but these are examples just from things I’ve enountered doing work on climate change economics and energy economics. They may well be minor compared to what is discussed in the book, but just happen to be examples I’m familiar with.

Congratulations on your book!
Anti-capitalists, troubled by the attention disparity you point out, have taken to using ecological justice as a catch-all shorthand, including overlapping aspects of injustice in spheres like resource shortages, agriculture, underdevelopment, water access, migration, climate crises, pollution, species extinctions, habitat destruction, poverty, even health crises like Covid-19 or our heightened mental distress, etc. These are widely understood as interlinked aspects of the capitalocene, the general assault on our common home.

Today we have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. –
Pope Francis: Laudato Si

Engels: A fair statement of my argument. There are inherently three general arguments about any course of action likely to cause catastrophe, in addition to those arguments specific to the particular case. One is that we are against catastrophes. The second is that we are against catastrophes happening to us, which by the nature of catastrophes is normally possible. The third is a justice argument that catastrophes are likely to have the worst impacts on those who are poor or who are victims in other ways, which as you say is a justice argument. But please “Gar,” not “Gary.” Not a big deal; just “Gar” is the name I go by and it is not short for “Gary” “Garth” “Garfield” “Garfish” “or any of the other names beginning with the same three letters that people will sometimes manage to get out of that single syllable.