As many in society work towards global sustainability, we live at a time when efforts to conserve biodiversity and geodiversity, and combat climate change, take place simultaneously with land grabs by large corporations, food insecurity, and human displacement through an ecological breakdown. Many of us seek to reconcile more-than-human nature and human nature and to balance intrinsic value and the current human expansion phase. These and other challenges will fundamentally alter the way people, depending on their worldview and ethics, relate to communities and the environment.

While environmental problems cannot be seen as purely ecological because they always involve people, who bring to the environmental table their different assumptions about nature and culture, so are social problems connected to environmental constraints. Similarly, social problems are fundamentally connected to environmental constraints and ecological health. While nonhumans cannot bring anything to this negotiating table, the distinct perspective of this book is that there is a need to consider the role of nonhumans as equally important stakeholders – albeit without a voice. This book develops an argument that human-environmental relationships are set within ecological reality and ecological ethics. Rather than being mutually constitutive processes, humans have obligate dependence on nature, not vice versa. We argue that over-arching ecological ethics is necessary to underpin conservation in the long-term. This requires a holistic ‘justice’, where both social justice (for humans) and ecological justice (for nature) are entwined. However, given the escalating environmental crisis and major extinction event we face, and given that social justice has been dominant for centuries, we believe that in many cases ecojustice will need to be prioritized. This will depend on the situation, but we feel that under ecological ethics, holistic ethics cannot always allow social justice to dominate, hence there is an urgent need to prioritize ecojustice today. Accordingly, this book will deal with questions of both social and ecological justice, putting forth the idea that justice for both humans and nonhumans and their habitats can only be achieved simultaneously. This book will explore the following questions: What is the relationship between social and ecological justice? How might we integrate social and ecological justice? What are the major barriers to achieving this simultaneous justice? How can these barriers be overcome? What are the major debates in conservation relevant to this?

doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-13905-6

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/