Chris Armstrong is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom. He has worked on various issues in applied political philosophy, including global justice, territory and natural resources, climate justice, the politics of the ocean, and the biodiversity crisis. His most recent book, Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis grapples with how biodiversity might be conserved without producing global injustice. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Armstrong discusses what readers will gain from the text, the discrepancy in urgency between the climate and biodiversity crises, and how a lack of writing routine works for him.
What is your work about?
My book wrestles with the global justice implications of the biodiversity crisis. If we are persuaded that there is a looming crisis and that we have reasons for serious concern about it, we ought to think seriously about what fair and inclusive responses might look like. I try to show that the nature of our biodiversity conservation policies will have serious implications for global justice: those policies could make existing problems of poverty and exclusion worse, or they could, perhaps, help tackle them. This is a difficult question, politically, because most extant biodiversity lies in the countries of the global South. In contrast, privilege is concentrated in the countries of the global North. So, the idea that each country should bear the burdens of conserving its biodiversity won’t do. Another reason why it is difficult is that we are still living in a world marked by colonialism, racism, and various other forms of injustice, and these have influenced prior conservation efforts. For instance, it’s worth noting that the origins of international conservation law lie in the efforts of colonial powers to regulate subsistence activities in the countries of the South. Inequities around race, culture, language and gender still mark the contemporary conservation field. As a result, the challenge of arriving at a distributively and politically just form of conservation governance is a sobering one.
It seems that political theorists and philosophers have been somewhat slow to engage with these issues. This is in stark contrast to climate change, where we now have extensive philosophical literature on climate justice. My book is an attempt to stimulate a similar level of engagement regarding the biodiversity case.
What are your main goals in the book?
You could say there are three main aims.
First, and at the most general level, I wanted the book to serve as a kind of overview of the territory for political theorists and philosophers, to allow them to get to grips with the idea of a biodiversity crisis, to grasp why it matters so much, and to begin to wrestle with some of the issues of distributive and political justice that will be involved in responding to it. The book will, I hope, be useful to people with a variety of different views about the nature of our duties of global justice, about the moral status of animals, about the value attached to biodiversity, and so on.
Second, and more specifically (since in my wider work, I advocate for a broadly egalitarian view of global justice), I wanted to show why people who care about global inequality should engage more seriously with the crisis and to show what broadly pro-egalitarian responses might look like. In the middle chapters of the book, I engage with questions about fair burden-sharing in global conservation and, indeed, with questions about how conservation burdens should be conceptualized in the first place.
Third, and much more practically, I wanted to engage with some of the more significant ‘applied’ biodiversity policies or would-be policies (especially biodiversity offsetting and the ‘Half Earth’ proposal) and to show that they have fairly significant global justice implications. These haven’t been addressed seriously enough to date – it’s striking, for instance, that political philosophers have had some exciting things to say about (the merits or drawbacks of) carbon offsetting but much less to say about biodiversity offsetting. This is true, although biodiversity offsetting came first, historically, and in a sense, provided much of the intellectual and policy architecture for carbon offsetting.
Is there anything you didn’t include that you wanted to? Why did you leave it out?
There are always difficult choices to be made, and here especially so, because I wanted this to be a fairly short and punchy book that could make a relatively immediate impact. One issue that has intrigued me for some time is why the global justice implications of climate change have been investigated so extensively, in contrast to the biodiversity crisis. This is, to some extent, an empirical, social-scientific question, or perhaps a question of intellectual history, and answering it properly is perhaps somewhat outside of my skill set. I have tried to explore this question in a separate (as yet unpublished) paper, and I will continue to think about it. A related question is: what are the major differences, if any, between the normative challenges thrown up by climate change and those thrown up by biodiversity loss? Again, I find this fascinating, but I just couldn’t pursue that question at any length here.
How is your work relevant to everyday life?
In the UK, where I work, we are often encouraged to do work that directly impacts government policy. I am not trying to do that here. I do not expect policymakers to read the book, although I hope academics in other disciplines beyond philosophy and political theory might do so. But I am contributing to a discussion about policy at a suitably general level. A good example might be the chapter on biodiversity offsetting. Consider a stylized case whereby a landowner in one place agrees to refrain from destroying biodiversity on their land, and this produces a ‘credit’ that a landowner somewhere else can then buy. This credit will entitle the buyer to destroy biodiversity in another place (where perhaps they want to build a factory or some housing) without making a ‘net’ contribution to biodiversity loss from the point of view of government biodiversity targets. In chapter 5 of the book, I try to assess what kinds of moral costs might be involved in a process like that. For instance, I explore the normatively significant relationships that people might have with biodiversity at particular sites and which ‘destruction in one place and conservation in another,’ as we might call it, could disrupt. I also explore the impact this could have on individual animals, who might be thought to have morally salient interests in the location of particular bits of biodiversity. This is a good illustration, I think, of the contribution that philosophy and/or political theory can make. Common objections to biodiversity offsetting often relate to the likelihood that offsetting schemes will fail to achieve their stated objectives (biodiversity will be preserved for a while, but not for very long; people will be given credits for preserving biodiversity that they really had no intention of destroying; and so on). But I show in this chapter that there can be serious moral costs attached to the dyad of ‘destroying biodiversity in one place and conserving it in another’ even if biodiversity offsetting achieves all its stated goals. It is a much more problematic practice than has often been realized because treating biodiversity as composed of fungible units (as offsetting schemes require) fails to capture its significance to individual people and individual non-human animals. I think it’s important for us to recognize this. Will this argument have any influence on political policy? It’s not beyond the realms of possibility, but, as ever, it’s a long shot.
What writing practices, methods, or routines do you use, and which have been the most helpful?
Academics often say, ‘I just need a few clear weeks to start my project.’ I have a very busy life, and for me, that will not happen. But, I have found that once the overall conception of the argument is clear in my mind, I can use even very small slices of time to get some of it down on paper. A day when I write 150 words is not a failure; it all adds up. Because I try not to write until I’m very sure what I want to say, I don’t go through a succession of drafts. Once it’s written, it’s written. So, in terms of writing routines, there isn’t one. In terms of practices, it’s similarly unstructured – I’m likely at any one point in time to be working on four or five different chapters, dipping in and out as inspiration strikes. Again, if the overall conception is very clear, working on many different parts of a book simultaneously is possible. This works for me, but everyone’s brain is different, so I’m not sure I would offer this as ‘advice’ to others.
What’s next for you?
Having started my career thinking about justice and global justice, in quite general terms, I have, in recent years, spent more and more time thinking about the intersection between global justice and a series of environmental issues (climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean governance, and so on). I’m not sure anyone needs another ‘theory of global justice’ or ‘theory of territorial rights’ – at least not from me. But, thinking at the intersection of global justice and these major environmental challenges has been quite fertile for me. So, I expect I will continue to plough that furrow. I will also continue to work on the ocean, the topic of my last book, which still fascinates me.
Chris Armstrong
Chris Armstrong is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Southampton, in the United Kingdom. He has worked on various issues in applied political philosophy, including global justice, territory and natural resources, climate justice, the politics of the ocean, and the biodiversity crisis.
Richard B. Gibson is Editor of the Current Events in Philosophy and the Bioethics series. He is a bioethicist with research interests in human enhancement, emergent technologies, novel beings, disability theory, and body modification.
I am very glad to see this book coming out, since it will draw attention to the intersection of two important moral concerns that are currently on a collision course. I am especially glad to see that it recognizes the impact that “biodiversity offsetting” will have on the nonhuman animals who happen to have the bad luck of living in the portion of habitat that is to be sacrificed, so that others may continue to live (at least temporarily). I do have a problem, however, with our mainstream tradition of assuming that “justice” applies to humans only. Taking the “big picture” view, the reason there is a biodiversity crisis at all is because our own species is continuing to expand its global population and therefore is increasingly co-opting terrestrial and marine habitats for its own use. From an anthropocentric perspective, considering the nonhuman inhabitants to be merely “natural resources” there for the taking is generally seen as morally unproblematic as long as certain subgroupings of our species are not unduly deprived of their fair share in relation to other groups of humans, which of course they have been, given our shameful history of colonialism, racism, and other forms of intraspecific injustice. From a biocentric perspective, however, the three-and-a-half-billion-year-old elaboration of life making up the Biosphere is now under assault on many fronts; we forget our kinship with the myriad lifeforms with whom we share this once-bountiful planet. Instead of continuing to expand our numbers and our wants, perhaps our notion of “justice” should be expanded, to recognize the “fair share” that is due our evolutionary cohorts and welcome them into our moral community with appreciation and gratitude, even as we strive to make our within-species dealings more egalitarian—sooner or later, we are all going to have to acknowledge that there are limits on a finite Earth, and make the best of it as ethically as we can.
I am very sympathetic to what you say, Ronnie, and would definitely not want to say justice is for humans only. What justice and fair shares look like when expanded to include all animals, I don’t know – it’s a hard challenge but I will continue to think about this.
Thanks for your comment, Chris. There are no easy answers, given the trajectory our species is currently on. But I think publicly discussing these issues may be a way to begin opening up our global consciousness to consideration of interspecific as well as intraspecific justice. I’d like to see us become more flexible in the way we think about “groups.” With our vaunted cognitive powers, humans seem to think we live in an abstract, humans-only world, subdivided into many different groupings of humans. Unfortunately we often tend to homogenize the individuals within these groupings, treating them well or poorly according to the status we assign their groups, relative to the exploitative power of our own group—hence racism, colonialism, all the other isms. Time to take a step back, get over it, learn to see our own species as one of many groupings of lifeforms on this planet! All of us beings just want to live well on this Earth. Evolution has provided wild creatures a way to coexist sustainably within their habitat—the ecosystem imposes its own limitations on their kinds. But we humans, having “erased” the existence of other forms of life from our awareness, think we are limited only by the “other” human groups, and respond with animosity and violence when we feel the pinch. Time to expand our collective consciousness on these relationships!
Where is the “justice” in a single species expecting to take over MORE than “half the Earth”?