ABSTRACT
A premise of this book is that justice is a necessary component of sustainability, and this notion of justice should include the broad moral order within which all trends of inequality or exploitation are contextualized. This chapter attempts to demonstrate why justice is so integral to sustainability, and investigates important connections of ethics, justice, and the maintenance of critical Earth systems and
cycles. Ethics and justice are lasting criteria for global sustainability, going back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Take, for example, the case of the Hopi, whose creation stories indicate that moral and ethical failures lead to critical social failures. In the 1960s, Frank Waters spent time with 30 elders of the Hopi
tribe, who would explain that ethics provide guidance to what is socially permissible and therefore provide limits to what societies allow themselves to do. The Hopi are renowned for their secrecy and for keeping many of their ceremonies shrouded from the eyes of a curious but different dominant Western culture. The elders broke this legendary silence to tell Waters the basic
message that things must change or this world would end. And, what’s more, they said they knew this not only from prophecy, but because it had happened before. These stories have been passed down for eons to every Hopi child, in hope that the lessons from the past were remembered. These lessons were of primal importance, relating to the very existence of the human race. Waters reports that the ancient and thriving Hopi people have
lived for millennia in the fragile arid high-desert landscape of what is now northern Arizona. They remember that the First People knew no sickness and were happy.
