ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a clear warnings of the potential breaking points towards which people are pushing the ecosystems that have shaped our civilisations. It argues biodiversity conservation is comparatively hard to sell because it requires the political will to challenge such prevailing fantasies and to address fundamental issues of how people measure social progress and how they tackle distributional problems in the world economy. The chapter highlights the increasing global demand for energy, resources and pollution sinks, pointing to consumption as a driver of biodiversity loss. It focuses primarily on distributive justice–the concern with how material costs and benefits are distributed across different groups of people, both within the current generation and across generations. The chapter stresses the way in which social injustices play an instrumental role as a driver of biodiversity loss. It seeks to make connections between issues of ecological distribution and social distribution, including how these relate to continued growth in metabolism and associated environmental pressures.
