Chris Armstrong's "Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis"

Chris Armstrong is a Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton. He works in normative political theory and is the author of Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis: Conservation in a World of Inequality (2024), A Blue New Deal: Why We Need A New Politics for the Ocean (2022), Why Global Justice Matters (2019), Justice and Natural Resources (2017), and Global Distributive Justice (2012).

His current research ranges across issues of ocean politics, conservation justice, natural resource justice, global justice, and climate justice.

Armstrong applied the "Page 99 Test" to Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis and reported the following:

Page 99 discusses the phenomenon of biodiversity offsetting, and engages in what I hope is an instructive comparison. People sometimes defend carbon offsetting by saying that offsetting makes our emissions basically harmless: sure, I emit a certain amount of carbon here, but if I pay you not to emit an equivalent amount there, no harm will be done to anyone, because the global temperature will not increase as a result of our actions. On page 99 I am arguing that even if this argument works for carbon, it can't work as a defence of biodiversity offsetting. This is because when biodiversity is destroyed in one place, that inevitably involves various harms being committed, to people or to other animals. Protecting biodiversity somewhere else does not stop that being the case. So biodiversity offsetting is just not a harm-free process.

The passage is fairy representative of the book as a whole – even if the topic of offsetting is a bit niche, the reader opening the book there would get a reasonably good sense of my approach. I am trying to think seriously about the global justice issues that protecting biodiversity throws up. Some of these centre around human interests, and some of them centre around our treatment of animals. I am also trying to throw light on some important real-world policies that political theorists haven’t talked about enough. Biodiversity offsetting is a good example of such policies. There is a good deal more in the book, but page 99 would be an interesting page to start to browse.

The main thing I’m trying to do in the book is to kick-start a proper conversation about the justice and injustice that can be associated with biodiversity conversation. We’ve done so much to think about what climate justice means. But where is the equivalent conversation for the biodiversity crisis? I wrote the book in the hope that I could help bring that conversation about.

Visit Chris Armstrong's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Blue New Deal.

--Marshal Zeringue