Abstract:
The subject matter of just biodiversity conservation has been receiving increased attention in interdisciplinary environmental debates, including political philosophy. In this context, different concerns of environmental (intra-human) and interspecies justice have been examined, which includes accounts of just burden-sharing concerning the costs of conservation. Yet, within this context one issue of philosophical interest has been largely overlooked which concerns the case of discrepancy between global justice theorising and local conditions; the ‘global duties – local burdens problem’. Against the background that biodiversity conservation always has implications for land-use (land as place and habitat), the necessity to consider this case arises due to the circumstance that in practice biodiversity protection can (and often has) put more burdens on individuals, communities or states that share the collective duty to lessen the degradation of biodiversity to a lesser degree, because areas of interest for habitat protection are not geographically evenly distributed and do not necessarily match up with a community’s environmental impact. Taking a common approach to environmental and interspecies distributive justice that relies on the distribution of ecological space as an example, this paper explains why his problem arises from the incongruity between the currency of justice (ecological space) in the global-abstract and the local-particular (the conceptual problem). It this then argued that cultural costs, in turn, are essential to understanding the central moral concern at stake.