Reframing Social Justice

At the outset of this new millennium, as citizens of a global village, or as bio-components of this planetary organism, Gaia, our generation of homo sapiens, can reflect more accurately than our predecessors on the story of life, the magnificence of spaceship Earth and the wonder of the universe. Our scientific and technological expertise not only gives us greater knowledge but also a greater ethical responsibility. Until recently, life on Earth flourished, but in my lifetime the level of damage done to a system that has been almost five billion years in the making gives us cause to reconsider the most important ethical question: how ought we live with the Earth?

My sensitivity to this question has been enriched as I have aged. Conversations with my wife, Coralie, whose interest in astronomy and bird-watching along with a deep commitment to eco-feminism, have enriched my understanding. Times of serious illness have generated the potent insight that my individual and embodied self is but part of a greater whole. This is an insight which puts a certain perspective on the nature of life itself.

Healing times in rainforests, at the beach or with the humpback whales, together with reading an emerging body of literature around environmental ethics and eco-spirituality have expanded my worldview and theology. I now see that “social analysis” and “bio analysis” (the analysis of life systems) must be linked - an argument advanced by the feminist Indian ecologists, Vandana Shiva and Arundati Roy. Another influential author is Thomas Berry, a priest who calls himself as a “geologian” rather than a “theologian”, and who is described by Theodore Roszak as “the bard of the new cosmology”. Berry (in The Great Work) makes a claim about the human spirit which emphasises the fundamental place of bio analysis:

We have no inner spiritual life if we don’t have the outer experience of a beautiful world.

Complementing this observation is that of another leading thinker, Franciscan theologian Leonardo Boff. He invites us to link social analysis with bio analysis.

The most threatened threatened of nature’s creatures are the poor …

Taken together these insights suggest a need to extend our understanding of social justice to what is better termed “eco-justice”. Eco-justice signifies that poverty in human societies is an ecological problem, just as violations of nature’s biodiversity and the biosphere have exacerbated the extent of global poverty. Therefore to achieve eco-justice we must not only address environmental degradation but also challenge the exploitation of the poor.

Eco-justice will not be achieved while one section of earth’s population lives in an orgy of unrestrained consumption and the rest destroys its environment just to survive. If global equity were to be achieved by all poorer economies reaching the consumption level of the United States, the annual global environmental damage from the resulting economic activities is inconceivable - 220 times what it is now.

The contemporary challenge is consistent with the message we were articulating in Action for World Development in the 1970s, a message sometimes summarised by the slogan, "Live simply so others can simply live". Not surprisingly therefore one of the most compelling and comprehensive expositions of eco-justice comes from the liberation theology voice, Leonardo Boff. The introduction to his evocatively titled Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor is clear:

It is not only the poor and oppressed that must be liberated; today all humans must be liberated. We are hostages to a paradigm that places us - against the thrust of the universe - over things instead of being with them in the great cosmic community. That is why I am extending the intuitions of liberation theology and demonstrating their validity and applicability for the questions enveloping the Earth, our bountiful mother.

In the Felix Arnott Memorial lecture which I delivered in 2002 I outlined a theory of eco-justice which is fundamentally grounded in biological sustainability together with a view that the membership of the society in which we are to practice justice must be inclusive of all living beings, non-human as well as human.

From his liberal political and philosophical perspective John Rawls defended a view of justice which seeks to include the most vulnerable minority victims of injustice. He proposes a social contract that emerges from a hypothetical veil of ignorance behind which rational persons are invited to consider what kind of society they would want if they belonged to a vulnerable and disadvantaged minority.