Planetary justice reconsidered: developing response-abilities in planetary relations

Abstract

This contribution puts forward a relational and posthumanist engagement with the idea of planetary justice. The planetary from this perspective should be conceived not to re-enforce, but rather to break apart, the idea that there is such a thing as a ‘planetary whole’. When we move away from ‘planetary wholes’, we also conceive of justice and ethical commitments differently from how they have been traditionally approached. Instead of attempting to create ‘justice on the planet’, we see that manifold concrete multispecies communities become central to generating ‘response-ability in planetary relations’. This article explores how this different orientation to planetary justice not only helps to break down the problematic spatial and temporal scales within which questions of justice are often framed but also points towards some different ways of responding ethically to the recent demands for planetary justice.