Visions of Just Conservation

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This chapter evaluates the debate on just conservation that has developed around the so-called Half-Earth proposal. The Half-Earth proposal was put forward most prominently to a non-expert audience by biologist Edward O. Wilson. Its central idea can be found in earlier work that observed that an average of 50 per cent of every region needs to be protected to conserve biodiversity, which is meant as a partial solution to the current mass extinction event on Earth. It is suggested that this crisis can be mitigated somewhat by 'setting aside' half of the Earth's land and half of sea spaces for nonhuman living beings. Based on the framework developed in the previous chapters, this chapter argues that the Half-Earth proposal can constitute a distributively just compromise between demands of ecological and environmental justice on the question of distribution of space in terms of habitat, but only if several conditions are fulfilled. Moreover, whether it can even constitute an all-things-considered demand of justice is, in turn, again dependent on a range of further considerations. In the end, the aim is not to have merely effective, but also just conservation practices.