Now that we have looked at rather abstract considerations surrounding the idea of global ecological justice, I would like to bring these different issues together by exploring a more applied dispute about biological conservation that is entangled in a web of empirical and normative debates. That is the so-called Half-Earth proposal that I am using as a case study to see what my account of interspecies justice has to say about it. The Half-Earth proposal was put forward most prominently to a non-expert audience by biologist Edward O. Wilson (2016) in support of the already existing Nature Needs Half community. 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 (for example Noss 1992, Noss and Cooperrider 1994) 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. Currently, however, this proposal is fiercely contested between its supporters and critics that draw on a range of different scholarly backgrounds.

This proposal is particularly interesting because the disagreements it highlights uncover different visions of what just conservation should look like. Different framings highlight different problems that need to be prioritised, and I would like to investigate how the normative side of these disagreements can be accounted for by the environmental-ecological justice framework that I have developed thus far. The proposal highlights the conflictual nature of conservation where human and nonhuman needs are at stake. In that sense it is a classical distribution conflict between humans and wild nonhumans while at the same time also uncovering important intra-social justice issues. Accordingly, I would like to investigate whether the Half-Earth proposal could constitute a distributively just compromise globally between the demands of justice held by humans and nonhuman beings against the backdrop of scarcity which materialises in the current mass extinction crisis.