The current mass extinction is a crisis in progress, and the window of opportunity to dampen its magnitude and consequences is closing (see Ceballos et al 2015). From a practical perspective this poses the question of what could be done about it; for example, what conservation practices (including changes to economic and social systems) might be most effective? We will return to this in Chapter 9, but now, I would like to focus on an underlying theoretical question: is biodiversity loss in itself an injustice? And if so, to whom or what is it an injustice? That is a narrower question than asking whether the current extinction crisis constitutes an injustice as we will see. Yet, considering the severity of the current rate of species extinctions, it is surprising that this general route of enquiry has received little philosophical attention. Even though there is a fairly widely shared belief by conservation biologists and environmental ethicists that species extinctions are morally wrong (see for example Soulé 1985, Cafaro and Primack 2014), this intuition has usually not been framed in terms of justice. An exception to this is, for example, Philip Cafaro's account (2015) who calls the sixth mass extinction an injustice and an ‘interspecies genocide’ but without grounding this claim in a particular theory of justice. This means that I am after the possibility of framing the extinction of a species as a matter of justice which does not preclude, of course, that there are other additional non-justice based grounds for morally problematising the extinction of a species, such as in terms of collective responsibility for its loss (see for example Oksanen 2007). Accordingly, the wrongness or badness of anthropogenic extinctions does not hinge solely on whether it can be framed as an injustice.

In the context of climate change, a lot has been written so far about doing justice to future generations. Yet whether the impact of climate change on nonhuman life is an issue of interspecies or animal justice – or of ethics more generally – has mostly been excluded from the discussion so far (with some notable exceptions, such as Attfield 2011, Nolt 2011, Palmer 2011, Cripps 2013).