Current Research Interests
I am currently writing a book on conservation and global justice. Its provisional title is Conservation and Global Justice: Responding Fairly to the Biodiversity Crisis, and it is under contract with Oxford University Press. I hope to complete it early in 2023, and so hopefully it will appear either in late 2023 or (more likely) early 2024. The book tries to give a much-needed boost to discussion of the global justice dimensions of the biodiversity crisis, and of collective responses to it.
My most recent book is A Blue New Deal: Why We Need a New Politics For the Ocean (Yale University Press, 2022). This book provided the first comprehensive account of what a just ocean might look like. Along the way, it tackles some more specific issues such as the future of people in small island states who might be rendered homeless (and perhaps even stateless) by rising sea levels; how to better protect those who work at sea, including fishers; and the rights of marine animals. You can find the book on Amazon or on Yale's website.
The book before that focused on issues of natural resource justice. Justice and Natural Resources provided the first systematic, book-length treatment of natural resource justice. It was the subject of a number of symposia, and a special issue on the book was recently published by the journal Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, along with a reply to my critics.
More generally, my research interests include:
The Politics and philosophy of the ocean
- The nature and limitations of existing institutions of oceanic governance
- The twin crises of inequality and environmental destruction
- Conceptions of ocean justice, and the role of the ocean in political theory
- Visions of just oceanic futures
Justice, natural resources, and biodiversity
- Egalitarian theories of natural resource justice, and their rivals
- The nature and justification of collective (e.g. state) claims over natural resources
- Fairly sharing the costs of natural resource conservation
- Competing accounts of sustainability
- Conceptions of biodiversity, the biodiversity crisis, the anthropocene, etc
Global justice and climate justice
- Egalitarian accounts of global justice
- Relationism and non-relationism
- Global justice and institutional design
- Fairly sharing the burdens of mitigation, adaptation and compensation