Having established that it makes sense to speak of a community of justice when describing the human-wild nonhuman relationship, we can turn to the question of which principles of distributive justice follow from this account. However, first we need to establish what constitutes an appropriate currency of distribution in this context. Or, putting it differently, first we need a clear identification of an appropriate metric – that is, a distribuendum – of distributive ecological justice, because it is not self-evident what the good that gets distributed is supposed to be in this context. Because distributive ecological justice has not received much attention to date, the literature cannot give us very much guidance on that matter. Brian Baxter (2005) only points to environmental resources (with an acknowledgement of the ecological footprint concept and the importance of territories), and Val Plumwood (2002) refers to environmental resources and land that need to be shared between humans and nonhumans. Yet in order to evaluate current practices in terms of justice, the currency of justice needs more specification if it is to be operationalised in terms of being measurable and consequently distributable. Moreover, it also needs to include all goods of distribution relevant in the sphere of interspecies justice which are not exhausted by the environmental resources concept.

Fortunately, the debate is already more advanced in the realm of environmental justice, broadly defined. When writing about global distributive justice, Tim Hayward (2005, 2006a) introduces the concept of ecological space as an alternative to the global justice literature on the distribution of natural resources (see Beitz 1979, Pogge 2007, Wenar 2008). Hayward originally defined ecological space as comprising ‘all the environmental goods and natural resources that play a part in the socio-economic life of humankind’ (2007, pp. 445– 6, emphasis in original), and the concept has consequently been adopted by other environmental political theorists (see Dobson 2003, Vanderheiden 2009, Peeters et al 2015). For example, Steve Vanderheiden (2009) has also argued that looking at global justice as a problem of how to allocate ecological space has a number of advantages.