In which ways is nonhuman life excluded from deliberations about justice by not being considered relevant, if considered at all? As we have seen, a recent development in political philosophy has been an extension of theorising to include acknowledging the existence of nonhuman beings and considering their wellbeing – usually with a focus on animals. However, generally speaking, the environment is still predominantly considered only as property in liberal theorising about justice (Bell 2015). Here I would like to consider a sub-question to this broader area of enquiry and focus on the problematic notion of humanity's original ownership of the Earth, which surfaces throughout the history of political thought since the 17th century.

As mentioned earlier, this is an important question for my argument insofar as not all accounts of environmental justice are compatible with my framework of interspecies justice. One implication of aiming for compatibility is to refrain from grounding an account of global environmental justice on some notion of humanity's original ownership of the Earth. Situated in posthumanist philosophical developments, I see the critique of this notion as an extension of the critical investigation of some environmental ethicists on the relationship between ownership and animals (see Cochrane 2009), as well as contributing to a necessary ‘denaturalisation’ of assumptions within political thought that ‘Otherise’ the nonhuman (see Plumwood 2002). Attributing original ownership of the Earth to humans only creates a similar problematic power asymmetry between agents that matter and objects that cannot own and can potentially even be owned. In other words, the notion of humanity's original ownership opens the door to a form of methodological misrecognition. Such philosophical theories exhibit a form of theoretical exclusion of an Other, which is nonhuman living beings in this case. The problem is that such perspectives exclude nonhumans from mattering in theory which can then translate into not mattering in practice. In a similar vein, but without referring to the notion of ecological justice, Marcel Wissenburg has argued that ‘if one is interested in protecting nature against human (over-)exploitation, then the best way to think of original ownership is in terms of the orthodox notion of nonownership’ (2017, p. 67).