We started with the current mass extinction as the practical and theoretical catalyst for the arguments developed in the last chapters. The upshot is that we have duties of justice to wild living beings because we are standing with them in a global distributive justice relationship. But as we have seen, what these duties entail is conditional on what circumstances of scarcity we find ourselves in; meaning that the extinction of a species functions as an indicator of injustice, but it is not sufficient on its own to make that case because in very dire circumstances an extinction is not necessarily caused by any distributive injustice. Yet, even in circumstances of severe scarcity it is required by ecological justice to at least minimise anthropogenic species extinctions, which already takes into account the duties of distributive environmental justice we have towards fellow humans. Based on this we have good grounds to believe that we have a duty of justice to avoid species extinctions whenever possible. What is possible is, on the one side, based on empirical contingencies about how we can change the modes that our societies operate in to be more sustainable and, on the other side, contingent on what we consider materially necessary for a flourishing, or at least decent, human life. In a nutshell, what I have presented here amounts to an account of global non-ranking biocentric distributive ecological/interspecies justice to wild nonhuman beings. Based on this theoretical framework, the human takeover of the Earth's ecological space – its resources, ecosystem benefits and actual spaces – that ultimately leads to species extinctions constitutes an injustice; it should be discussed and responded to as a matter of justice.

The notion of justice is attributed particular weight in Western modern political philosophy, the mainstream of which has retained a very anthropocentric outlook until recently. Yet, I hope that it has become clear by now that the anthropocentrism in a lot of political thought stems from justice-independent assumptions and that it is consequently possible, and in light of the current mass extinction crisis urgently needed, to defend an account of justice towards nonhumans that speaks to the material realities of life in common on a shared Earth. It seems that one main objection to the idea of interspecies justice regards the conflicts it creates between humans and nonhumans.