Sustainability: Why We Should Still Start from Here for Theorising Just Conservation

In 1999, Alan Holland published a widely-read contribution to an edited collection entitled ‘Sustainability: should we start from here?’. The question Holland was asking concerned, amongst other things, whether sustainability would lead towards the protection of ‘nature’. That is not a simple question to answer, because the relationship between sustainability and nature protection is complex, while at the same time one’s answer to this question will also depend on what sustainability and nature protection are supposed to mean. Against this background, I argue in this paper that the notion of sustainability should be given more weight in theorising (non-anthropocentric) accounts of just conservation. Thus, with reference to Holland’s question I argue that we should still start from ‘here’.