Ecological Sustainability: What We the People Owe Ourselves as a Duty of Self-Determination

I argue that a people as an intergenerational group has a self-directed duty of ecological sustainability that is a precondition, and even a correlate, of its own right to self-determination. Conceptualizing ecological sustainability as a self-directed duty of self-determination offers several advantages. First, it avoids the nonidentity problem, since the identity conditions of intergenerational peoples do not depend on which specific individuals will become members. Second, it better captures the normatively valuable relationships knitting different generations into a single political community than theories that ascribe rights to self-determination or sovereignty to discrete generations. Third, grounding a duty of ecological sustainability in self-determination not only responds to a distinct demand of legitimacy but also sidesteps problems that arise when appealing instead to justice, especially egalitarian distributive principles. Lastly, I reply to the worry that a duty grounded in the right to self-determination cannot be a genuinely binding duty insofar as a people can simply waive its right to self-determination. I contend that a people cannot permanently waive its right to self-determination while continuing to exist, and even when a people chooses to dissolve, it is still bound by its self-directed duty of ecological sustainability until it ceases to exist.