From time immemorial, just as today, the underclass and the powerless have been forcibly limited from accessing resources for their own material advantage. It is thus injustice toward the more-than-human world—stripping it of its intrinsic being and value, and turning it into being-for and value-for people (“resources”)—that constitutes the foundation of social injustice and inequality.
Yet that foundation remains largely invisible, because a critical dimension of humanity’s self-awarded entitlement to use nature as we will has also been to make it taboo to regard our relationship with the natural world as having anything to do with matters of justice or injustice. Thus the anthropocentric credo, today buoyed along through such ideas as “resources,” “natural capital,” “ecological services,” “working landscapes,” and the like—ideas specifically indebted to the erasure of any intrinsic modality (ontological or evaluative) of the nonhuman realm—is left untouched, as is its plainly colonialist vocabulary. At the same time, the solution to social injustice is portrayed as the “democratic” (ever the buzzword) sharing of planetary loot, loot described more politely through such commonplace concepts as those listed above. The poor will be lifted from their dire plight, so goes the promise, as the natural world becomes sustainably degraded for the benefit of all people. But as I now turn to argue, the problem with this solution to social injustice is that it will not work; and if it were to work, it could hardly be called justice. Social relations between people do not transpire in a vacuum, despite the cult of humanity’s long-cultivated fancy that the natural world is a stage for the grand show of human affairs. It is within the context of the dominant relationship between humanity and Earth that social relations have become constituted as material, normative, and historical realities. As long as the living world is construed as a suite of resources to be seized or converted, human relations will tend to manifest the corollaries of this materialized belief: There will be competition, exploitation, corruption, struggle for access and control, posturing, and conflict over all manner of resources. Systematic distortions of human relations are inextricably coupled with the resourcist mindset—they are supported and inflamed by the relentlessly enacted regard of the natural world as a domain-to-be-used for human profit or advancement. The source of the disparity between the haves and the have-nots thus lies in the conception-cum-treatment of Earth’s living beings and nonliving things as resources—a corrupt concept which continues to masquerade as merely a descriptive word.
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"PETA’s video “Someday,” brought to life by Los Angeles animator Anna Saunders, was created in honor of Morrissey’s 55th birthday." 
