Even A Grain Of Sand Deserves Justice

Look around you right now, wherever you are. There is sand everywhere. If you’re in a room, the windows, computer screen, computer chips and concrete in or under the building, all come from sand. If you’re walking in a city, sand is what gives strength to skyscrapers, makes up the mortar in brick buildings, the glass of streetlights, screens of billboards and is a component of pavements, roads, tarmacs and highways. Our modern life depends on sand. It is an essential material, resource and inanimate “thing.”

But what if it is more than that? What happens to our engagement with the world, planet and each other if we take a more expansive view of sand, if we expand the spheres of justice to include sand?

Can I hear you pause? Stay with me. Sand can be the subject of justice because it is something more than innate, seemingly endless matter. If we concentrate on sand as a multiplicity of relationships, sand easily becomes a proxy for theorizing and operationalizing planetary justice.

Engaging with the planet requires thinking at an overwhelmingly grand scale — the totality of Earth and its processes. The Earth seems simultaneously infinitesimal and fragile in the vastness of the cosmos, and temporally and spatially enormous compared to our lives, close surroundings and mere mortal timescales.

But by focusing in on sand, not as an object, but as a relational entity, I hope to convince you that this complex interweave is key to matters of planetary justice and the development of a framework of values and behaviors necessary to protect all beings on Earth.

Do I hear you protest that there are more pressing issues? That the unraveling of democracy means we must focus on justice for humans first?  But it’s all connected. We live in unsettling times, at least in part because humans have been privileged and elevated by religion, philosophy, governments, industry — and justice theorists. Privileging the human has justified abuse of what is natural and wrought havoc on Earth’s surface, causing biodiversity loss, cruel treatment of non-human animals, climate change, etc., and this moment of overall polycrisis. 

Moreover, only some humans bear an elevated status. Social injustice occurs when privilege is used to “animalize” other humans and thus excise them from the boundaries of justice. Migrants become “animals” the state can incarcerate without the normal protections afforded citizens, for instance. But imagine the potential of a justice theory that includes the more-than-human — animal, vegetable, elemental and mineral — as worthy subjects of justice. If everything is justice-worthy, it becomes harder to assign delegitimizing, animalizing labels to deny justice to other humans. You see, this is exactly the right time to think about planetary justice.

And, if even a grain of sand is worthy of justice, then perhaps non-human animals, or perceived animalized humans, are too.

Always In Relation

Let’s begin with sand’s origin story.

Sand forms over eons. There is no uniformity to sand in terms of its origin or content, structure or even function. Sand is defined by its granular size: smaller than gravel but bigger than silt. It’s composed of the materials adjacent to its location — rock, soil, minerals and the dead parts of living things like shells and coral. It is ground matter formed over decades, centuries, millennia. Sand is both attached and related to its environmental locale. Composed of natural and unnatural materials, like glass or plastics, sand is at once ubiquitous and unique.

Here’s another origin story: not a fictional one, but one based on my early experiences of sand. Where I grew up on the western coast of Aotearoa, New Zealand, the sand is black. Impossible to walk on during a hot summer’s day, it’s made of grains of volcanic rock. Basalt blasted to the surface in past eruptions; it is the stuff of the inner Earth. The rock has been tumbled down rivers and pounded by waves into its sandy form and now rests out to sea and on the beaches.

In my childhood, we spent two Christmas holidays on an island off the east coast of Aotearoa. There, we encountered an enigma. The main beach had white sand — normal sand if you will. Moving south along the shoreline, the next beach was pink and the third beach green — far from normal. But oddly enough, they were also completely normal. The pink sand bore the colors of the shells of dead lobsters, scallops and crabs that had lived on, in and adjacent to the beach. The origin of that sand was carapace and shell. The green one, too, wore the color of death — dead sea urchins. While red when alive, the shells of Evechinus chloroticus, or kina, turn green once they die and their shells are exposed to the sun.

Our first set of sand relationships are then relationships of origin. 

Sand is more than a platform for picnics and romps. It’s a habitat. Beyond the crabs, urchins, crayfish and shellfish that make sand their home, other life forms, plant and animal, also find refuge in sand. 

Sand is a place for them to stand, breed and perform their life projects. While sand is inanimate, while it may not know it in the sense that we humans understand knowing, it is home for others. Our second set of relationships that make sand significant then are those of residency, of relationships of sand-as-home and supporter of other’s lives.

We can also think of sand as a larder. While sand may be a safe habitat for some, it is also the source wherein others — human and more-than-human — find sustenance. Think of the birds strutting the tidal zone, plunging their beaks deep in the sand, or maybe it is you who is digging for shore-line shellfish for your evening feast or income. Sand-as-larder is our third nest of relationships.

Sand can be a buffer between land and sea; it has relationships with both. During storms, the sea engulfs and sweeps sand into the offshore zone. In calmer times, sand is slowly returned by the gently lapping waves that kiss the beach. In past times, now-disintegrated sand bars and dunes guarded the land from storm-driven waves, protecting the land from erosion. Rising sea levels and intensified storms are changing this dynamic relationship. In many places, changing climate regimes are one of many threats to planetary wellbeing at a macro level and coastal wellbeing at a micro level. In some areas, increased rates of coastal erosion have withdrawn sand from the foreshore and near shore at a faster rate than it can be replaced. It is interfering with our fourth relationship: the relationships among sand, sea and land.

The disruption of these natural processes embeds injustice. Not only does it affect coastal property owners, for whom the causes and effects of climate change are matters of (in)justice, but it upsets a host of relationships between sand and other planetary beings. Climate change creates this injustice because some humans choose not to acknowledge the value of relationality to those beings.

Sandy Lifecycles

Sand captures time. In exploring its relationships of origin, we encountered elements in the sand that have existed since the formation of the planet around 4.5 billion years ago through to the comparatively ephemeral life spans of shellfish and lobster. There is, however, another temporal dimension that twists with the stories of sand and sand’s relationships, temporalities of destruction and recreation.

Sand builds. It makes rock, like sandstone, which is the stuff of monuments, cathedrals and churches, homes and institutional buildings. And sandstone is worn away — by wind and water — back into sand. A circular creation story. Sand in rivers and along the coast is washed out to sea beyond continental shelves to the deep trenches beyond. There, it sinks, and under the pressure of its mass and the sea itself, it coalesces into rock. Over millennia, it may then be heated, bent and uplifted as sandstone. 

All time may be sealed in the matter of sandstone: from eruptions to rivers, shore to abyss — the temporalities of sand live outside human scales.

Moving To The Planetary

Earlier, I asked you to look around for the presence of sand — in glass, computer chips, concrete and mortar, pavement, skyscrapers and monuments, seawalls and barriers. It is the stuff of our cities; indeed, it is no stretch to say modern cities depend on sand.

But the sand required to build cities is running out. The United Nations Environment Program lists sand and related materials like crushed stone as the second most exploited natural resource on Earth, second only to water, and like water, it is critical to human and city life. 

Because sand is running out, some sand extractors are becoming ruthless. Maybe they were ruthless anyway, but their ruthlessness is now leading to significant social injustice as they steal sand from communities and livelihoods from people, simultaneously causing cascading environmental harms. This is a matter of injustice.

The idea of justice is an idea that harkens back to Plato and Aristotle and underpins how governments and institutions ought to engage with citizens. But the dominating Anglo-Euro-American tradition is almost entirely human-focused. Subjectivity is assigned to human beings alone. Oddly though, there is no single theory of justice, no single understanding of what may be expected of institutions and the state, no single definition of why justice matters and what undergirds or substantiates its claims, who or what it applies to, how it might unfold and what its telos, or ideal endpoint as it were, is. That creates a crack through which the light of planetary justice might shine.

When we extend justice to the planetary level, we are extending the range of obligations that governments, their officials and institutions have. Planetary justice expects them to provide for conditions of fairness and wellbeing to the flows and cycles that constitute flourishing for everything on planet Earth and the atmosphere that encloses it. Who or what can be a subject of planetary justice is broad: it encompasses human and more-than-human as it recognizes the bundles of embedded relationships and dependencies that exist between all earthly beings — animal (including human), vegetable, mineral and elemental. 

This means governments and institutions have a duty to consult with and consider the perspectives of all members of the political community, not just those who fit a dominant category. In other words, matters of justice are not one-size-fits-all. Humans have wielded a disproportionate amount of physical power alongside their intellectual power; such human advantage motivates a call for planetary justice.

The political theory of planetary justice suggests that human beings have a set of responsibilities to each other and the planet that requires them to minimize (but not necessarily eliminate) any relational disturbances between Earth beings because those relations have weight — for individual creatures, their communities and as a function of the planetary system. Planetary justice supports systemic flourishing. 

Sand is the child of multiple natural processes; crustal formation, landform erosion, aquatic (riverine, lake and coastal processes), and aeolian processes. Sand exists because of and within a whole complex of relationships, each in its own way important to life on Earth. When moral human beings (and immoral ones, for that matter) regard sand as inanimate and, ironically, immaterial, they do violence to that basket of relationships.

Unfortunately, traditional justice theories suggest that at least some humans would excise our exemplar (im)materiality — in this essay, sand — from the spheres of justice: they dictate that humans have a legitimate right to interfere in that complex of relationships that are sand. 

But sand is not just sand. Each grain of sand exists in relation to other grains, its context and a teeming mass of beings from the microscopic to the lazing sea lions or even joyous family picnics. Sand’s relationality gives it moral significance and the potential to be, a liveliness if you will. It is the multiple relationships of this liveliness that make sand a site of flourishing that generates the obligations and duties of justice. And so, if we understand sand as a worthy subject of justice, we must consider all matter on the planet worthy of consideration, too, and not simply as a resource for human consumption. Everything deserves our mindful consideration.

Our Responsibility

Most relationships are expected to serve all parties involved, but to be clear, sand owes humans nothing: It is humans — one of the most destructive powers on this planet — who bear responsibility to sand as a relational subject.  It is humans who must support the well-being of sand communities, or at least to step back and allow them to flourish without undue interference and abuse. I am arguing that sand is not individual grains, nor is it an infinite playground nor just a construction material, it is rather a set of relationships. Sand is not (just potential) property: it is a community in relation with consequential moral significance, something more than a depleting resource that must be rationed for future human benefit. It exists, as do all “natural resources” despite, not for, humanity. Moreover, multiple existences, including all urban humans, are utterly dependent on it.

We Need To Revise Our Concepts Of Justice

As theories of justice evolved through the massive political and intellectual changes of the European Enlightenment, they responded to the specific conditions that existed at that time and in that place. And in that time and place they brought positive good. Their claims of universal superiority, however, are legitimately questionable. And there is unquestionably a straight-line link from the philosophies of the European Enlightenment to the polycrisis of this moment.

Planetary justice is offered as a framework to motivate a move beyond the grip of an obsolete Enlightenment frame. However, in societies and cultures that continue to reify the human, this is hard. When theorists are used to granting subjectivity to humans alone, they tend to use the hallmarks of what it is to be human as their guide. Consequently, the subject of justice remains most often an identifiable, individual “thing,” and the possible subjects are restricted to material things exhibiting characteristics that are closest to humanity’s — ones that have life. There are exceptions: those theorists whose gaze, often inspired by Indigenous thinking, is broader and more inclusive.  

Here I have tempted you to think beyond material subjectivity, strangely perhaps through a material, sand, and to focus the obligations of justice on relationships and relationality rather than individuals. The focus of justice then becomes enhancing flourishing not of an individual, be that individual human or grain of sand, but rather to the planet’s multiple relationships, rather like Indigenous peoples’ philosophies of inter-being relationality and obligations. 

We, as humans, don’t need to cease to use the materials of the planet to afford our own flourishing but such thinking requires us to do so mindful of the relationships that might be disrupted in that use. This requires a level of attention to the totality of systems that make Earth habitable, the climate amenable and society somewhat equitable; systems that have been subverted by the reification of the human, a reification that has, to date, condensed relationality to domination, toil and the dollar.