Abstract

This dissertation reconceives feminist notions of justice as mutuality to meet the ecological, economic and social challenges of the present. It proposes a notion of justice as sustainable mutual relations or "sustainability" and suggests this is the shape the norm of justice can best assume to address pressing issues of environmental degradation and poverty. Employing the lens of agriculture, justice as sustainability is evaluated as critique, vision and norm for ethical action and reflection. An ethic of sustainability is fleshed out together with an expanded basic needs approach inclusive of whole eco-communities. Justice as sustainability constitutes the moral bottom line for ethical action and reflection. ;The lens of agriculture is employed to analyze eco-communal challenges to land, atmosphere, water, and biodiversity. Soil loss, declining farming communities, the potential dangers of genetically modified crops, and the destabilizing trajectory of global world trade are among the issues discussed. Transformative cultural and agricultural practices and structures are then described for a more sustainable agriculture, from the household to global levels. These sites of struggle for sustainability in agriculture embody alternative practices and structures seen as key to a more sustainable future. ;Sustainability as justice is theorized as central to a religious vision of abundant, spirited life in eco-community. This vision is rooted in theo-ethical understandings of relationality that reflect the trinitaritan relation at the heart of the author's Lutheran and feminist theological sensibilities. Strengthened by experiences of attention and encounter across difference, and embodied in feelings of reverence for life and in patterns of reciprocity, justice as sustainability promotes an ethic capable of both meeting the eco-communal challenges of the present and of incorporating Christian ecological insights critical to re-imagining life together in earth community