In a 2020 op-ed in The Guardian, Nemonte Nenquimo, a leader of the Waorani people, an Indigenous nation whose home is the Amazon rainforest, stated: ‘This is my message to the western world – your civilization is killing life on earth.’ Could this be true? Could a way of life in one place not only harm people and damage environments in other places, but also destroy life itself across the planet? If this is true, then do those in the West have a duty to change their way of life? How could this change occur across societies? Are the concepts and ideas we currently use to speak about social justice, such as human rights, sufficient to bring about this needed social change, change that would honour and preserve life on earth?

This book's argument rests on the following premises: as a result of European colonisation, the way of life in any Western country today relies on resource extraction and commodity production in other countries it thereby renders poor. This international division of labour involves practices that deny the human rights – the political, economic and cultural rights – of the workers who mine the minerals, sew the clothes, and otherwise provide the basic substances for life in the West. Fair trade programmes and wage increases do not change the fact that some spend their days hunched over sewing machines while others continually update their wardrobes.

Even a cursory reading of international news, or literature from a variety of places, makes clear that the West's way of life depends on resource extraction that violates human rights in different parts of the planet. Poor people the world over often make ethical appeals asking people in the West to change their basic habits of living in order to allow for others to live, to live with dignity, and to live amidst sustaining land and water. By leveraging rights claims in pronouncing what dominant powers have tried to silence, philosophers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Édouard Glissant have also called for the West to change its political and economic foundations.