At issue in environmental-policy theory is what environmental obligation is *for*, and whether the political community has a structural duty to maintain the biophysical conditions on which future participants depend or only the contingent duties contemporary participants happen to settle on. The framework's recognition tradition reads environmental protection as constitutive intergenerational infrastructure: what political communities owe across time to participants whose voice is structurally absent from current direction-recognition systems. Three contemporary traditions deny this framing at its premise.

Free-market environmentalism (Coase 1960; Anderson and Leal 1991) reads environmental degradation as the diagnostic signature of missing property rights over commons resources rather than as a structural failure requiring intergenerational-obligation architecture. Where property rights can be configured over the atmosphere, the ocean, the aquifer, the fishery, market mechanisms (tradeable permits, privatization of commons, Coasean bargaining) deliver maintenance more reliably than regulatory architectures grounded in obligation to absent future participants. To require an intergenerational-recognition mechanism is on this reading to skip the prior question of whether the externality could not have been internalized through property-rights design in the first place.

Deep ecology (Næss 1973; Devall and Sessions 1985) reads the framework's recognition obligation as grounded in human participants (current and future) and therefore as systematically inadequate to the moral standing non-human nature has *in itself*. An architecture that treats ecological infrastructure as constitutive *for human participation* rather than as having standing in its own right reproduces the anthropocentrism that produced the failure mode. To make environmental protection a function of human-political-community maintenance is to repeat the framing error that produced the crisis.

The cost-benefit / prioritization tradition (Nordhaus 2013; Lomborg 2001) reads environmental policy as an optimization problem to be settled by empirical magnitudes: discount rates, costs of mitigation, costs of adaptation, opportunity costs against other public goods. Even granting intergenerational obligation in principle, framework-level derivation underdetermines what the constraint actually requires once implementation costs are scored, and the framework therefore cannot do the work cost-benefit analysis is doing for actual policy. To preclude pricing the structural floor is to license unmoored policy preferences against the discipline empirical magnitudes impose.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the opposite destination on multiple independent grounds. The classical stewardship tradition — biblical *to till it and keep it* (Genesis 2:15 NRSVUE), Indigenous seventh-generation thinking (Haudenosaunee and other lineages), Edmund Burke's contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn (1790), Catholic creation-care doctrine (most recently Francis 2015) — located intergenerational obligation in metaphysical participation but tracked a real recognition obligation across time. The Earth-system science tradition (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015; Richardson et al. 2023) identifies nine biophysical thresholds whose transgression destabilizes the conditions under which complex political life is possible. The ecological-economics tradition (Daly 1977; Costanza et al. 1997) reads the economy as a subsystem of the biosphere requiring biophysical-floor maintenance for its own functioning. The capabilities tradition (Nussbaum 2006, ch. 6) reaches environmental protection through the question of which capabilities institutions have to maintain for participation to remain substantively available across time. The commons-governance tradition (Ostrom 1990; Bollier 2014) documents that collective-management institutions can maintain commons across multi-generational time horizons under specifiable structural conditions. Indigenous environmental philosophy (Kimmerer 2013; LaDuke 1999; Whyte 2018) names the long-horizon governance traditions that have already done what the framework derives is structurally required.

The dispute the section frames is whether environmental obligation can be reduced to property-rights design, ecocentric-grounding moral standing, or cost-benefit empirical magnitudes (theses pressed by Coase and the Andersons, by Næss and the deep-ecology tradition, and by Nordhaus and Lomborg) or whether intergenerational recognition is the structural function environmental protection must perform if it is to maintain the conditions on which political life depends, a thesis pressed by the stewardship traditions through the planetary-boundaries science. [§9.5.2](<9.5.2 What is Required.md>) is where the structural-necessity derivation resolves the dispute, drawing on the [§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>)/[§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>)/[§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) grounding to fix what environmental protection must deliver to count as environmental protection at the species scale. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.5 Environment](<9.5 Environment.md>) | [9.5.2 What is Required](<9.5.2 What is Required.md>) →
