Environmental Ethics

Saturday, August 9, 2025

What’s up

Monday, July 14, 2025

Slavery in the name of progress | A Wake-Up Call by Martin Scorsese

…the dangerous paradox at the heart of modern civilization: what we call "progress" might actually be leading us toward collapse.
Based on Ronald Wright's concept of the "progress trap," this documentary journeys through history, economics, biology, and politics to reveal how technological advancement, debt, overconsumption, and ecological destruction are threatening the future of humanity.

Ronald Wright's bestseller A Short History of Progress inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qqiG7tYxD1Q&si=bDQXnnWUU4VoJIAX

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, by Bill McKibben

Coming Aug 19-

https://a.co/d/ihegwje

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment

...there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth's power systems, in every sense of the word "power," offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you're interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don't come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.

Bill McKibben

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

Sunday, June 1, 2025

The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania

"…The balance of evidence is such that it would appear unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential disaster will do us in," Bostrom wrote, adding later in the paper, "With technology, we have some chance, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself."

Whether or not Musk read the paper, he has echoed Bostrom and other proponents of longtermism, including the philosopher William MacAskill. MacAskill became something of a celebrity intellectual among technologists and financiers, to whom he preached an "earning-to-give" approach to philanthropy. Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced crypto magnate, was one of his biggest acolytes. Musk touted MacAskill's 2022 book, "What We Owe the Future," saying on X — the social media network that he owns — that the explication of longtermist thinking is "a close match to my philosophy."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/elon-musk-longtermism-effective-altruism-doge.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Monday, May 19, 2025

Mr. W, long misunderstood but useful at last

https://www.threads.com/@st.catharinesguy/post/DJ0JWRcs1Lk?xmt=AQF0g4sgL6LWgzCEJJohhXz2yWokwmlvvPqbdLTL8DwEuw

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Go to Mars, Never Die and Other Big Tech Pipe Dreams

… One prominent paper concluded that $100 spent on A.I. safety saves one trillion future lives — making it "far more" valuable "than the near-future benefits" of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. "For a strong longtermist," Becker writes, "investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics."

Tech billionaires' pet projects can sound deliriously futuristic, but lurking underneath them all is an obsession that is very old. It's the primal fear of death, encased in a shiny new rocket ship. Becker quotes other writers who have noticed how Silicon Valley, with its omnivorous appetite, has turned existential angst into yet another input. "Space has become the ultimate imperial ambition," the scholar Kate Crawford writes in "Atlas of A.I.," "symbolizing an escape from the limits of Earth, bodies and regulation." In "God, Human, Animal, Machine" (2021), Meghan O'Gieblyn describes how technology took over the domain of religion and philosophy: "All the eternal questions have become engineering problems."

The "ideology of technological salvation" that Becker identifies can therefore be understood, too, as a desperate attempt to deal with despair. Amid his sharp criticisms of the tech figures he writes about is a resolute call for compassion. He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.

"We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for," Becker writes. "We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everything-forever-adam-becker.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

PHIL 3340 scheduled to return to MTSU Fall 2026... DEC 6 Final blogpost (final draft) due. Post earlier for constructive feedback... Posting will close after Dec.6. If you are unable to post, send your report directly to me - phil.oliver@mtsu.edu - and include footnotes to all terms you intended to link... A NOTE ON OUR TEXTS. This is an ambitious reading schedule. Read what you can, prioritizing the texts in descending order: first-listed assignment for each class gets top priority, second gets 2d, and so on... Fall 2024: HONORS BUILDING 116, T/Th 4:20 pm

TEXTS Fall '24

First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

The college project

“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
― Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“When the last tree is cut and the last fish killed, the last river poisoned, then you will see that you can't eat money.”
― John May, The Greenpeace Story

“We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.”
― T.S. Eliot

“There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
― Bill McKibben, The End of Nature

“We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”
― Ernst F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
― Aldo Leopold

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”
― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

	Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) http://michaelpollan.com/
5/14/15, 10:57 AM All the lectures and talks from Edible Education 101 are now online. All told, a great introduction to food politics bit.ly/1Fausvx