Environmental Ethics: Welcome, Dr. McPhee!

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Welcome, Dr. McPhee!

The President of our fair institution, @PresidentMcPhee, has kindly consented to join our Environmental Ethics & Activism class Monday afternoon (Nov. 26) to discuss his signing of the Presidents' Climate Commitment.

"We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming and its potential for large-scale, adverse health, social, economic and ecological effects. We recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely being caused by humans. We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by mid-century at the latest, in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible." Continues...

All with an interest in the environment and issues of sustainability are welcome to join us too, at 2:20 pm in James Union Building room 202 on the MTSU campus.

We hope to gain Dr. McPhee's assent to the proposition that MTSU should and will join the rapidly-growing ranks of colleges and universities whose leaders are far-sighted enough to recognize that they must lead us all toward a more sustainable world (including our TBR school rivals U. of Memphis and UT-Knoxville). He can be #665!

To add your signature, please sign our petition. Thank you!

And since it's not every day we get the ear of our President, we need to be concise and precise with our message. Some salient points we'll want to be sure to bring out:

These Tennessee schools have already committed to "climate neutrality": Rhodes, Sewanee, Memphis, UT-Chattanooga, and UT-Knoxville.
Presidents signing the Commitment are pledging to eliminate their campuses’ net greenhouse gas emissions in a reasonable period of time as determined by each institution. ACUPCC institutions have agreed to: complete an emissions inventory; within two years, set a target date and interim milestones for becoming climate neutral; take immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by choosing from a list of short-term actions; integrate sustainability into the curriculum and make it part of the educational experience; make the action plan, inventory and progress reports publicly available.
FAQs
How much will it cost? Most signatories have agreed to voluntarily pay annual dues of $1,000-$3,000 based on institution size to cover a portion of the operating expenses of the supporting organizations...
Accountability & consequences. The ACUPCC is a pledge to create a plan to incorporate climate and sustainability into the educational experience of all students, and to pursue climate neutrality in campus operations. While there are no legal or financial repercussions for non-fulfillment, the accountability for meeting the terms of the Commitment comes through the public reporting...

"If you want to review the history of climate diplomacy before you start seeing coverage from Doha, Qatar, next Monday of the 18th round of negotiationsunder the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, two choices are to click on this 83-second animation or click here for my past coverage for The Times..." Andrew Revkin, DotEarth

"Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either... " Is this the End? James Atlas, nyt

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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

Environmental Ethics

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Welcome, Dr. McPhee!

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Peripatetics

	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