Environmental Ethics: Study guide

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Study guide

Quiz 1

1. Why do we engage in ecological amnesia?

2. Who (besides politicians) can declare a crisis?

3. What target was agreed on at Copenhagen? What is projected by the World Bank, and by the IEA?

4. What habit of thought rules our era?

5. What kind of shift does Klein consider crucial to addressing "our problem"?

Quiz 2

1. What percentage of climate scientists have concluded that anthropogenic climate change is real?

2. What is the Heartland Institute devoted to?

3. What was Upton Sinclair's famous observation?

4. What is "green fascism"?

5. Who did Al Gore proclaim to have "the best green energy program" in North America?

6. What three "policy pillars" are incompatible with bringing emissions to safe levels?

7. What accounting system has created a distorted picture of the drivers of global emissions?

8. What logic, "even more entrenched than free trade," must be confronted if we're to have a chance of achieving lower emissions in time?

Quiz 3

1. What is Energiewende?

2. Within what time-frame did Jacobson and Delucchi conclude we could shift to renewables?

3. What percentage of profits did the Big Five oil companies devote to renewables in 2008?

4. What was missing from President Carter's famous "malaise" speech, according to Christopher Lasch?

Quiz 4

1. What has cut off the past and orphaned critical opinion in the present?

2. What stopped the President from seizing the moment of financial crisis to create a transitional climate opportunity?

3. How can natural gas serve as an effective short-term transition fuel?

4. How are the Canadian tar sands not like science fiction?

5. What do intelligent investors know about the results and commitments of U.N. climate summits?

6. What language has become foreign to a great many of us?

Quiz 5

1. What's the dominant conceptual model used by today's decision makers?

2. How does our culture rationalize drawing down finite resources without worrying about tomorrow?

3. Who's the patron saint of extractivism, and what's the ironic legend of his death?

4. Who calls coal a "natural sponge"?

5. What's the antithesis of extractivism?

6. Who advocated a "land ethic"?

Quiz 6

1. Who partnered in Texas to save a prairie chicken?

2. What's virtually impossible to do without taking money of questionable origin?

3. What was the "environmentalism of the poor"?

4. Who said "we should have tried to change the system and root causes"?

5. What environmental group partnered with Walmart?

6. What do we now know about fracking that weakens its case, compared to the early '90s?

7. How are some manufacturers gaming the carbon trading system?

8. What does Klein say the leader of the Environmental Defense Fund wants environmentalists to do more?

Quiz 7

1. What's Gaia Capitalism?

2. What should we remember about Noah's Ark?

3. What has Virgin Airways added to its fleet since Richard Branson's meeting with Al Gore?

4. How has air capture technology "morphed"?

5. What was Branson "onto," with his pledge, and what's the problem with it?

6. What's our most intoxicating narrative?

Quiz 8

1. With what Jane Austen-inspired metaphor does Klein describe the work of the Chicheley Hall retreat?

2. What kind of wave might ensue, if we ever stopped blocking the sun?

3. Why is Frankenstein a terribly poor metaphor for geoengineering?

4. What kind of stories do we need, according to Klein, instead of visions of a space-faring human future?

Quiz 9

1. Where is Blockadia?

2. What stopped the Russian government from prosecuting Arctic Sunrise protesters as pirates?

3. What's Blockadia's simple principle?

4. Oilwatch International leads a global movement to do what?

5. What's the Catch-22 of fossil fuels?

6. What was the Halliburton Loophole?

7. What was the most disliked industry in America in 2013?

8. What does Wendell Berry say it would take to eliminate sacrifice zones and ecological crises?

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Ch 10
1. Why was the engagement of Bella Bella's students in opposition to the Northern Gateway pipeline a "big deal"?

2. What do extractive industries like Arch Coal not "get"?

3. How much water does it take to produce a barrel of tar sands oil?

4. Why do Chinese environmentalists "thank smog"?

5. What movement has the Sierra Club belatedly joined?

6. What are Transition Towns?

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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

Environmental Ethics

Thursday, September 22, 2016

Study guide

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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