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	The TLS ⁦‪@TheTLS‬⁩ How literature can help us confront the vast threat of climate change the-tls.co.uk/articles/clima…   6/30/20, 11:15 PM

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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Summer reading

I already own two of these books, I wrote one of them, and I just ordered a fourth from @ParnassusBooks1. Next month, I'll order more. Thank you for the great reading list, @YaleClimateComm. https://t.co/lO52Jd04km

— Margaret Renkl (@MargaretRenkl) June 25, 2020

NYTimes.com: On a Pennsylvania Farm, ‘Nature Is Not Just Carrying On’

On a Pennsylvania Farm, 'Nature Is Not Just Carrying On'

Quarantine in the country means fresh air and space, but a writer's sense of good fortune is darkened by the state of nature. "What I'm observing is unsettling," she says.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/climate/quarantine-coronavirus-covid.html?smid=em-share

How Public Opinion Changes for the Better

Bill McKibben:

...In the climate crisis, each fight against a pipeline or a frack well, against an oil company or a bank that backs it, is important in its own right. But each also serves as a way to build the pressure that will, eventually, move us psychologically from a world that sees the fossil-fuelled economy stretching out into the future to one that understands we need to change.

There are signs that we're reaching that paradigm shift, both because of powerful organizing (eight million people in the streets last fall for global climate strikes) and because environmental events, such as the wildfires in California and Australia, demonstrate our scary reality more plainly all the time. Around the world, more and more cities and countries are rolling out economic-recovery plans that emphasize climate action, as if that was the most obvious idea. (It is.) Even in this country, you can see it in the polling: a string of recent surveys shows that the issue of global warming is Drumpf's single greatest vulnerability. And you can sense it in significant corners of the culture, too—corners that pay a lot of attention to marketing and branding and predicting the future. Lyft's announcement on Wednesday that all of the cars used in its network will be electric by 2030 will not solve the climate crisis. (Indeed, if it draws people away from the subway, it could make it worse; what we really need are electric buses and electric bikes.) But it's a sign—like Wallace's car circling the Nascar track—that, after years and years of organizing, a new logic is beginning to drive events.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/how-public-opinion-changes-for-the-better?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Arboricide

Neighbors committing arboricide, felling perfectly healthy trees to make way for a gratuitous circle drive. Where’s the Lorax when you need him? pic.twitter.com/R1vBbROrXG

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 15, 2020

Making a planet worth saving

Bill McKibben:

Most weeks, we talk about how to save the world, which seems the only accurate way to put it, given that we’ve just lived through the hottest May in recorded history and that the carbon-dioxide levels in our atmosphere just hit a new high, unmatched in the past three million years. There are, per usual, dozens of interesting new reports and studies I could tell you about and dozens of dangerous new political developments, right down to the Trump Administration waiving environmental reviews for major projects such as pipelines. (Just no more review—go ahead and build.) But the pain expressed so eloquently in the richest country on Earth these past few weeks can’t help but make one wonder: If we’re just going to use solar power instead of coal to run the same sad mess of unfair and ugly oppression, is it really worth it? Despite the glad sight of Americans surging into the streets this past weekend—and even with news that the Minneapolis City Council is setting out to dismantle its police department and replace it with something else—I worry that, as with other such moments in the past, this one may slip away without our society really doing the deep work of facing our collective demons.

Photograph by Vanessa Charlot / Redux

So I thought it would be worth listening to some of my colleagues at 350.org (a group that I helped found), who, on Thursday night, put together this Webinar. It isn’t necessary, of course, to agree with all the views expressed there; if the Webinar doesn’t make you uncomfortable in spots, your comfort meter may be pegged too high. But discomfort never killed anyone, not like a knee on the neck or a coal-fired power plant down the street. It features the 350.org activists Thanu Yakupitiyage, Dominique Thomas, Cherrell Brown, Natalia Cardona, Emily Southard, Tianna Arredondo, and Clarissa Brooks, as well as Sam Grant, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of 350. Their guests are Oluchi Omeoga, who is a Minneapolis organizer with Black Visions Collective, and Lumumba Bandele, the national strategies and partnerships director for Movement for Black Lives... (New Yorker)

Environmental Ethics-Fall 2020

PHIL 3340, Environmental Ethics-Fall 2020

Posted Jun 9, 2020 11:51 AM to D2L

Welcome to this semester's "web-assisted" version of the course, last offered in the classroom in 2018. 

The present plan, as of June 2020, is to meet once a week "on ground," on campus in Room [tba] at 2:20 pm on Wednesdays, and in virtual Zoom space on Mondays at 2:20 pm (sessions to be recorded and made available for non-synchronous viewing) beginning August 24. 

We'll support the course with the dedicated blogsite I've created specifically for the purpose (not D2L). Once you've all joined me as authors on the site we can commence our virtual conversations, supplemented by videos and Zoom meetings. 

Required Texts: Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Attfield; Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben; On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein; The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren

You can contact me directly via email (not D2L): phil.oliver@mtsu.edu.

Talk to you soon.

jpo (Dr. Oliver)

"Earth Tribe"

📣 Announcing: the #EarthTribe! 🌱 Join a global movement of young people taking action to tackle #climatechange & other pressing threats to the environment! 🌎 Ready to take action? 😎 Our handy quiz will help you find your path: https://t.co/a7kv6nAtuQ #WorldEnvironmentDay pic.twitter.com/nIZDYhUcz0

— World Scouting (@worldscouting) June 5, 2020

"Mutha" Earth

Call Your "Mutha'" A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene Jane Caputi 9780190902711 Paperback 28 August 2020 Heretical Thought

Links Between Racism and the Environment - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/05/climate/racism-climate-change-reading-list.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Climate%20and%20Environment

Sustainability and inequality are the same conversation

Only a very few people have complained to me these past weeks about 350 doing what it can to support #BlackLivesMatter . More and more people understand that the world's crises are tightly linked. So grateful to all who push together. https://t.co/48wnW8dPOD

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) June 5, 2020

How the Protests Have Changed the Pandemic

Last month, we debated how far the virus could travel when we speak loudly and how close together tables at restaurants should be; this month, we may learn how much virus is expelled when pepper spray irritates the lungs. https://t.co/w6kItgHpqj

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 4, 2020

“...mass gatherings, even those held outdoors, even with precautions, are potential super-spreader events—opportunities for a virus to explode through a population. In the past week, tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in scores of cities to protest racial injustice and police brutality; by Wednesday, more than nine thousand had been arrested. Many of the cautious, phased reopening plans state governments had put in place have been upended. As a matter of racial justice, the case for protest is unequivocal: Floyd’s killing was grotesque, and the latest in a series. From a public-health perspective, however, the situation is more complex. Fragile progress toward containing the coronavirus has been threatened. Last month, we debated how far the virus could travel when we speak loudly, and how close together tables at restaurants should be; this month, we may learn how much virus is expelled from the nose and mouth when pepper spray irritates the lungs…” NY’er

Around the lake--toward an ecological imagination

Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues

	Bill McKibben ⁦‪@billmckibben‬⁩ "When the threat becomes recurring and persistent—as is the case with police brutality—it causes rapid wear and tear on body organs and elevated allostatic load and can lead to conditions such as diabetes, stroke, accelerated aging, and death." newyorker.com/news/annals-of… 6/4/20, 8:33 AM

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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Environmental Ethics 2020

My colleagues and I were asked by our college to provide short promotional videos for our Fall courses. Here's mine for this course. (The 7-second gap in the middle is there for editorial purposes, btw, I wasn't having a brain-freeze.)

Returning to MTSU, Fall 2020- 

Environmental Ethics 

PHIL 3340

Hi, I'm Dr. Oliver. For the past several years, in alternate Fall semesters, I've taught the Environmental Ethics course at MTSU--always a little differently, with a variety of texts and approaches, but always with the firm conviction that no greater challenge faces humanity than that of learning to live responsibly, respectfully, and sustainably on the earth, "the only home" (as Carl Sagan said of our "pale blue dot") we've ever known."

That conviction once again fuels the approach we'll take this Fall, along with a sobering recognition that, like the other pressing challenges of our time including the COVID-19 pandemic of the past several months and the recent civil unrest protesting tragic incidents of racial injustice, meeting the climate challenge will require mutual support and concerted, constructive action.

Environmental Ethics is not just another arid academic research subject, it's an existential roadmap  to a livable future for our children and theirs, and for the myriad other forms of life that make up what pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold called the biotic community.

This fall's course will also reflect the hopefulness of a new generation, your generation, class of 2020-something, that in many ways is beginning to stand up, speak up, and insist (with the courageous young woman Greta Thunberg) that there is a tomorrow and you'll not stand for the short-sighted indifference of an older generation that acts, like Dr. Seuss's "Onceler" in The Lorax, as if their time was the only time that matters.

Required Texts:

• Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Attfield; 
• Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben; 
• On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein; 
• The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren