Environmental Ethics: July 2020

Monday, July 27, 2020

Pollution and health

"In a relatively short period of time, we have come to know that air pollution is having a negative impact on almost all our major organs."

Watch María Neira's full TED Talk here: https://t.co/7cipDhR7Iw pic.twitter.com/uLjMLq4hsr
— TED Talks (@TEDTalks) July 27, 2020

Sunday, July 26, 2020

The Great Climate Migration Has Begun - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html?action=click&algo=als_engaged_control_desk_filter&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=187473897&impression_id=3d8916f0-cf71-11ea-a508-651da7dd8b7f&index=0&pgtype=Article&region=footer&req_id=693077376&surface=home-featured

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Tweet from Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)

Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) tweeted at 3:50 PM on Tue, Jul 21, 2020: Enormous thanks to all who sent good wishes after last week's bike crash. I think I'll be out of the hospital tomorrow--6 broken ribs and a mangled shoulder, but superb care from many nurses, who are an hourly reminder that compassion and competence make for a wonderful mixture. (https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/1285678593587195904?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Tweet from Margaret Renkl (@MargaretRenkl)

Margaret Renkl (@MargaretRenkl) tweeted at 11:31 AM on Thu, Jul 16, 2020: If we don’t fix this in November, everything else we hope to fix will get even worse. https://t.co/ui99W2xH62 (https://twitter.com/MargaretRenkl/status/1283801395716595713?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

Tweet by Greta Thunberg on Twitter

Greta Thunberg

⁦‪@GretaThunberg‬⁩

It's time to #FaceTheClimateEmergency

This is our open letter and demands to global leaders, signed by thousands of activists, scientists, representatives of civil society influencers.
We'll keep collecting signatures and urge everyone to sign & share
->ClimateEmergencyEU.org pic.twitter.com/fNVhoTXUOj

7/16/20, 5:43 AM

I’m extremely honoured to receive the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity. We’re in a climate emergency, and my foundation will as quickly as possible donate all the prize money of 1 million Euros to support ... ->
1/3 pic.twitter.com/Eti6AJXSvj
— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) July 20, 2020

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Monday, July 13, 2020

Tweet by Bill McKibben on Twitter

Bill McKibben

⁦‪@billmckibben‬⁩

Frackers don't clean up after themselves
This is about the ultimate in 'privatize the profit, socialize the mess.'
nytimes.com/2020/07/12/cli…

7/13/20, 7:01 AM

Download the Twitter app

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Tweet by Five Books on Twitter

Five Books

⁦‪@five_books‬⁩

NEW: "I saw a conceptual emergency" Cultural thinker ⁦‪@romankrznaric‬⁩ talks to ⁦‪@casparhenderson‬⁩ about long-term thinking, the subject of his new book, The Good Ancestor, out later this week:
fivebooks.com/best-books/lon…

7/13/20, 7:20 AM

Download the Twitter app

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Thursday, July 9, 2020

I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing

From The New York Times:

Why do American cities waste so much space on cars?

As coronavirus lockdowns crept across the globe this winter and spring, an unusual sound fell over the world's metropolises: the hush of streets that were suddenly, blessedly free of cars. City dwellers reported hearing bird song, wind and the rustling of leaves. (Along with, in New York City, the intermittent screams of sirens).

You could smell the absence of cars, too. From New York to Los Angeles to New Delhi, air pollution plummeted, and the soupy, exhaust-choked haze over the world's dirtiest cities lifted to reveal brilliant blue skies.

Cars took a break from killing people, too. About 10 pedestrians die on New York City's streets in an ordinary month. Under lockdown, the city went a record two months without a single pedestrian fatality. In California, vehicle collisions plummeted 50 percent, reducing accidents resulting in injuries or death by about 6,000 per month.

As the roads became freer of cars, they grew full of possibility. Rollerblading and skateboarding have come back into fashion. Sales of bicycles and electric bikes have skyrocketed...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/09/opinion/ban-cars-manhattan-cities.html?smid=em-share

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Tweet from Maria Popova (@brainpicker)

Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 8:25 PM on Tue, Jul 07, 2020: On this day in 2012, leading scientists signed the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, acknowledging definitively that many non-human animals are conscious and capable of experiencing emotions. 200 years earlier, Shelley made the prescient case for it: https://t.co/5ffDetMwCr (https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1280674326291927042?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13

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

Monday, July 27, 2020

Sunday, July 26, 2020

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Monday, July 13, 2020

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Peripatetics