the ultimate thanks-giving

"I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure."

When the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks learned that he was dying, he wrote something almost unbearably beautiful about the measure of living — the ultimate thanks-giving:

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/oliver-sacks-gratitude

Another meeting. Can't wait.

 

Park resistance

Throwback to the March for Science—an inspiring day standing up for facts, progress, and the importance of evidence-based policy. #MarchForScience #ScienceMatters

[image or embed]

— Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) November 27, 2024 at 10:13 AM

Far From the Climate Talks: The Human Cost of Global Warming in 2024

Every month so far has seen floods, fires, smashed heat records or some combination of extreme weather. Little time remains for leaders to agree on what to do about it.

The dissonance is jarring.

Inside a stadium in the authoritarian petrostate of Azerbaijan, diplomatic deliberations to slow down climate change are snagged over money.

Outside, the burning of fossil fuels has exacted incalculable human losses. Millions of people are suffering. Nature is losing.

Here's a partial accounting of this year's calamities month by month, and how some of the planet's most vulnerable are trying to cope in creative ways... nyt

Surviving a Second Trump Term | Pith in the Wind | Nashville News | nashvillescene.com

A survival guide for living in a theocracy of hypocrites and dumbasses.

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/surviving-a-second-trump-term/article_5ed2d6e4-aa81-11ef-adb3-3f8464d85370.html

State censorship?

I don't think anyone will ever suspect me of being censored, or self-censored... or that anyone in my classes feels inhibited about expressing themselves. Right? But what about other courses? The fact that our legislature is raising these issues is a bit concerning, as regards academic freedom. These are challenging times for freedom of expression in America, with books being banned and tolerance being scorned. Thoughts, anyone? (Thanks for the link, Gary.)

Are MTSU professors censored by the state?

Last week, students received a biennial campus climate survey asking if they can express themselves adequately at MTSU. 

The survey resulted from Public Chapter No. 268, which prohibits public higher education institutions from taking specific actions regarding divisive concepts and students’ and employees’ beliefs, ideologies or viewpoints. Governor Bill Lee signed it into law in 2023.

As part of the law’s requirement, public higher education institutions must survey students, staff and faculty to determine if individuals can freely express their beliefs, ideologies or viewpoints.

“When [the law] was passed, many professors became concerned that it would limit their free speech, but a careful reading makes it clear that no professor who teaches his or her course in a professional way is in danger of losing a position with the university,” said Ken Paulson, director of MTSU’s Free Speech Center and a renowned first amendment lawyer.

However, organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee said, “the provisions of these laws are intentionally vague and mandate reporting of ill-defined ‘violations,’ causing fear of future retribution from the Tennessee legislature.”

The law explicitly targets 16 divisive concepts... (Sidelines, continues)

Easing the Biodiversity Crisis One Flowerpot at a Time

With very little time left to prevent the most hideous effects of climate change, Americans elected a president and a Congress whose policies will cost the planet four years of progress and send us backward at the same time. In this crisis, the greatest risk we face is the temptation to surrender to helplessness. For people who care about preserving life on Earth, the stakes are too high to do nothing, but it is all too easy to believe there is nothing we can do.

With any question of justice, the big picture can feel overwhelming. At those times, I have almost always found it helpful to zoom in, to focus on the same problem at a smaller, more manageable scale. I may not be able to save the zebras and the leopards, but I can help save the zebra swallowtail butterflies and the giant leopard moths. I can do that, at least in my own small yard, by nurturing the host plants they need to reproduce. Making a discernible, measurable difference to my wild neighbors is an act of resistance, too...

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/opinion/holiday-gift-giving-gardening-biodiversity-charity.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

What a Lame Duck President Could Do for Lame Turkeys

"…Today's turkeys are not treated by turkey producers as individual birds capable of enjoying their lives, but as machines that convert cheap crops (which are also often subsidized) to something that can be sold at a higher price. The 46 million turkeys killed and eaten at Thanksgiving are almost all "broad-breasted whites," selectively bred to have abnormally large breasts, because that is the part that most people prefer to eat. These birds have bodies so misshapen that they usually cannot reproduce on their own. They are the result of artificial insemination, which, especially for the females, is a procedure that they resist, but in vain..."

Peter Singer

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/22/opinion/biden-turkey-thanksgiving-pardon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Problematic

Solar cycles

In South Korea, the solar panels in the middle of the highway have a bicycle path underneath.
Cyclists are protected from the sun, isolated from traffic, and the country can produce clean energy.
More details/photos: https://bit.ly/3Oj5JzJ

Cop28 is a farce rigged to fail, but there are other ways we can try to save the planet | George Monbiot | The Guardian

"… Throughout these Conference of the Parties (Cop) summits, fossil fuel lobbyists have swarmed the corridors and meeting rooms. It's like allowing weapons manufacturers to dominate a peace conference. This year, the lobbyists outnumber all but one of the national delegations. And they're not the only ones: Cop28 is also heaving with meat and livestock lobbyists and reps from other planet-trashing industries. What should be the most important summit on Earth is treated like a trade fair.

It's not surprising that the two decisive measures these negotiations should have delivered at the outset – agreements to leave fossil fuels in the ground and to end most livestock farming – have never featured in the final outcome of any Cop summit. Nor should we be astonished that these agreements favour non-solutions such as carbon capture and storage, whose sole purpose is to provide an excuse for inaction..."

George Monbiot

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/09/cop28-rigged-fail-save-planet-climate-summit-fossil-fuel

A message that bears repeating

Trees don't just absorb carbon—they literally cool the air around them. Urban areas with more trees are up to 10°C cooler in summer. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.

https://www.threads.net/@earthlyeducation/post/DCorE3mOmOw?xmt=AQGzn1zu7Ge2KiUrltpiwpcQWH6ZJD62Us0AGOG3Eq42Kw

If you missed it

Some good news from November…

https://www.threads.net/@sambentley/post/DCpHFNruKpu?xmt=AQGzgDzedL_cKIVVSpdKIeukSydf7s2aXYTTA3niFPNFTg

Questions NOV 26

MacA Part V-Taking Action. McK Paul Hawken, Rebecca Solnit. Final report presentations conclude. Exam Dec 3. Final report blog posts due Dec 6.

• MacA Part V-Taking Action - Martin Stricklin
• McK Paul Hawken, Rebecca Solnit - Molly Carico
• Gary Wedgewood
• [Is that everyone?]

McK

1. Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest [which, btw, I used the first time I taught this course] reminds us that the environmental movement makes sense only when coupled with what? 961
2. What is the gift of self perception? 969-70
3. What is Rebecca Solnit's message, how does it connect with Thoreau's? 971f.
4. A passion for justice is not incompatible with what? 974

MacA 

1. What is the implicit Aymara philosophy? 224
2. What does MacA think an impartial concern for the future says about the decision whether to have children? 234
3. Does MacA think one person can make a difference? 245
4. What organizations does MacA recommend we support? 251-2

And one final question (for now), as our semester winds down:

Exam 2 audio review, Part I

Here are the questions thru mid-November from which the December 3 exam may be drawn, stay tuned for Part II.

Questions NOV 21

MacA Part IV-Assessing the End of the World. McK Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan

NOV 21 

• MacA Part IV-Assessing the End of the World - Katherine Welch
• McK Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan - Jonathan Keith
• ...Chelsie Gordon

McK

1. What can't Barbara Kingsolver forget about the paper she writes on? 941
2. About what does Kingsolver agree with Annie Dillard 943
3. What's been our natural habitat since 1996? 945  What has our "exodus" taken from us? What does wildness do for us? 946-7
4. What does Michael Pollan's Second Nature say about wildness? 948
5.  The modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) depends on a "sea" of what? 949  What "logic" supports this? 951
6. To what is the health of livestock inextricably linked?  How much E-coli bacteria is fatal to ingest? 957
7. Why isn't corn as cheap as it seems? What does it do to a cow? 958-9

MacA

1. What was MacA's mentor Parfit's primary moral concern? What new area of moral philosophy did it inspire? What'ss Parfit's (and MacA's)  central claim? 168-9
2. What is the intuition of neutrality? What observation does MacA say contradicts it? 171-2
3. What do sci-fi time travel scenarios like Back to the Future often suppose, and what do they rarely consider? What's an example of how we radically change the course of history? 174-5
4. What is the Repugnant Conclusion?  The Dominance Addition? 180-1 The Sadistic Conclusion? 185
5. Why does MacA consider anti-natalism a mistake? 187f. What does he think we should hope about future civilization? 189
6. COMMENT?: Schopenhauer's and Benatar's statements? 192
7. Do you (would you) consider hypothetical supra-humans our descendants? 193
8. How much of their day do survey respondents say they would prefer to skip? How many said their lives contain more happiness than suffering? 198-9  How about you?
9. What US demographic has gotten less happy over time? 205  Why do you think that is?
10. Would you take the deathbed option? 212, 216
11. COMMENT?: "Although they are rare in the population as a whole, malevolent, sadistic, or psychopathic actors may be disproportionately likely to gain political power..." 219

More than 200 health professionals say Trump has ‘malignant narcissism’ in open letter

George Conway-led Pac questions Republican nominee’s mental fitness for office in full-page New York Times ad

An anti-Trump political group organized a letter signed by more than 200 mental health professionals, warning that Donald Trump is dangerous because of “his symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder – malignant narcissism”, which makes him “grossly unfit for leadership”.

Less than two weeks before the presidential election, the group bought a full-page ad styled as an open letter in the New York Times on Thursday, arguing that the Republican nominee for the White House is “an existential threat to democracy” in the US... (continues)

 The sixth great extinction is happening, conservation expert warns

Victoria Gill

Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Inside Science•@vic_gill

...This week, world leaders have gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, for COP29 - the latest round of UN climate talks.

And Dr Goodall says taking action to slow down the warming of our planet is more urgent than ever.

“We still have a window of time to start slowing down climate change and loss of biodiversity,” Dr Goodall says. “But it's a window that's closing.”

Destruction of forests, and other wild places, she points out, is intrinsically linked to the climate crisis.

“So much has changed in my lifetime,” she says, recalling that in the forests of Tanzania where she began studying chimps more than 60 years ago, “you used to be able to set your calendar by the timing of the two rainy seasons”.

“Now, sometimes it rains in the dry season, and sometimes it's dry in the wet season. It means the trees are fruiting at the wrong time, which upsets the chimpanzees, and also the insects and the birds.”...

Whole article is here:  https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93qvqx5y01o

An organism at war with itself

"We are one planet."

From COSMOS: A Personal Voyage, Episode 13 "Who Speaks for Earth"

https://www.threads.net/@carlsagandotcom/post/DCkia7IyLE0?xmt=AQGztz1gF_MNyatAyJadN-mMc1DfdbhUGjMDEELwbx7VAg

Shock therapy

"...On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term.

 

But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.

Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.

More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him.

Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security..." HCR

Saving Endangered Animals Will Help Save Us, Too

We were living in a cataclysmic age of mass extinction and climate instability even before the election. Now the climate denier in chief is poised to gut the environmental protections that do exist. Even so, conservation nonprofits are struggling to raise the funds they need to challenge his wrecking-ball agenda in court. The people who care are feeling defeated, and the fight has not yet begun.

I was already grieving, and the approach of Remembrance Day for Lost Species, which falls each year on Nov. 30, didn't help. Was this really the best time to pick up "Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures" by the dazzling British author and scholar Katherine Rundell? Did I really want to read another book about how so much of life on earth is close to ending?

As it turns out, this is the perfect book to read in the aftermath of a planet-threatening election. In times like these, terror and rage will carry us only so far. We will also need unstinting, unceasing love. For the hard work that lies ahead, Ms. Rundell writes, "Our competent and furious love will have to be what fuels us." This is a book to help you fall in love.

Among the 23 endangered creatures she celebrates in "Vanishing Treasures," the last on the list is humans. This is not a sly overstatement to make a point. How will we grow crops if we lose the pollinators? What medical advancements — like the GLP-1 drugs, derived from a study of Gila monsters, that now treat diabetes and obesity — will we miss if reptiles go extinct? Which diseases will run rampant in our communities if scavengers are poisoned out of existence?

…

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/opinion/climate-endangered-animals-humans.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Questions NOV 19

MacA Part III-Safeguarding Civilisation. McK thru Sandra Steingraber

• MacA Part III-Safeguarding Civilisation - Eli Kersey
• McK thru Sandra Steingraber - Nathan Ruppel
• ... - Chelsie Gordon
• [Make-up] McK thru David Quammen - Audrey Lewis

MacA

1. Who conceived Spaceguard? Who imitated it? How effective is it? 106-7
2. How uncommon are pathogen escapes? 109 Are they a serious concern? 112-3
3. How is the Planet of the Apes scenario related to the Fermi Paradox? 117-19
4. What question is more pertinent than why Rome fell? What good came out of that? 123-4
5. What are some 20th century examples of human resilience? 126-7
6. Is MacAskill pessimistic about the worst-case nuclear scenario? 129-131  How about climate change? 134-6
7. In light of the election, do you share MacA's "best guess"? 141
8. Why does progress become harder to achieve? 151 How might civilization avoid "stagnation"? How might it last a long time? 156-8  Under what conditions might stagnation trigger extinction? 162

McK

1. Janisse Ray engages what culture long ignored by environmentalists? 898
2. The absence of what practice has devastated gopher tortoises? 902
3. How do junkyards resemble/illustrate ecosystems? 904-5
4. How long did Julia Butterfly Hill occupy Luna? 907
5. By what analogy does Hill describe her "movement"? 912  Why wouldn't she come down to escape the storm? 915  What did she learn from Luna's "voice"? 917
   
6. What evangelical notion did Calvin DeWitt apply to environmentalism? 919 What are his three principles? 920f.
7. What shouldn't you eat? 924
8. What does abad mean? 926
9. Sandra Steingraber has spent her career investigating what? 929
10. What was Rachel Carson's big point? 930
11. Who's at the top of the food chain? 931
12. What are some effects of exposure to Dioxin? 938

Questions NOV 14

MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes. McK thru David Quammen

• MacA Part II-Trajectory Changes Christina Guest
• McK thru David Quammen - Audrey Lewis
• ... - Eli Miller

MacA

1. Who are some classical and Enlightenment philosophers who accepted slavery?  What 18th century activist does MacAskill credit with challenging it most effectively? What else did he oppose? 49-50
2. What is the dead-hand problem? What's an example? 54
3. What evolutionary biologist famously denied the likelihood that a re-wound "tape of life" would support the emergence of human-level intelligence? What is the current consensus among biologists concerning evolutionary contingency? What principles govern cultural evolution? What happens to cultures that don't entrench themselves? 55-60
4. What does 20th century history show about moral progress? 65 What do we need, to drive it forward? 72
5. Who were the Mohists? What did they have in common with the British utilitarians? 76 What did the rise and millennial lock-in of Confucianism illustrate? 78
6. What technology of our time is key to the prospects of future lock-in? 79  What will we have created, if research in this area proceeds to its ultimate achievement?  80
7. What have tech moguls like Bezos, Thiel, and Altman invested in and/or patronized? 85
8. What is the alignment problem? It it's solved, what might continue for billions of years to come? 87
9. What countries does MacAskill expect to grow in power in the future? 93 What kind of world does he say we should want to build? 99-101

McK

1. Annie Dillard compared Richard Nelson to who? 860
2. What do the Koyukon elders teach? 873
3. What is David Quammen's main subject? What is it good to remember about feathers (and paleontologists)? 874-5
4. How many species will be lost, if current trends continue? 881
5. What does anyone interested in biodivdersity need to think about? 884

A nice moment between Joel (Cicely Alaska's imported Columbia-trained physician) and Ed, the local Shaman-in-training and aspiring filmmaker, from the great TV series Northern Exposure:

 ZIllow just debuted a climate risk map. This East Tennessee town shows up as having a long-term air pollution risk

Allison Kiehl  Knoxville News Sentinel  Nov. 12, 2024

ZIllow's new climate risk maps show an East Tennessee city has an extreme air pollution risk.

In September 2024, the online real estate site partnered with First Street, a company specializing in climate risk mapping, to make climate data accessible to potential homeowners.

The First Street maps existed before the Zillow partnership. But now, the data is meant to be a tool for potential home buyers as they assess climate risk, insurance costs and long-term affordability of properties before putting in an offer.

The maps help buyers understand five major risks: Flood, fire, wind, heat and air.

“Climate risks are now a critical factor in home-buying decisions,” said Skylar Olsen, chief economist at Zillow in a recent press release. “Healthy markets are ones where buyers and sellers have access to all relevant data for their decisions."

Continues at:  https://www.knoxnews.com/story/money/2024/11/12/zillow-climate-risk-map-shows-air-p

We Study Climate Change. We Can’t Explain What We’re Seeing.

We need more timely updates in response to the rapid changes to the climate.

The earth has been exceptionally warm of late, with every month from June 2023 until this past September breaking records. It has been considerably hotter even than climate scientists expected. Average temperatures during the past 12 months have also been above the goal set by the Paris climate agreement: to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.

We know human activities are largely responsible for the long-term temperature increases, as well as sea level rise, increases in extreme rainfall and other consequences of a rapidly changing climate. Yet the unusual jump in global temperatures starting in mid-2023 appears to be higher than our models predicted (even as they generally remain within the expected range)...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/opinion/climate-change-heat-planet.html?smid=em-share

“If it kills me”

Clever dramatically-convergent portrayal of environmental activism & bioethics (long Covid, depression, mental illness), with a side of British humor…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0024w9s?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

Samantha Harvey’s ‘beautiful and ambitious’ Orbital wins Booker prize | Books | The Guardian

"Our unanimity about Orbital recognises its beauty and ambition. It reflects Harvey's extraordinary intensity of attention to the precious and precarious world we share".

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/12/orbital-by-samantha-harvey-wins-booker-prize-2024

==

...Harvey has said that while writing the novel she continually watched streaming video from the International Space Station showing Earth from space.

“To look at the Earth from space was a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” she said during her acceptance speech. nyt

"“With each sunrise nothing is diminished or lost and every single one staggers them. Every single time that blade of light cracks open and the sun explodes from it, a momentary immaculate star, then spills its light like a pail upended, and floods the earth, every time night becomes day in a matter of a minute, every time the earth dips through space like a creature diving and finds another day, day after day after day from the depth of space, a day every ninety minutes, every day brand new and of infinite supply, it staggers them.” Samantha Harvey, Orbital

Questions NOV 12

 MacA Part I-The Long View. McK thru Jack Turner

• William MacAskill, What Do We Owe the Future? (MacA) Part I-The Long View - Aidan Haines
• McK thru Jack Turner - Gray Fogo

McK

1. Abandoned houses tell us what, says Linda Horgan? 812
2. What does David Abram want us to honor and value? 815
3.  What renders a healer worthless? 820 What do western anthropologists overlook in the shaman's craft? 821
4. What is magic in its most primordial sense? 822 What experience led Abrams to rethink his conception of "spirits"? 826
5. What emerging ecological perspective is similar to the animism of traditional cultures? 829 What power or presence did Abrams learn to perceive? What form of wisdom did he  begin to appreciate? 833-4
6. What's another translation of the Japanese word for Enlightenment? 838
7. What do we fail to appreciate about our descriptions and explanations of human behavior? 846

MacA

1. What is MacAskill's book's worldview, and what is his preferred definition of it? ix What does he want us to be? xiii
2. What was MacAskill's initial response to longtermism? What metaphors illustrate his current view? 5-6 What tyranny does he say we should abandon? 9 What is his aim in this book? 21-2
3. COMMENT?" Do you see a connection between l'ism and John Dewey's continuous human community? (*below) Or Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation?
4. COMMENT:? "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain." --William James
5. COMMENT:? "Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present." --Albert Camus
6. How is humanity like a teenager? 19 What reckless behavior did MacAskill indulge in, as a teen? 34, 39
7. Climate change highlights what? How is decarbonization a win-win-win...? 24-5 What's our outsized opportunity? 28
8. What killed off the megafauna? 30
9. What do Frank Capra and Bill McKibben have in common? What lesson about "plasticity" did McKibben learn? 42-3

 

Longtermism

https://www.williammacaskill.com/longtermism

Longtermism is the view that we should be doing much more to protect future generations.

Longtermism is based on the ideas that future people have moral worth, there could be very large numbers of future people, and that what we do today can affect how well or poorly their lives go. Let’s take these points one at a time. 

First, future people have moral worth. Just because people are born in the future does not make their experiences any less real or important. To illustrate this, we can put ourselves in our ancestors’ shoes and ask whether they would have been right to consider people today morally irrelevant by mere fact of not having yet been born. Another way to look at this is through considering our ability to harm future people. For instance, consider how we store nuclear waste. We do not simply set it out in the desert without further precautions, because it will start to leak in several centuries. Instead, we carefully store it and mark it for future generations, because we recognize that it would be wrong to cause future people foreseeable harm.

Second, there could be very large numbers of future people. Humanity might last for a very long time. If we last as long as the typical mammalian species, it would mean there are hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. If history were a novel, we may be living on its very first page. Barring catastrophe, the vast majority of people who will ever live have not been born yet. These people could have stunningly good lives, or incredibly bad ones. 

Third, what we do today can affect the lives of future people in the long run. Some might argue that it is hard or impossible to predict the future, so that even if future people are morally important and even if there will be many of them, we cannot predictably benefit them beyond a hundred years time. However, while it is difficult to foresee the long-run effects of many actions, there are some things that we can predict. For example, if humanity suffered some catastrophe that caused it to go extinct we can predict how that would affect future people: there wouldn’t be any. This is why a particular focus of longtermism has been on existential risks: risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential. Risks that have been highlighted by longtermist researchers include those from advanced artificial intelligence, engineered pathogens, nuclear war, extreme climate change, and global totalitarianism. Besides mitigating existential risks, we can also predictably shape the longterm future by changing the trajectory of humanity in a persistent way, like through changing what it values. 

William has a book on longtermism called What We Owe The Future which was published in August and September 2022.

Learn more about longtermism in an excerpt of What We Owe The Future in The New York Times, an introductory article in BBC, and a long-form piece in Foreign Affairs. The links below are also helpful:

• https://longtermism.com/

• https://80000hours.org/articles/future-generations/

• https://www.forethought.org/longtermism

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/longtermism

==

The Case for Longtermism

By William MacAskill

A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of “What We Owe the Future,” from which this essay has been adapted

Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth.

Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first, then the third-ever person, and so on.

One hundred billion (or so) lives later, you are the youngest person alive today. Your life has lasted somewhere in the ballpark of four trillion years. You have spent approximately 10 percent of it as a hunter-gatherer and 60 percent as a farmer, a full 20 percent raising children, and over 1 percent suffering from malaria or smallpox. You spent 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth.

That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present.

But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammal species (about one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just a few months old. The future is big.

I offer this thought experiment because morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore...  (continues)

==

* "The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant." —From A Common Faith by John Dewey

What It Means to Come of Age in Climate Chaos

David Wallace-Wells wrote the intro to this feature edition. (It doesn't appear to be online, I'll bring in the physical magazine if anybody wants to see it.)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/04/magazine/climate-change-kids.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Who Says You Can’t Live Off the Grid in Manhattan?

"… Bill McKibben, an environmental activist who has spent decades advocating collective action, applauded Mr. Spodek's use of solar panels, pointing to a movement in Germany in which more than 500,000 people added solar panels to their balconies in the first half of 2024.

"More power to him," Mr. McKibben said of Mr. Spodek. "It's a really good illustration of how effective solar power is, even in small doses. And there's going to be an endless amount more of just this kind of experimentation."

But he added that private lifestyle choices were limited in their impact. "The most important thing an individual can do is be a little less of an individual," he said, "and join together with others in movements big enough to enact some change."

Mr. Spodek acknowledged that his own exercise in living off the grid had a negligible effect on climate change. He was vague about how his personal example — even his modest workshops and podcast, "This Sustainable Life" — could spread beyond the circle of people already trying to live more sustainably.

But even small, individual gestures can have a ripple effect, said Sarah Lazarovic, vice president of communications and creative strategy at the nonprofit Rewiring America, which promotes conversion to electricity, including solar.

"When someone puts up solar panels on their place, it's catalytic because people see it done," she said. "Then they'll do it, and other people will see that. So I never underestimate the power of individual action."

Mr. Spodek pointed — perhaps immodestly — to other social movements that began with a few individuals.

"I have no intent to just do one-on-one for the rest of my life," he said. "What I'm doing is creating leaders so that they can create yet more leaders. And that means creating organizations, institutions."

Culture change had to start somewhere, he said. Why not with him?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/05/nyregion/joshua-spodek-eco-influencer.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare