Environmental Ethics

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Gaia

“In the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, bacteria were largely portrayed as infectious and unhealthy. (The idea that you should aspire to and can achieve a germ-free body and environment is still mobilized to sell products from shirts to soaps.) Lynn Margulis saw it differently, and, after viewing the TV show Star Trek, commented acerbically that she “was struck by its silliness. The lack of plants, the machinate landscape, and in the starship, the lack of all nonhuman life-forms seemed bizarre. Humans, if someday they trek in giant spaceships to other planets, will not be alone. In space as on earth, the elements of life, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus and a few others, must recycle. This recycling is no suburban luxury; it is a principle of life from which no technology can deliver us.” Having contributed hugely to how we would understand life in its smallest unit, the cell, she went on to theorize life in its largest expression, collaborating with James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis that the planet Earth can be understood as a single self-regulating system. Lovelock, she writes in her book Symbiotic Planet, “pointed out that our planetary environment is homeostatic. Just as our bodies, like those of all mammals, maintain a relatively stable internal temperature despite changing conditions, the earth system keeps its temperature and atmospheric composition stable.” That is, the earth is a grand self-regulating system that modulates the gases in the atmosphere to stabilize temperatures—until human beings in the industrial age emitted so much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that we destabilized the climate. Because of some of Lovelock’s early language and his use of the earth goddess Gaia’s name, his theory was sometimes disparaged on the grounds he’d said the planet was alive. What he had really said was that it was a system sustained and stabilized by the whole of living organisms and inorganic systems. The stories we tell about what nature is are the stories we tell about who we are or should be. Nature is treated as a touchstone for what is genuine; natural used as a term for what is authentic, legitimate, proper. This is often twisted…” — The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit https://a.co/00o1T4TN

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

Earthrise, earthset...

Earthrise Apollo 8, '68

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Earth rise 1968

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010851813/in-1968-they-saw-earth-from-the-moon-for-the-first-time.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Wednesday, April 22, 2026

Happy chance

By happy chance, Earth Day coincides with the birthdays of four of America’s greatest nature writers: William Bartram, John Muir, John James Audubon, and Frederick Law Olmsted. Explore classics of the environmental imagination in the LOA series: http://loa.org/books/topics/20-nature-environmental-writing/

Earth Day, Kant’s bday

Today is Earth Day. It was first observed in 1970, but its roots go back to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s landmark book exposing the effects of pesticides and other chemical pollution on the environment. Troubled by the lack of attention pollution was receiving on the national stage, Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson began going on speaking tours, trying to educate people and politicians about environmental issues, and while the public was concerned, the politicians didn’t pay much attention.

During the late 1960s, Senator Nelson had the idea to harness the energy and methods of the student protests against the Vietnam War to organize a grassroots conservation movement. At a press conference in 1969, he announced plans for a nationwide demonstration, to take place the following spring. It was a gamble that paid off, and the public’s response was enthusiastic. Gladwin Hill wrote in The New York Times, “Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam.” Twenty million people nationwide participated in the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and the government finally took notice, forming the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts.

According to the Earth Day Network, Earth Day is celebrated by a billion people, making it the world’s largest secular holiday.

It’s the birthday of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, born in Königsberg, Prussia in 1724. His father was a saddle maker. He studied theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy at university, and worked for a time as a private tutor; he made very little money, but it gave him plenty of time for his own work. He lectured at the University of Königsberg for 15 years until he was eventually given a tenured position as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. Though he enjoyed hearing travel stories, he never ventured more than 50 miles from his hometown, believing that travel was not necessary to solve the problems of philosophy.

In his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued against Empiricism, which held that the mind was a blank slate to be filled with observations of the physical world, and Rationalism, which held that it was possible to experience the world objectively without the interference of the mind; instead, he synthesized the two schools of thought, added that the conscious mind must process and organize our perceptions, and made a distinction between the natural world as we observe it and the natural world as it really is. He viewed morality as something that arises from human reason, and maintained that an action’s morality is determined not by the outcome of the action, but by the motive behind it. He is also famous for his single moral obligation, the “Categorical Imperative”: namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way.

He wrote, “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe […] the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

…

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-april-22-2026/

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

HENRY DAVID THOREAU TO AIR ON PBS MARCH 2026

HENRY DAVID THOREAU TO AIR ON PBS MARCH 2026

Source: About PBS - Main
https://share.google/1hsIbj4ladm6L9CHF

I Am An American Philosopher: Phil Oliver – Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy

https://american-philosophy.org/i-am-an-american-philosopher-interview-series/i-am-an-american-philosopher-phil-oliver/

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

“choose a direction and keep on walking”

"…you do not have to picture the destination to reach it or at least draw closer to it, you just need to choose a direction and keep on walking—though that metaphor makes it sound as though it already exists, if at a distance, rather than that the process itself creates it and covers the distance between the idea and the actuality."

— The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

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