Monday, August 24, 2020

Questions Aug 26

W 26 EE 1-2. How the World Thinks, and other things (including some discussion of today's reading, in my Wednesday dawn post... there's also video in two parts, because I dropped the camera...)
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IMPORTANT UPDATE: I gave you guys the wrong Meeting ID... (no wonder I got emails indicating that people were waiting for me at all hours!)... And apparently all my emails have been going to D2L mail, look there if you haven't yet.

 I've emailed the correct ID Tuesday morning. Sorry for the confusion. jpo
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*Some questions for you to ponder, and write about in your weekly essay if you wish. But you can write about anything in or prompted by our texts you'd like. I encourage you to formulate and respond to your own and your classmates' discussion questions, and not just mine.

(You get 3 points for that weekly essay, and up to 2 more each week if you've commented on at least two classmates' posts. Include a brief summary of all your online activity with each weekly essay (you can go back and edit those, if you've posted or commented or just had new thoughts you want to share late in the week.) Your weekly summary can look something like this:

  • Tuesday: posted an essay called [Your title here]-3 points
  • Wednesday: commented on Joe Blow's essay called [Whatever]-1 point
  • Thursday: commented on Sue Who's essay called [Whatever]-1 point
  • Thursday" commented on Bill Chill's essay called [Whatever]
Notice, you max out at 5 points each week... but additional comments look good and earn your professor's respect (which could come in handy, at grading time).
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CORRECTION: I read McKibben's The End of Nature in the late '80s, not 70s. Still a long time ago, though, he was still quite prescient. “There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.” (As I'm sure we'll see the GOP confirm this week.)
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*Discussion Questions (DQs)

  • Do you adhere to biospherical egalitarianism and Deep Ecology (see p.7)? Why or why not?
  • Does your "true self" extend to the whole of nature (8)? In practical terms, what does that mean?
  •  What's wrong with anthropocentrism, ethically, ecologically, pragmatically, or otherwise?

  • In what senses are we apart from and a part of nature? Do any of those exempt us from ethical responsibility to future generations of humans and non-humans?
  • Is Stoicism the wrong philosophy for this moment, if indeed it counsels that we should "follow nature" and comply with the status quo? (17) [What about Stoic Pragmatism?]
  • If you don't feel "at home" anywhere, do you lack an environment? (18) [But shouldn't we feel at home everywhere, given our cosmic identity as creatures of the stars? -as Neil Tyson said.]
  • Are you an anthropocentrist, biocentrist, ecocentrist, or something else?
  • What do you think about "needlessly cutting down a healthy tree"? (26)
  • [Yours]


The Giving Tree: Silverstein, Shel: Amazon.com: Books Amazon.com: The Lorax (Classic Seuss) (9780394823379): Dr. Seuss ...  The Fall of Freddie the Leaf: A Story of Life for All Ages: Leo ...



An environmentally-"woke" writer you should know. 
Margaret Renkl is a Nashville resident who writes a wise weekly column for the national newspaper of record, the New York Times. Here's how she concludes her latest essay.
We may be in the middle of a story we don’t know how will end, or even whether it will end, but we are not helpless characters created and directed by an unseen novelist. We have the power, even in this Age of Anxiety, to enfold ourselves in small comforts, in the joy of tiny pleasures. We can walk out into the dark and look up at the sky. We can remind ourselves that the universe is so much bigger than this fretful, feverish world, and it is still expanding. And still filled with stars.
Her essays are consistently good, as is her first book Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss. I don't know if she'd say so herself, but she's a worthy philosopher.
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Wednesday in Environmental Ethics we commence our look at Robin Attfield's Very Short Intro, which announces early on: "the environment that our grand-children inherit will be vastly different from that of our early ancestors, and even from the environment we were born into ourselves." He's not talking about the pandemic or the political swamp-pit of our present moment, but he could be. ("Origins" and "Key Concepts" are his opening chapters.)

The world is awash in change, uncertainty, and executively-orchestrated chaos. It would be hard to dispute or dissuade a younger person who'd concluded that the older generations have saddled theirs with an irretrievable climate catastrophe. I've had more than a few conversations with young "anti-natalists" whose present intent is to stop propagating our species altogether, saying they find it unconscionable to contemplate bringing new life into such a world. How sad. 

But I'm still wearing my rally cap, hoping for the right kind of change. That astronauts' image of the Earth hanging beautifully and vulnerably in space is still transformative and inspiring for me, still a powerful reminder that we're one species on a small rock with every incentive to bridge our differences and make a habitable, sustainable world for our children's children (etc., ad infinitum).


The heedless, voracious, unsustainably anthropocentric "Last Man" cannot be our paradigm. Right? He's a Onceler. A one-off. The world will happily lose him.

248787. sy475 At one point in our Zoom conversation Monday we discussed The World Without Us, both the concept and Alan Weisman's book.
He asks us to envision our Earth, without us... our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence... everyday items may become immortalized as fossils... copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock... plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe... just days after humans disappear, floods in New York's subways would start eroding the city's foundations... asphalt jungles would give way to real ones... organic and chemically treated farms would revert to wild... billions more birds would flourish... cockroaches in unheated cities would perish without us. g'r
“Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.”

Well at least the cockroaches would miss us.
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5 comments:

  1. Levi J.August 26, 2020 at 2:34 PM

    Additional DQ's:
    -Do you consider environmental preservation to have an intrinsic value? Or, rather, a use value? Is a distinction necessary/important? (9, 24)
    - Do you agree with the author's definition of "environmental problems"? (17)
    - Regarding environmentalism, what entities do you consider to be within the scope of moral standing? (11)

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    1. Ed CraigAugust 27, 2020 at 10:40 AM

      I throw this out for discussion. I think environmental preservation has both intrinsic value and instrumental value. A healthy ecosystem can be said to have intrinsic value because it is a good in itself. (I guess that is a tautology.) I’d ask the question here, which I am asking myself as I write this, why is it a good in itself? It clearly has instrumental value to the human and other species, in that it helps the well-being and flourishing of living creatures. But I need to disregard (I think) that means value in determining why it is an end itself. The one way that can do that now is to use Platonic thinking about the good, the ideal, and conclude that a healthy ecosystem is closer to the ideal, with or without its instrumental value to humans.

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  2. Ed CraigAugust 27, 2020 at 11:00 AM

    Comment on DQ does your "true self" extend to the whole of nature (8)? In practical terms, what does that mean?

    That I and the whole world of physical substance are parts of one substance, nature, is a “thought that I choose to believe even though I might have had other thoughts.” To have that concept of myself, my true self, as a finite part of an infinite whole has the practical effect of allowing me to experience transcendence. But that is metaphysical thinking, isn’t it? Posted on 8/27/20

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    1. Levi J.August 28, 2020 at 4:35 PM

      Yeah, that seems pretty metaphysical. But then again, how does one physically express their sense of "self"--a metaphysical concept? Yes, it would probably have to be a some sort of lifestyle/action, but I don't really know how you would express this all-encompassing identity. Does one where certain cloths? Eat certain foods? Participate in certain events? This will definitely have to be a point I muse on...

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  3. Heather FaulknerAugust 27, 2020 at 4:50 PM

    In what senses are we apart from and a part of nature? Do any of those exempt us from ethical responsibility to future generations of humans and non-humans?

    I think that we are in every sense a part of nature. I think we have a tendency, as people, to view ourselves as fundamentally different from all other living beings. Now, don't get me wrong, we definitely have certain features that have made us very successful as a species. Our ability to ruminate on these issues certainly makes us unique, but we are still natural animals. At the end of the day, we are susceptible to the lethal effects of disease, famine, storms, etc. So, our unique features may make us different from other beings, but it is all perfectly natural.

    Do we have an ethical responsibility to future living beings? I guess because we have the ability to understand our actions and the effects of those actions, yes. Because we are capable of knowingly hurting or helping future generations, the right thing to do is to choose to help.

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