Environmental Ethics: April 2022

Monday, April 25, 2022

Why Our Hope for the Planet Is Not Yet Extinct

New life is everywhere, renewing itself among us, reminding us not to give up.

...So we cling to good news in whatever form it takes. Whether it's tenuously hopeful global news (like the I.P.C.C.'s report that we still have time to prevent the worst ravages of climate change) or encouraging local news (like the people who are letting their lawns go wild to feed the bees), being reminded of what is yet possible goes a long way toward countering gloom.

...Americans are now more attuned than ever to the peril the natural world is in, and that is my greatest reason for hope. Ideological holdouts may continue to insist that climate change is a liberal hoax, and clueless people may continue to give the matter no thought at all. But these groups are no longer the norm. According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 72 percent of Americans believe the planet is warming. Seventy-seven percent support research into renewable energy. The same percentage believes that children should be taught about climate change in school... Margaret Renkl

Saturday, April 23, 2022

PBS NewsHour | A backyard naturalist captures nature in essays | Season 2022 | PBS

Margaret Renkl
https://www.pbs.org/video/backyard-naturalist-1650661368/

Friday, April 22, 2022

Earth Day 2022

Today's annual Earth Day Doodle features real time-lapse imagery from Google Earth and other sources showing the impacts of climate change across our planet.
http://www.google.com/doodles/earth-day-2022

This Earth Day, We Could Be Helping the Environment—and Ukraine

Even as we watch the horrors daily inflicted on the Ukrainians, we have not been asked to change our daily habits in any way to be of help to them.

"For too long, we have wanted to help in the fight, but had no way into battle. Electrifying your home one machine at a time is today's Victory Garden—a thing you can do to fight tyranny, inflation, and runaway emissions." Bill McKibben, continues

Monday, April 18, 2022

Ministry for the future

Kim Stanley Robinson hasn't stopped thinking of what humanity might yet make of itself. We're going to read his Ministry for the Future in Environmental Ethics this Fall, alongside Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Paul Hawken, and the Sunrise Movement.

"Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face." (g'r)

Yes, it's a work of fiction, of the imagination; but that's the source of possibility and the power of maybe. Maybe life will be worth living, climatically speaking, in the decades to come. Dreaming it is a necessary condition of its reality.

The burning source of all our power gets a cameo chapter and speaks bluntly.

“I am a god and I am not a god. Either way, you are my creatures. I keep you alive. Inside I am hot beyond all telling, and yet my outside is even hotter. At my touch you burn, though I spin outside the sky. As I breathe my big slow breaths, you freeze and burn, freeze and burn. Someday I will eat you. For now, I feed you. Beware my regard. Never look at me.”

We don't need to worship Sol, but we do need to respect her. Now. KSR says this possible future had best begin no later than January 2025. The window is shrinking fast.

Friday, April 8, 2022

Barbara Kingsolver

It’s the birthday of American novelist Barbara Kingsolver (books by this author) born in Annapolis, Maryland (1955). She grew up in rural Kentucky and spent part of her childhood in the Congo, where her father was a physician and the family lived without running water or electricity. Both experiences left her passionate about social justice and biodiversity, issues that she explores in all her novels, especially The Poisonwood Bible (1998) — and Flight Behavior (2012) which tackles the effects of global climate change on monarch butterflies. In her memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007) she described how her family moved from Arizona to a farm in Virginia, and spent a year growing all their food, from tomatoes to raising chickens and turkeys.

Kingsolver’s most recent work is a book of poetry published in 2020, How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons). WA

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, April 25, 2022

Saturday, April 23, 2022

Friday, April 22, 2022

Monday, April 18, 2022

Friday, April 8, 2022

Peripatetics