Fall 2024

 Returning to MTSU, Fall 2024

PHIL 3340, Environmental Ethics

TEXTS:

• Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Anthropocene) --Humanity’s impact on the planet has been profound. From fire, intensive hunting, and agriculture, it has accelerated into rapid climate change, widespread pollution, plastic accumulation, species invasions, and the mass extinction of species—changes that have left a permanent mark in the geological record of the rocks. Yet the proposal for a new unit of geological time—the Anthropocene Epoch—has raised debate far beyond the scientific community...
• Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation –describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded… with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything.
• William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future –argues for longtermism: that positively influencing the distant future is our time’s key moral priority… if we make wise choices now, our grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.
• Bill McKibben, ed., American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau –can be read as a survey of the literature of American environmentalism, but above all, it should be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the writing.
• Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions –she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act?
• David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming –a travelog of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
• For more information contact Dr. Oliver – phil.oliver@mtsu.edu