Environmental Ethics: Questions SEP 19

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Questions SEP 19

GT 3.1--3.7 (thru Food & Nutrition). WW 157-188 (thru Crisis Capitalism). McK thru Donald Culross Peattie. Midterm report presentations begin...

Greta says the climate crisis is symptomatic of what larger crisis? 132
What did the WHO director say is our rationale for creating conditions that threaten epidemic, mass migration, and climate stress? 133
What are some actions that both contribute towards the UN's sustainability goals and improve health? 135
How many more heat-related deaths are projected by the end of the century, if emissions persist and no adaptation occurs? 137
What's the lethal "wet bulb" temperature? 138
Meeting the Paris Agreement emissions targets in the next half century would have what result? 142
Where might climate change spread malaria and dengue? 145
What common practice is an unfortunate illustration of "survival of the fittest" in action? 147
What is the field of planetary health teaching us? 149
What animal populations have been especially decimated since 1970? 150
Please post your discussion questions in the comments space below.

Why does W-W think there's so much fictional apocalypse in pop culture? What may such stories become, as climate change expands? 157-160
Why doesn't Amitav Ghosh think we'll probably never have a "great climate novel"? 160-1 What's the best cli-fi you've read? (For me it's Overstory and Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and I'm looking forward to Playground... and Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.)
Who are the "stakeholders" in the status quo of industrial capitalism, and what complicates the impulse to villainize the oil companies? 163
Where is climate denial not a problem? 164
What's misleading about climate "parables" involving polar bears and coral reefs? What "pathetic fallacy" do they encourage? How have plastic and bees exemplified "red herring" parables? 165-7
Why have floods elsewhere in the world "hardly made a mark" in the U.S. and Europe? 168
What new message have climate scientists only recently been comfortable with, as they've overcome their "reticence"? 173
Which of the cognitive biases named on 174-5 do you consider most responsible for our collective failure to address climate change?
What's the Frankenstein problem? 177
What does Naomi Klein mean by "the shock doctrine"? 179
What is Kids vs. Climate? 184
What are the two proposed "negative emissions" methods, and what is their unfortunate present status? 186-7

McK

What was Benton MacKaye's vision for the AT? 209
A cosmopolitan city, said MacKaye, is not what? 214-5
In whose memory is the national wildlife refuge on Sanibel Island named? 224
What future did archy predict for Earth? 238

4 comments:

Katherine WelchSeptember 19, 2024 at 2:46 PM
How many more heat-related deaths are projected by the end of the century, if emissions persist and no adaptation occurs?
If there are no adaptations, heat-related deaths are projected to have an increase of 10x what it previously was. The question is, do policy makers care if it doesn't affect them? At what point do they start to feel that they are in danger and need to adapt? Will they adapt in time?
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Katherine WelchSeptember 19, 2024 at 2:51 PM
What is Kids vs. Climate?
Also known as Juliana v. the United States, this equal-protection lawsuit argued that in failing to take action against global warming, the federal government shifted decade's worth of environmental cost on younger/future generations.
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Aidan HainesSeptember 19, 2024 at 4:13 PM
I wish more people would post discussion questions to respond to..

I do want to respond to the issue of the polar bears in my own ideas however.
The polar bear and coral reef parables distract us from the real issue that climate change is not just affecting these species, but hurting countless other species as well as humans on a global scale. It’s a sense of escapism, in a way.

Discussion questions I have for today:

Have there been any recent breakthroughs in technology to help us with our climate change problems? Do you think AI could be beneficial in any ways in combatting these problems?

(Because we’ve brought up Mike Pence)
What is Mike Pence’s stance on climate change? Does he believe in it? What ways may there be to remind people and show that it’s a real problem?
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Eli MillerSeptember 19, 2024 at 4:28 PM
Greta speaks on how she believes some people have more value or more importance regarding who should be helped with climate change. Fundamentally climate causes mass immigration and can effect people in desperate places. heat related deaths could potentially rise 370%
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SEP 24 GT 3.8--3.14 (thru Winter...). WW 189-225 (thru History After Progress). McK thru Aldo Leopold... SEP 26 PH -33 Foreword... Oceans. GT 3.15--3.20 (thru True Cost...). WW 226-265. McK thru E.B. White... Midterm report presentations continue... Good News: keyshop says I now have access to the building after 4:30. So, we can look forward to going out again...when it's not too hot or too loud... A NOTE ON OUR TEXTS. This is an ambitious reading schedule. Read what you can, prioritizing the texts in descending order: first-listed assignment for each class gets top priority, second gets 2d, and so on... Fall 2024: HONORS BUILDING 116, T/Th 4:20 pm

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

	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

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Questions SEP 19

4 comments:

Peripatetics