It's Us Against Our "Leaders"

 

• Are you confident that alternate energy generation of renewable energy will scale up quickly enough to make a difference? Or that appropriate fuel efficiency standards on automobiles will be imposed in the years just ahad? Do you expect to drive an e-vehicle soon?

• Why are so few of our leaders willing to make the "strong ethical case for vigorous and concerted action to mitigate climate change"? 107

While confident may not be the word, I am more hopeful, that alternative energy sources will help make a difference. If not a big difference at least to help slow down the damage. I understand that our current alternative energy systems still aren’t perfect, but at this point I see it as what does the least amount of damage, while other people, such as our “leaders” see it as what is the least expensive and produces the most profit. When it comes to fuel efficiency standards, I once again hope that those will be imposed. This is mainly due to the fact that while we know there are still kinks in the system, e-vehicles are overall a better option for the environment. Yes the topic of batteries is still a little controversial, but they are currently working on a better solution. As for myself, I am currently still on my first car and plan to drive it till the wheels fall off, but my goal and hope is to be able to drive an e-vehicle as soon as I can. Overall I get that it may not make that big of a difference, but until our leadership acknowledges climate change and actually tries to figure out ways to do something about it, I am going to do what I can.

When it comes to our “leaders” and their relationship to climate change, I honestly think it mainly comes down to the topic of money. Our current system makes so much money and some people are having great success and profiting more than they could have imagined, but at what cost? In their minds, implementing a new system would cost too much and too many people would lose their jobs. But what they are not seeing is that with a new system comes new jobs, maybe even more jobs that do not even exist yet, but can exist within a new system. Or maybe the new system will be even more successful than the current. Overall, I believe that in their minds (or wallets) the system isn’t broken so they don’t need to fix it.

Weekly Activity:

• This post

• Commented on Kathryn's post

• Commented on Patrick’s post

Grand Total:

15

Environmental Ethics: Questions Sep 9

Is nature sacred? (94) *

As far as the book is concerned, Johnathan Helmand stresses that " The Earth is the Lords" (Psalms 24:1).  He also says that monotheistic religions are not sacred but insist that for Judaism , humanity is responsible and answerable to god for its use. My personal option, I feel that nature is sacred but we as humans don't treat it as such . We violated it every chance we get . In order for us  as humans to correct the harmful impact on Nature, we need to see nature as sacred. We need to respect and admire what nature does for everybody and everything on this planet. Nature supplies us with so many resources and we take from it with no remorse. If people would just stop and think about what nature really does for us, we might be able to be more aware of what we do to it. 

Weekly Essay

 

The Ethics of solar panels

While I do believe that most people would say that we need to change over from fossil fuels to green energy just so we don’t run out the finite fuels that our planet has.  I would say though that we are ethically bound to do so in a way that does not harm the environment, which is not the case with today’s version of solar panels which have become synonymous with green energy.  The current production for solar panels creates greenhouse gases which goes against the reason against why we made them to begin with.  Also, the way they measure the environmental impact the production of solar panels has on the planet is reliant on the companies supplying the data.   

            Then there is the problem with what to do with solar panels after they break, because the simple fact is solar panels are not recycle friendly.  As a matter of fact, this green solution is considered hazardous by many governments, including California.  Another problem is that you can’t toss them into any old landfill because the toxic materials inside the product could break and leach into the soil.  Then there is problem of replacing broken solar panels as recycling them doesn’t cover the cost of purchasing new solar panels either.  You also have to consider what is inside these solar panels as well.  While, I will admit that solar panel companies do use less lead than others in the production of their product, they do contain cadmium telluride which is hazardous containment.  Although the George Washington University released a study that said that solar panels are safe under normal conditions, but as the saying goes “no plan survives contact with the enemy” you can’t expect normal conditions all the time in life so the question how much damage would these containments do to the environment if they did leak out.

 

Weekly Essay

 Why are so few of our leaders willing to make the "strong ethical case for vigorous and concerted action to mitigate climate change"? 107

It’s literally all about money. What is currently profitable and what is currently not profitable. Millions of dollars have been channeled into the systems we currently have in place and any company that does significant change would have to pay hand over fist to accommodate these significant changes. Those who do not will also lose millions of dollars but also be left in the dust. So rather than facilitating these changes, they choose to instead lobby politicians to back their horse rather than the peoples’.  Once technology gets better, and we find cheaper and more efficient methods to replace the already cost efficient ones we have now, then more and more companies will hopefully be able to justify the cost of change in favor of long term savings. 

Another reason is that the current non renewable economy employs a decent amount of employees. Once we no longer need coal, oil and the like, the jobs that all have to do with extraction, transportation, refining, and more, will go the way of the milk man. In order to prevent this gap in employment, we would need to invest in educating and retraining thousands of people in other fields that they may have no experience in which would require more accessible education through universities and trade schools. Hopefully the growth in renewable methods can fill this gap in jobs naturally. However, these will unfortunately require completely different skill set. 

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	Gregg Caruso ⁦‪@GreggDCaruso‬⁩ The western United States is on fire, Greenland's ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, and wildlife populations have plunged an average of 68% since 1970. Yet human overconsumption, Co2 admissions, and intensive agriculture rolls on unabated.   9/10/20, 11:38 AM

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Facing Our Carbon Footprint

         I spoke briefly during a zoom call about a questionnaire I was requested to take during a class I took in  my early years of college. This class was Conservation of Biodiversity, a science class that also dealt with similar environmental ethics that we discuss on a day to day basis. To summarize the questionnaire people answer questions regarding their eating habits, transportation, a guesstimate of everyday electrical use, amongst a variety of other questions. The questionnaire then estimates how many earths it would take to sustain your specific lifestyle. My class had a low of 2.5 earths to a high of 18 (mine being 3.5). Going into this exercise I understood that humans underappreciate the earth and assume its resources for themselves and monetary gain. With that being said I would like to assume that my other classmates felt the same way about the environment. However, what makes the fight against environmental injustice so difficult is understanding how far behind humanity truly is in creating balance between natures basic needs and human basic needs. My classmates and myself are a prime example of a sample study of people that are aware of environmental issues but were not privy to understanding how shockingly unstable the earth actually is. Humanity is very strong with understanding that an issue is present, however when it comes to addressing said issue, facing it, feeling empathy for it, and finally creating a means to put and end to the issue is where the ignorance lies. One may even compare this ideology to grand issues such as the BLM movement and the income gap between men and women in the workforce. Here is a link the the questionnaire if you feel so inclined to face your personal issues with the environment and mother nature herself. https://www.footprintcalculator.org/

Nature: The Underrated Diety

 How sacred is nature? That question was the subject of some discussion this week. The way that I see it, this earth is the closest thing we have yet to find of a physical god. Religions for all of history have included nature in religious practices. Whether that be having sacred landmarks or seeing various natural elements as deities, indigenous religions especially have revered nature. And how did colonialism affect these ideologies? Well, we carved four white men into the Black Hills of South Dakota, otherwise known as the Six Grandfathers. These mountains were sacred to the indigenous people of South Dakota, and they were destroyed to show the faces of the people who invaded and colonized their land. 

The world we live on, this floating ball of rock and heat and life, it's all we know. It quite literally created the conditions for life. We were created by the earth. It gives us water and food and breathable air and everything we need, and we destroy it daily. We've caused irreversible damage. The earth also punishes us. We abuse and exploit the earths resources in the name of capital, and we are seeing the consequences. You could quite literally compare the fires on the west coast to a punishment of hell. The earth is our god and we have ignored her for too long. 

As Carl Sagan emphasized, the earth is all we have for now. We don't have the capabilities to inhabit another planet, at least not anytime soon. These issues are things we have to tackle with the highest priority.

Weekly Summary

-Sep 9, commented on discussion questions 

-Sep 10, this post

-Sep 10,  commented on Levi's post

Glorious good luck

 LISTEN. It's Cousin Mary's birthday. Poet Mary Oliver is one of my favorite dawn role-models. She said "If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did.” Her best efforts were marvelous. I mentioned Ursula Goodenough's Sacred Depths of Nature in Environmental Ethics yesterday, that was her great theme: sacred nature, precious and fragile and finite. "...the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—over and over announcing your place in the family of things." (continues)

How Wm James can save your life

What would he say about the climate crisis? 'Do something!' (And what would Spinoza say? 'Think about something else,' maybe?

One day during her years at Radcliffe in the 1890s, Gertrude Stein sat down to write a philosophy exam. She just wasn’t in the mood, though, so instead of answering its questions she penned a short note to her professor, William James: “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry, but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today”. In due course Stein received a response from James: “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself”. He gave her an excellent grade.

When William James was born, in 1842, his father had begun moving the family away from Calvinism, with its belief that life’s moments are mere instruments to serve an end wholly external to humankind, God’s inscrutable will. When James died, in 1910, he had come to embrace the idea that life’s moments are instead to be savoured for their intrinsic worth, and that a person should rely ultimately on their own inner ends to endow them with meaning. That may explain why he rewarded Stein for her philosophical insight: she took her own feelings in the moment as the paramount value.

James’s quest – for meaning that is internally derived and intrinsic, not externally given and instrumental – took decades of writing to work out. And, as John Kaag shows in Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James can save your life, it was rife with doubt. Replacing the rock of God with the frail reed of oneself as a source of meaning, and accepting each ephemeral moment as a font of value instead of relying on a grander scheme, is an anxiety-making exercise. Yet once traditional religion had ceased to be an option for him, James was writing, Kaag says, to “save his own life”... (continues)

==

And speaking of Wm James...

The sacred dot

 Following up on the issue of what's "sacred," Carl Sagan's pale blue dot monologue perfectly captures the naturalized and secular version of the term for me. In case anyone here is not familiar with it, or hasn't pondered it slowly, here it is. (And here's one of many video pairings with Sagan's own voice narration.)

A Pale Blue Dot

This excerpt from Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

THE PALE BLUE DOT OF EARTH. This image of Earth is one of 60 frames taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on February 14, 1990 from a distance of more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) and about 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane. In the image the Earth is a mere point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Our planet was caught in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the Sun. This image is part of Voyager 1's final photographic assignment which captured family portraits of the Sun and planets.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. -- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

And speaking of Sagans...

Cosmic philosophy (which we've been discussing in CoPhi) runs in the Sagan family.

Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Possible Worlds

This sequel to Carl Sagan's blockbuster continues the electrifying journey through space and time, connecting with worlds billions of miles away and envisioning a future of science tempered with wisdom.

Based on National Geographic's internationally-renowned television series, this groundbreaking and visually stunning book explores how science and civilization grew up together. From the emergence of life at deep-sea vents to solar-powered starships sailing through the galaxy, from the Big Bang to the intricacies of intelligence in many life forms, acclaimed author Ann Druyan documents where humanity has been and where it is going, using her unique gift of bringing complex scientific concepts to life. With evocative photographs and vivid illustrations, she recounts momentous discoveries, from the Voyager missions in which she and her husband, Carl Sagan, participated to Cassini-Huygens's recent insights into Saturn's moons. This breathtaking sequel to Sagan's masterpiece explains how we humans can glean a new understanding of consciousness here on Earth and out in the cosmos--again reminding us that our planet is a pale blue dot in an immense universe of possibility. g'r

Sasha Sagan, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

As I see it, here we are on this rock that orbits a star, in a quiet part of a spiral galaxy somewhere in the great, wide vastness of space and time. On our rock these events, changes, and patterns have an enormous impact on us Earthlings. They are important to us...

And yet here we are. Right now. It's easy to forget how amazing this is...

"What is the meaning of life? Sagan finds its meaning everywhere--with her family, around the world, and especially among the stars of the cosmos. Read her work; you'll have a deeper appreciation for your every step, every bite, and every breath." --Bill Nye

Sasha Sagan was raised by secular parents, the astronomer Carl Sagan and the writer and producer Ann Druyan. They taught her that the natural world and vast cosmos are full of profound beauty, that science reveals truths more wondrous than any myth or fable.

When Sagan herself became a mother, she began her own hunt for the natural phenomena behind our most treasured occasions--from births to deaths, holidays to weddings, anniversaries, and more--growing these roots into a new set of rituals for her young daughter that honor the joy and significance of each experience without relying on religious framework.

As Sagan shares these rituals, For Small Creatures Such as We becomes a moving tribute to a father, a newborn daughter, a marriage, and the natural world--a celebration of life itself, and the power of our families and beliefs to bring us together. g'r

 Is nature sacred? 

Whether or not nature is sacred depends on who you ask, and many people will likely have differing opinions on why it is or isn’t. Some would even say it is not sacred at all, but if you ask me, I say it is. When I stumble upon a beautiful place or come across an old tree my first reaction is that these things should be preserved. Something that has existed in peace and beauty for so long should not be disturbed. It really does pain me to see someone chop down a thousand-year-old tree with no regard or appreciation for how long that organism has existed. There is a respect for nature that has not been present in western culture for a very long time, and you can call me a tree hugger for believing trees shouldn’t be chopped down, but there are ways for humans to exist and grow without feeling the need to conquer every patch of grass we can find. 

The people who once roamed these lands we’ve claimed for ourselves believed nature is sacred and they placed great value in respecting and preserving it. Instead of adopting these beliefs, we decimated them along with everything else that gets in the way of avarice. For so long nature has been a tool to be exploited rather than a partner to be cared for. Our species has acted as a parasite on this planet, doing nothing to contribute to the diversity or wellness of our environment. If human beings viewed nature to be sacred then we probably wouldn’t be missing half of our coral reefs and jungles.  

Many religions, especially eastern ones, hail the importance of respecting nature and associate nature with God in order to give it importance and value. Connecting god to nature automatically makes nature sacred and is effective in teaching people the importance of our environment. Buddhism is one of the better examples of a teaching believing nature is sacred, and even goes as far as to say if you don’t value the lives of invertebrates then you aren’t compassionate. This type of compassion taught by Buddhism has always attracted me, and if more people thought like this, I truly believe the world’s problems would be solved. It is a shame that the Buddha wasn’t as popular as Jesus back in the day.  

Shintoism is Japan's indigenous religion and like many other indigenous religions focuses on nature and its important connection to the spiritual world. This belief personifies nature and attaches spirits to the physical world so that human beings will respect what is around them. A lot of indigenous religions also believe in repercussions for disrespecting nature or angering the spirits found within nature. I find it strange how across the world there are these indigenous spiritual beliefs that all share the same appreciation for nature. I think today we have forgotten our debt to mother earth, and instead of feeling thankful for all that has been provided to us, humanity feels entitled to the Earth’s riches. If only greed hadn’t ruined the world am I right. 

An Economic Solution to Hand-wringing and Disingenuous Politicians

I've been struck by the amount of people joking about how terrible this year has been, i.e.:

However, if we continue on the course we've charted, I'd posit that this year is a reflection of the new norm. Longer, more aggressive hurricane seasons, rising temperatures, and rampant wildfires are all repercussions of a rapidly destabilized climate directly resulting from our overconsumption of natural resources and carbon emissions. 

In the last chapter of our reading, the author posits multiple solutions to this issue, including the enforcing of a "global carbon budget". In this budget, carbon emissions would be set according to a country's population, and, given a country's need for CO2 consumption is greater than its allotment, remaining entitlements of ostensibly poorer nations could be bought by richer nations. This is a great idea (granted this budget included the stipulations to: 1. place a carbon cap to accommodate larger populations and 2. the 55% consumption of the carbon budget already consumed by developed nations be considered), in theory. However, the author then goes on to say that is unlikely to happen due to lack of consensus among our nations' leaders and if by some miracle there was a galvanizing to spur our leaders into taking these initiatives, it is likely they would not be enough to prevent a 2 degree Celsius increase. So, basically, our hands are tied.

In order to actually tackle the issues put forth by climate change, there needs to be a massive restructuring of how our global economy functions. The economic concept of 'Degrowth' calls for the abolition of economic growth as a primary objective. Advocates of this school of thought point out that the richest nations are the primary consumers of carbon and this consumption often disproportionately affects poorer nations. By shifting our focus on energy reduction and redistribution of resources, degrowth would serve the function of reducing carbon consumption and emissions while simultaneously allowing developing nations access to the resources they need (which are conveniently often stripped from their own countries in our current economy). 

This model, while currently unprecedented, is very achievable. It demands no massive shifts in technology (like many sustainable models do, often relying on future, unknown or undeveloped systems), it merely requires the political will. So, let us Deep Ecologists, ecofeminists, Greens, Christians, Atheists, Jews, etc. unite in collectively bullying our nations' leaders into having an environmental conscience and reversing our trajectory away from the dystopian nightmare we are currently hurtling towards.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HckWP75yk9g 

Weekly activity:

-wrote this post (3 pts.)

Prior activity:

~10 pts.

Total:

~13pts.

An unsilent rebuke

LISTEN-Up@dawn. Exciting day in Zoom-land ahead, beginning with a visit from our regional Peace Corps rep... (continues)

Peace Corps

We'll visit with a Peace Corps rep on Wednesday at 12:40 in CoPhi, let me know if any of you in Environmental Ethics would care to join us and I'll send you the Zoom link. A little history:

 

Through the years, Peace Corps Volunteers have been connected by their passion for service and love for their host countries.

The transformative impact of the Peace Corps on the communities we serve and the Volunteers themselves can be measured in many ways. A shared cup of tea with a host mother that leads to a greater understanding of Americans. A new school library built, or a safe latrine where there wasn't one before. A young boy prepared to serve his own community, a young girl who sees herself as equal to her male classmates. A Volunteer with a clear career path and a lifelong passion. Here are just some of the ways the Peace Corps measures impact.

In the field

• Fighting HIV/AIDS
• Fighting Hunger
• Protecting the Environment
• Improving Access to Technology

In the community

Peace Corps Volunteers leave a legacy in the lives of the community members they reach, educate, and inspire. Some of those young people grow up to be extraordinary leaders, including engineers, doctors, and government officials...

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers have gone on to achieve extraordinary success in all kinds of fields. 

Some, inspired by their service, stay in education or health-related professions, or choose to join the Foreign Service. Others pursue careers in business, from entrepreneurial startups to management at major companies. 

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers are working as journalists, writers, members of Congress, and even astronauts.

https://www.peacecorps.gov/

Tweet by Brent Toderian on Twitter

	Brent Toderian ⁦‪@BrentToderian‬⁩ These Dutch "bicycle buses" are transporting 50+ kids getting the kind of exercise that leads to better learning, who DON'T need to be driven & dropped off by parents adding lots of local car traffic. Nijmegen, NL video via ⁦‪@MartijnLi‬⁩ HT ⁦‪@urbanthoughts11‬⁩ pic.twitter.com/cwxxLCYnlN   9/7/20, 12:44 AM

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