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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
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Thursday, June 25, 2020
Summer reading
I already own two of these books, I wrote one of them, and I just ordered a fourth from @ParnassusBooks1. Next month, I'll order more. Thank you for the great reading list, @YaleClimateComm. https://t.co/lO52Jd04km— Margaret Renkl (@MargaretRenkl) June 25, 2020
Friday, June 19, 2020
NYTimes.com: On a Pennsylvania Farm, ‘Nature Is Not Just Carrying On’
On a Pennsylvania Farm, 'Nature Is Not Just Carrying On'
Quarantine in the country means fresh air and space, but a writer's sense of good fortune is darkened by the state of nature. "What I'm observing is unsettling," she says.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/climate/quarantine-coronavirus-covid.html?smid=em-share
Quarantine in the country means fresh air and space, but a writer's sense of good fortune is darkened by the state of nature. "What I'm observing is unsettling," she says.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/climate/quarantine-coronavirus-covid.html?smid=em-share
Thursday, June 18, 2020
How Public Opinion Changes for the Better
Bill McKibben:
...In the climate crisis, each fight against a pipeline or a frack well, against an oil company or a bank that backs it, is important in its own right. But each also serves as a way to build the pressure that will, eventually, move us psychologically from a world that sees the fossil-fuelled economy stretching out into the future to one that understands we need to change.
There are signs that we're reaching that paradigm shift, both because of powerful organizing (eight million people in the streets last fall for global climate strikes) and because environmental events, such as the wildfires in California and Australia, demonstrate our scary reality more plainly all the time. Around the world, more and more cities and countries are rolling out economic-recovery plans that emphasize climate action, as if that was the most obvious idea. (It is.) Even in this country, you can see it in the polling: a string of recent surveys shows that the issue of global warming is Drumpf's single greatest vulnerability. And you can sense it in significant corners of the culture, too—corners that pay a lot of attention to marketing and branding and predicting the future. Lyft's announcement on Wednesday that all of the cars used in its network will be electric by 2030 will not solve the climate crisis. (Indeed, if it draws people away from the subway, it could make it worse; what we really need are electric buses and electric bikes.) But it's a sign—like Wallace's car circling the Nascar track—that, after years and years of organizing, a new logic is beginning to drive events.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/how-public-opinion-changes-for-the-better?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
...In the climate crisis, each fight against a pipeline or a frack well, against an oil company or a bank that backs it, is important in its own right. But each also serves as a way to build the pressure that will, eventually, move us psychologically from a world that sees the fossil-fuelled economy stretching out into the future to one that understands we need to change.
There are signs that we're reaching that paradigm shift, both because of powerful organizing (eight million people in the streets last fall for global climate strikes) and because environmental events, such as the wildfires in California and Australia, demonstrate our scary reality more plainly all the time. Around the world, more and more cities and countries are rolling out economic-recovery plans that emphasize climate action, as if that was the most obvious idea. (It is.) Even in this country, you can see it in the polling: a string of recent surveys shows that the issue of global warming is Drumpf's single greatest vulnerability. And you can sense it in significant corners of the culture, too—corners that pay a lot of attention to marketing and branding and predicting the future. Lyft's announcement on Wednesday that all of the cars used in its network will be electric by 2030 will not solve the climate crisis. (Indeed, if it draws people away from the subway, it could make it worse; what we really need are electric buses and electric bikes.) But it's a sign—like Wallace's car circling the Nascar track—that, after years and years of organizing, a new logic is beginning to drive events.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/how-public-opinion-changes-for-the-better?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
Monday, June 15, 2020
Arboricide
Neighbors committing arboricide, felling perfectly healthy trees to make way for a gratuitous circle drive. Where’s the Lorax when you need him? pic.twitter.com/R1vBbROrXG— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 15, 2020
Wednesday, June 10, 2020
Making a planet worth saving
Most weeks, we talk about how to save the world, which seems the only accurate way to put it, given that we’ve just lived through the hottest May in recorded history and that the carbon-dioxide levels in our atmosphere just hit a new high, unmatched in the past three million years. There are, per usual, dozens of interesting new reports and studies I could tell you about and dozens of dangerous new political developments, right down to the Trump Administration waiving environmental reviews for major projects such as pipelines. (Just no more review—go ahead and build.) But the pain expressed so eloquently in the richest country on Earth these past few weeks can’t help but make one wonder: If we’re just going to use solar power instead of coal to run the same sad mess of unfair and ugly oppression, is it really worth it? Despite the glad sight of Americans surging into the streets this past weekend—and even with news that the Minneapolis City Council is setting out to dismantle its police department and replace it with something else—I worry that, as with other such moments in the past, this one may slip away without our society really doing the deep work of facing our collective demons.
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Photograph by Vanessa Charlot / Redux
So I thought it would be worth listening to some of my colleagues at 350.org (a group that I helped found), who, on Thursday night, put together this Webinar. It isn’t necessary, of course, to agree with all the views expressed there; if the Webinar doesn’t make you uncomfortable in spots, your comfort meter may be pegged too high. But discomfort never killed anyone, not like a knee on the neck or a coal-fired power plant down the street. It features the 350.org activists Thanu Yakupitiyage, Dominique Thomas, Cherrell Brown, Natalia Cardona, Emily Southard, Tianna Arredondo, and Clarissa Brooks, as well as Sam Grant, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of 350. Their guests are Oluchi Omeoga, who is a Minneapolis organizer with Black Visions Collective, and Lumumba Bandele, the national strategies and partnerships director for Movement for Black Lives... (New Yorker)
"Earth Tribe"
📣 Announcing: the #EarthTribe! 🌱 Join a global movement of young people taking action to tackle #climatechange & other pressing threats to the environment! 🌎 Ready to take action? 😎 Our handy quiz will help you find your path: https://t.co/a7kv6nAtuQ #WorldEnvironmentDay pic.twitter.com/nIZDYhUcz0— World Scouting (@worldscouting) June 5, 2020
Tuesday, June 9, 2020
"Mutha" Earth
Call Your "Mutha'"
A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene
Jane Caputi
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Sunday, June 7, 2020
Friday, June 5, 2020
Sustainability and inequality are the same conversation
Only a very few people have complained to me these past weeks about 350 doing what it can to support #BlackLivesMatter . More and more people understand that the world's crises are tightly linked. So grateful to all who push together. https://t.co/48wnW8dPOD— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) June 5, 2020
Thursday, June 4, 2020
How the Protests Have Changed the Pandemic
“...mass gatherings, even those held outdoors, even with precautions, are potential super-spreader events—opportunities for a virus to explode through a population. In the past week, tens of thousands of Americans have taken to the streets in scores of cities to protest racial injustice and police brutality; by Wednesday, more than nine thousand had been arrested. Many of the cautious, phased reopening plans state governments had put in place have been upended. As a matter of racial justice, the case for protest is unequivocal: Floyd’s killing was grotesque, and the latest in a series. From a public-health perspective, however, the situation is more complex. Fragile progress toward containing the coronavirus has been threatened. Last month, we debated how far the virus could travel when we speak loudly, and how close together tables at restaurants should be; this month, we may learn how much virus is expelled from the nose and mouth when pepper spray irritates the lungs…” NY’erLast month, we debated how far the virus could travel when we speak loudly and how close together tables at restaurants should be; this month, we may learn how much virus is expelled when pepper spray irritates the lungs. https://t.co/w6kItgHpqj— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 4, 2020
Racism, Police Violence, and the Climate Are Not Separate Issues
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Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu
👣Solvitur ambulando
💭Sapere aude
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
Environmental Ethics 2020
My colleagues and I were asked by our college to provide short promotional videos for our Fall courses. Here's mine for this course. (The 7-second gap in the middle is there for editorial purposes, btw, I wasn't having a brain-freeze.)
Returning to MTSU, Fall 2020-
Environmental Ethics
PHIL 3340
Hi, I'm Dr. Oliver. For the past several years, in alternate Fall semesters, I've taught the Environmental Ethics course at MTSU--always a little differently, with a variety of texts and approaches, but always with the firm conviction that no greater challenge faces humanity than that of learning to live responsibly, respectfully, and sustainably on the earth, "the only home" (as Carl Sagan said of our "pale blue dot") we've ever known."
That conviction once again fuels the approach we'll take this Fall, along with a sobering recognition that, like the other pressing challenges of our time including the COVID-19 pandemic of the past several months and the recent civil unrest protesting tragic incidents of racial injustice, meeting the climate challenge will require mutual support and concerted, constructive action.
Environmental Ethics is not just another arid academic research subject, it's an existential roadmap to a livable future for our children and theirs, and for the myriad other forms of life that make up what pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold called the biotic community.
This fall's course will also reflect the hopefulness of a new generation, your generation, class of 2020-something, that in many ways is beginning to stand up, speak up, and insist (with the courageous young woman Greta Thunberg) that there is a tomorrow and you'll not stand for the short-sighted indifference of an older generation that acts, like Dr. Seuss's "Onceler" in The Lorax, as if their time was the only time that matters.
Required Texts:
- Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Attfield;
- Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben;
- On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein;
- The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Are We Past the Peak of Big Oil’s Power?
The coronavirus crisis has both obscured and illuminated one of the most seismic developments on our planet in many decades: I think it's now clear that the power of the fossil-fuel industry has decisively passed its zenith. It's not a spent force by any means, but, even in the past few weeks, events have shown it to be waning where for a century and a half it has waxed...
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Tweet from Maria Popova (@brainpicker)
Maria Popova (@brainpicker) tweeted at 8:34 PM on Wed, May 27, 2020: “Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.” (https://twitter.com/brainpicker/status/1265818699879022593?s=02) Get the official Twitter app at https://twitter.com/download?s=13
Alan Weisman’s Thought Experiment Becomes a Reality
"The World Without Us," imagines what Earth would look like if everyone vanished.
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
NYTimes.com: What a Week’s Disasters Tell Us About Climate and the Pandemic
From The New York Times:
What a Week's Disasters Tell Us About Climate and the Pandemic
Extreme weather presents an even bigger threat when economies are crashing and ordinary people are stretched to their limits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/climate/climate-change-coronavirus.html?smid=em-share
What a Week's Disasters Tell Us About Climate and the Pandemic
Extreme weather presents an even bigger threat when economies are crashing and ordinary people are stretched to their limits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/climate/climate-change-coronavirus.html?smid=em-share
Monday, May 25, 2020
Climate mindset (TED)
...Coronavirus and climate - there are many ways in which they're connected. They're both global challenges that are coming at us at this moment. They both require us to step up as individuals and as society. They require us to replenish our trust in our faith in science. They require us to collaborate, and they make us realize that we are only as strong as the weakest member of our societies. And the other thing that they do is they require us to take strong action without being able to control the outcome. No one individual can take action that can prevent the spread of coronavirus. And in my talk, I talk about some of these health care workers. And what was kind of instructive to me as I looked at it was I realized that as long as you feel like you're - what you're doing has meaning and purpose, you'll take action even if you can't control the outcome. That's why those nurses, you know, so - in such an inspiring way, take such action, put themselves in such risk to do all these different things. That's also the story of transformation of the world going back generations in times of great challenge and conflict and difficulty. People couldn't control that, but they felt a sense of purpose and meaning in engaging with the issue... (continues)
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