"There is a tomorrow": Philosophical Reflections on the Climate Crisis

1. Spring 2020 Honors
Lecture Series on
Climate Change -
"There is a tomorrow":
Philosophical Reflections
on the Climate Crisis
Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

2. I’m delighted to be back
for my 3d Honors
Lecture, I seem to return
about every five years...

3. https://www.slideshare.net/osopher/honors-apr13-3708492?qid=0da1cdec-7614-4630-b5a8-74564305189a&v=&b=&from_search=1

4. Feb 3, 2014: Spg 2014 Honors Lecture Series: Health & Happiness

5. Don’t forget to register and vote!

6. Hope you enjoyed the Super Bowl and
your team won (mine did)... or at least
enjoyed the commercials (Bill Murray
and the Groundhog remind us, there
are no do-overs when it comes to
sustaining a habitable climate.)
But the thing I like most about Super
Sunday is… now there are just 9 days
‘til pitchers and catchers report to
Spring Training!

7. My biology-major daughter (who may or may not be in this room)
tells me my slides are too wordy, but that’s due to an old habit
acquired from my esteemed Vandy mentor John Lachs. He always
handed out hard copies of his lectures, on the premise that
audiences do a better job of tracking when they receive
information through more than one portal. Reading AND listening
is better, he said, than just one or the other alone.
As an environmental ethicist who
wishes to speak for the trees, I don’t
do hard copies. But the words are
here if you want to see them, now or
later: my slideshows are all posted
at slideshare.net/osopher.

8. The Lorax
by Dr. Seuss
(1971)
"I am the
Lorax. I speak
for the trees.
I speak for the
trees, for the
trees have no
tongues.”

9. “But now,” says
the Once-ler,
“Now that you’re
here, the word of
the Lorax seems
perfectly clear.
UNLESS
someone like
you cares a
whole awful lot,
nothing is going
to get better.
It’s not.”

10. A 130-foot-tall white oak tree on the
Oaklands property near the MTSU
campus is listed on the Tennessee
Landmark and Historic Tree Register.
Sprouted in the 1770s, the massive oak,
which measures at least 60 inches in
diameter, is one of the oldest in the
county.

11. “People aren’t the apex species they think
they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller,
slower, faster, older, younger, more
powerful-call the shots, make the air, and
eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.” g’r
“This is not our world with trees in it. It's
a world of trees, where humans have just
arrived.”
“The best arguments in the world won't
change a person's mind. The only thing
that can do that is a good story.”
“What you make from a tree should be at
least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
“You can’t come back to something that is
gone.”

12. Overstory is the larger, taller trees of growth occupying a
forest area and shading young trees, hardwoods, brush, and
other deciduous varieties which are growing beneath the
larger trees (i.e., understory).

13. "I wish that I could give you
something... but I have nothing
left. I am an old stump. I am
sorry..."
"I don't need very much now,"
said the boy, "just a quiet place
to sit and rest. I am very tired."
"Well," said the tree,
straightening herself up as much
as she could,
"well, an old stump is a good for
sitting and resting. Come, Boy,
sit down. Sit down and rest."
And the boy did.
And the tree was happy.”
― Shel Silverstein, The Giving
Tree

14. "What's a purpose?" Freddie had
asked.
"A reason for being," Daniel had
answered. "To make things more
pleasant for others is a reason for
being. To make shade for old people
who come to escape the heat of their
homes is a reason for being. To
provide a cool place for children to
come and play. To fan with our leaves
the picnickers who come to eat on
checkered tablecloths. These are all
the reasons for being."
"Each of us is different. We have had
different experiences. We have faced
the sun differently...

15. NYT Climate & Environment… FAQs...2019 The Year in Climate Change…
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC
We’re in big trouble.
Over the coming 25 or 30 years, scientists say, the climate is likely to
gradually warm, with more extreme weather. Coral reefs and other
sensitive habitats are already starting to die. Longer term, if emissions
rise unchecked, scientists fear climate effects so severe that they might
destabilize governments, produce waves of refugees, precipitate the
sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in the Earth’s history, and
melt the polar ice caps, causing the seas to rise high enough to flood
most of the world’s coastal cities. The emissions that create those risks
are happening now, raising deep moral questions for our generation.

16. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a shocking report
“Global Warming of 1.5°C.” An equally accurate but more evocative title could have been
“We’re almost out of time.”

17. It is shocking, not because those working on the science are
surprised by the messages (indeed they are all based on
existing and published science), but because in aggregate the
message is extraordinary and alarming. The diversity and
severity of impacts from climate change read like a narrative
we might see in a Hollywood movie, but are in fact, and
disconcertingly, the clear-eyed projections of where we are
heading in reality, barring massive economic mobilization
and rapid transition to cleaner technologies… (continues)

18. “We can’t just continue living
as if there was no tomorrow,
because there is a tomorrow.
That is all we are saying.”
Greta Thunberg
===
“This moment does feel
different. Throughout history,
many great morally based
movements have gained
traction at the very moment
when young people decided to
make that movement their
cause.” Al Gore TIME

19. ‘Our house is still on fire’
DAVOS, Switzerland — Greta Thunberg on
Tuesday punched a hole in the promises
emerging from a forum of the global political
and business elite and offered instead an
ultimatum: Stop investing in fossil fuels
immediately, or explain to your children why
you did not protect them from the “climate
chaos” you created.
“I wonder, what will you tell your
children was the reason to fail and leave
them facing the climate chaos you
knowingly brought upon them?” Ms.
Thunberg, 17, said at the annual gathering of
the world’s rich and powerful in Davos, a village
on the icy reaches of the Swiss Alps… nyt

20. Greta Thunberg said on Friday
that U.S. Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin's comments had
"no effect" on her during a news
conference with other young
climate activists in Davos.
Mnuchin told Greta Thunberg she
should study economics on
Thursday, a quip that came two
days after U.S. President Donald
Trump and Thunberg sparred
indirectly at the Davos summit.
After Trump said the U.S. had
committed to joining the one
trillion tree initiative, Thunberg
retorted that fixing the climate
crisis was not only about trees.

22. “One can only surmise that Mnuchin slept through his
undergraduate economics classes. Otherwise he would know
that every, and I mean every, major Econ 101 textbook argues
for government regulation or taxation of activities that pollute
the environment, because otherwise neither producers nor
consumers have an incentive to take the damage inflicted by
this pollution into account.”
Paul Krugman, Greta Versus the Greedy Grifters

23. Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg)
1/29/20, 6:53 AM
“The Guardian will no longer accept advertising from oil and
gas companies, becoming the first major global news
organisation to institute an outright ban on taking money from
companies that extract fossil fuels.”
A good start, who will take this further?
theguardian.com/media/2020/jan…

24. There is a tomorrow, but what’s the forecast? Cloudy, gray, much
warmer. Foreboding, unless a new “front” moves in very quickly.
"We’re in big trouble," says one commentator:
Over the coming 25 or 30 years, scientists say, the climate is likely to gradually
warm, with more extreme weather. Coral reefs and other sensitive habitats are
already starting to die. Longer term, if emissions rise unchecked, scientists fear
climate effects so severe that they might destabilize governments, produce
waves of refugees, precipitate the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals in
the Earth’s history, and melt the polar ice caps, causing the seas to rise high
enough to flood most of the world’s coastal cities. The emissions that create
those risks are happening now, raising deep moral questions for our generation.
But most especially for your generation.

25. “We as a species must make a
decision. How absurd that sounds.
It sounds absurd because we’ve
never made a decision as a species,
and it seems implausible to think
that we could. But . . . continuing
on our present course would
threaten the entirety of human
civilization. . . We could well have
only a decade within which to
make major changes lest we lose
the opportunity to retrieve a
climate balance that is favorable
for human life and human
civilization. Al Gore, U.S. Vice
President, 1993-2001”

26. The good news. A new front is
beginning to appear on our radar. The
rise of a new generation of engaged
activists, led now by Thunberg, leads
long-time climate crusader Al Gore to
hope for a bright new dawn. “This
moment does feel different. Throughout
history, many great morally based
movements have gained traction at the
very moment when young people
decided to make that movement their
cause.”
Today I'll reflect on the perils and
promise of this moment, as mroe and
more young people are stepping up to
face its challenge.

27. 9.16.19, Tucker
Auditorium. Al Gore
spoke with deep gratitide
for his parents' influence,
& with impassioned
urgency when asked
what he wanted students
in the audience to
understand about the
climate crisis. "We know
what we have to do.
What's not to like about
doing the right thing?!"
#mtsu #AlGore

28. Al Gore: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We Can Win
We have the tools. Now we are building the political power.
By Al Gore
Mr. Gore was the 45th vice president of the United States.
Sept. 20, 2019
Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster
than you thought they could.
The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following the trajectory of that
economics maxim as horrors long predicted by scientists are becoming realities.
More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing, monster fires ignite and burn on
every continent but Antarctica, ice is melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and
accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and island nations...

29. Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. Cities face drinking water shortages. The ocean is
becoming warmer and more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish populations that provide
vital protein consumed by about a billion people.
Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food production and displacing millions of people.
Record-high temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, North Africa
and South Asia uninhabitable. Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing nations. A sixth
great extinction could extinguish half the living species on earth.
Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and the consequences are worsening much
faster than most thought was possible. A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that the weather is
growing more extreme. And yet every day we still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming
pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I
often echo the point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The accumulation of carbon dioxide,
methane and other greenhouse gases — some of which will envelope the planet for hundreds and
possibly thousands of years — is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-
class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours.
This is the crisis we face… nyt

31. https://www.sunrisemovement.org

32. 2019 Was the Second-Hottest Year Ever, Closing
Out the Warmest Decade
Analyses by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed that
global average surface temperatures last year were nearly 1 degree
Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the average from the
middle of last century, caused in large part by emissions of carbon
dioxide and other heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
That much warming means the world is far from meeting goals set to
combat climate change. “These trends are the footprints of human
activity stomping on the atmosphere,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director
of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which conducted the NASA
analysis. “We know that this has been driven by human activities.” nyt

33. On January 18, 1970, The
New York Times ran a
full-page ad announcing a
day of environmental
action. This day, which
was first named publicly
in this ad, became the
very first Earth Day.
“On April 22 we start to
reclaim the environment we
have wrecked,” the ad stated.
“Earth Day is a
commitment to make life
better, not just bigger and
faster; To provide real rather
than rhetorical solutions… it
is a day for looking beyond
tomorrow. April 22 seeks a
future worth living.”

34. ...on Christmas Day it was 70 degrees in Nashville, and two weeks
later, the daffodils were blooming. It’s always a mistake to confuse
weather for climate, but all five of the five warmest years on record
have occurred since 2015,
and last year was the 43rd
year in a row in which
temperatures across the
planet measured above
average. There can be no
reasonable argument about
what is happening here in
the Anthropocene.”
Margaret Renkl, A Seed in
Darkest Winter nyt

35. Effortless Environmentalism
If 2019 is truly “the year we woke up to climate change,” then
2020 should be the year we start actually doing something about
it. Because we are very nearly out of time…
The best thing you can do to save the earth is to fall in love with
your own world. When you love something, you want to nurture
and protect it. It’s lovely to think of preserving the earth as a
matter of protecting the oceans and the forests and the flood
plains and the prairies. But preserving the earth is just as much
about protecting the blue jays and the spiders and bats and the
garter snakes and the box turtles and the toads. Pay attention to
their courtship songs and their territorial cries of fury. Study their
stirring in the leaves. Listen for the rush of wings. Margaret Renkl,
nyt

36. Happy New Year! It’s 2020, and the forecast for this next decade is cloudy with
an apprehension of doom. According to the United Nations, the world has only
until 2030 to cut carbon dioxide emissions down to roughly half those of 2010
levels to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the more ambitious target
of the Paris Agreement. (The world has already warmed by about 1 degree
Celsius since the 19th century.) The outlook, in the words of a United Nations
report released in November, is “bleak.” Daunting as the problem may be,
millions of people still don’t accept the premise of its existence: Depending on
how you ask, only about half to two-thirds of Americans believe that climate
change is caused by humans…
So You Want to Convince a Climate Change Skeptic

37. Attempting to convert deniers is not the most productive way to fight climate
change, argue Marcus Hedahl and Travis N. Rieder in Georgetown University’s
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal. In their view, climate change is a
problem less of individual belief than of collective action, a failure
that can be remedied only through public policy. The most efficient route
toward enacting such policy, the authors argue, lies not in convincing
deniers to believe in climate change but in galvanizing those who
already do. They write:
With a significant majority of voters supporting taxing or regulating
greenhouse gases, those who want to spur climate action ought to focus
instead on getting a critical mass of climate believers to be appropriately
alarmed. Doing so, we contend, may prove more useful in creating the
political will necessary to spur bold climate action than would engaging
directly with climate deniers.

38. “To live an ethical life, is it essential
that we minimize our carbon
footprint by, for example, installing
solar panels… avoiding meat, and
whenever possible riding a bike or
taking public transport rather than
driving a car ...these are good things
to do, but… Our overriding
obligation, as individuals, is to be
activist citizens and to do our best to
persuade our government to come
together with other governments
and find a global solution to a global
problem.” One World Now: The
Ethics of Globalization

39. The proposal that the impact of humanity on
the planet has left a distinct footprint, even
on the scale of geological time, has recently
gained much ground. Global climate change,
shifting global cycles of the weather,
widespread pollution, radioactive fallout,
plastic accumulation, species invasions, the
mass extinction of species - these are just
some of the many indicators that we will
leave a lasting record in rock, the scientific
basis for recognizing new time intervals in
Earth's history. The "Anthropocene," as the
proposed new epoch has been named, is
regularly in the news...
The Anthropocene remains a work in
progress. Is this the story of an
unprecedented planetary disaster? Or of
newfound wisdom and redemption? g’r

40. “Our planet has entered the
Anthropocene – a new geological
epoch when humanity’s influence
is causing global climate change,
the loss of wild spaces, and a
drastic decline in the richness of
life. Microbes are not exempt.
Whether on coral reefs or in
human guts, we are disrupting the
relationships between microbes
and their hosts, often pulling
apart species that have been
together for millions of years.”
― Ed Yong, I Contain Multitudes:
The Microbes Within Us and a
Grander View of Life

41. “But the Anthropocene isn’t a novel
phenomenon of the last few centuries.
Already tens of thousands of years ago,
when our Stone Age ancestors spread from
East Africa to the four corners of the earth,
they changed the flora and fauna of every
continent and island on which they settled.
They drove to extinction all the other
human species of the world, 90 per cent of
the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of
the large mammals of America and about 50
per cent of all the large land mammals of
the planet – and all before they planted the
first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool,
wrote the first text or struck the first coin.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History
of Tomorrow

42. "The real fault line in American
politics is not between liberals and
conservatives.... It is, rather, in how
we orient ourselves to the
generations to come who will bear
the consequences, for better and for
worse, of our actions."
Due to our refusal to live within
natural limits, we now face a long
emergency of rising temperatures,
rising sea-levels, and a host of other
related problems that will
increasingly undermine human
civilization. Climate destabilization
to which we are already committed
will change everything… g’r

43. “So we are left with a stark
choice: allow climate
disruption to change
everything about our world,
or change pretty much
everything about our
economy to avoid that fate.
But we need to be very
clear: because of our
decades of collective denial,
no gradual, incremental
options are now available to
us.”
Naomi Klein

44. “This may explain the odd
space that the climate crisis
occupies in the public
imagination, even among
those of us who are actively
terrified of climate collapse.
One minute we’re sharing
articles about the insect
apocalypse and viral videos
of walruses falling off cliffs
because sea ice loss has
destroyed their habitat, and
the next...

45. ...we’re online shopping and willfully turning our minds
into Swiss cheese by scrolling through Twitter or
Instagram. Or else we’re binge-watching Netflix shows
about the zombie apocalypse that turn our terrors into
entertainment, while tacitly confirming that the future
ends in collapse anyway, so why bother trying to stop the
inevitable? It also might explain the way serious people
can simultaneously grasp how close we are to an
irreversible tipping point and still regard the only people
who are calling for this to be treated as an emergency as
unserious and unrealistic.”
― Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal

46. Some see a “fault line” on climate between
religion and secular humanism: "climate change
and the possible destruction of the earth cannot
be seen as an existential threat from the
standpoint of religious faith... If you have
religious faith, you believe that all finite life can
be terminated and yet what is truly valuable will
remain." [I’m curious to know what Dean Vile will
say about that when he shares a “Biblical view”
here in April.] But one prominent secular
humanist says the climate crisis is bigger than
that...
This Life: Secular Faith and
Spiritual Freedom

47. We have not met, yet I feel I know you well
enough to call you friend. First of all, we grew
up in the same faith. Although I no longer
belong to that faith, I am confident that if we
met and spoke privately of our deepest beliefs,
it would be in a spirit of mutual respect and
goodwill. I write to you now for your counsel
and help. Let us see if we can, and you are
willing, to meet on the near side of
metaphysics in order to deal with the real
world we share. I suggest that we set aside our
differences in order to save the Creation. The
defense of living Nature is a universal value. It
doesn't rise from nor does it promote any
religious or ideological dogma. Rather, it
serves without discrimination the interests of
all humanity.
Pastor, we need your help. The Creation—
living Nature—is in deep trouble.

48. 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...

49. 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.

50. 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

51. Unless emissions are reduced, and radically, a rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit) will be pretty much unavoidable by 2030. This will make the
demise of the world’s coral reefs, the inundation of most low-lying island nations,
incessant heat waves and fires and misery for millions—perhaps billions—of
people equally unavoidable...
Don’t Wait
Every decade is consequential in its own way, but
the twenty-twenties will be consequential in a more
or less permanent way. Global CO2 emissions are
now so high—in 2019, they hit a new record of
forty-three billion metric tons—that ten more years
of the same will be nothing short of cataclysmic.

52. Really waking up, and not just
dreaming to ourselves that
things will be O.K., has become
urgent—beyond urgent, in fact. To
paraphrase Victoria’s fire authority:
The world is in danger, and we
need to act immediately to survive.
♦
Elizabeth Kolbert
New Yorker

53. “Obviously, the fate of
our own species
concerns us
disproportionately.
But at the risk of
sounding anti-
human—some of my
best friends are
humans!—I will say
that it is not, in the
end, what’s most
worth attending to...

54. “If warming were held to a minimum, the team
estimated that between 22 and 31 percent of the
species would be “committed to extinction” by
2050. If warming were to reach what was at that
point considered a likely maximum—a figure that
now looks too low—by the middle of this century,
between 38 and 52 percent of the species would be
fated to disappear.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An
Unnatural History

55. Over 1 billion animals feared dead in
Australian wildfires
The death toll for animals in Australia continues to go up.
The World Wildlife Fund in Australia estimates that as many as 1.25 billion animals may have been killed
directly or indirectly from fires that have scorched Australia.
"The fires have been devastating for Australia’s wildlife and wild places, as massive areas of native
bushland, forests and parks have been scorched," Stuart Blanch, an environmental scientist with the
World Wildlife Fund in Australia, told USA TODAY. Many forests will take many decades to recover, he
said.
The fires, which have been blazing since September, have killed 26 people, destroyed 2,000 homes and
scorched an area twice the size of the state of Maryland. They have been fueled by drought and the
country’s hottest and driest year on record, and exacerbated by climate change… USA Today

57. A wake-up call on saving endangered species
So, why should you care that so many of Earth's species are going to run out of time, and relatively soon?
Because what happens to them … will eventually happen to us...Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark Project

58. “...we must think rationally, globally,
collectively, and optimistically about
the long term. Advances in
biotechnology, cybertechnology,
robotics, and artificial intelligence--if
pursued and applied wisely--could
empower us to boost the developing and
developed world and overcome the
threats humanity faces on Earth, from
climate change to nuclear war. At the
same time, further advances in space
science will allow humans to explore the
solar system and beyond with robots
and AI. But there is no "Plan B" for
Earth--no viable alternative within
reach if we do not care for our home
planet.” g’r

59. “The dearth of optimistic
visions of the future, at least
in the United States, is
central to the psychic
atmosphere of this bleak
era. Pessimism is
everywhere…”
The Darkness Where the
Future Should Be, nyt

62. "Another method of planetary annihilation that has worked for us in the past is accelerating a
planet’s climate crisis. We had a whole plan laid out to melt your glaciers and polar ice caps...But
it turns out you’ve already melted most of those things on your own. "
Hello, Earthlings,
We Are Here to
Destroy You
My slimy
colleagues and I
come from the
planet ZOR-T4,
and we do not
come in peace.
newyorker.com
9:26 AM · Jan 18,
2020

63. “There is a tomorrow” is an aspirational statement. How can we make it so?
Perhaps with an eye on the clock…
"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by
the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what
would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future
date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my
entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets
people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I
would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical
clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a
year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every
millennium." Daniel Hillis
Long Now Founation

64. The Omega Glory I was reading, in a recent issue of
Discover, about the Clock of the Long Now. Have you heard
of this thing?... When I told my son about the Clock of the
Long Now, he listened very carefully, and we looked at the
pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there
really be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without
hesitation, “there will...” Michael Chabon

65. “I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with
the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But
in having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love
and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on
the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children
after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006.
If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t
willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten
thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have
children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in
your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren,
and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can
never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless
and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn
out, in the end, to be wrong.” Michael Chabon

66. "Betting on the future" for our kids
and theirs (et al) has a particular
environmental resonance in these
Greta/Green New Deal days.
it's intuitive to me that if we care
about our children, about the next
generation, then it's a small next
step to care about the long-term fate
of life on Earth and about all
generations. That's the bet we take,
when we have children. And we do
all have children. They're all ours,
we're theirs. We're all in this starship
together.

67. PARTING WORDS to the Environmental Ethics class last year...
LISTEN. My parting words in the CoPhilosophy course (which is what I call Intro to
Philosophy) mostly have to do with loving the questions that express and expand
our curiosity. Philosophy begins, after all, in wonder.
Same message applies here, with an added explicitness about the indispensable
prerequisite of curiosity and wonder, namely: a planetary home to host us
wondrous, curious questioners. Our lives are mutually bound up with one another
and with the natural world, with "those upon whose smile and well-being our own
happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we
are connected by a bond of sympathy," said Professor Einstein. Our fates are
intertwined, and inseparable from the fate of the Earth. "The environment is
everything that isn't me," he said, but of course he knew it's also me-it just isn't all
about me. We are all connected by the gift of having been so improbably born on a
lovely planet, against all odds. We have every reason to be, as my old mentor said,
grateful for and in love with life...

68. To love life is to love its enabling conditions,
and to revile whatever would disable them.
Thus, we've been reading and discussing
texts from Ellis, Klein, Leutjen, McKibben, and
your many cli-fi selections that sound an
alarm - a warning that those life-conditions
are at this particular moment profoundly
threatened, but that we owe it to one another
and to our progeny to not just sit here and
surrender to a doom of our own making.
This is not fear-mongering, unless you think
the alarm that sounds down at the firehouse is
fear-mongering. It's meant to be a wake-up
alarm, a call to action. Activists, you must
realize if you think about it, are optimists: they
insist we do something, because we can…
(continues)
Only that day dawns to which we
are awake. There is more day to
dawn. The sun is but a morning
star. HDT
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/

69. Discussion Questions:
● Is there a tomorrow, for your generation and for the other species we share this
planet with?
● Are you optimistic, pessimistic, both, neither?
● How do you think America and/or the world will have changed in ten, twenty, fifty
years?
● Do you think you’ll still be driving a personal vehicle propelled by fossil fuels when
you’re thirty, or forty, or fifty? Will most Americans?
● Do you think it’s more important to tackle climate change by taking personal action
to live more sustainably (recycling, reducing your personal carbon footprint, eating
less meat etc.) or by engaging in activism like Greta? Or both?
● What question would you put to any of the presidential candidates, on this Iowa
caucis dauy, regarding climate change and our way of life?

70. http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/

71. http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/

72. Gregg Caruso
@GreggDCaruso
·9h
I’m teaching Environmental Ethics this
semester (among other things). I cannot
imagine a more important course at a
more important time!
Phil Oliver
@OSOPHER
·4h
Replying to @GreggDCarusoLast
time I taught EE through the lens
of cli-fi ("climate fiction"), there's
such a wealth of it... and of
provocative polemics from Bill
McKibben, Naomi Klein, Elizabeth
Kolbert. Strange to say, but it's
such a fun subject to teach these
days-if looming apocalypse can
be fun!
Gregg Caruso
@GreggDCaruso
·4h
Replying to @OSOPHERI’m using Louis P.
Pojman and Paul Pojman (eds.),
Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory
and Application, and supplanting it with
additional readings.

73. “Day to day, we forget that if the
billions of years of life on Earth were
scaled to a twenty-four-hour day, our
settled civilizations began about a
fifth of a second ago.”

75. “To see how much our thinking about
ethics needs to change, consider the
work that, better than any other,
represents late twentieth-century
thinking on justice in the liberal
American establishment: John
Rawls's A Theory of Justice….

76. If we were to apply this method globally rather than for a given society it would
immediately be obvious that one fact about which those making the choice
should be ignorant is whether they are citizens of a rich country…
the issue of how the rich countries and their citizens are to respond to the needs
of the hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty has an urgency that
overrides the longer-term goal of changing the culture of societies that are not
effectively regulated by a public conception of justice...”
One World Now

77. “How could I pray and ask God to help
me, or my family, or my country, or any
other cherished thing I cared about,
when God would not save millions of
Jews
from Hitler? ...To interpret history as
expressing God’s will, God’s will must
accord with the most basic ideas of
justice as we know them… The following
months and years led to an increasing
rejection of many of the main doctrines
of Christianity...” John Rawls: His Life
and Theoryof Justice

78. Arthur C[harles] Clarke (1917) In
2007, on his 90th birthday, Clarke
recorded a video in which he says
goodbye to his friends and fans. In it,
he said: "I have great faith in
optimism as a guiding principle, if
only because it offers us the
opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling
prophecy. So I hope we've learnt
something from the most barbaric
century in history — the 20th. I would
like to see us overcome our tribal
divisions and begin to think and act as
if we were one family. That would be
real globalization ..." He died of
respiratory failure three months later.
WA

79. Science
Under
Attack: How
Drumpf Is
Sidelining
Researchers
Science
Under
Attack: How
Drumpf Is
Sidelining
Researchers
and Their
Work
Science Under Attack: How Trump is Sidelining
Researchers and Their Work
The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related
to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil
drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-
caused climate change, which President Drumpf has dismissed despite a
global scientific consensus.
But the erosion of science reaches well beyond the environment and
climate...

80. What Will the World Look Like in 2030?
Mark Blyth
PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, BROWN UNIVERSITY
Only one thing matters between now and 2030: climate change.
Strange, then, that we will do nothing about it — for reasons of
politics. The Republicans are denialists whose main constituencies
are in states whose business model is carbon heavy. The Democrats
are Green New Deal-ers at the grass-roots level, but the money people
inside the party fear and distrust their base...

81. With that kind of split among the Democrats, it’s easy to imagine
the plausible: Drumpf wins re-election, leaving the Denialist in
Chief to continue at the top of the world’s most powerful
government. With the Senate more or less structurally locked in
their favor, Republicans will probably get one more clean shot at the
White House in 2024. But thereafter, climate change will be “Too
Big to Ignore,” and boomers will no longer be a decisive electoral
bloc. At that point, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is either a kingmaker
or obtains the nomination herself, and perhaps even wins. But this
will be 12 years after we were told we had 12 years to fix the
problem. Oops. nyt

82. Stacey Abrams
DEMOCRAT FROM GEORGIA
...By 2030, we’ll see whether our nation has stood true to
its pluralistic roots and used the climate crisis as an
opportunity to restore alliances here and around the
world.

83. Garry Kasparov
CHAIRMAN OF THE RENEW DEMOCRACY INITIATIVE AND FORMER WORLD CHESS CHAMPION
...The free world is lurching toward a polarized, post-truth reality that
reminds me of my life in the Soviet Union, where the truth was
whatever the regime said it was that day. If the battle for a shared, fact-
based reality is not fought and won, 2030 will make the outrages and
demagogy of 2019 look like a golden age of comity.

84. “Thirty years ago,in 1989, I
wrote the first book for a wide
audience on climate change…
My basic point was that humans
had so altered the planet that
not an inch was beyond our
reach…”
“I am usually classed as a
progressive, a liberal. But it
seems to me that what I care
most about is preserving a
world that bears some
resemblance to the past—a
world with some ice at the top
and bottom and the odd coral
reef in between, a world where
people are connected to the past
and future (and to one another)
instead of turned into obsolete
software.”

85. Bill McKibben (@billmckibben)
1/14/20, 7:05 AM
Biggest news in a long time. After a ton of pressure, Blackrock--which owns more fossil fuel stock than anyone on earth--announces it will
put 'climate change at the center of its investment strategy.' A huge--if by no means final--win for activists!
nytimes.com/2020/01/14/bus…

86. Follow the money
WASHINGTON — If you asked us
why a dozen people sat on the
floor next to the A.T.M. in a Chase
Bank branch on Friday, waiting
for the police to arrest us for this
small act of civil disobedience, we
would come up with the same
answer as the famous robber
Willie Sutton: “Because that’s
where the money is”... driving the
climate crisis. Cutting off that flow
of cash may be the single quickest
step we can take to rein in the
fossil fuel industry and slow the
rapid warming of the earth...

87. JPMorgan Chase isn’t the only offender, but it is among the worst. In the last
three years, according to data compiled in a recently released “fossil fuel
finance report card” by a group of environmental organizations, JPMorgan
Chase lent over $195 billion to gas and oil companies.
For comparison, Wells Fargo lent over $151 billion, Citibank lent over $129
billion and Bank of America lent over $106 billion. Since the Paris climate
accord, which 195 countries agreed to in 2015, JPMorgan Chase has been the
world’s largest investor in fossil fuels by a 29 percent margin… Bill McKibben,
nyt 1.11.20
==
Citing Climate Change, BlackRock Will Start Moving Away from Fossil
Fuels - “a watershed moment in climate history”

88. How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet
With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are
at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its
assault on the facts. By Bill McKibben November 16, 2018
...Earlier this year, Americans for Prosperity, the most
important Koch front group, waged a campaign against new bus
routes and light-rail service in Tennessee, invoking human
liberty. “If someone has the freedom to go where they want, do
what they want, they’re not going to choose public transit”...

89. ...We are on a path to self-destruction, and yet there is
nothing inevitable about our fate. Solar panels and wind
turbines are now among the least expensive ways to
produce energy. Storage batteries are cheaper and more
efficient than ever. We could move quickly if we chose
to…
The possibility of swift change lies in people coming
together in movements large enough to shift the
Zeitgeist.
Bill McKibben

90. Trump moves to exempt big projects from environmental review
WASHINGTON — The White House on Thursday introduced major changes to the nation’s benchmark
environmental protection law, moving to ease approval of major energy and infrastructure projects
without detailed environmental review or consideration of climate change.
Many of the changes to the law — the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark
measure that touches nearly every significant construction project in the country — had been long
sought by the oil and gas industry as well as trade unions, which have argued that the review process is
lengthy, cumbersome and used by environmental activists to drag out legal disputes and kill
infrastructure projects.
Under the law, major federal projects like bridges, highways, pipelines or power plants that will have a
significant impact on the environment require a review, or environmental impact statement, outlining
potential consequences. The proposed new rules would narrow the range of projects that require such a
review… nyt

91. “Cli-fi”
Over the last two decades, the
global landscape of cultural
production has been teeming with
a cornucopia of fictional texts, in
print, in live performance, and on
the screen, engaging with the
local and global impact of
advanced human-induced climate
change. In academia as well as in
popular culture, this rapidly
growing body of texts is now
commonly referred to by the
catchy linguistic portmanteau ‘cli-
fi’... biblio
● The Overstory by Richard Powers
● Radio Free Vermont by Bil McKibben
● Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
● *Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver
● *Anchor Point by Alice Robinson
● *We Are Unprepared by Meg Little Reilly
● *Polar City Red by Jim Laughter
● *Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink by
G.Kleiner and L.Thompson
● *see The Best Cli-Fi Books by Dan Bloom
● Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood
● New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson
● Clade by James Bradley
● Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
● Severance by Ling Ma
● Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich
● The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh
● Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson
● Staying with the Trouble by Donna J.
Haraway

93. It’s okay to be smart-climate science
“...Since 1870, with
fossil fuels, cement
production, and land
use combined, humans
have put about
2,000 gigatons of CO2
into the atmosphere,
that's two million
million tons, and about
40% has stayed there…”

94. Fifty years later, almost to the date, Earth Day Network is running another full-
page ad inThe New York Times, this one announcing Earth Day’s 50th
anniversary on April 22, 2020.
The first Earth Day led to a cascade of environmental legislation: the Clean
Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the establishment of the
Environmental Protection Agency. In a year that many consider make-it-or-
break-it moment for the trajectory of our planet, April’s mobilization must
inspire a similar wave of environmental protections.
Millions will take to the streets to demand change for the 50th anniversary of
Earth Day on April 22. Where will you be? Register to join the EARTHRISE
movement for the future of our planet, and sign up to receive updates.
earthday.org

96. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts
as the present, we are deciding, without quite
meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will
remain open and which will forever be closed. No
other creature has ever managed this, and it will,
unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The
Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the
course of life long after everything people have
written and painted and built has been ground into
dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the
earth.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural
History