tag:theconversation.com,2011:/id/topics/environmental-philosophy-18831/articles
Environmental philosophy – The Conversation
2023-05-02T11:20:36Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/197337
2023-05-02T11:20:36Z
2023-05-02T11:20:36Z
Let’s protect nature, but not merely for the sake of humans
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505742/original/file-20230122-7807-zl9grz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">kasakphoto / shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Environmentalists rightly urge us to consider the long-term effects of our actions. Plastic bags, they point out, can take <a href="https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/06/do-plastic-bags-really-take-500-years-to-break-down-in-a-landfill.html">hundreds of years</a> to decompose, while radioactive waste can remain dangerous for <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/?sh=6ac5c09b29cf">hundreds of thousands of years</a>. It could take the Earth’s biosphere <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0835-0.epdf?sharing_token=aTHzMLo_AlXX7aaRw_fTrdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PJ0k8VL0jPtK5lFUpAS_HQFGcUa0NXd6UQ9ttIChkbJlL0a6oRMKymtDAPbJkZ16dAFGaROsFxVGvToo7WE5xbTuF7V54UyZ03lB41I2wm9PFHkp2K3CPpmOlIyNXt6eqd4iiCL3LNRs2ku3t6_TAaJ6hgtPACe3LWfr0h0hp9Jqyg3UOZNNt2sPUIeFdb0Sg=&tracking_referrer=www.newsweek.com">several million years</a> to recover from human-caused mass extinctions.</p>
<p>As an environmental philosopher, I spend a lot of time thinking about facts such as these. This can be depressing. Still, looking very far into the future offers a glimmer of hope. After all, our waste will eventually decompose. The ecosystems we have degraded will eventually recover. </p>
<p>To be sure, like all things, planet Earth will eventually meet its end, <a href="https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/earth-end/">engulfed, perhaps, by the expanding sun</a>. However, as comedian George Carlin <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c">once said</a>, it will nonetheless “be here for a long, long, long time after we’re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ‘cause that’s what it does”.</p>
<p>Only a few people, perhaps including <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/interview-with-leslie-stahl-cbs-news-60-minutes">Donald Trump</a>, claim that this provides a reason to refrain from preserving biodiversity, reducing pollution or taking any other sort of environmental action. However, some think it tells us why such action is needed. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Earth from space" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=277&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=277&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=277&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=348&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=348&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506578/original/file-20230126-23261-3xo4uj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=348&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The planet will recover….eventually.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">19 STUDIO/Shutterstock</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>For them, the fact that the planet will eventually recover tells us that when environmental action is needed, it’s needed not for the planet’s sake, but for ours – for the sake of us humans.</p>
<p>Here’s how Peter Kareiva, former chief scientist and vice president of NGO The Nature Conservancy, expresses <a href="https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/article/back-to-school-unlearning-nine-environmental-myths/">the point</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Almost no matter what we do, life will persist on Mother Earth – she is one tough lady. Even if there is a massive extinction, slowly the number of species will recover. So it is not Mother Earth that we should worry about. It is the quality of our own lives.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Satya Tripathi, secretary-general of the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet, <a href="https://www.ncronline.org/news/earthbeat/earth-doesnt-need-saving-we-do-un-official-says-laudato-si-conference">agrees</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We need to look at ourselves, be very selfish, stop making high-sounding claims that we are helping Mother Nature and the planet, [and] start telling that we are helping ourselves […] The planet does not need saving. Mother Nature was here billions of years ago, and she will be here after us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The writer Frederick Lim takes <a href="https://www.responsiblebusiness.com/videos/the-planet-earth-doesnt-need-saving-we-do/">a similar line</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The planet does not need saving. Mitigating the impacts of climate change isn’t for Earth’s sake. Rather, it is for our own survival […] Even if we choose to neglect the climate emergency, and cause the Earth’s environment to be inhabitable, planet Earth would still survive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The argument implied by these claims runs as follows. Take some immense and near-invulnerable entity such as planet Earth or Mother Nature. That entity will eventually recover from whatever damage we humans do to it. </p>
<p>So we don’t need to engage in environmental action for the sake of anything as grand as planet Earth or Mother Nature. We need to do it for ourselves – for the sake of us humans.</p>
<p>This is an argument for “anthropocentrism”: the view that the non-human world only has value because it <a href="https://dro.dur.ac.uk/36663/1/36663.pdf?DDD24+dfl0sj+vbdv77">serves human interests</a>. There are several things wrong with it. Here, though, let’s consider just one.</p>
<p>The anthropocentrists seem to assume that people can only ever take environmental action either for the sake of some gigantic entity such as planet Earth, or for the sake of human beings. So if we reject the first option, we must accept the second.</p>
<p>That, however, is a false dilemma. Other options are available.</p>
<h2>For the sake of the animals</h2>
<p>Take <a href="https://indonesia.wcs.org/wild-places/bukit-barisan.aspx">Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park</a> in Sumatra, for example. The anthropocentrists quoted above would, I expect, acknowledge that that huge area of highly biodiverse tropical forest should continue to be protected. </p>
<p>But they would add that it needn’t be protected for the sake of the planet. Even if the forest is levelled and transformed into coffee plantations, the planet will be just fine. Ditto Mother Nature.</p>
<p>They would add that Bukit Barisan Selatan should be protected for the sake of human beings – because it supplies certain people with vital material goods, for instance, or because it has <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-nature-matters-9780198871613?lang=en&cc=bw">cultural value</a> for them.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A furry animal" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/505729/original/file-20230122-57409-xaanvt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Dishevelled and bearlike’: the binturong, or bearcat, is actually related to civets and mongooses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">MyImages - Micha / Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But that is not the whole story. There is a third option – a third reason why the area should be protected. </p>
<p>Consider the non-human animals for whom the place is home. Consider the dishevelled, bear-like binturong, or the slow loris, a fluffy, owl-eyed mammal with a toxic bite. Or take the Sumatran rhino, the Sumatran tiger or the Sumatran elephant. These animals are not just parts of planet Earth, Mother Nature or whatever. They are conscious individuals. </p>
<p>And, as the philosopher <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674024106">Martha Nussbaum</a> and others have argued, they both deserve to flourish and need places in which they can flourish. So, although the forest really should be protected for our sakes, it should be protected for theirs too.</p>
<p>The anthropocentrists are, therefore, partly right. The planet doesn’t need saving. But acknowledging this does not mean we must be “very selfish” and devote all our efforts to saving ourselves. There are other reasons to protect the strange, wonderful and partly non-human world we inhabit.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/197337/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon P. James does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Some people argue that no matter what humans do, life will persist.
Simon P. James, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Durham University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/166366
2021-10-22T16:36:02Z
2021-10-22T16:36:02Z
Environment Bill: UK government offers five principles for protecting nature – here’s why they won’t work
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427770/original/file-20211021-15766-qjcu46.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3888%2C2590&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/euroasian-red-squirrel-44142709">Seawhisper/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Abandoned and then resurrected in 2020, <a href="https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2593">the Environment Bill</a> is now entering the final stages of its passage through Parliament. This is the UK government’s post-Brexit policy framework for issues like air quality, pollution, climate change and biodiversity.</p>
<p>Leaving the EU gave the UK Parliament the power to set its own environmental policy, a responsibility it has grappled with since July 2018, when a draft version of the Environment Bill was first announced. Campaigners have decried the government’s decision to reject changes to the bill which would enshrine <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58968871">greater protection for forests</a> and oblige water companies to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/20/mps-set-to-reject-move-to-make-water-firms-cut-sewage-discharges">reduce raw sewage discharges</a> in rivers. But there’s a more fundamental issue with the bill which could make it a failure even on its own terms. </p>
<p>At its heart is a list of five <a href="https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environmental-principles/draft-policy-statement/supporting_documents/draftenvironmentalprinciplespolicystatement.pdf">environmental principles</a> by which government ministers would be bound upon the bill’s entry into law.</p>
<p>First there’s the “integration principle”, which compels ministers to embed environmental protection in all of their policies. Then there’s the “prevention principle”, which would require government policy to aim to prevent, reduce or mitigate environmental harm. The “rectification at source principle” states that if damage to the environment cannot be prevented, it should be tackled at its origin, while the “polluter pays principle” requires those responsible for causing damage to the environment be responsible for compensating for it. The “precautionary principle” means that a lack of scientific certainty shouldn’t postpone measures to prevent environmental damage when there is a serious threat.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A river in summer with milky water pollution." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/427773/original/file-20211021-27-1x1keue.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Will the Environment Bill tackle sewage damage to rivers?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/foam-pollution-on-summer-river-bad-1762938881">MikhailBerkut/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The bill has been <a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmenvfru/1893/1893.pdf">criticised</a> for not requiring public authorities like local councils to follow its principles, and for giving ministers <a href="https://theconversation.com/environment-bill-a-laudable-but-disappointing-attempt-to-rewrite-the-law-after-brexit-110858">too much freedom</a> to determine how to interpret them.</p>
<p>Many critics are worried that while the principles point UK environmental policy in the right direction, they don’t force the government to travel there. But for me, the bigger problem is that the principles don’t actually point us in <a href="https://theconversation.com/environmental-policy-isnt-value-neutral-where-do-the-ethics-hide-31679">any direction at all</a>.</p>
<h2>The five principles in practise</h2>
<p>Principles three, four, and five refer to averting environmental “damage”, while the second principle refers to “environmental harm”. These expressions seem to make sense. </p>
<p>But something can only be damaged or harmed in comparison to a baseline of good functioning, which remains undefined. And while the first principle encourages “environmental protection”, protecting something just means preventing harm or damage to it, which brings us back to where we started. So where should this baseline be set?</p>
<p>One might think that it’s easy enough to assess the good functioning of the environment. At a bare minimum, the environment isn’t functioning well if it cannot support life. However, there’s no realistic scenario under which the Earth’s environment becomes hostile to all life. </p>
<p>As the biologist Stephen Jay Gould <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429496653-11/golden-rule-proper-scale-environmental-crisis-stephen-jay-gould">reminds us</a>, the combined power of the world’s nuclear weapons is dwarfed by the power of the asteroid strike thought to have killed the dinosaurs, and yet that strike not only failed to wipe out all life on Earth but paved the way for the rise of the mammals.</p>
<p>Just as the environmental change created by the asteroid had its winners (the mammals) and losers (the dinosaurs), even changes like causing the <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/is-extinction-ever-good-thing.htm">extinction</a> of a species can provide benefit to others and so aren’t purely harmful. </p>
<p>Consider the recent furore over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/geronimo-alpaca-killed-four-year-battle-save-him-fails">Geronimo the alpaca</a> in the UK, which was killed by government officials after twice testing positive for bovine tuberculosis. The decision to kill Geronimo was, obviously, bad for Geronimo. But it was arguably good for other animals who might have contracted tuberculosis from him. So was the government, by approving the killing of Geronimo, averting environmental “damage” and “harm” – or causing it?</p>
<p>This question has no answer. There is no such thing as an environment being good or bad, better or worse. The Earth’s environment simply serves the interests of some at the expense of others, as do our interventions in it. This makes environmental policy an ethical matter. </p>
<h2>Environmental ethics</h2>
<p>In the case of Geronimo, for example, do politicians have ethical obligations to domesticated animals? I think they do, which I argue in my forthcoming <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Contractarianism-Role-Obligations-and-Political-Morality/Sachs/p/book/9781032120188">book</a> Contractarianism, Role Obligations, and Political Morality. And if that’s the case then the government’s killing of Geronimo was unjustified even if it served the greater good.</p>
<p>Part of the ethical duty of democratic institutions is to make judgements around contentious questions like these. The UK Parliament, for instance, must clarify either that it counts as environmental damage if an animal is harmed or killed or that environmental damage concerns only what is good or bad for humans.</p>
<p>By declining to address these questions, Parliament is abdicating its duty to set clear guidelines for environmental protection. Nor does Parliament solve the problem by adopting the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)‘s <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs">policy statement</a> on how the five principles should be interpreted, as that statement doesn’t address these questions either.</p>
<p>Consider, for instance, whether new forests should be planted for the sake of removing carbon from the atmosphere, but at the cost of using land that otherwise might support a more <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/23/row-over-uk-tree-planting-drive-we-want-the-right-trees-in-the-right-place">biodiverse ecosystem</a>. It is up to people working for the Forestry Commission and Defra to take that difficult decision, but they are unelected and not easily held accountable for their actions. </p>
<p>It’s hard to think of a question on which it’s more important to reach a democratic decision than the question of what we want our environment to look like. As tempting as it may be for MPs to hand that decision over to someone else, the time for delaying these debates is fast running out.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/166366/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Benjamin Sachs-Cobbe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The bill promises to prevent environmental damage and harm where possible, but what will this entail?
Benjamin Sachs-Cobbe, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/160260
2021-06-03T20:12:31Z
2021-06-03T20:12:31Z
Friday essay: reckoning with an animal that sees us as prey — living and working in crocodile country
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403734/original/file-20210601-15-c9gzv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=100%2C225%2C4982%2C3593&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A crocodile known locally as ‘Barrat’ emerges from the water of the lower Daintree River, Far North Queensland.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kevin Crook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The wet season in tropical Australia begins with tension. Physical tension, caused by the friction of earth and clouds. Mental tension, caused by the heat, and the expectation of rain and relief. It is also an ecological tension, where every plant and animal is poised — genetically, physiologically — to grow, reap, sow and copulate within a few short months. </p>
<p>We call it the build-up. The tension builds, and then it breaks. It was at the point of breaking when Val Plumwood, a young philosopher from the temperate south, was taken by a crocodile.</p>
<p>She was an environmental activist, exploring Kakadu to experience the wilderness she’d had a hand in protecting. She was paddling upstream in a small, red, low-sided canoe when it began to rain. There are many attacks on visitors to the tropics, especially those in small watercraft, but we know more about this one than any other.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=845&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=845&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=845&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1062&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1062&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403897/original/file-20210602-23-1hyskss.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1062&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Val Plumwood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When Val began fighting for the protection of wild places in the 1970s, the saltwater crocodile was rare almost to the point of extinction. By the mid ‘80s they were protected, plentiful, and in remote places, lacked memory of the hunters’ gun. When Val climbed into her vessel that morning in 1985, she did so in good faith. They were not a known threat to someone travelling by canoe in a back channel lagoon.</p>
<p>But crocodiles are a threat. Young salties eat fish and crabs. As they grow, they move on to larger prey — dogs, pigs, people, horses and buffalo. Our species fits comfortably in their diet, slipping into the line-up between pigs and horses. </p>
<p>Crocodiles may be opportunistic hunters, but their encounters with prey aren’t chance. They think about it. They watch, and they learn. Wash your pots and pans on the riverbank every evening, and you are inviting an attack. For people along the coastline of the tropical arc between Eastern India and Australia, they colour the water’s edge with a lurking malice and the threat of a violent death.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403898/original/file-20210602-17-1prkvr5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A crocodile in Kakadu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dean Lewins/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We share our world with other dangerous animals. Sharks, for instance, kill every year. Venomous snakes too. However, there is a difference. Snakes strike when threatened, usually by an unintentional kick in the ribs. Sharks do bite when unprovoked, but rarely, and they almost never consume us. We share our beaches with them, but you can spend your life in the water and never get bitten. The saltwater crocodile is a different beast, and it boils down to intent. As crocodile researcher Professor Grahame Webb has put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no way of avoiding nor sugarcoating the predatory nature of saltwater crocodiles. If you dive off the Adelaide River bridge, 60 km east of Darwin’s city centre, and start swimming, there is a 100% chance of being taken by a saltwater crocodile. It is not the same as swimming with sharks.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/crocodile-culls-wont-solve-crocodile-attacks-11203">Crocodile culls won't solve crocodile attacks</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Fear and fascination</h2>
<p>Like Val Plumwood, I too had come up north from the temperate south, and was not used to sharing my world with something that wanted to eat me.</p>
<p>There is a mountain range in north Queensland, cut off from the mainland by the sea. The space between is filled with a tangle of mangrove trees and snaking waterways. Heading down one of these channels in the early morning, my small boat cut around a bend, and on the far bank I saw a crocodile basking in the sun.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403737/original/file-20210601-15-74sll0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hinchinbrook Channel, North Queensland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kevin Crook</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I eased back on the throttle and let my boat drag through the water. This was my chance to see one up close, as long as I didn’t scare it off. I was a young scientist, new to the tropics, and hadn’t yet seen a croc up close. I’d glimpsed them sliding off the banks as I motored past, or as eyes above the waterline, following my boat with interest.</p>
<p>I drifted closer, engine idling.</p>
<p>It was big. I turned the engine off to let momentum and the current take me closer. I didn’t want to disturb the creature. Apart from the occasional snapping of pistol shrimp in their burrows, the air was still and quiet. The forest around us was a deep green, reflected in the greasy green of the water. The mud bank was almost black with silt; waist-deep, from recent experience. I could see the heft of the animal as I approached. </p>
<p>Its muscular tail rested in an arc, and the great mass of its body bulged, unsupported on dry land. It didn’t flinch as I drew closer, it held its jaws open in a permanent, basking yawn.</p>
<p>Now I was close enough to see very clearly its long pointed teeth ringing the muscular bed of the lower jaw. I could see sinew and texture in the enormous muscle that connects upper and lower jaw, allowing it to slam the two shut <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0031781">with the bite force of <em>Tyrannosaurus rex</em></a>. I could see it too well. Current and momentum had conspired to bring me right to the bank where the animal lay. I was no longer worried about disturbing the creature. I was within striking distance. I was an outsider, intruding, and I was afraid.</p>
<p>The fear and fascination never quite reconciled. I had seen the crocodile as an indicator, both in the <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/indicator-species">ecological sense</a>, as my training had described, but also in a personal sense. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403733/original/file-20210601-19-jxpl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A crocodile in the mangroves of the lower Daintree River, Far North Queensland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kevin Crook</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ecologists like indicator species, because they tell us about a complex world in a very simple way. They stand in for a whole range of factors.</p>
<p>A caddis-fly larva can tell you about the purity of the alpine pond you found it in, how recently it was frozen and the stability of the seasons. A stingray can tell you about the flooding patterns of a sandbank and the abundance of invertebrates therein. They do this just by showing up. Crocodiles, to me, indicated nutrient rich tropical waters providing a glut of large bodied prey. Warm winters and big barramundi.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403930/original/file-20210602-19-1im3mwz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author baiting a camera trap.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Sheree Marris</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They indicated the sanctuary of the wild. Here was a place beyond the realm of humankind, remote, beautiful, and my place of work. They punctuated the landscape, and their presence transformed the place. In the temperate south, a bank in an inlet might be a good place to pull up for lunch, or cast a line. Here, it’s a place you don’t want to linger. </p>
<p>A floating log becomes an object of suspicion, and the value of a swimming hole, no matter how inviting, is measured in downstream barriers. We tend to hold crocs up as a symbols, and dangle the fact of their existence in front of southerners and tourists to prove our rugged credentials. But I had not reckoned with the animal itself.</p>
<p>As I fumbled for the ignition, the crocodile turned its full attention to me and slid down the bank. In one easy motion it slipped under the surface, and swam toward our boat.</p>
<p>I kicked the engine into gear. As the roar of my 15-horse motor sped us to safety, I wondered how on earth we live alongside these creatures. I also wondered how many of those 15 horses that croc could eat in its lifetime.</p>
<h2>Living on the water’s edge</h2>
<p>Crocodiles are not symbols — I was about to learn — they are living beasts capable of real material damage. I could venture into their world, but spent most of my time high above the waterline. For other people in that Indo-Pacific arc, contending with these animals is daily life. Work brought me to the islands of Papua New Guinea, where crocodiles are a threat to both people and property. While it might sound far flung, New Guinea is closer to my home in North Queensland than any Australian capital. It’s part of the same great landmass of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahul_Shelf">Sahul</a>, and shares a recognisable fauna and flora.</p>
<p>In the places I worked, people built their villages at the water’s edge, on volcanic black-sand beaches. That strip of coast contains all of everyday life; houses, fishing nets, canoes, livestock, children, dogs and cooking fires. So, when the largest reptile in the world crawls from the ocean of a nighttime, and carries away a squealing pig, it seems a reasonable price to pay. Especially considering the other potential prey sleeping in their beds.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403735/original/file-20210601-15-187m3iu.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Moving through a back channel of the Langalanga estuary, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Bradley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I was investigating the estuaries along the coast with a local man named Alfonse. He told me the story of a fatal attack in his village. Alfonse is a serious man with a young family, a gentle sense of humour and a legitimate hatred of Malaysian logging companies. We were working in a system called the Langalanga, a great palm swamp, almost cut off from the sea. In the slanted afternoon light, the marine palms reflect crazily on the black water, and their fruit-rot nectar clots the air.</p>
<p>Some of Alfonse’s family were camped on the edge of the swamp, and had set out in a canoe to collect mussels — a happy scene repeated on occasion throughout the seasons. </p>
<p>A few years back, another family was doing the same, when the father was taken by a crocodile. As he was being dragged under by the legs, his wife held on to his arms, and in that brief battle there was enough time for him to say “take care of the kids”. By the time I left, a man from our team was taken by a crocodile somewhere in that same labyrinth of palms.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403738/original/file-20210601-15-1d4cke4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Late afternoon in the palm swamp, Langalanga estuary, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Bradley</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>We are food</h2>
<p>Crocodiles can seem like murderous creatures. Actively in pursuit of us, like we might pursue a pizza.</p>
<p>Val Plumwood learned this too, from the vantage point of her red canoe, as her path converged suspiciously with a floating log. The log was a crocodile, and from that point on, she was prey. The animal charged her craft several times. She tried to escape by climbing an overhanging tree. It burst from the water between her legs and clamped down on her torso. In that moment, in the force of realisation that accompanied the puncture wounds to her abdomen, she saw very clearly that she was food.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403899/original/file-20210602-17-ggm5jt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Murderous creatures: a crocodile in Kakadu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dean Lewins/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She was thrown into a death roll — crocodiles thrash with such force that all the air and struggle is sucked out of their prey, which they then hold underwater until drowned. Val, somehow, survived this experience. It was then repeated.</p>
<p>Incredibly, she surfaced and climbed to safety in the overhanging tree. She was plucked from the tree again, by her left leg, and the horror was repeated for the final time.</p>
<p>But, inexplicably, the crocodile’s jaws relaxed. Val wrestled free and scrambled up the mud bank. Her lower half was shredded, and she could see the raw meat of her leg muscle hanging from the bone. She staggered back through the bush until she began losing consciousness.</p>
<p>She gave out at the edge of the swamp, as the wet season floodwater rose around her. Here she accepted her end as food for the crocodiles waiting in the rising lagoon.</p>
<p>We know so much about this attack because Val survived it. But also because she was a philosopher. She didn’t just survive it, she thought about it, she examined its consequences, and <a href="https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/eye-crocodile">she wrote about it</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=460&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403736/original/file-20210601-23-1etjkor.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=578&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Australian philosopher Val Plumwood pictured in 1990. In her work, Val interrogated the human-nature dualism that lies at the heart of modern culture.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of the key Australian thinkers of our time, she challenged the way we look at the natural world. It took her the rest of her life to fully reckon with the experience of being prey. The result is a revelation of a book, pulled together posthumously, (Plumwood died of a stroke in 2008), called The Eye of the Crocodile. Val’s experience has become a centre point for me, around which all my encounters with crocodiles now pivot. The anchoring wisdom in a confusing set of facts and impulses.</p>
<p>At the heart of her insight is the knowledge that we are food — “juicy, nourishing, bodies” for the rest of the animal kingdom. We forget that. Or perhaps, we never really come to know it. Val knew, but when she found herself as prey, she rejected the idea. I’ll let her speak for herself here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My disbelief was not just existential but ethical — this wasn’t happening,
couldn’t be happening. The world was not like that! The creature was breaking the rules, totally mistaken, utterly wrong to think I could be reduced to food. As a human being, I was so much more than food. Were all the other facets of my being to be sacrificed to this utterly undiscriminating use, was my complex organisation to be destroyed so I could be reassembled as part of this other being?</p>
<p>With indignation as well as disbelief, I rejected this event. It was an illusion! It was not only unjust but unreal! It couldn’t be happening. After much later reflection, I came to see that there was another way to look at it. There was illusion alright, but it was the other way around. It was the world of ‘normal experience’ that was the illusion, and the newly disclosed brute world in which I was prey was, in fact, the unsuspected reality, or at least a crucial part of it… both I and the culture that shaped my consciousness were wrong, profoundly wrong —about many things, but especially about human embodiment, animality and the meaning of human life.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403739/original/file-20210601-17-1pq9bk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1069&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the end, we are just another animal, scratching around on the surface of the earth. Like a few other terrestrial vertebrates, we sometimes forage in shallow seas and there, form part of the coastal food chain. In the Indo-Pacific arc, at this moment in ecological history, that food chain finishes with the saltwater crocodile. </p>
<p>They are simply the inheritors of their evolutionary mantle, held long before we ever dipped our toes in the water. In our brief history on this earth, we have rarely been at the top of our own food chains.</p>
<p>We are food, and not just for crocodiles. We live our lives trying to avoid eye contact with the fact, but it is always there in our peripheral vision. We are victim to a constant gnawing of insects, bacteria, fungus, and when we die — no matter how hard we try to bury and embalm — we finally succumb. Diseases like Ebola haunt our collective imagination, but their worst symptoms are simply the failing of our own immune system to hold back the flood of decay that will find us all when we stop breathing.</p>
<h2>'Life as a circulation’</h2>
<p>Ecologists no longer talk about food chains as if there is a top and a bottom. Food loops, cycles of productivity and nutrients, hold the great ecosystems of this earth in place, as vast organised structures of recycling viscera. Our denial of our place in them is what Val came to see as “dualism” — the belief in a hierarchy of nature with ourselves at the top; different, unique, separate. Outsiders on our own planet. Because of this, crocodiles seem like monsters of a senseless world, a world to be feared.</p>
<p>We think of ourselves as somehow separate from the rest of nature’s bloom and rot. This <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/PLUECT-2">man vs wild illusion</a> butts up against reality in ways that now threaten our existence.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/meet-north-queensland-first-the-party-that-wants-to-kill-crocs-and-form-a-new-state-147562">Meet North Queensland First, the party that wants to kill crocs and form a new state</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The experience of being outside of nature allows us to deny the urgency of the many crises now facing our planet. We see the signs, but it is easy to distance the collapse of the natural world from the continuity of our own lives, and hold an unreasonable faith that the human world will go on indefinitely. But this is denial. Nature, as we know, can crush us in its jaws. To face the reality that confronts us as a species, we must feel like insiders — part of our own planet. But what would that look like?</p>
<p>In Arnhem Land, where Val was attacked, people have lived alongside crocodiles for thousands of years. They see themselves differently — not as outsiders, but as part of the landscape. <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1835-9310.2005.tb00312.x">Indigenous philosophies</a>, such as those of the <a href="https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol2/iss2/2/">Yolngu</a>, see human or animal life as existing for others, not just itself. The crocodile is not hideous for eating humans. They are animals to be understood and respected, through the kind of insider knowledge gained over thousands of years. They take life, but are also capable of acting in good faith. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=279&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=279&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=279&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/403901/original/file-20210602-21-11e5f7f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=350&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A saltwater crocodile named Brutus pictured on the Bloomfield River, north of Daintree in Queensland, in 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mike Darcy/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their maternal tenderness is equally important. They punctuate the landscape as powerful beings, reminding us to tread carefully, because the world is not arranged for our pleasure alone. This resonated with Val who understood “life as a circulation, as a gift from a community of ancestors”. Death, whether by crocodile or otherwise, is recycling, a “flowing into an ecological and ancestral community of origins”.</p>
<p>In the time it took me to write this, a man named Andrew Heard was taken from his dingy in that tangle of creeks in North Queensland where I still work. The police found his vessel upside down and some of his remains in the mangroves. Following normal protocol, the authorities caught two crocodiles. The Department of Environment and Science examined the animals and <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-14/human-remains-found-inside-crocodile-believed-to-be-andrew-heard/13153762">found remains of the man inside</a>.</p>
<p>We could, as a society, decide to get rid of them all. Fifty years ago, we almost did.</p>
<p>At a time like this, with the community around me reeling in shock, and grappling with some measure of personal fear, I understand that impulse.</p>
<p>I’m going out there again tomorrow, as usual. Older now, my fear and fascination have turned into something else. Despite their intentions for us, I like having them around. To me, they are indicators — but they indicate more than warm winters and big barramundi. They indicate a living world, giving and taking, and a society that’s starting to find its place in it.</p>
<p>As I motor down the creek, they punctuate the landscape, reminding me that we’ve decided, together, there are lives that matter beside our own. That despite the pain we may face in the future, we’re beginning to find our way. They indicate hope.</p>
<p><em>This essay received an Honourable Mention in the 2021 Nature Writing Prize.</em></p>
<hr>
<p><em>Editor’s note: This essay has been edited following feedback from crocodile physiology and management expert Laurence Taplin. The author wishes to emphasise that it was written as a personal reflection based on firsthand experiences, published reports and accounts.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/160260/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Bradley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
For an ecologist working in a tangle of creeks in North Queensland, crocodiles are a tangible threat. We are food to them, yet we must learn to co-exist with these creatures.
Michael Bradley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, James Cook University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/114056
2019-03-25T15:24:45Z
2019-03-25T15:24:45Z
Why fear and anger are rational responses to climate change
<p>Not everyone cheered for the school children striking against climate change. In the US, democratic senator Dianne Feinstein accused them of <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/22/politics/feinstein-video-sunrise-movement-kids/index.html">“my way or the highway” thinking</a>. German Liberal Democrats leader Christian Lindner said that the protesters don’t yet understand “what’s technically and economically possible”, <a href="https://twitter.com/c_lindner/status/1104683096107114497https:/twitter.com/c_lindner/status/1104683096107114497">and should leave that to experts instead</a>. The UK’s prime minister, Theresa May, criticised the strikers for “<a href="https://news.sky.com/story/theresa-may-criticises-pupils-missing-school-to-protest-over-climate-change-11638238">wasting lesson time</a>”.</p>
<p>These criticisms share a common accusation – that the striking children, while well-intentioned, are behaving counter-productively. Instead of having a rational response towards climate change, they let emotions like fear and anger cloud their judgement. In short, emotional responses to climate change are irrational and need to be tamed with reason.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=783&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=984&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=984&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265586/original/file-20190325-36256-11wbw8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=984&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) – his moral philosophy had a lasting influence on how we view emotions and rationality.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kant_gemaelde_3.jpg">Johann Gottlieb Becker/Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The view that emotions are intrusive and obscure rational thinking dates back to Aristotle and <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/">the Stoics</a> – ancient Greek philosophers who believed that emotions stand in the way of <a href="https://theconversation.com/want-to-be-happy-then-live-like-a-stoic-for-a-week-103117">finding happiness through virtue</a>. Immanuel Kant – an 18th-century German philosopher – saw acting from emotions as <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/#GooWilMorWorDut">not really agency at all</a>.</p>
<p>Today, much of political debate is moderated with the understanding that emotions <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/there-s-no-emotion-we-ought-to-think-harder-about-than-anger">must be tamed for the sake of rational discourse</a>. While this view stands in a long tradition of Western philosophy, it invites Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to insist that <a href="https://theoutline.com/post/7083/the-magical-thinking-of-guys-who-love-logic?fbclid=IwAR1tPq0UV7f1_Bw_LaCIkUBsqFSCRQoUTBgO1Ux_xWe4RIuxgT6q1Q6LjwI&zd=2&zi=3vvvdrcd">“facts, reason and logic”</a> can dismiss an emotional response to anything in debates.</p>
<p>However, the view that emotions aren’t part of rationality is false. There’s no clear way of separating emotions from rationality, and emotions can be rationally assessed just like beliefs and motivations.</p>
<h2>Emotions can be rational</h2>
<p>Imagine you’re walking in the woods, and a huge bear approaches you. Would it be rational for you to feel fear?</p>
<p>Emotions can be rational in the sense of being an appropriate response to a situation. It can be the correct kind of response to your environment to feel an emotion, <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotion/#CognRatiFittWarrCohe">an emotion might just fit a situation</a>. Fear from a bear coming towards you is a rational response in this sense: you recognise the bear and the potential danger it represents to you, and you react with an appropriate emotional response. It could be said to be irrational not to feel fear as the bear walks towards you, as this wouldn’t be a correct emotional response to a dangerous situation.</p>
<p>Imagine you find out that a meteor will kill millions of people across the world, displace hundreds of millions more, and make life for the remainder of humanity much worse. The world’s governments neither put a defence system in place, nor do they evacuate the people threatened. Fear from the meteor, and anger at the inaction of governments, would be a rational response as they are an appropriate reaction to danger. And if you don’t feel fear and anger, you’re not appropriately responding to a dangerous situation.</p>
<p>As you’ve probably guessed, <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/">the meteor is climate change</a>. The world’s governments aren’t addressing the causes of climate change or preparing to mitigate its impact. For the people of Mozambique, who are <a href="https://theconversation.com/cyclone-idai-rich-countries-are-to-blame-for-disasters-like-this-heres-how-they-can-make-amends-113971">reeling from the devastation of Cyclone Idai</a>, anger is entirely appropriate. Climate change is largely a product of economic development in richer countries, while the world’s <a href="https://grist.org/article/cyclone-idai-lays-bare-the-fundamental-injustice-of-climate-change/">poorest are bearing the brunt of its effects</a>.</p>
<h2>Are emotions counter productive?</h2>
<p>Regardless of how fitting an emotional response is, it may sometimes be unhelpful for what a person wants to achieve. Theresa May makes this point about the school strike: understandable, but young people missing valuable lessons makes it harder for them to solve climate change. As others have already pointed out, climate change demands rapid action – waiting until some vague point in the future when the children are old enough to do something is <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/22/politics/feinstein-video-sunrise-movement-kids/index.html">relinquishing responsibility</a> instead of meaningful action.</p>
<p>It is, however, hard to deny that fear and anger sometimes lead people to choices they regret. However, dismissing emotional responses on this basis is too quick. There are many examples where fear and anger have triggered the correct response and created a motivational push for change. As Amia Srinivasan, an Oxford philosopher working on the role of anger in politics, puts it, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Anger can be a motivating force for organisation and resistance; the fear of collective wrath, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, can also <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/a-righteous-fury/">motivate those in power to change their ways</a>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A lot of social change has happened because of anger against injustice, empowering the weak and oppressed, while causing those in power to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04fc70p">fear they may be ousted leads to reforms and change</a>. We do need scientific understanding of the climate crisis to solve it, but banning emotions from the debate and dismissing rational fear and anger about climate change may encourage people to do nothing. </p>
<p>So, not only are children, who are angry and scared about climate change, rational, they might be more so than the adults criticising them. Emotions play a bigger part in life beyond rationality – they mark values and indicate what people care about. Fear of the future and anger at inaction are ways young people can express their values. Their emotions are, <a href="http://blogs.ubc.ca/hopeprinceengl470a/files/2016/10/audre-lorde.pdf">in the words of feminist writer Audra Lorde</a>, an invitation to the rest of society to speak.</p>
<p>Dismissing the emotions of school children not only invalidates their rational responses to a grave situation – it implicitly states that their values aren’t taken seriously, and that adults don’t want to reach out to them.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=140&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/263883/original/file-20190314-28475-1mzxjur.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=176&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/imagine-newsletter-researchers-think-of-a-world-with-climate-action-113443?utm_source=TCUK&utm_medium=linkback&utm_campaign=TCUKengagement&utm_content=Imagineheader1114056">Click here to subscribe to our climate action newsletter. Climate change is inevitable. Our response to it isn’t.</a></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/114056/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anh Quan Nguyen receives funding from the Heinrich-Böll Foundation and is a member of Extinction Rebellion Scotland.</span></em></p>
Climate change is an emergency which will hurt the planet’s most vulnerable people – the only irrational response is cool detachment.
Quan Nguyen, PhD candidate, University of St Andrews
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/112942
2019-03-10T19:21:17Z
2019-03-10T19:21:17Z
Janet Laurence: After Nature sounds an exquisite warning bell for extinction
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262788/original/file-20190307-82684-19eypvq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artist Janet Laurence is ferocious and uncompromising in her work.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Jacquie Manning</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2014 I rang artist Janet Laurence and <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/janet-laurence/">suggested I write a book about her art</a>. Not all of it, just the plant-related artworks. This was to be a philosophical musing on our mutual fascination with the crossover between art and the vegetal world. Now, five years later, it is time for a deeper, longer view of the artist’s work. A <a href="https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/829-janet-laurence/">survey exhibition</a>, with catalogue, is now launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262798/original/file-20190307-82656-1cw8j2u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Janet Laurence, Heartshock (After Nature), 2008 / 2019, installation view, Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many accounts of the artist describe her as a peripatetic traveller, who flits to Japan one week and the Amazon the next – a flighty bowerbird who, in curator Rachel Kent’s words, has to be caught in a butterfly net.</p>
<p>My experience is different: I have only seen a rigorous scholarly approach. Her reading of environmental humanities scholarship, eco-theory and nature philosophy, is always up to date.</p>
<p>She texts me with quotes from the writings of the late ethnographer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Bird_Rose">Deborah Bird Rose</a> or forest expert <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Simard">Suzanne Simard</a>. She sends me images of medieval texts drawn as inverted trees. Her knowledge of animal and plant science exceeds that of most scholars. Her intellectual character flows through each exhibition like a blood supply.</p>
<p>Janet Laurence reminds me of the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, who studied first with Plato and then with Aristotle, who gave him the task of finding connections between animals and plants. What resulted was the first systemisation of the botanical world, the <a href="https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus-data/L070.pdf">Enquiry into Plants</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-the-environmental-humanities-20040">Explainer: what are the environmental humanities?
</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>What Theophrastus endeavoured to find were plants’ character, their differences and their substance. His approach was categorical and observational. This kind of attitude resonates with Janet Laurence’s work. Her plant, fish and animal artworks are uncompromising, enduring, and have a constant scholarly form. She will not rest until her installations are perfectly complete. Her commitment is ferocious.</p>
<p>The second characteristic I associate with Janet Laurence is her political activism. She is an environmentalist, an activist. She deeply cares about the natural world, such as “nature” now is, and her work is a political tool to activate and engage her viewers. It is a cry, a howl, a mournful dirge. Many of us now feel we must use whatever weapons we have to raise the alarm for extinction and ecosystem depletions. Laurence’s new exhibition sounds that warning bell.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262790/original/file-20190307-82688-ncgiur.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (still), 2015–16, various wet specimens, corals, pigment, acrylic bones, laboratory glass, collection of the artist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy and © the artist</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The final distinguishing character of Laurence’s work is its aesthetic allure. Laurence is mistress of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities">Wunderkammer</a>, a “cabinet of curiosity” or collection of notable objects. This approach emerged in the 17th century and developed as the collecting of rare objects to suggest imperial power and sovereign superiority. </p>
<p>It is a methodology that Laurence uses in this survey exhibition, especially her new iteration of Deep Breathing, which was previously exhibited at the climate talks in Paris in 2015, at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262793/original/file-20190307-82669-1dkcf4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef (detail), 2015–16, installation view, Muséum National D'histoire Naturelle, Paris, 2015, various wet specimens, corals, pigment, acrylic boxes, laboratory glass, collection of the artist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy and © the artist</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/heres-looking-at-deep-breathing-resuscitation-for-the-reef-by-janet-laurence-63408">Here's looking at: Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef by Janet Laurence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This new version of the undersea hospital is richly bucolic and abundant. Projections on the blue end walls and glittering reflections of the massive Perspex boxes add to a sensation of being down in the watery deep. There are coral, sea creatures, turtles, cephalopods, shellfish. </p>
<p>However, the exquisite wonder is deceptive. This is only a reminder of the past. In fact, Deep Breathing is a hospital – triage, diagnosis and pathology procedures are undertaken here. The red thread that is woven through the white corals and endless vials and medical bottles is a blood transfusion. A desperate attempt to keep species alive.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262802/original/file-20190307-82695-155i9xj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Janet Laurence, Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, 2015–16 / 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The museum has also commissioned a major new work called Theatre of Trees. This is an epic installation of five metre high concentric-circled fabric drops, mimicking the rings of a trunk.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262796/original/file-20190307-82652-r6dyyd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Janet Laurence, Forest (Theatre of Trees), 2018–19, installation view, Janet Laurence: After Nature, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy and © the artist, photograph: Jacquie Manning</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On three sides of the illusory and elusive circular structure are three rings, circus-like, which comprise a botanical library (the tree of knowledge), a wonder lab with 19th century specimens from the Museum of Arts and Applied Sciences botanical collection, and an elixir bar for botanical infusion tasting.</p>
<p>The tree rings of silk, gauze and reflective fabric are alive with projected films in black and white. They are animated by screen-printed hand-painted photographic images. The experience of walking through these rings of fabric is ethereal. Time is slowed. </p>
<p>This is vegetal time, longer and deeper than human time. Tree root communication, seasonal changes, leaf nodes emitting chemicals – these are processes that follow a creeping hand of time.</p>
<p>These exquisite experiences, made rich and sensual by Laurence, beg the question: what are the categories of art that intersects with nature studies – known as “nature aesthetics”? How might Theophrastus categorise and document the epoch of art and nature where artists raise awareness for the damaged Great Barrier Reef, the endangered black cockatoo (whose bird song echoes through the museum’s galleries), the mysterious dragon blood tree or the extinct Thylacine. </p>
<p>Perhaps this work marks a new resolution around the idea of “nature aesthetics”, where nature now has new cultural meaning, beyond ideas of pristine landscapes or untouched wilderness. So, what are the criteria that make contemporary “nature aesthetics” work? Some of the contributing elements must be politics, even violence. Other elements must be the ability to change and to evolve. </p>
<p>Still more must retain sensation and beauty, those conventional but wily notions of aesthetic value. Janet Laurence’s nature aesthetic artwork is a mark in history, an historic point in time … to be watched, with care.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/829-janet-laurence/">Janet Laurence: After Nature</a> is at the Museum of Contemporary Art until 10 June 2019.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112942/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Prudence Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A new survey exhibition of contemporary artist Janet Laurence urges us to reconsider the relationship between art, nature and politics.
Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/113146
2019-03-08T11:43:53Z
2019-03-08T11:43:53Z
Thoreau’s great insight for the Anthropocene: Wildness is an attitude, not a place
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262717/original/file-20190307-82669-1r0kept.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Henry David Thoreau lived at 255 Main Street in Concord, Massachusetts from 1850 until his death in 1862.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoreau%E2%80%93Alcott_House#/media/File:Thoreau_Alcott_House,_Concord_MA.jpg">John Phelan/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When Americans quote writer and naturalist <a href="https://www.walden.org/thoreau/a-brief-chronology/">Henry David Thoreau</a>, they often reach for his assertion that “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.” This phrase elicited little response when Thoreau first read it during a lecture in 1851. A century later, however, it had become a guiding mantra for the American environmental movement, adopted by the Sierra Club as an unofficial motto and launched into the cultural stratosphere via bumper stickers, T-shirts and posters.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the line was cherry-picked from its original context, conflates wildness with wilderness and predates Thoreau’s later, more nuanced insights about wildness. His mature views, which I stumbled onto when researching my book <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674545090">“The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years</a>,” can more effectively help us cope with a world so changed by people that geologists have proposed a new epoch, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-irony-of-the-anthropocene-people-dominate-a-planet-beyond-our-control-64948">Anthropocene</a>. </p>
<p>To the mature Thoreau, wildness was an entanglement of different realities and more of an attitude than an attribute. A pervasive condition lurking beneath the surface – especially in the midst of civilization. A creative force, willed not by intent but by impulse, accident and contingency. As a card-carrying <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ElExWMsAAAAJ&hl=en">geologist</a> who has written two books on Thoreau <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088184">as a natural scientist</a> and lifelong <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674545090">“river rat,”</a> and the first “<a href="https://www.walden.org/product/the-guide-to-walden-pond/">Guide to Walden Pond</a>,” I believe the mature Thoreau lurking beneath distorted cultural motifs has much to tell us. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262732/original/file-20190307-82656-1vut50i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People often assume Thoreau lived in solitude at Walden for decades, but he actually spent most of his life on Concord’s Main Street.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden#/media/File:Walden_Thoreau.jpg">Ticknor & Fields/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Romanticizing the wild</h2>
<p>Shortly after sunset on April 23, 1851, members of the <a href="https://www.walden.org/history-of-the-lyceum-movement/">Concord Lyceum</a> gathered at First Parish Unitarian Church. One of their most loyal members, “H. D. Thoreau,” stepped up to the podium to read his newest lecture “The Wild.” His late-spring timing was perfect, this being the wildest time of year for the romantics and naturalists of his 19th-century agroecosystem. </p>
<p>“I wish to speak a word for Nature,” he opened boldly, “for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” Humans, he claimed, were “part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.” These prophetic, inclusive statements constitute America’s declaration of interdependence. </p>
<p>This lecture was published in The Atlantic as <a href="https://www.walden.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Walking-1.pdf">an essay titled “Walking”</a> after Thoreau’s death in 1862. In it Thoreau recast the “howling wilderness” of the Puritan divines who settled Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-1630s as an ideal spiritual landscape for neo-pagans of the early 1850s. </p>
<p>But we know from <a href="http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals.html">Thoreau’s voluminous writings</a> that the insight for his “In Wildness” mantra came not from some high mountain temple, deep forest or dismal bog, but from a pair of panoramic art exhibits that Thoreau saw in late 1850 – likely in urban Boston, likely via the rattling railroad. </p>
<p>In September 1853, having recently returned from a moose hunt in interior <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/titles/7113.html">Maine</a>, Thoreau came up with the idea of setting aside wild landscapes for posterity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Why should not we… have our national preserves… in which the bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of the earth’ –our forests… not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true recreation.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>By then Thoreau was a middle-class, stay-at-home resident of the bustling market town of Concord, and the surrounding area was being rapidly clear-cut for farms and fuel and industrialized with mines, turnpikes, railroads, bridges, dams and canals. “I cannot but feel,” he wrote despondently on March 23, 1856, “as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country… Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? I am reminded that this my life in nature… is lamentably incomplete.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262733/original/file-20190307-82681-15oavd8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Concord Center, Massachusetts, in 1865, shortly after Thoreau’s death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://historyofmassachusetts.org/concord-massachusetts-history/">HistoryofMassachusetts.org</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>No wildness distant from humans</h2>
<p>Finally Thoreau resolved the tension between his yearning for primitive nature and his role in helping to civilize it as a surveyor for land development. While searching for native cranberries in late August 1856, he found himself in the far corner of a small bog so worthless that it had been apparently untouched by human hands. There, he realized, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>His explanation is clear. Wildness is an attitude, a perception. “A howling wilderness does not howl,” he wrote, “it is the imagination of the traveler that does the howling.” Using his imagination, he could even find wildness in a patch of weedy ferns: “Yet how essentially wild they are! As wild, really, as those strange fossil plants whose impressions I see on my coal.” By this stage, Thoreau was finding wildness in lumps of fossil fuel. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=631&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/262785/original/file-20190307-82672-1hwagr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 19th-century professional surveying compass similar to what Thoreau used to aid land development.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Robert Thorson</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of Thoreau’s final conceptions of wildness is most relevant to the Anthropocene world. The scene was a sparkling morning on Aug. 11, 1859. He was boating the lower Assabet River, making measurements for a scientific consulting project. Drifting toward him on the smooth current came a parade of iridescent freshwater mussel shells, “floating down in mid-stream – nicely poised on the water,” each left “with its concave side uppermost,” each a “pearly skiff set afloat by the industrious millers.” </p>
<p>In that moment, Thoreau realized that each of his delicately balanced “skiffs” was a consequence of at least a dozen commingled cultural actions, from muskrats eating the mussels to farmers inadvertently improving mussel habitat with sediment pollution and industrialists storing and releasing hydropower to create factory goods. </p>
<p>After this insight, Thoreau began to see his entire watershed world as a meta-consequence of three centuries’ worth of human perturbations, literally rippling through his local system along every conceivable energy gradient. For example, when monitoring stream stage to the precision of 1/64th of an inch, he realized that seemingly wild rivers mirrored the work schedules of upstream factories, and that “even the fishes” kept the Christian Sabbath. His whole local universe was ubiquitously, unpredictably, impetuously and wildly reacting to what today we call global change. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"951876273717919744"}"></div></p>
<h2>Recognizing wildness</h2>
<p>As with a coin, our modern Anthropocene condition flips Thoreau’s declaration of interdependence. On its 1851 side, humans are “part and parcel” of nature as organic beings embedded within it. On its 1859 side, nature is “part and parcel” of us, hopelessly entangled and embedded in our works and residues. </p>
<p>Fast forward to 2019. Earth’s planetary system, provoked by our overreach, is now doing its own thing in places, at scales and on schedules beyond our control. Wildness is bubbling up everywhere: Wilder fires, wilder stock markets, wilder weather, higher floods, drowning seas, collapsing ice sheets, accelerating extinctions and demographic unrest. </p>
<p>Thoreau’s realistic, late-in-life insights can help us comprehend these ongoing Anthropocene impacts, accept responsibility for the changes coming our way, reframe them in more positive terms and reaffirm that Nature is ultimately in charge. </p>
<p>He teaches us that wildness is much, much more than raw nature. It’s a perception emanating from our minds. A base instinct, uncluttered by rational thought. The creative genius of artistic, scientific and technological creativity. The spontaneous emergence of order from disorder, as with drifts on dry snow or the origin of life. Finally, wildness is the meta-wildness of complex, nonlinear systems, the sum total of forward-propagating, somewhat unpredictable cascades of matter and energy.</p>
<p>The mantra “In Wildness is the preservation of the world” can remain true, provided we ask ourselves what we mean by wildness and what we’re trying to preserve. </p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to clarify that “In wildness is the preservation of the world” was used by the Sierra Club as an unofficial motto.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/113146/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert M. Thorson has consulted for various federal, state, and nonprofit agencies and nonprofits, including Teacher's Training Workshops on Thoreau funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a lifetime member of the Thoreau Society and an official collaborator with the Walden Woods Project for "The Guide to Walden Pond." </span></em></p>
Many people associate Henry David Thoreau with solitude in the outdoors. But Thoreau understood in the mid-1800s that there was no such thing as nature separate from humans.
Robert M. Thorson, Professor of Geology, University of Connecticut
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/92808
2018-04-18T10:42:26Z
2018-04-18T10:42:26Z
What Earth Day means when humans possess planet-shaping powers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213864/original/file-20180409-114116-1acdvrn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Humanity's control over nature represents a shift in the relationship between humans and the surrounding world. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">boscorelli/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For nearly 50 years, Earth Day has provided an opportunity for people across the globe to come together and rally in support of the natural world. While the specific challenges have varied, the goal has remained more or less the same: to protect the rich, biological world that the current generation has inherited from being overwhelmed by the influences of humanity.</p>
<p>While there have been many notable successes since this day of celebration began in 1970, the overall trajectory has not been uplifting. </p>
<p>Today you can travel to the furthest part of the Arctic Ocean, to the highest point of the Caucasus Mountains, to the remotest spot in the Australian outback and find the unmistakable signs of human activity. Chemical and industrial traces are now present in <a href="https://www.akaction.org/tackling_toxics/world/global_transport_toxics_arctic">every pinch of soil</a> and <a href="https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/study-finds-toxic-pollutants-fish-across-worlds-oceans">every drop of water</a>. Transported by high-altitude atmospheric winds, millennia-old patterns of precipitation, and the tire treads of fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, the imprints of humanity reach all corners of Earth. </p>
<p>These kinds of global impacts demand a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and the surrounding world. Despite the efforts of those who have marched passionately and religiously on Earth Day, we live in the age when “pristine nature” has permanently blinked out of existence.</p>
<h2>Awesome powers</h2>
<p>Many are suggesting that humanity should mark this moment by declaring that the planet has entered <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth">the new epoch of the Anthropocene</a>. The fact that our species has left its mark in every remote bay, on every mountaintop, and across every continent is certainly a cause for reflection. But it might also be seen as a dubious form of branding to celebrate the mess our species has created by naming the next epoch in our honor.</p>
<p>More urgent than getting the name right, however, is the need to think very carefully about where to head from here. For the most noteworthy aspect of the emerging epoch is not the fact that human influence has reached every corner of the entire planet. It is the fact that, as Earth Day approaches 50, technologies are coming online with unprecedented capacity to remake the natural world. </p>
<p>Nanotechnology, synthetic biology and climate engineering have the potential to transform an already tainted planet into an increasingly synthetic whole. Such powerful technologies do not just mark a new period in Earth’s ongoing history. They create the real possibility of what <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/synthetic-age">I call a “Synthetic Age.”</a> From the atom to the atmosphere, key planetary processes have the potential to be reconfigured by Earth’s most audacious species.</p>
<p>By shrinking common materials down to the scale of billionths of a meter, nanotechnologists <a href="http://www.nano.gov/nanotech-101">can make available</a> new forms of matter with highly unusual and extremely valuable properties. Using new techniques for editing and assembling DNA, synthetic biologists can <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633">fabricate whole genomes</a>, which they can insert into bacterial hosts to hijack their operation. Ecosystem engineers are on the point of redesigning targeted species by sending genetic traits through wild populations, using tools known as <a href="http://nas-sites.org/gene-drives/files/2015/08/Gene-Drives-Brief06.pdf">gene drives</a>. Climate engineers are <a href="https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/keutschgroup/scopex">preparing to field test</a> technologies that can <a href="http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2017/11/climate-engineering-risky-explored-experts-say-un-conference/">reduce the amount of short-wave solar radiation</a> entering the atmosphere to cool global temperatures.</p>
<p>What makes these sorts of technologies and practices different from anything that has come before is not how far they reach geographically, but how deeply they go “metabolically.” They mark the beginning of a new period of Earth’s history in which humanity starts to take control of the processes responsible for giving the planet its shape. The biological, geological and atmospheric forces that have sculpted the world over countless epochs start to become the products of human endeavor. Responsibility for some of the formative processes of the biosphere falls increasingly into human hands.</p>
<h2>De-extinction and outdesigning evolution</h2>
<p>Take the prospect of recreating <a href="https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/46248">the genomes of extinct species</a> as an example. </p>
<p>The gene-reading techniques developed during the <a href="https://www.genome.gov/12011238/an-overview-of-the-human-genome-project/">Human Genome Project</a>, the gene-synthesis methods being refined at places like the <a href="http://www.jcvi.org/cms/research/projects/first-self-replicating-synthetic-bacterial-cell/overview/">J. Craig Venter Institute</a>, and the genome-editing practices now available through <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-gene-editing-is-just-the-beginning-1.19510">CRISPR-Cas9</a> are together on the cusp of making it possible to recreate close proxies of the genomes of species long ago extinguished from the Earth. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213867/original/file-20180409-114124-1s0y7rn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Iberian ibex was the first extinct species to be recreated (although the clone died shortly after), a reflection of the growing control people have over basic natural processes.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_ibex#/media/File:Cabra_mont%C3%A9s_2.jpg">Juan Lacruz</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In mammals, it may not be long before a rebuilt genome can be inserted into the evacuated nucleus of an egg cell from a related species and implanted into the womb of a surrogate parent. A primitive version of such a technology was used for the (extinct) Pyrenean ibex in 2003 leading to the mildly disconcerting occurrence of the <a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/hello-again-pyrenean-ibex-can-cloning-resurrect-an-extinct-species/">birth of the world’s first extinct mammal</a>.</p>
<p>In the event, the celebration of the resurrected ibex was cut short by lung deformities, which led to its death within minutes. It is not yet clear whether these types of genetic imperfections can be avoided in future. <a href="http://reviverestore.org/">Some are optimistic</a> that they can. If the technical obstacles are overcome, a genetically manipulated Pyrenean ibex or even a whole new ibex – call it Synthetic Ibex Version 2.0 – could be fashioned from the genes of the extinct animal to occupy the niche that had been left behind.</p>
<p>If de-extinction becomes possible, phenomena once uniquely responsible for shaping the biological world would move out of the natural realm and into the human domain. There would be a genuine alternative to the processes of inheritance, mutation, genetic drift, reproductive isolation and natural selection that were the grist for Darwin’s evolutionary mill. As Harvard chemist <a href="http://www.ruf.rice.edu/%7Erau/phys600/whitesides.htm">George Whitesides</a> said, it would be “a marvelous challenge to see if we can outdesign evolution.”</p>
<h2>Important choices</h2>
<p>Earth Day’s annual celebration of the natural world provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on such practices and to note how they put the whole idea of “nature” into question. It is not just that no part of the natural world will be untouched anymore. The natural world – and the processes that have formed it – might increasingly be replaced by synthetic substitutes.</p>
<p>The exact contours of this Synthetic Age are far from determined. There is still the opportunity to pause and to decide that certain physical, biological and atmospheric processes should remain free of human design. Some species might be deliberately left to continue their evolutionary odyssey unmolested. Some landscapes might be selected to remain entirely in the hands of ecological and entropic forces.</p>
<p>So let’s not miss a unique opportunity. On this Earth Day, recognition of the dawning of a new epoch is appropriate. But it is important not because the planet’s fate has already been sealed. It is important precisely because it provides an opportunity for a more conscious and self-reflective decision about the world humanity will choose to create.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92808/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher J Preston has received funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>
It’s time to admit the age of pristine nature is over. In its place is humanity and planet-shaping technologies, from gene editing to climate engineering. Earth Day in a Synthetic Age.
Christopher J. Preston, Professor of Philosophy, University of Montana
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/86966
2017-11-07T12:43:48Z
2017-11-07T12:43:48Z
Why we need a better philosophy of trees
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193450/original/file-20171106-1014-1s6o43g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Souluminous/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>On November 6 1217, Henry III’s <a href="http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/forests/Carta.htm">Charter of the Forest</a> gave ordinary English people back their traditional rights to use royal hunting grounds for livestock grazing and collecting firewood. The freedoms that were restored in the use of ancient woodland reshaped the community’s legal and political relationship with nature. But, today, this relationship has broken down. Only <a href="https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/">2%</a> of the UK’s ancient woodland survives; over half has been destroyed since the 1930s. Only <a href="https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/about-us/what-we-do/">13%</a> of the UK is covered with trees, compared to the European average of 37%. And so exactly 800 years on, in Lincoln Castle, home of the original charter, a new <a href="https://treecharter.uk/">Charter for Trees, Woods and People</a> has been launched by the Woodland Trust. </p>
<p>The purpose of the new charter is to set out “the principles by which trees and people in the UK can stand together”. In the face of <a href="https://treecharter.uk/about.html">problems</a> such as low planting rates, inconsistent management, threats from housing and infrastructure developments, the desire is to “build a people-powered movement for trees” and to “demonstrate the important role that trees play in people’s lives”. The principles of the charter include the protection of irreplaceable trees and woods, the creation of transport networks for wildlife, the strengthening of habitats with trees and the development of an action plan to harness their health benefits. Its purpose is to serve as a unified “rallying cry” for disparate voices and organisations, and so to bring the plight of trees and woodlands to national consciousness, in a particularly cogent way. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193547/original/file-20171107-1027-4kjh33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">English woodland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bellephoto/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So why is such a charter needed? Writing as a philosopher, and reflecting on the history of my subject, it does give pause for thought: trees, and plants generally, have simply not garnered attention in the way that humans, and more recently, non-human animals have. It’s as if Socrates’ <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Phaedrus+230d&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0174">remark</a> that “the trees teach me nothing” is very much still the attitude today. </p>
<p>Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Exciting work in botany is revealing the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/19/what-plant-knows-daniel-chamovitz-review">extraordinary capacities</a> of plants: for memory, for communication, for tracking environmental features and even – perhaps – for discrimination between self and non-self. Any philosopher interested in the intelligence or psychological capacities of animals, human or otherwise, needs to be able to situate their work in relation to these <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant">newly discovered capacities</a>.</p>
<p>Take the complex, often vast, symbiotic relation between common fungi and the roots of forest trees, dubbed the “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web">wood wide web</a>”. Here, organisms have formed a <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-trees-communicate-via-a-wood-wide-web-65368">mutually beneficial connection</a> for the purpose of exchanging nutrients or even, in the case of trees, distributing resources. If we want to know about the nature of intelligence, or what a species is, or whether an entity such as a forest is a super-organism, attending to the lives of trees can teach us a lot.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193540/original/file-20171107-1055-zxp945.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Log, mushrooms and mycelium.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/conchur/15446550510/in/photolist-pwXBjo-obufGW-KHviDw-KSNp5B-KauKyc-7n2nkZ-ZrBJ2q-CpLLUd-aMEfwT-k6k35M-qiMRg4-oQupv8-obyy2R-Lbx3CM-L4N6V6-Lbx3vT-dzYDHj-KauKqX-KauKBt-obyx9Z-KeZSE4-gtJCEw-KiYYY4-EaRtf-odjfg4-odkxxM-oqe8U5-RNRLxC-bQEyEc-Z858Eo-CpLRzA-7Wnmp2-CpLLkN-oPjUoh-Vb1QLo-9TdiJy-ZvU2WH-gtKvrU-Z85pzQ-YuEt9k-VLedjR-9F7kWn-7WqDBY-5rUXXg-ZvU2Bp-Vb1QSL-ZvU2ng-grzdLw-dSEv4f-aVfdMr">conchur/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Beheading wildflowers</h2>
<p>To be fair to Socrates, when he says that “only the people in the city” can teach him, what he means is that it is only by speaking to and interacting with others, within the walls of the city-state, that we can learn how to be good. But, again, he’s wrong. We live among trees and how we interact with them, as well as the degree of our sensitivity to them, has moral significance. </p>
<p>Imagine a person gleefully beheading wildflowers by the roadside or cutting down an oak in their garden for the sheer pleasure of it. Many of us would that say these <a href="http://www.ekah.admin.ch/fileadmin/ekah-dateien/dokumentation/publikationen/e-Broschure-Wurde-Pflanze-2008.pdf">actions are wrong</a>. Why? It’s not as if another person has been harmed because their property rights have been violated. If we assume that trees lack sentience, then it isn’t right to say that the actions are cruel, because cruelty presupposes a being that can suffer. </p>
<p>Kant <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MJcrTG6tJsAC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192&dq=kant+metaphysics+morals+plants+beauty&source=bl&ots=kkwb7y3TQJ&sig=i2TGPUhBlTCWbCFWfhjOUxliCWs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjJzq7qtarXAhUHvBoKHc7iBGIQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=kant%20metaphysics%20morals%20plants%20beauty&f=false">condemns</a> the wilful destruction of nature because he thinks such actions inculcate bad habits. He argues that we have an indirect duty to treat animals well, for example, because a person who is cruel to animals will often end up being cruel to human beings, to whom we owe direct duties. Likewise, we have indirect duties to inanimate nature – Kant lumps together beautiful crystal formations with the beauty of plants – because respecting their intrinsic, aesthetic value helps instils in us the habit to treat each other well. So, although Kant does deal with humanity’s relationship with nature, he only does so in terms of how this relationship benefits human beings and their social interactions. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193541/original/file-20171107-1068-1rn6c4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Killing wildflowers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oko Laa/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Beyond natural capital</h2>
<p>So what is the dominant philosophical conception of nature now? </p>
<p>The new charter appears largely to reflect this Kantian approach to nature, at least in broad terms. It draws our attention, rightly, to all the benefits of trees in our lives and in the lives of other sentient creatures: habitats resilient to climate change, opportunities for education, cultural enrichment, health benefits, the list goes on. </p>
<p>The danger is that this human-centric approach slides inexorably into an increasingly popular <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/natural-capital-committee">natural capital</a> mode of valuation, in which trees and woodlands are conceived first and foremost as “assets” that provide vital “ecosystem services”. It is this language, borrowed from economics, that, for example, frames the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/183095/Independent-Panel-on-Forestry-Final-Report1.pdf">Independent Panel of Forestry</a> report, published in 2011 to advise the government on the future direction of forestry and woodland policy in England.</p>
<p>The philosopher in me would like to point out that we ought to value trees for their own sake and not simply for the benefits or “services” they provide to human beings (or another forms of sentient life). However, in a time of environmental devastation, any reason to protect trees and woodlands is a good reason. In any case, the two are not mutually exclusive. We can, without contradiction, value nature for its own sake and also for the sake of its benefits. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/193543/original/file-20171107-1008-1dvsj05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Why do we value this tree?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fotoluminate LLC/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But there is, perhaps, a special role for philosophers in banging on about the former, even as we need the latter approach to get government to listen. It used to be thought that the only thing that mattered morally was a capacity to reason. Then, in the 19th century, the British utilitarians <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/">showed</a> that an animal’s capacity to suffer meant that we also owed the animals moral consideration. Now, it seems, the sheer fact that a thing is alive is of moral importance. </p>
<p>It may be that value attaches to an organism’s ability to develop all of its natural, biological capacities, <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/envi-eth/">as biocentrists think</a>. Or it may be that we attach value to entities that display certain kinds of animate, bodily movement, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11007-016-9396-y">as I have argued</a>. In any case, trees are special, wonderful organisms and the Charter for Trees, Woods and People does a great service in drawing their silent, mysterious lives to our attention.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86966/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tristan Moyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It’s as if Socrates’ remark that ‘the trees teach me nothing’ is very much still the attitude today.
Tristan Moyle, Senior Lecturer, Philosophy, Anglia Ruskin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64947
2016-10-10T12:16:02Z
2016-10-10T12:16:02Z
What if nature, like corporations, had the rights and protections of a person?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140611/original/image-20161005-20110-9ipkfz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The forest around Lake Waikaremoana in New Zealand has been given legal status of a person because of its cultural significance.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/58611670@N04/6090717440/in/photostream/">Paul Nelhams/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has solidified the concept of corporate personhood. <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/raisins-hotels-corporate-personhood-supreme-court/396773/">Following rulings</a> in such cases as <a href="http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/sebelius-v-hobby-lobby-stores-inc/">Hobby Lobby</a> and <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/01/21/5-years-later-citizens-united-has-remade-us-politics">Citizens United</a>, U.S. law has established that companies are, like people, entitled to certain rights and protections.</p>
<p>But that’s not the only instance of extending legal rights to nonhuman entities. New Zealand took a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/14/world/what-in-the-world/in-new-zealand-lands-and-rivers-can-be-people-legally-speaking.html?_r=0">radically different approach</a> in 2014 with the <a href="http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2014/0051/latest/DLM6183601.html">Te Urewera Act</a> which granted an 821-square-mile forest the legal status of a person. <a href="http://maorilawreview.co.nz/2014/10/tuhoe-crown-settlement-te-urewera-act-2014/">The forest is sacred</a> to the Tūhoe people, an indigenous group of the Maori. For them Te Urewera is an ancient and ancestral homeland that breathes life into their culture. The forest is also a living ancestor. The Te Urewera Act concludes that “Te Urewera has an identity in and of itself,” and thus must be its own entity with “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” Te Urewera <a href="https://vertigo.revues.org/16199?lang=en#bodyftn5">holds title to itself</a>.</p>
<p>Although this legal approach is unique to New Zealand, the underlying reason for it is not. Over the last 15 years I have documented similar cultural expressions by Native Americans about their traditional, sacred places. As an anthropologist, this research has often pushed me to search for an answer to the profound question: What does it mean for nature to be a person?</p>
<h2>The snow-capped mountain</h2>
<p>A majestic mountain sits not far northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like a low triangle, with long gentle slopes, Mount Taylor is clothed in rich forests that appear a velvety charcoal-blue from the distance. Its bald summit, more than 11,000 feet high, is often blanketed in snow – a reminder of the blessing of water, when seen from the blazing desert below.</p>
<p>The Zuni tribe lives about 40 miles west of Mount Taylor. In 2012, <a href="http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/saa/aap/2014/00000002/00000004/art00001">I worked with a team to interview 24 tribal members</a> about the values they hold for Dewankwin K’yaba:chu Yalanne (“In the East Snow-capped Mountain”), as Mount Taylor is called in the Zuni language. We were told that their most ancient ancestors began an epic migration in the Grand Canyon. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140766/original/image-20161006-32727-1ssijxc.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mount Taylor in New Mexico, a sacred site to the Zuni who believe it is a living being.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chip Colwell</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over millennia they migrated across the Southwest, with important medicine societies and clans living around Mount Taylor. After settling in their current pueblo homes, Zunis returned to this sacred mountain to hunt animals like deer and bear, harvest wild plants like acorns and cattails, and gather minerals used in sacrosanct rituals that keep the universe in order. Across the generations Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanne has come to shape Zuni history, life, and identity no less than the Vatican has for Catholics.</p>
<p>But unlike holy places in the Western world, Zunis believe Mount Taylor is a living being. Zuni elders told me that the mountain was created within the Earth’s womb. As a mountain formed by volcanic activity, it has always grown and aged. The mountain can give life as people do. The mountain’s snow melts in spring and nourishes plants and wildlife for miles. Water is the mountain’s blood; buried minerals are the mountain’s meat. Because it lives, deep below is its beating heart. Zunis consider Mount Taylor to be their kin.</p>
<p>There is a stereotype that Native American peoples have a singular connection to nature. And yet in my experience, they do see the world in a fundamentally different way from most people I know. Whether it is mountains, rivers, rocks, animals, plants, stars or weather, they see the natural world as living and breathing, deeply relational, even at times all-knowing and transcendent.</p>
<p>In my work with Arizona’s Hopi tribe, I have traveled with cultural leaders to study sacred places. They often stop to listen to the wind, or search the sky for an eagle, or smile when it begins to rain, which they believe is a blessing the ancestors bestow upon them. </p>
<p>During one project with the Hopi tribe, we came across a rattlesnake coiled near an ancient fallen pueblo. “Long ago, one of them ancestors lived here and turned into a rattlesnake,” the elder Raleigh H. Puhuyaoma Sr. shared with me, pointing to the nearby archaeological site. “It’s now protecting the place.” The elders left an offering of corn meal to the snake. An elder later told me that it soon rained on his cornfield, a result from this spiritual exchange.</p>
<h2>Violent disputes</h2>
<p>Understanding these cultural worldviews matters greatly in discussions over protecting places in nature. The American West has a long history of battles over the control of land. We’ve seen this recently from the Bundy family’s <a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/461997746/how-protests-turned-into-an-armed-takeover-of-a-wildlife-refuge-in-oregon">takeover of the federal wildlife refuge</a> in Oregon to the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/07/12/war_on_federal_parks_radicalized_republicans_try_prevent_turning_bears_ears_in_utah_into_a_national_monument/">current fight over turning Bears Ears</a> – 1.9 million acres of wilderness – into a national monument in Utah.</p>
<p>Yet often these battles are less about the struggle between private and public interests, and more about basic <a href="https://theconversation.com/does-nature-have-value-beyond-what-it-provides-humans-47825">questions of nature’s purpose</a>. Do wild places have intrinsic worth? Or is the land a mere tool for human uses? </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140767/original/image-20161006-32734-tw46du.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Hopi elder making an offering to a snake to protect a sacred space.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Chip Colwell</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much of my research has involved documenting sacred places because they are being threatened by development projects on public land. The Zuni’s sacred Mount Taylor, much of it managed by the U.S. National Forest Service, has been extensively mined for uranium, and is <a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/41.21/dueling-claims">the cause of violent disputes</a> over whether it should be developed or protected.</p>
<p>Even though the U.S. does not legally recognize natural places as people, some legal protections exist for sacred places. Under the National Historic Preservation Act, for example, the U.S. government must take into consideration the potential impacts of certain development projects on “traditional cultural properties.” </p>
<p>This and other federal heritage laws, however, <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-native-american-pipeline-resistance-in-north-dakota-is-about-climate-justice-64714">provide tribes a small voice in the process</a>, little power, and rarely lead to preservation. More to the point, these laws reduce what tribes see as living places to “properties,” obscuring their inherent spiritual value.</p>
<p>In New Zealand, the Te Urewera Act offers a higher level of protection, empowering a board to be the land’s guardian. The Te Urewera Act, though, does not remove its connection to humans. With a permit, people can hunt, fish, farm and more. The public still has access to the forest. One section of the law even allows Te Urewera to be mined.</p>
<p>Te Urewera teaches us that acknowledging cultural views of places as living does not mean ending the relationship between humans and nature, but reordering it – recognizing nature’s intrinsic worth and respecting indigenous philosophies. </p>
<p>In the U.S. and elsewhere, I believe we can do better to align our legal system with the cultural expressions of the people it serves. For instance, the U.S. Congress could amend the NHPA or the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to acknowledge the deep cultural connection between tribes and natural places, and afford better protections for sacred landscapes like New Mexico’s Mount Taylor. </p>
<p>Until then, it says much about us when companies are considered people before nature is.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64947/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chip Colwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
An anthropologist argues for new ways to value sacred landscapes.
Chip Colwell, Lecturer on Anthropology, University of Colorado Denver
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64948
2016-10-04T10:10:59Z
2016-10-04T10:10:59Z
The irony of the Anthropocene: People dominate a planet beyond our control
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139958/original/image-20160930-9309-zhfn2t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We've left our mark on the planet in many ways.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2712986388/in/photolist-bAiYGw-dHtCUV-wSpBm8-dyKuX4-kWkVna-58JLko-cE76Ss-cE76NQ-bwoZDc-4YKcaT-dWb7Fn-s7ixLe-dYqzeW-dJu9p4-bPdZGB-bPef8B-bAj4no-bPdDTr-9EvMYa-5YKJnf-5YKJJb-5pdw66-7LQn4F-7Hv2CJ-5pdx3v-3fTs2u-diJrSR-bFdfHp-aNG55Z-rdCKUi-anWBN2-5vPkGb-bwoZap-dWzhaQ-bwoZ5c-6fbCgo-q4mniU-pB3So-8HJ1sF-761yaF-haKj7-dcBDvJ-aDFpZG-5KeDsX-haKm5-7iULzA-rMXqX-4RJknL-bFAfYe-6RyF6f/">NASA</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It’s becoming increasingly commonplace to suggest that humans now dominate the planet. Earlier this year the <a href="http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/">Anthropocene Working Group</a> officially proposed that we live in a <a href="https://theconversation.com/an-official-welcome-to-the-anthropocene-epoch-but-who-gets-to-decide-its-here-57113">new geological epoch</a>, one characterized by humanity’s far-reaching impacts on Earth.</p>
<p>Many researchers see this as a wake-up call or a rallying cry – an attempt to jolt humanity into deeper consideration of its actions. Some are concerned that this marks the end of nature as we know it. </p>
<p>But it appears that nature – if we still want to use that term – may have some tricks up its sleeve. Despite humans’ pervasive influence on the planet, our actual control over natural systems remains limited, even in the Anthropocene, the “Age of Humanity.”</p>
<h2>Local versus global perspective</h2>
<p>In the Brazilian Amazon, where I conduct most of <a href="http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/kawa-amazonia-in-the-anthropocene">my research</a> as an environmental anthropologist, people have been shaping their environment in subtle yet persistent ways for millennia. One prime example is <a href="http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/research/terra%20preta/terrapretamain.html">terra preta do índio</a>, a rich soil that is the product of long-term human settlement. </p>
<p>Prior to European contact, the organic refuse of indigenous populations was mixed with charcoal (or “biochar”) from village fires and in-field burning, which led to persistent environments of sustained fertility. Whether it was intentional or not, Amazonian indigenous societies altered the landscape in ways that made it more congenial to human habitation and agricultural production.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139960/original/image-20160930-9475-ekfv9c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People around the world, including in the Amazon, have been changing their landscapes for millennia by, for example, enriching soil with organic wastes and charcoal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/soilscience/5093650035/in/photolist-8L7hGk">soilscience/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>However, when I began studying management of such soils by contemporary farmers in the Amazonian town of Borba, a different picture emerged. In many of our conversations, the discussion turned toward the actions of the environment and the demands it placed upon them. Farmers cultivating pineapple were frustrated by the attack of the pineapple mealy bug, which spread a wilt virus that curled healthy pineapple leaves and turned them bright red. </p>
<p>Communities located in the floodplains told me of how they had lost entire orchards of cacao and açaí due to the intense flooding that hit in 2009, forcing them to rely on governmental emergency loans and family support to survive during the months that followed. Even farmers who were fortunate enough to have access to fertile terra preta soils in the stable uplands described to me the problems they had contending with the onslaught of weeds that colonized their fields. One farmer asked if I could use my contacts with the local agricultural extension agents to procure a weed whacker for him to help fight off the unruly invasives.</p>
<p>Many outsiders far removed from the everyday realities of Amazonia are concerned about the destructive force that agriculture represents to the Amazonian environment. But often rural smallholder farmers in the region see themselves as fighting a relentless battle against the attack of pests, fungi, weeds, and disease that threaten their crops, and subsequently their livelihoods. </p>
<p>Even as extension agents and farmers gain access to agrochemicals and other modern scientific methods for contending with these threats, such reinforcements can only realistically help to win minor battles. For the Amazonian smallholder farmers that I came to meet, the image of the “fragile forest” was a wildly foreign concept. Instead, what they experienced was an environment of robust, defiant vitality. From their vantage point, humankind has not come anywhere near to conquering nature.</p>
<h2>Taming nature?</h2>
<p>Many researchers and scholars claim that humanity’s relationship to the environment is at a <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-earth-nearing-environmental-tipping-point/">critical juncture</a>, and I would agree. But I wonder to what extent we overestimate our power and underestimate that of nature, which is really the entirety of the world that is not <em>Homo sapiens</em>.</p>
<p>Although humans are now seen as independent drivers of global environmental change, clearly humanity is not in control of the planet’s forces, much less the only force on the planet. Witness hurricanes in New Orleans and New York and tsunamis in Java and Japan. </p>
<p>The Anthropocene should remind us that while our technologies have expanded our ability to impact the Earth, a much broader array of lifeforms and forces are constantly thwarting our attempts to wrest control of the world around us. The Zika virus, herbicide-resistant “superweeds,” flesh-eating microbes and accumulating CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere are all challenging humanity and its quest for planetary domination.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/140158/original/image-20161003-20228-jt5dyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Canola cultivation in Australia: The increased use of crops resistant to one type of herbicides – another way man has attempted to control nature – has led to a response from nature in the form of weeds that are increasingly resistant to herbicides.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/26085795@N02/6193178809/in/photolist-argEhZ-8Fk8Vj-8FgKj4-q61aeB-6o12rB-nrLGaF-aG3ebg-d9jTs9-nGdqwj-nJ25cB-nrMEpN-q5Skg9-nJiR6n-nrPTPX-nJ4WuY-nGdrMf-nL3idV-nrLqrN-8Fh1ng-8FgRWt-nrPDWE-nGyo7u-nJ69dW-8Fh1KR-8FjYMq-8FjZQW-nrPvsy-5osr4e-qAxedR-qyg22G-qAxdV6-qiZf29-ekEQAg-qj88nD-qiZe59-ns7fTa-8FjXfQ-nHXVNi-8FkcYQ-8Fk6QJ-ns7fsR-nGypqS-nJAToD-dPqv4J-dPqvgS-8Fk2vY-nrLhkP-nLog3T-qyg1G3-pDxxU7">Jan Smith/flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is true that the success or survival of many species on this planet has recently hinged on their ability to adapt to human needs and the human presence. Widespread biodiversity loss is testament to humanity’s capacity to transform landscapes and the organisms that dwell within them. </p>
<p>But with the slow creep of sea-level rise and the onset of global climate change, it appears that humanity will face much greater challenges as it learns to adapt to shifting environmental conditions that it has helped set in motion. In many ways, the Anthropocene is rooted in a growing realization that we are in a state of ecological crisis that defies our control.</p>
<p>The question now is: What are we going to do about it? Leveraging technology “to tame nature” has never quite seemed to work out how we planned. At least on a local level, nature has a way of pushing back: Just look at Henry Ford’s <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105068620">failed rubber plantations</a> in the Amazon or Chernobyl’s <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science/">increasingly wild landscape</a> that grew out of nuclear disaster.</p>
<p>Perhaps the Anthropocene’s greatest challenge will be forcing us to think beyond our strictly human needs and to understand those of the ecological systems in which we are embedded. It may just be that our lives depend upon it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64948/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas C. Kawa received funding from the US Department of Education through a Fulbright-Hays Award for his research in Brazil.</span></em></p>
Yes, humans hold awesome power over the rest of the planet, but nature will always fight our attempts to ‘tame’ the natural world.
Nicholas C. Kawa, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, The Ohio State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65014
2016-09-12T01:41:43Z
2016-09-12T01:41:43Z
Bioethicist: The climate crisis calls for fewer children
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136946/original/image-20160907-25249-169w2c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Should a future parent consider the impact more people will have on the Earth? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">child via www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2016, I found myself in the middle of a lively debate because of my work on climate change and the ethics of having children. </p>
<p>NPR correspondent Jennifer Ludden profiled some of my work in procreative ethics with an article entitled, “<a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/08/18/479349760/should-we-be-having-kids-in-the-age-of-climate-change">Should we be having kids in the age of climate change?</a>,” which summarized my published views that we ought to consider adopting a “<a href="http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319338699">small family ethic</a>” and even pursuing <a href="https://www.academia.edu/19933914/Population_Engineering_and_the_Fight_against_Climate_Change">fertility reduction efforts</a> in response to the threat from climate change. Although environmentalists for decades have worried about overpopulation for many good reasons, I suggest the fast-upcoming thresholds in climate change provide uniquely powerful reasons to consider taking real action to slow population growth.</p>
<p>Clearly, this idea struck a nerve: I was overwhelmed by the response in my personal email inbox as well as op-eds in other media outlets and over 70,000 shares on Facebook. I am gratified that so many people took the time to read and reflect on the piece.</p>
<p>Having read and digested that discussion, I want to continue it by responding to some of the most vocal criticisms of my own work, which includes research on “<a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/HICPEA">population engineering</a>” – the intentional manipulation of human population size and structure – I’ve done with my colleagues, Jake Earl and Colin Hickey.</p>
<p>In short, the varied arguments against my views – that I’m overreacting, that the economy will tank and others – haven’t changed my conviction that we need to discuss the ethics of having children in this era of climate change. </p>
<h2>How bad will things get?</h2>
<p>Some comments – those claiming climate change is a hoax, devised by those who wish to control the world’s resources – are not worth responding to. Since <a href="https://theconversation.com/consensus-confirmed-over-90-of-climate-scientists-believe-were-causing-global-warming-57654">97 percent of all relevant experts</a> cannot convince climate change skeptics of the basic scientific facts, then nothing I say will change their minds.</p>
<p>Other concerns, however, do require a response. Many people reacted to my work on procreation ethics by saying climate change will not be so bad, and so curbing individual desires, such as having children, in its name is unnecessary fear-mongering.</p>
<p>In my work, I suggest that 1.5-2 degrees Celsius warming over preindustrial levels will be “dangerous” and “very bad,” while 4 degrees C will be “catastrophic” and will leave large segments of the Earth “largely uninhabitable by humans.” Here is a very brief survey of the evidence for those claims based on what I consider reputable sources.</p>
<p>At <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climatechange/publication/turn-down-the-heat">1.5-2 degrees C</a>, a World Bank report predicts an increase in extreme weather events, deadly heat waves and severe water stress. Food production will decrease, and changing disease vectors will create unpredictable infectious disease outbreaks. Sea levels will rise, combining with increased storm severity to place coastal cities at risk. The World Health Organization (WHO) <a href="http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs266/en/">estimates</a> that from the years 2030-2050 – as we reach this level of warming – at least 250,000 people will die every year from just some of the climate-related harms.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/136957/original/image-20160907-25244-1d7tfyl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">It’s widely recognized that the global poor will disproportionately suffer the consequences of climate change. Here people displaced by flooding in Pakistan in 2010 line up for water.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/asiandevelopmentbank/5669461491/in/photolist-9CZto4-eaE1bP-7nc11g-7ojwWv-7JcSmt-qqPeXF-pueeAn-qqVPxW-i4yTao-797AiW-7oxVw5-ptZY73-qqYXfg-q9zsMt-ptZMxs-q9qhBh-qqPdua-pueJhk-qoHsGh-2jYDxZ-qoHPtN-pu1n6E-qqW1Cw-q9z3DP-qqZ4ek-qqPbrn-fCz4ke-pueLQ6-puenbH-qqVQa7-qoHrCJ-qoHPAS-q9qYtG-q9zR4n-q9y92r-7Pe2kB-qqVDK9-q9rCDm-qqWnNC-qoHoaS-q9yUz2-q9xU7T-pueMJk-puenXT-pu1mgJ-qqZfXR-pueoFr-qqNWRX-q9rJvm-ptZXq3">Asian Development Bank</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps many of us in rich countries (the “us” who might be reading this) will be largely protected from these early harms; but that doesn’t make them less real to the vulnerable citizens of, say, <a href="https://maplecroft.com/portfolio/new-analysis/2013/10/30/31-global-economic-output-forecast-face-high-or-extreme-climate-change-risks-2025-maplecroft-risk-atlas/">Bangladesh</a>, <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg2/index.php?idp=671">Kiribati or the Maldives</a>. In fact, it <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ethics-of-climate-change-what-we-owe-people-and-the-rest-of-the-planet-51785">escalates the injustice</a>, as the global wealthy have benefited from and contributed to climate change the most, while the global poor will be hurt first and worst.</p>
<p>At <a href="http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/865571468149107611/pdf/NonAsciiFileName0.pdf">4 degrees C warming</a>, the World Bank predicts that every summer month will be hotter than any current record heat wave, making the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean deadly during the summer months. Many coastal cities will be completely under water, and all low-lying island nations will likely have to be abandoned. Hundreds of millions, if not billions of people could become <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-should-we-compensate-poor-countries-for-loss-and-damage-from-climate-change-55612">climate refugees</a>, as their homelands become uninhabitable.</p>
<p>Based on these descriptions, I stand by my predictions.</p>
<h2>No, environmentalists don’t hate babies</h2>
<p>Other critics have argued that advocating for a lower birth rate = <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/24/baby-haters-use-global-warming-to-justify-their-selfishness/">hating babies</a> or being “<a href="http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2016/08/horwitz-make-babies-and-dont-let-the-greens-guilt-trip-you-about-it.html">anti-life</a>.”</p>
<p>Obviously I don’t hate babies! I’m pretty wild about my own kid, and small humans in general. </p>
<p>This anti-life charge is more interesting, but equally wrong. The premise seems to be that those who wish to lower fertility rates must be misanthropic, or fail to see the value of humans. But that gets things exactly backwards: A radical concern for climate change is precisely motivated by a concern for human life – in particular, the human lives that will be affected by climate disruptions.</p>
<p>A valuable philosophical contribution here is <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13064981/Frick_gsas.harvard.inactive_0084L_11842.pdf?sequence=1">the distinction between “making people happy” and “making happy people.”</a> When I feed a hungry person, or prevent a harm from befalling someone, I improve a person’s well-being. But when I create a person whom I will then feed and prevent from harm, I make a person who will predictably be well off. In the first case, I added happiness to the world by helping an existing person; whereas in the second case, I added happiness by creating a person who will be happy. See the difference?</p>
<p>I, like many philosophers, believe that it’s morally better to make people happy than to make happy people. Those who exist already have needs and wants, and protecting and providing for them is motivated by respect for human life. It is not a harm to someone not to be created.</p>
<p>In fact, I would argue that it is more “anti-life” to prioritize creating new life over caring for, or even not harming, those who already exist.</p>
<h2>Can the economy grow with lower population growth?</h2>
<p>Another opposing argument: People are not only consumers – they are also <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/08/23/rising-population-makes-world-better-not-worse/d7TvIfu8L9F1LTv2yxYhfI/story.html">producers</a>, and so will make the world better.</p>
<p>Yes, humans are producers, and many wonderful things have come from human genius. But each person, whatever else they are (genius or dunce, producer or drag on the economy) is also a consumer. And this is the only claim needed in order to be worried about climate change.</p>
<p>The problem here is that we have a finite resource – the ability of the Earth’s atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases without violently disrupting the climate – and each additional person contributes to the total amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. So although humans will hopefully save us (we do, in fact, desperately need brilliant people to develop scaleable technology to remove carbon from the air, for instance), the solution to this cannot be to have as many babies as possible, with the hope that this raises our probability of solving the problem. Because each baby is also an emitter, whether a genius or not.</p>
<p>Lastly, there’s the view that lowering fertility rates <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/23/have-lots-of-children-its-good-for-the-planet/">will kill the economy</a>.</p>
<p>Several commenters point to low-fertility countries like Japan, Italy and Germany, and argue that problems experienced by such countries are proof that the “real” population crisis is our dropping fertility rate. We need more babies to grow into healthy young producers to keep our economic engine humming.</p>
<p>The truth in this objection is the following: An economy that requires infinite growth to be healthy will be harmed in a world of finite resources. But if it’s true that our economies can’t survive slowing or even reversing population growth, then we’re in some trouble no matter what. </p>
<p>Why? It’s simple logic that we cannot grow our population forever. We can either reflect now on how to protect our economy while working toward a sustainable population, or we can ignore the problem until nature forces it on us, perhaps violently and unexpectedly.</p>
<p>I’ll conclude with one, final thought: I don’t enjoy arguing for a small family ethic, or a population engineering scheme. Despite snide accusations to the contrary, I get no research funds or any other incentive for making this case. I’m arguing these points because I’m genuinely worried about the future of our planet, and the people who will inherit it, and I believe difficult yet civil discussion is the crucial first step to making that future one we won’t be condemned for creating.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65014/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Travis N. Rieder does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A philosopher of ‘procreation ethics’ at the center of a controversy over having kids explains why we can’t ignore the population question in an era of climate change.
Travis N. Rieder, Research Scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/50654
2015-12-15T10:54:39Z
2015-12-15T10:54:39Z
Stretching science: why emotional intelligence is key to tackling climate change
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105536/original/image-20151211-8335-i6ko67.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scientists need to get comfortable with dealing with people and their feelings.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">crowd from www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Climate science has been instrumental in developing the ambitious carbon emission reduction targets negotiated at the recent <a href="http://www.cop21paris.org/">climate talks</a> in Paris. At the same time, the kinds of actions needed to avert the worst effects of climate change demand new ways of engaging that go <a href="https://theconversation.com/historic-paris-climate-pact-reached-experts-react-52091?">far beyond</a> science and formal diplomacy. </p>
<p>This shift from a focus on the technical to the social is not unexpected. After the particularly challenging <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/climate/2015-paris-climate-talks/from-the-archives-2009a-murky-end-in-copenhagen">climate talks of 2009</a>, science and technology studies expert Sheila Jasanoff concluded a <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/content/328/5979/695.full">Science article</a> by reflecting that the scientific community “has demonstrated it can learn and change in its methods of representing science to scientists. That ingenuity should now be directed toward <em>building relationships of trust and respect with the global citizens</em> whose future climate science has undertaken to predict and reshape.” </p>
<p>In other words, while climate science has advanced greatly, the human-to-human piece still needs attention. </p>
<p>Indeed, over the past several years, it has become clear it is not enough to rely on scientific and technical information, expertise, and authority alone when it comes to transformative social action on climate change. Instead, <a href="http://peoplesclimate.org/">many people</a> are working together to affect change outside the realm of science, often in seemingly messy and chaotic ways. </p>
<p>Shifting climate work into this kind of relational mode — one centered on people and how we relate with each other and our environment — is a sea change in how we deal with an issue traditionally steeped in scientific intricacy. </p>
<h2>Working with conflict and emotion</h2>
<p>We are exposed daily to information about how climate change is altering landscapes we love, impacting people who don’t have the resources they need to adapt, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ethics-of-climate-change-what-we-owe-people-and-the-rest-of-the-planet-51785">harming many species</a>. </p>
<p>The attendant <a href="http://scienceunicorn.blogspot.com/2013/12/grief-and-science.html">grief</a> and <a href="http://www.karnacbooks.com/product/environmental-melancholia-psychological-dimensions-of-engagement/37000/">anxiety</a> can be overwhelming for many, including (and maybe <a href="http://grist.org/climate-energy/climate-depression-is-for-real-just-ask-a-scientist/">particularly</a>) scientific and technical experts. </p>
<p>Learning to effectively engage in this emotionally laden environment calls for significant <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-stepping-stones-of-integrating-emotions-into-practicing-science/7360">subjective and emotional skills</a>, such as the ability to <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/12/emotion-and-the-art-of-negotiation">deal with anger</a> and <a href="http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/in-climate-change-psychology-often-gets-lost-in-translation">anxiety</a> – whether our own or others. Yet by training scientists tend to value objectivity and facts, rather than subjective views and feelings. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105535/original/image-20151211-14647-z637l9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pheezy/90845825/in/photolist-92Bik-dzhrFm-dzhsh9-dSTQvg-dSZCS1-dSZxSj-7iv1nU-nxRuYc-KgLGV-yR6N3Y-4TAhqE-4Tw5iF-4TvZm2-dSZeRG-dSZv9d-dSZsZw-dSZvj9-dtD8cQ-dSTLXV-dSU2v6-dSTNDD-dSTNgM-nFmWD9-dZYHPH-dSTZZT-dSZDK9-dSTN5F-dSZBmj-dSTZzV-dSZyo9-jq8ouH-xBg831-bV34dz-bUYRB2-NkU2A-dSZDDs-ccmzdb-4op1Ns-9GvGgy-9xYZpy-9GsMLp-9GvN13-9GvJ8d-9GsJ58-7yvdTZ-88pYeZ-dSZpzy-dSTGYt-dSZky5-dSZxaQ">pheezy/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In addition, some environmental challenges are increasingly taking on characteristics of <a href="http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/conflicts.aspx">intractable conflicts</a>, which may remain unresolved despite good faith efforts. </p>
<p>In the case of climate change, conflicts ranging from debates over how to lower emissions to <a href="http://eurpub.oxfordjournals.org/content/19/1/2.short">denialism</a> are obvious and ongoing -– the science community has often approached them as something to be defeated or ignored. </p>
<p>While some people love it and others hate it, <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/conflict/index.xhtml">conflict</a> is often an indicator that something important is happening; we generally don’t fight about things we don’t <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/program/joanna-macy-a-wild-love-for-the-world/transcript/7022">care</a> about. </p>
<p>Working with conflict is a challenging proposition, in part because while it manifests in interactions with others, much of the real effort comes in dealing with our own <a href="http://bit.ly/186rTMd">internal conflicts</a>. </p>
<p>However, beginning to accept and even value conflict as a necessary part of large-scale societal transformation has the potential to generate new approaches to climate change engagement. For example, understanding that in some cases denial by another person is protective may lead to new approaches to engagement. </p>
<p>As we connect more deeply with conflict, we may come to see it not as a flame to be fanned or put out, but as a resource. </p>
<h2>A relational approach to climate change</h2>
<p>Indeed, because of the emotion and conflict involved, the concept of a relational approach is one that offers a great deal of promise in the climate change arena. It is, however, vastly underexplored. </p>
<p>Relationship-centered approaches have been taken up in <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1193009">law</a>, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1484839/">medicine</a>, and <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674754119&content=toc">psychology</a>. </p>
<p>A common thread among these fields is a shift from expert-driven to more collaborative modes of working together. Navigating the personal and emotional elements of this kind of work asks quite a <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17414200">bit</a> <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1571-9979.2007.00165.x/full">more</a> of practitioners than subject-matter expertise.</p>
<p>In medicine, for example, <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1484841/">relationship-centered care</a> is a framework examining how relationships – between patients and clinicians, among clinicians, and even with broader communities – impact health care. It recognizes that care may go well beyond technical competency. </p>
<p>This kind of framework can demonstrate how a relational approach is different from more colloquial understandings of relationships; it can be a way to intentionally and transparently attend to conflict and power dynamics as they arise.</p>
<p>Although this is a simplified view of relational work, many would argue that an emphasis on emergent and transformative properties of relationships has been revolutionary. And one of the key challenges, and opportunities, of a relationship-centered approach to climate work is that we truly have no idea what the outcomes will be. </p>
<p>We have long tried to motivate action around climate change by decreasing scientific uncertainty, so introducing social uncertainty feels risky. At the same time it can be a relief because, in working together, nobody has to have <em>the</em> answer.</p>
<h2>Learning to be comfortable with discomfort</h2>
<p>A relational approach to climate change may sound basic to some, and complicated to others. In either case, it can be useful to know there is evidence that skillful relational capacity can be taught and learned. </p>
<p>The medical and legal communities have been developing <a href="http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Abstract/2007/04000/Viewpoint__Reflections_on_a_Well_Traveled_Path_.19.aspx">relationship-centered</a> training for years. </p>
<p>It is clear that relational skills and capacities like conflict resolution, <a href="http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/teaching-doctors-to-be-mindful/">empathy</a>, and <a href="http://ccare.stanford.edu/education/about-compassion-cultivation-training-cct/">compassion</a> can be enhanced through practices including active <a href="http://scienceunicorn.blogspot.com/2013/10/on-listening-in-science-communication.html">listening</a> and self-reflection. Although it may seem an odd fit, climate change invites ability to work together in new ways that include acknowledging and working with the strong emotions involved.</p>
<p>With a relationship-centered approach, climate change issues become less about particular solutions, and more about transforming how we work together. It is both risky and revolutionary in that it asks us to take a giant leap into trusting not just scientific information, but each other.</p>
<p><em>Adapted from: Kearns, F.R. 2015. A relational approach to climate change: Working with people and conflict. In <a href="http://bit.ly/1MZZB5S"><em>Climate Change Across the Curriculum</em></a>, edited by Eric Fretz. Lexington Books. Available December 2015.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50654/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Faith Kearns receives funding from The Whitman Institute.</span></em></p>
Scientists need to be comfortable dealing with subjective views, rather than empirical data, and people’s feelings to make progress in addressing climate change.
Faith Kearns, Water Analyst, California Institute for Water Resources, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/51785
2015-12-08T09:57:25Z
2015-12-08T09:57:25Z
The ethics of climate change: what we owe people – and the rest of the planet
<p>Ethics is a particularly relevant if underreported topic of conversation at the United Nations conference on climate change in Paris. While technical disputes grab the lion’s share of attention, we should not forget the moral reasons we must address global warming – because of the substantial harm it does and will do to the human and nonhuman world.</p>
<p>Climate justice refers to the disproportional impact of climate change on poor and marginalized populations, while climate equity refers to who should bear the burden of responsibility for addressing climate change.</p>
<p>These twin concerns have both intranational and international dimensions. Climate change will negatively and disproportionately impact poor and marginalized people <em>within</em> national borders as well as cause conflicts <em>between</em> nations, regions and cities that are more or less vulnerable to climate disruptions. </p>
<p>How should ethics inform these questions? </p>
<h2>Fairness and costs</h2>
<p>Any economic discussion regarding lowering greenhouse gas emissions needs to address <a href="http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/put-ethics-at-heart-of-climate-talks-vatican-says-at-paris-summit-94178/">social justice</a>. </p>
<p>For example, a <a href="http://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/Worldbank/document/SDN/background-note_carbon-tax.pdf">carbon tax</a> is recognized by economists as the most efficient means for pricing and reducing carbon emissions. As with all taxes, the cost of such a tax would be passed on from businesses to consumers. Who then should bear this cost? Should the tax be borne equally by all, or be paid by the wealthy and corporations who benefit most from dumping carbon into the atmosphere?</p>
<p>Similarly, islands and coastal areas close to sea level face the prospect of catastrophic inundation and storm damage from <a href="http://sealevel.climatecentral.org">rising seas</a> and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-and-hurricane-katrina-what-have-we-learned-46297">increasing strength of hurricanes</a> and typhoons. These are communities geographically vulnerable through no fault of their own. </p>
<p>Should they bear the cost of building the infrastructure – sea walls, raised roads, pumping stations – to improve their resilience? Indeed, some island nations must be prepared to <a href="https://theconversation.com/most-kiribatian-households-are-mulling-climate-migration-and-thats-just-the-start-51627">evacuate their entire population</a>. Should they alone bear the huge costs and social risks of climate migration? </p>
<h2>Who shoulders the burden?</h2>
<p>With respect to climate equity, a heated debate has arisen over who should take the most responsibility for climate action. Historically, the global north of industrialized nations (the United States and western Europe) has contributed most to global warming. </p>
<p>Some in the global south, including India’s Prime Minister <a href="http://www.firstpost.com/world/full-text-pm-narendra-modis-speech-at-the-plenary-session-at-cop-21-summit-in-paris-2527862.html">Narenda Modi</a>, argue that <em>increasing</em> developing countries’ use of fossil fuels is necessary to lift millions out of poverty.</p>
<p>Indeed, India’s latest <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/cop21-paris-climate-conference-narendra-modi-cautions-against-unilateral-steps-in-combating-climate-change/article7933873.ece">negotiating position</a> is to demand that the global north make steep carbon cuts so that India may continue to pollute for economic development. India would reduce the “carbon intensity” of its economic activity, but would not make cuts for decades as its total greenhouse gas pollution grows. </p>
<p>Such a position has led to a <a href="https://theconversation.com/india-chooses-electricity-and-economics-over-emissions-goals-48666">great</a> <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/23/paris-climate-talks-developed-countries-must-do-more-than-reduce-emissions">deal</a> of <a href="http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/11/why-the-paris-climate-deal-is-meaningless-000326">bickering</a>, not only over who should shoulder the economic and social burden, but how <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/sustainable-development">sustainable development</a> should move forward.</p>
<p>Moreover, the national commitments to reduce carbon emissions are essentially <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/03/un-wrong-track-plans-limit-global-warming-2c-top-scientist-climate-change">voluntary and self-policed</a>. Taken together, they do not <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28612-paris-climate-summit-earth-may-warm-by-6c-even-with-a-deal/">limit global warming</a> to two degrees Celsius, a threshold we cannot exceed if we hope to maintain a planet of prosperous societies and flourishing biodiversity. Far preferable is to <a href="http://fortune.com/2015/12/05/climate-change-entrepreneurs/">draw down greenhouse gas emissions</a> for a safer 1.5C increase, a position that is not even being discussed. </p>
<h2>Inequalities of wealth and power</h2>
<p>There are a host of other moral issues related to climate justice and equity.</p>
<p>One is that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/science/chief-of-house-science-panel-picks-battle-over-climate-paper.html?_r=0">conservative politicians</a>, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elliott-negin/did-exxonmobil-just-admit_b_8625514.html">corporate interests</a> and their <a href="http://mediamatters.org/blog/2012/11/28/meet-the-climate-denial-machine/191545">think tank sycophants</a> have knowingly peddled climate denial for decades. This is straight-out malfeasance and malpractice in terms of political and research ethics. </p>
<p>Add to that the rising <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/study-richest-10-are-causing-climate-change-2015-12">inequalities of wealth</a> at home and abroad. <a href="http://mashable.com/2015/12/04/neil-degrasse-tyson-climate-summit/#_JdNybbvx8qw">Global elites</a> will suffer few consequences and have little incentive to act for the good of the public or the planet. This will further exacerbate ethical and political fractures between climate haves and have-nots. </p>
<p>In addition, urban sprawl and ongoing <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/04/climate-change-population-crisis-paris-summit">population growth</a> will consume an area the <a href="http://phys.org/news/2011-09-cities-equaling-size-mongolia-years.html">size of Mongolia</a> by the end of the century, with all that entails for environmental degradation and the economic needs of the urban poor. </p>
<p>We will also see the geographical expansion of diseases, food insecurity, social unrest, resource wars, climate refugees and billion-dollar climate disasters, all at a huge cost to human life and suffering. Moral and political fatigue will slowly reduce our capacity to properly care and respond to this growing set of crises. </p>
<h2>Obligations to other species</h2>
<p>Yet, neither climate justice nor equity speaks to the other aspect of climate ethics, namely our moral duties to <a href="http://mashable.com/2015/12/05/climate-change-animals/#eNPJv..yxkqq">other animals</a> and the broader <a href="https://flipboard.com/topic/biodiversity/%27racing-extinction%27-sounds-the-alarm-for-vanishing-species/a-B4Dv-UsGTLqMX7RnYSMeXw%3Aa%3A140136171-a8b572ec4e%2Fapnewsarchive.com">community of life</a>.</p>
<p>Global warming is undoubtedly the product of human causes. We not only brought this problem on ourselves, but foisted it onto the natural world with nary a thought for the ethics of doing so. </p>
<p>The <a href="http://ethicsandclimate.org">dominant rhetoric</a> might decry what global warming will do to human societies, but it rarely speaks of what it does and will do to the creatures and ecosystems with whom we share the earth. Pope Francis’ <a href="https://laudatosi.com/watch">Ladauto Si</a> is a sterling exception in this regard. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/setting-aside-half-the-earth-for-rewilding-the-ethical-dimension-46121">intrinsic value of people, animals and nature</a> means that we have a <a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-war-on-feral-cats-shaky-science-missing-ethics-47444">direct duty to the nonhuman world</a> to address climate change as a matter of moral urgency.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=413&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/104505/original/image-20151204-14451-1tcyqaf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Other species of animals live in sophisticated social groups and, many argue, express emotions as people do. What is our moral obligation to them?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_heigan/19175373854/in/photolist-vdsNA3-dZ9ZTe-d1bdo5-dLfEvG-a7RWd7-9k1oJ3-bp7jUK-p6gMtq-rMhR48-9qixXv-atJLJY-7oVMBc-ofUf1i-oppv1V-bD1u9c-bq6wX9-71jtgH-aMsPqv-sPSYLg-eX6ryg-kt6E5B-pPYPRp-rN7FPD-bRcWii-rAb2n6-aCrZq5-yoUfG-82wtbt-ahrECb-6cDtnB-nLiD74-8coHXE-5KGtf9-SnWtq-qb1cPc-8YjyFj-aXiSDR-e6EMp4-4vU4C5-auNqGn-vZQqUT-7YHNgW-igMi5D-isULxK-isUAkd-isU8q1-isUgNo-m4HRD-6r3Lg-agYj13">martin_heigan/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Interspecies responsibilities also put questions of climate justice and equity into a <a href="http://geographical.co.uk/opinion/item/1390-the-ethical-imperative">larger moral landscape</a>, changing how we see our common and differentiated responsibilities to combat climate change. </p>
<p>Fights over climate justice and equity are essentially about what we owe each other as human beings. The rich, Western, industrialized countries should share the largest burden not only for historical reasons, but because they are wealthy enough to absorb the costs for the long-term well-being of themselves and the global south. </p>
<p>But arguing over what nation or social group should be held culpable can distract from the urgent need to act for the well-being of people and the planet now. </p>
<h2>The rest of nature</h2>
<p>Emergent industrialized economies like India’s also have a rapidly increasing responsibility to cut their own global emissions of greenhouse gases. <a href="https://flipboard.com/@william_lynn/climate-e99bsrghy/developing-nations-shift-emissions-stance-in-climate-talks/a-JaZwY1OARTWVvlWGY0s-Tw%3Aa%3A20118371-1c066b16b6%2Fapnewsarchive.com">Island nations</a> have made this point eloquently in the face of bickering between the global north and south. </p>
<p>And India’s current negotiating position seems more focused on better positioning the economy for the global stage, than it is in meeting its common if differentiated responsibilities. India is not alone in this. Its elites are simply outspoken in their anthropocentric self-interest. </p>
<p>The same critique applies to how we ought to care for other animals and the rest of nature. Their fate should not be hostage to a narrowing argument about culpability. It is rather a matter of <a href="https://theconversation.com/making-the-moral-case-on-climate-change-ahead-of-paris-summit-50888">responding morally</a> to the needs of others — human or nonhuman — in the face of climate crisis. What matters most is not apportioning blame and seeking advantage, but making things right.</p>
<p>Global warming threatens the well-being of people and the planet, raising crucial issues of ethics and public policy that we ignore at our peril. Left unchecked, or by doing too little too late, climate change will haunt future generations and leave a despoiled earth as our legacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/51785/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William S. Lynn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A narrow debate of what countries should pay to respond to climate change obscures a bigger moral discussion that touches on economics, ethics and people’s relationship to the natural world.
William S. Lynn, Research Scientist, Clark University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/50888
2015-11-23T10:32:08Z
2015-11-23T10:32:08Z
Making the moral case on climate change ahead of Paris summit
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/102553/original/image-20151119-18445-dt81l2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Poor people are more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as extreme weather and sea level rise, yet have contributed little to the causes. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/asiandevelopmentbank/8426484598/in/photolist-dQBWid-7bAp4K-9fgqQr-ghUHjC-ghMycy-4bwF9L-8AC8mN-ghV8GC-ghUVPY-ghV1zv-ghVg6K-ghUX3R-ghV2Qz-ghVqpx-ghV2X1-ghV3yG-i4yMj3-ghVfVV-ghVqdd-ghVwSH-ghVcEC-ghVkuT-ghV1kw-ghV8tG-ghUZgs-ghV8QU-ghVuHn-ghUSQn-ghUFpL-ghV8xh-ghVomC-ghVcDy-ghVsdp-ghV42o-ghVn7n-ghUGsY-ghUnoL-ghUZnR-ghV7eq-6GNXew-ghUVhA-ghUPo1-ghMWJ6-ghVLht-ghVbmU-ghUVKG-ghN9Wc-ghN8nR-ghUWpN-ghMNHQ">asiandevelopmentbank/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Much of the general public is well aware of scientists’ recommendations on climate change. In particular, climate scientists and other academics say society needs to keep global temperatures to no more than <a href="https://theconversation.com/limiting-global-warming-to-2-c-the-philosophy-and-the-science-32074">two degrees Celsius</a> above preindustrial levels to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change. </p>
<p>But now more academics are weighing in on climate change: philosophers, ethicists, and social scientists among others. </p>
<p>More than 2,100 academics, and counting, from over 80 nations and a diversity of disciplines have endorsed a <a href="http://globalclimatechangeweek.com/open-letter/">moral and political statement</a> addressed to global leaders ahead of December’s UN climate conference in Paris. </p>
<p>A few of the more widely recognizable signatories include philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky (MIT); cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol); climate scientist Michael E Mann (PSU); writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben (Middlebury College); historian of science Naomi Oreskes (Harvard); and moral philosopher Peter Singer (Princeton). </p>
<p>As one of the philosophers responsible for this open letter, along with my colleague Keith Horton (University of Wollongong, Australia), I wish to explain why we felt compelled to organize it and why the endorsement of many influential philosophers is important.</p>
<p>In addition to Chomsky and Singer, the list of prominent philosophers who have converged from various philosophical backgrounds and points of disagreement to endorse this letter include many of the most influential figures in contemporary moral and political philosophy. </p>
<h2>Thinking about the real world</h2>
<p>While it may be popular among certain politicians to malign academics as removed from the “real world,” the fact remains that academics by virtue of training and professional necessity are driven to distinguish valid argument and sound evidence from fallacy. </p>
<p>We are bound to reference current research, and to examine our data before making claims if we hope to be taken seriously by our peers. We have a pedagogical obligation to instill these same practices in our students. We also have a moral obligation to prepare them for responsible citizenship and careers.</p>
<p>Global warming is the most important moral issue of our time, and arguably the greatest existential threat that human beings, as a whole, have faced. So the response to climate change from philosophers should be no surprise. </p>
<p>Those most responsible for climate change are relatively few compared to the vast numbers of people who will be harmfully affected. Indeed, climate change will, in one way or another, impact all life on Earth. </p>
<p>If we fail to decisively address the problem now, warming may escalate in a relatively short time beyond the point which human beings can reasonably be expected to cope, given the nature of <a href="https://nas-sites.org/americasclimatechoices/more-resources-on-climate-change/climate-change-lines-of-evidence-booklet/evidence-impacts-and-choices-figure-gallery/figure-9/">reinforcing feedback effects</a>. </p>
<p>The moral implications are enormous, and this letter represents the closest we have to a consensus statement from the world’s preeminent professional ethicists on some of the moral obligations industrial nations, and their leaders, have to global communities, future generations, and fellow species. The letter begins: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some issues are of such ethical magnitude that being on the correct side of history becomes a signifier of moral character for generations to come. Global warming is such an issue. Indigenous peoples and the developing world are least responsible for climate change, least able to adapt to it, and most vulnerable to its impacts. As the United Nations Climate Conference in Paris approaches, the leaders of the industrialized world shoulder a grave responsibility for the consequences of our current and past carbon emissions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Importantly, the letter points out that even if current nonbinding pledges being offered by world leaders ahead of the conference are achieved, we remain on course to reach potentially catastrophic levels of warming by the end of this century. The letter continues: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is profoundly shocking, given that any sacrifice involved in making those reductions is far overshadowed by the catastrophes we are likely to face if we do not: more extinctions of species and loss of ecosystems; increasing vulnerability to storm surges; more heatwaves; more intense precipitation; more climate related deaths and disease; more climate refugees; slower poverty reduction; less food security; and more conflicts worsened by these factors. Given such high stakes, our leaders ought to be mustering planet-wide mobilization, at all societal levels, to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degree Celsius.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is increasingly obvious as we head to Paris that both industrialized and developing nations must make serious efforts to limit their greenhouse gas emissions beyond their current pledges. This is a requirement of physics. </p>
<p>It is unrealistic to expect most developing nations to meaningfully limit greenhouse gas emissions without binding pledges from industrialized nations to do so, as well as significant commitments to provide <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-biggest-sticking-point-in-paris-climate-talks-money-49193">financial and technological assistance</a> to poorer nations facing developmental challenges. This is a practical necessity and a requirement of ethics.</p>
<h2>Ethical thinking</h2>
<p>At its most fundamental level, thinking ethically means taking the interests of others seriously enough to recognize when our actions and omissions must be justified to them. </p>
<p>As individuals, our instincts too often drive us toward self-interest. Consequently, acting ethically beyond the circle of our immediate relations – that is, those we perceive most capable of reciprocating both harms and benefits – is difficult. </p>
<p>Still, the history of our species teaches that humanity as a whole benefits most when we are able to put narrow self-interest aside, and make an ethical turn in our thinking and behavior. </p>
<p>Now, faced with climate change the next great ethical turn in our thinking and behavior can’t come soon enough. We will make progress in addressing climate change when, and if, we begin taking the lessons of morality seriously.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to correct language on climate scientists’ recommendations for global average temperature increase.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50888/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lawrence Torcello does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
More than 2,000 academics, including philosophers and ethicists, are urging global leaders at the Paris climate summit to focus on the moral dimensions of climate change.
Lawrence Torcello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/48225
2015-10-26T10:10:47Z
2015-10-26T10:10:47Z
The problems with Big History and turning science into myth
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/98718/original/image-20151016-25142-kms7dl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Looking to the cosmos to find our place in the universe. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Milky Way from www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2002, a conservative Christian pastor named Michael Dowd and his science writer wife, Connie Barlow, quit their jobs, sold their possessions, and purchased a van they decorated with symbols of a <a href="http://www.thegreatstory.org/images/fish-kiss.jpg">Jesus fish kissing a Darwin fish</a>. Since that time, these two have lived largely as itinerant preachers whose message is the wondrous revelation of science.</p>
<p>These <a href="http://evolutionaryevangelists.libsyn.com/">evolutionary evangelists</a> are part of a growing movement that looks to science for a new sacred story that has more staying power than traditional religions. Its proponents proclaim a grand narrative of what is called cosmogenesis – the unfolding of the universe, from the moment of the Big Bang to the present – as a modern sacred myth for all people. </p>
<p>The new cosmology – a word that here signals both the study of the universe and an overarching religious worldview – defines human beings as the part of the universe that has become conscious of itself. We are the only creatures to have evolved an awareness of our place in the universe. Humans’ dawning cosmological awareness, it is believed, will connect us emotionally to cosmic processes, allowing us to feel more at home in the universe. Sensing our place in cosmic patterns and processes will inspire sustainable practices on Earth. </p>
<p>A new story is urgently needed, the argument goes, because we suffer from a crippling condition of modernity known as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Amythia-Natural-History-Western-Culture/dp/0817351361">amythia</a>: we lack a serviceable myth to orient us to what is real and important. The stories provided by the traditional faiths are no longer plausible or relevant in light of modern science and our global environmental crisis. We need a consecrated science, a <a href="http://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/JSRNC/issue/view/2140">new Genesis</a>, according to this line of thinking. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Bill Gates is down with Big History.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The movement has unleashed a deluge of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Universe-Story-Primordial-Celebration/dp/0062508350">books</a>, <a href="http://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org/synopsis/">films</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SfrYYSidJE">YouTube videos</a>, <a href="http://thegreatstory.org/">websites</a>, <a href="http://inspiringnaturalism.libsyn.com/">podcasts</a> and university course <a href="http://ncronline.org/news/people/california-college-helps-place-humans-universe-story">offerings</a> that proclaim the mythopoeic, or myth-making, virtues of science. </p>
<p>This new cosmology displays many of the earmarks of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene">Anthropocene</a>, a new geologic age of humans. We are the dominant, planetary presence in whom the cosmos has entrusted the next precarious phase of Earth’s evolution. Our task as a species is to guide the planet into a new, hoped-for geological era – the <a href="http://ecozoictimes.com/what-is-the-ecozoic/what-does-ecozoic-mean/">Ecozoic</a> – characterized by mutual enhancement of humans and the planet. </p>
<p>Will this cosmology spark a new wave of environmental consciousness?</p>
<h2>‘Epic science’ as religion of reality</h2>
<p>It was the late 1970s when Thomas Berry proclaimed the need for a new cosmic story. Berry’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS5byHRScVY">diagnosis</a> was that the old religious narratives had lost much of their power and functionality. Our storylessness was exacerbated by scientists’ seeming reluctance, at that time, to present their knowledge in grand, mythic form. That would soon change, as a wave of science popularizers – Carl Sagan, Edward O Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett – stepped in to portray science as an epic quest whose rewards are vastly superior to the charms of religion.</p>
<p>Today, a cluster of Thomas Berry’s <a href="http://thankgodforevolution.com/node/1869">devotees</a> remain. Some regard insights from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as foundational to the creation of a new common myth, since evolutionary science both explains our need for religious myth and provides the raw materials from which to craft it. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The universe as a story – the legacy of Thomas Berry.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1978, as Berry issued his call for a new story, E O Wilson identified something he called the evolutionary epic, “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/On-Human-Nature-Preface-Revised/dp/0674016386">probably the best myth we will ever have</a>.” Humanity’s “mythopoeic” needs would one day be fulfilled by the epic grandeur of scientific materialism. Science would claim its rightful place as a superior “alternative mythology.” With his subsequent publication of <a href="http://wtf.tw/ref/wilson.pdf">Consilience</a> in 1998, he laid out his vision of scientific knowledge so complete and unified that it would tell us who we are and where we came from. A number of Berry’s followers seized upon Wilson’s prophetic words and <a href="http://thegreatstory.org/Epic-Evol-Journal.html">set to work</a> constructing a sacred narrative.</p>
<p>In a similar vein to Wilson, Dawkins has long argued for the superiority of scientifically clarified – that is, real – forms of wonder and awe vis-à-vis “fake” wonder at mysteries, puzzles or miracles. </p>
<p>Dawkins’ book, The Magic of Reality from 2011, is directed at child audiences. Science in hand, Dawkins takes on the true genesis of rainbows, as well as such vexing queries as “When did everything begin?” and “Why do bad things happen?” The book’s message is that science is not one way of experiencing wonder. It is the authentic way. The magic of reality is “wonderful <em>because</em> it’s real.” </p>
<p>Self-styled evangelists Dowd and Barlow <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcOwS8EFSoU">promote</a> Dawkins’ Magic of Reality as an important step toward a new “religion of reality,” and hail the so-called new atheists as daring <a href="http://thegreatstory.org/dowd-austral.pdf">prophets of reality</a>.</p>
<p>Other advocates include religion scholars <a href="https://environment.yale.edu/profile/tucker/">Mary Evelyn Tucker</a>, <a href="http://environment.yale.edu/profile/grim/">John Grim</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH493NsM31Y">Loyal Rue</a>; mathematical cosmologist <a href="https://storyoftheuniverse.org/">Brian Swimme</a>; “<a href="https://school.bighistoryproject.com/bhplive">big historians</a>” <a href="https://theconversation.com/big-history-why-we-need-to-teach-the-modern-origin-story-10405">David Christian</a> and <a href="http://www.dominican.edu/academics/ahss/undergraduate-programs/history/cbcynthia">Cynthia Stokes Brown</a>; astrophysicist and science educator <a href="http://humbleapproach.templeton.org/complexity/participants.html">Eric Chaisson</a>; and biologist <a href="https://wubio.wustl.edu/goodenough">Ursula Goodenough</a>. </p>
<h2>Cosmology and ethics</h2>
<p>A subset of Berry’s disciples turn not to the seductive – and reductive – paradigm of consilience, or linking together of different disciplines to form a grand unity of knowledge, but to advances in Big Bang cosmology as evidence of the implicit narrative structure of reality. </p>
<p>Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, senior lecturers at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, have teamed up with Berry’s protégé Brian Swimme to launch a multimedia phenomenon called <a href="http://www.journeyoftheuniverse.org/">Journey of the Universe</a>. Their claim is that the past century of cosmological science has brought forth a coherent, comprehensive account of the universe and our place in it. We now understand ourselves as the “heart and mind” of a deeply <a href="http://www.anthropic-principle.com/?q=anthropic_principle/primer">anthropic</a> universe in which our species’ emergence was implicit from the very beginning.</p>
<p>Universe Story movements promote <a href="http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2015/09/14/cosmology-and-the-environment/">cosmology as a source of ethics</a>. They imply we must model our lives after the deep, meaningful patterning of the universe itself which displays impulses of creativity, intimacy and relationality. Yet, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aaddWJtRoQ">Woody Allen recognized</a> in a memorable scene from Annie Hall, it remains unclear how we are to get any practical ethical guidance from the perspective of an expanding universe that seems to render our earthly concerns meaningless. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">What’s the point? The universe is expanding.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>How might the inherent creativity of the cosmos – say, the nuclear reactions of stars – point us toward renewable energy sources and away from, say, nuclear reactors or geoengineering? Proponents offer woolly assurances that “wonder will guide us.” Yet, much of the narrative’s wonder seems directed at ourselves. We are the being in whom the universe “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Journey-Universe-Brian-Thomas-Swimme/dp/0300209436/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1443359696&sr=8-1&keywords=journey+of+universe+book">shivers in wonder at itself</a>,” the one species complex enough to have pierced the cosmic veil.</p>
<h2>A planetary education</h2>
<p>The new cosmology has real-world impacts. It seeks to confer unity and a comprehensive context to every stage of the educational process, from childhood to professional training. The idea of E O Wilson’s Consilience similarly insists that unity of knowledge offers the best way to reform university education, to “renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts.” </p>
<p>Disciplines oriented to the study of human culture will eventually cede much of their territory to science, Wilson predicts. The humanities earn their keep as disciplines that serve science by embellishing its authoritative narrative with poetry, art or dance. As Wilson <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Green-Space-Time-The-Science/dp/0387947949">explains</a>, science provides “real” content and the humanities obligingly disseminate it in appealing forms: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“the humanities could in effect continue to do their thing, but they would have vastly richer material to work with – grander themes – because the real world of the universe, from black holes to the origin of consciousness, offers far more complex and grander themes [than the humanities or religion].”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wilson’s followers call for a consilient college curriculum that introduces students to the Epic as the integrating theme of their entire university experience. A number of universities around the country, including <a href="https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/%7Eejchaisson/current_teaching.pdf">Harvard University</a> and <a href="http://epsc.wustl.edu/courses/epsc210a/">Washington University</a> in St Louis, offer courses on The Epic of Evolution or The Universe Story. These courses introduce students to a grand narrative whose meanings are by definition largely given in advance, whose options for student self-understanding are neatly contained and prescripted. </p>
<p>The new religion of reality may be coming to a classroom or pulpit near you. You will know it by its tagline: “One world calls for one story.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48225/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa H. Sideris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Proponents of Big History say science provides a better sacred story for humanity than traditional faiths. Will this lead to an era of better stewardship of the environment?
Lisa H. Sideris, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Director IU Consortium for the Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society, Indiana University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/47444
2015-10-07T10:09:36Z
2015-10-07T10:09:36Z
Australia’s war on feral cats: shaky science, missing ethics
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94861/original/image-20150915-29620-eggpkq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Feral cat with galah, mounted specimen. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feral_cat_with_galah.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In July 2015, the Australian government announced a “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/rweb/world/australia-plans-to-kill-2-million-cats-by-2020/2015/07/16/3df490a80b27b6b62907a5ce728e9611_story.html">war on feral cats</a>,” with the intention of killing over two million felines by 2020. The <a href="http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive-species/feral-animals-australia/feral-cats">threat abatement plan</a> to enforce this policy includes a mix of shooting, trapping and a reputedly “humane” poison. </p>
<p>Some conservationists in Australia are hailing this as an important step toward the <a href="https://www.rewildingaustralia.com.au/the-plan-to-eradicate-feral-cats/">rewilding of Australia’s outback</a>, or the idea of restoring the continent’s biodiversity to its state prior to European contact. Momentum has also been building in the United States for <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/culturing-science/killer-cats/">similar action</a> to protect the many animals outdoor cats kill every year.</p>
<p>In opposition are animal advocates including the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/02/morrissey-attacks-australian-plan-to-cull-2-million-feral-cats">British singer Morrissey</a> who are appalled at the rhetoric of a war on cats and promote nonlethal methods of controlling the negative effects of cats as being <a href="http://www.humanesociety.org/animals/cats/facts/cat_statement.html">more effective and humane</a>. </p>
<p>Who is right? The truth lies somewhere in between and is a matter of both science and ethics. </p>
<h2>Guesstimates</h2>
<p>Today’s <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/cat-sense/id612428184?mt=11">house cat</a> (<em>Felis catus</em>) originated as the North African wildcat (<em>Felis silvestris lybica</em>). When a house cat roams or lives outside, it is called an outdoor cat. This category includes cats who are owned, abandoned or lost. Feral cats are house cats who have reverted to the wild, and are generally born and raised without human companionship or socialization. This makes a huge difference in their behavior.</p>
<p>After a certain point as kittens, cats are almost impossible to socialize and are “feral” – from the Latin term <em>ferus</em> for wild. While there is a related debate over whether house cats are <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/07/cat_domestication_debate_over_hunting_tameness_docility_affection_feral.html">domesticated</a> at all, they have nevertheless so thoroughly infiltrated human societies that they are now distributed throughout the world, and along with dogs are <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/28/where-cats-are-more-popular-than-dogs-in-the-u-s-and-all-over-the-world/">humankind’s favorite mammalian companion animal</a>. </p>
<p>From a scientific perspective, there is little doubt that under particular geographic and ecological conditions, outdoor cats can threaten native species. This is especially true on oceanic islands whose wildlife evolved without cats and are consequently unadapted to feline predators. For example, when cats were introduced to Pacific islands by European colonists, their numbers grew until they frequently posed a <a href="http://www.livescience.com/2102-birds-glad-cats-eat-rats.html">threat to native wildlife</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94854/original/image-20150915-29607-s9xvkt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Feral cat map.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/invasive-species/feral-animals-australia/feral-cats">Australian Department of the Environment</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On mainlands, areas of high biodiversity that are isolated from surrounding habitats can respond like “terrestrial islands” to introduced species. In Australia, cats can be a threat to quolls, a carnivorous marsupial, and other indigenous wildlife if dingoes or Tasmanian devils are not around to keep them in check. A similar situation occurs in North American cities and countrysides, where coyotes vastly reduce the impact of outdoor cats on wildlife. </p>
<p>This ability to disturb ecological communities should come as no surprise. Scientists often refer to species as native, exotic or invasive. While there are historical criteria that play a role in making this determination, it is primarily a value judgment about where a species comes from, and whether it has a positive, neutral or destructive impact on the environment. Over the course of time, ecological communities adapt and immigrant species become native to their place. The baseline for assessing damage is usually the natural world as it was before the European age of exploration. </p>
<p>Cats are indeed an exotic species outside their ancestral home (Europe and North Africa), and they interact with the natural environment in myriad ways. They can also run amok by the standards noted above. However, whether cats are judged destructive is really a matter of context. Isolated Pacific islands that have never seen a cat are a far cry from cities where they are a normal element of urban ecology. </p>
<p>Of course, we might say the same about humans, although outside of extremists’ debates over politics and immigration, we do not use these terms nor advocate the mass slaughter of other people. We recognize this to be unethical. </p>
<p>Still, some conservationists claim that cats are the single largest threat to biodiversity regardless of ecological context. One oft-cited <a href="http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n1/full/ncomms2380.html">study</a> in <em>Nature Communications</em> claims that 1.4 to 3.7 billion birds and 6.9 to 20.7 billion small mammals are killed by cats every year in the United States alone. Yet the scientific case for this claim is shaky at best. </p>
<p>Why? Virtually every study of outdoor cats assumes that because cats in some habitats threaten biodiversity, they are a threat across all habitats everywhere. This is a projection from a small set of localized case studies to the world at large. In other words, a guesstimate. </p>
<p>This is why the ranges of birds and mammals preyed upon that are cited above are so wide. Such guesstimates are neither descriptive nor predictive of the world. Some advocates have criticized such studies as junk science. For a particularly sustained critique see <a href="http://voxfelina.com">Vox Felina</a>, which aims to “improve the lives of feral cats” through more thorough discussion. I think calling the academic literature junk science overstates the case a tad. Such studies can improve our understanding about what happens in similar situations, even if they cannot be generalized to all cats everywhere. </p>
<p>These studies, though, make little effort to understand the complexities of outdoor cats interacting with wildlife. When they do, the picture they reveal is quite different from what the guesstimates assume. </p>
<p>For instance, <a href="http://www.kittycams.uga.edu/research.html">kitty-cam studies</a> show that most cats hang out, visit the neighbors and do not travel far from home. In addition, if there are competing predators nearby, they tend to <a href="http://senr.osu.edu/about-us/news/feral-cats-avoid-urban-coyotes-are-surprisingly-healthy">exclude cats</a> from the area. This is particularly true of coyotes in the North America, and is thought to be the case with <a href="http://conservationmagazine.org/2015/02/dingoes-could-be-the-answer-to-australias-wildlife-decline/">dingoes</a> and perhaps <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/11/tasmanian-devils-on-mainland-would-reduce-feral-cats-and-foxes-study-finds">Tasmanian devils</a> in Australia. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94858/original/image-20150915-29616-1dukxz2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Canis lupus dingo, Cleland Wildlife Park.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And shocking as it might seem, there are no empirical studies on just how many feral or outdoor cats exist. No one has actually tried to count the actual number of cats out there. All the numbers bandied about are guesstimates. </p>
<p>For example, it is common for the Australian press and authorities to claim there are roughly 20 million feral cats. Yet as ABC News in Australia discovered, these figures are <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-13/greg-hunt-feral-cat-native-animals-fact-check/5858282">unverifiable</a>. Even the authors of the scientific report used to justify the war on cats admit there is <a href="https://theconversation.com/to-eradicate-feral-cats-we-need-to-know-how-many-are-out-there-33014">no scientific basis</a> for estimating the number of outdoor cats in Australia. Similar uncertainties apply to guesstimates about feral cats in Europe and North America. They exemplify the term “urban legend.” </p>
<p>So scientists really have no idea how many feral cats are in Australia or North America. What’s more, they have a poor grasp of how much of a real impact feral or nonferal cats make on wildlife. </p>
<p>If the science about cats and their impact on biodiversity is this unreliable, then why is Australia talking about a war against feral cats? Why are conservationists in North America in such a lather about instituting similar lethal control programs? </p>
<p>The answer: it is all about ethics. </p>
<h2>Look in the mirror</h2>
<p>While rarely voiced, many conservationists hold unarticulated moral norms about repairing the damage done to Mother Earth by human civilization. </p>
<p>The moral responsibilities of being good stewards of the Earth mean the protection of endangered species, the preservation of natural habitat, conserving resources, reducing pollution and so on. Given the depredations of the human species (as a whole) on the Earth’s other life forms and living systems, environmental conservation is indeed a praiseworthy goal. Especially when it considers how to <a href="https://theconversation.com/setting-aside-half-the-earth-for-rewilding-the-ethical-dimension-46121">rewild the Earth</a> so that other species besides humans might thrive. </p>
<p>Yet this worldview suffers from a number of blind spots that many conservationist are simply unwilling to see. </p>
<p>The first is the moral value of individual animals. Most conservationists recognize the moral value of ecological systems. Aldo Leopold’s “<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/sand-county-almanac-other/id774942656?mt=11">land ethic</a>” is a universal touchstone for this belief. Leopold held that humans and nature (collectively “the land”) were part of the same community to whom ethical responsibilities were owed. Yet conservationists still tend to view animals as biological machines, functional units of ecological processes, and commodities for human use. </p>
<p>The problem is that they fail to apply the lessons learned from their own dogs and cats – namely, that many nonhuman animals are feeling and thinking creatures and have <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/being-animal/id677229392?mt=11">intrinsic value</a> in their <a href="https://theconversation.com/does-nature-have-value-beyond-what-it-provides-humans-47825">own right</a>. In other words, individual animals as well as ecological communities have moral value apart from any use we may have for them. This means we have ethical responsibilities to cats as well as to biodiversity, and need to do a better job of balancing the well-being of both.</p>
<p>The second blind spot is blaming the victim. Are cats any more of an invasive species than human beings? Who transported cats across the world so that they are now one of the most widely distributed mammalian carnivores? See <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/cat-sense/id612428184?mt=11">John Bradwhaw’s Cat Sense (2013)</a> for a history of this global distribution. </p>
<p>When compared to humanity’s destruction and degradation of habitats, extinction of species, and the sprawl of our cities and economic activity, are we really to believe that it is cats who are the enemy of biodiversity? And what about <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/04/11/invasive_species_will_save_us_the_new_way_we_must_think_about_the_environment_now/">cats who “fit” into urban ecologies</a>, taking the place of otherwise absent predators and contributing ecological services in the form of pest control? Blaming cats instead of humanity’s unsustainable behaviors seems too easy, too simple, and a deflection away from <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/08/150820212652.htm">the species that is truly culpable</a> for the sorry state of our world. </p>
<p>The third issue conservationists do not typically address is the questionable moral legitimacy of lethal management. Traditional conservation likes to think of lethal measures, such as hunting, trapping and poisoning, as an unproblematic tool for achieving management goals. The legitimacy of this rests on the assumption that “individuals don’t matter,” itself a reflection that only people and/or ecosystems, not individual animals, have intrinsic moral value. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94857/original/image-20150915-29630-19tqhnf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Reporter Gregg Borschmann holds a dead feral cat on French Island, Victoria.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/gregg-and-cat/5802256">Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet there is a powerful movement of wildlife advocates and managers pushing back against this presumption. Flying under various names like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wild-Neighbors-Approach-Wildlife-Edition/dp/0974840084">humane wildlife management</a> and <a href="http://compassionateconservation.net">compassionate conservation</a> – its proponents say we should consider the well-being of both ecosystems and individual animals. This is right not only because of the intrinsic value of the animals being managed, but because many of these animals require stable social structures to thrive. </p>
<p>While feral cats may live solitary lives, outdoor cats in general are very social, frequently living with human beings, being cared for as community cats and interacting with other felines in extended cat colonies. Out of respect for cats and the people who care for them, we should give preference to nonlethal alternatives in management first and foremost. </p>
<p>To be sure, advocates for outdoor cats often have their own scientific and ethical blind spots about cats on the whole and about nonlethal management strategies. There may even be times when the threat of feral cats to a vulnerable species is so great that lethal action may be justified.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, even the most ardent supporter of rewilding should admit that it is human beings who bear direct moral responsibility for the ongoing loss of biodiversity in our world. A war on cats ignores their intrinsic value, wrongly blames them for mistakes of our own making, and fails to adequately use nonlethal measures to manage cats and wildlife. </p>
<p>As an ethicist, I care about both native wildlife and cats. It is time to stop blaming the victim, face up to our own culpability and seek to rewild our world with an eye to the ethics of our actions. There is no justification for a war on outdoor cats – feral or otherwise – based on shaky science and an absence of ethical reasoning.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47444/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William Lynn consults with government agencies and non-profit organizations on the ethics of managing animals, wild and domestic. </span></em></p>
Australia wants to kill off two million feral cats and momentum for similar plans is growing in the US. Is there a good case for killing or neutering outdoor cats to protect biodiversity?
William S. Lynn, Research Scientist in Ethics and Public Policy, Clark University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/47825
2015-10-02T08:33:43Z
2015-10-02T08:33:43Z
Does nature have value beyond what it provides humans?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95429/original/image-20150919-31758-10t4hoj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nature, reflected</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">John A. Vucetich</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>You can drive a nail with a hammer, and you can pull one. With a pencil you can write a poem or a song. Hammers and pencils are clearly useful – instrumentally valuable, that is. But if the pencil snaps or the hammer cracks, then it’s off to the trash heap. </p>
<p>Your daughter is different. She may be useful in mowing the lawn and providing a tax write-off, but she also possesses value far beyond her utility. Daughters are also intrinsically valuable.</p>
<p>What about the intrinsic value of nature? Does nature have only pencil- and hammer-like values, or does nature also possess intrinsic value?</p>
<p>A handful of very vocal conservationists these days make assertions about the exclusive importance of <a href="http://e360.yale.edu/feature/ecosystem_services_whats_wrong_with_putting_a_price_on_nature/2583/">nature’s instrumental value</a>. We will not be motivated to protect nature, they assert, unless we appreciate the full range of “<a href="https://theconversation.com/us/topics/ecosystem-services">ecosystems services</a>” nature provides to humans (water purification, pollination and the like). In turn, they make claims about, even ridicule, the failure of appeals to conservation premised upon the intrinsic value of nature. </p>
<p>This fervent commitment to the instrumental value of nature even trickles down to individual, highly sentient, parts of nature. It’s okay to kill lions, they say, because killing a lion for a trophy can generate <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-killing-lions-like-cecil-may-actually-be-good-for-conservation-45400">important conservation revenue</a>. A lion’s life is, they say, instrumentally valuable, a means to an end. </p>
<p>All of these assertions are built upon the assumed truth of an empirical claim. They assume that only by appealing to the instrumental value of nature will we motivate environmental action, because, they assume, that’s how humans value nature. We are, that is, anthropocentric (from the Greek, meaning human-centered). Everyone knows that, right?</p>
<p>Actually, as it turns out, not right.</p>
<h2>Widely held view</h2>
<p>In our <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12464">research</a> we found that the premise currently underpinning so much conservation effort is wildly mistaken. </p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.michaelpnelson.com/Publications_files/Bruskotter%20et%20al.%20%282015%29%20IV%20Report.pdf">survey we conducted</a> with Ohio residents – hardly a bastion of tree-hugging-granola-munching-Birkenstock-wearing-Prius drivers – demonstrated that more than 82% of Ohioans acknowledged the intrinsic value of wildlife. A nationally representative <a href="http://www.michaelpnelson.com/Publications_files/Bruskotter%20et%20al.%20%282015%29%20IV%20Report.pdf">survey</a> of adults revealed very similar numbers (81%). Moreover, we see this high level of intrinsic value attribution across demographic groups: whether rural residents or urbanites, rich or poor, male or female, hunters or non-hunters. Interestingly, more than 90% of people who strongly identified as “conservationists” in the Ohio survey acknowledged nature’s intrinsic value. This suggests that conservationists who reject nature’s intrinsic value are out of the mainstream of their peers.</p>
<p>But if so very many of us believe in nature’s intrinsic value, then why do we seem to behave otherwise? Why do we continue to pollute more than necessary? Why do we continue to destroy natural habitats by expanding human developments in places where human well-being is already high? Why do we as a society make so many decisions that appear to be, or that actually are, inconsistent with the idea that nature possesses intrinsic value?</p>
<p>Perhaps because while you believe in nature’s intrinsic value, you don’t believe that enough of the rest of us share your belief for it to be an effective basis for conservation. Perhaps, that is, we’ve bought into a false narrative about our own ethical beliefs?</p>
<h2>Acknowledgment</h2>
<p>This is one of the many mistaken ideas about nature’s intrinsic value, but it’s an important one. The assumptions we make (rightly or wrongly) about the world, including about the way people value that world, control the approaches we take or believe to be viable, the questions we ask or fail to ask, and ultimately the outcomes we can expect or never even imagine. It’s vital that we get this right; it colors every aspect of our relationship with nature.</p>
<p>So, let’s give ourselves some credit, even a little pat on the back (but gently, only one hand, just for a moment). Now, let’s think hard about what widespread acknowledgment of nature’s intrinsic value means. </p>
<p>It means that we are not necessarily the equivalent of morally self-absorbed infants. We are more morally mature than we might have imagined, than people keep insisting. </p>
<p>But this is bittersweet, because with moral maturity comes moral responsibility. As we acknowledge that we attribute intrinsic value to nature, we must hold ourselves accountable for that acknowledgment.</p>
<p>We invite conservationists and the conservation community to engage in a moment of reflection: we say we believe nature has intrinsic value; from that belief, what follows?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47825/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Paul Nelson receives funding from The National Science Foundation. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeremy T. Bruskotter is a member of the Terrestrial Wildlife Ecology Laboratory (TWEL) at Ohio State University. He receives receives research funding from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>John A Vucetich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Should conservationists ‘sell’ the value of nature by focusing on the ecosystem services nature provides people? Surveys show this may be the wrong tack.
Michael Paul Nelson, Professor of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Oregon State University
Jeremy T. Bruskotter, Associate Professor of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University
John A Vucetich, Associate Professor of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, Michigan Technological University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/46121
2015-08-26T09:50:47Z
2015-08-26T09:50:47Z
Setting aside half the Earth for ‘rewilding’: the ethical dimension
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92717/original/image-20150821-31391-7a173d.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Wildlife corridors: four proposals to 'rewild' portions of North America.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/a2/38/a238356c-4419-4640-b647-e80651253fdf/wild-map.png">Smithsonian Institute</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>A much-anticipated book in conservation and natural science circles is EO Wilson’s <a href="http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294989875">Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life</a>, which is due early next year. It builds on his <a href="http://eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson-on-saving-half-the-earth/">proposal</a> to set aside half the Earth for the preservation of biodiversity. </p>
<p>The famous biologist and naturalist would do this by establishing huge biodiversity parks to protect, restore and connect habitats at a continental scale. Local people would be integrated into these parks as environmental educators, managers and rangers – a model drawn from existing large-scale conservation projects such as Area de Conservación Guanacaste (<a href="http://www.acguanacaste.ac.cr">ACG</a>) in northwestern Costa Rica.</p>
<p>The backdrop for this discussion is that we are in the sixth great extinction event in earth’s history. More species are being <a href="https://theconversation.com/study-humans-causing-sixth-extinction-event-on-earth-43439">lost today than at any time</a> since the end of the dinosaurs. There is no mystery as to why this is happening: it is a direct result of human depredations, habitat destruction, overpopulation, resource depletion, urban sprawl and climate change.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.mcz.harvard.edu/Departments/Entomology/wilson_e_o.html">Wilson</a> is one of the world’s premier natural scientists – an expert on ants, the father of island biogeography, apostle of the notion that humans share a bond with other species (<a href="http://www.wilderdom.com/evolution/BiophiliaHypothesis.html">biophilia</a>) and a herald about the danger posed by extinction. On these and other matters he is also an eloquent writer, having written numerous books on biodiversity, science, and society. So when Wilson started to talk about half-Earth several years ago, people started to listen.</p>
<p>As a scholar of ethics and public policy with an interest in animals and the environment, I have been following the discussion of half-Earth for some time. I like the idea and think it is feasible. Yet it suffers from a major blind spot: a human-centric view on the value of life. Wilson’s entry into this debate, and his seeming evolution on matters of ethics, is an invitation to explore how people ought to live with each other, other animals and the natural world, particularly if vast tracts are set aside for wildlife.</p>
<h2>The ethics of Wilson’s volte-face</h2>
<p>I heard Wilson speak for the first time in Washington, DC in the early 2000s. At that talk, Wilson was resigned to the inevitable loss of much of the world’s biodiversity. So he advocated a global biodiversity survey that would sample and store the world’s biotic heritage. In this way, we might still benefit from biodiversity’s genetic information in terms of biomedical research, and perhaps, someday, revive an extinct species or two.</p>
<p>Not a bad idea in and of itself. Still, it was a drearily fatalistic speech, and one entirely devoid of any sense of moral responsibility to the world of nonhuman animals and nature.</p>
<p>What is striking about Wilson’s argument for half-Earth is not the apparent about-face from cataloging biodiversity to restoring it. It is the moral dimension he attaches to it. In several <a href="https://nature.berkeley.edu/breakthroughs/sp15/eo-wilson-on-saving-half-the-earth">interviews</a>, he references the need for humanity to develop an ethic that cares about planetary life, and does not place the wants and needs of a single species (<em><a href="http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/origins/homo_sapiens.php">Homo sapiens sapiens</a></em>) above the well-being of all other species.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92841/original/image-20150824-17779-17f6tbi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The half-Earth proposal prompts people to consider the role of humans in nature.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jene/419699555/in/photolist-D654e-eCUHSG-5qsMBv-gCsst9-cd6XhA-qCtKeC-qmdNBe-jXMbM1-uij2N7-oVTrg5-jhpeX7-pcEFNN-jHSXR5-2VrHzQ-oA9P8r-pPCtf4-eMscvg-vXEm1y-drgfd5-4CxdNT-qjATV6-3TKHkz-81xEsS-aSQNnx-hjDvha-dX3oNV-85GEV8-9qmd7n-vppGv1-rYUCUv-pmXpMY-9cahzk-oWQnad-6xfxNh-ciCQhw-tDsN1n-qiuJcv-akakLB-8T3riN-94xiiR-j9nC3v-65tAKD-ppw7RA-rGyojn-sqi3Zg-eMZc6J-pnGy9o-iV2kJP-dkJmJQ-jQEu8F">jene/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To my ear, this sounds great, but I am not exactly sure how far it goes. In the past, Wilson’s discussions of conservation ethics appear to me clearly anthropocentric. They espouse the notion that we are exceptional creatures at the apex of evolution, the sole species that has intrinsic value in and of ourselves, and thus we are to be privileged above all other species. </p>
<p>In this view, we care about nature and biodiversity only because we care about ourselves. Nature is useful for us in the sense of resources and ecological services, but it has no value in and of itself. In ethics talk, people have intrinsic value while nature’s only value is what it can do for people – extrinsic value. </p>
<p>For example, in his 1993 book <a href="http://islandpress.org/book/the-biophilia-hypothesis">The Biophilia Hypothesis</a>, Wilson argues for “the necessity of a robust and richly textured anthropocentric ethics apart from the issues of rights [for other animals or ecosystems] – one based on the hereditary needs of our own species. In addition to the well-documented utilitarian potential of wild species, the diversity of life has immense aesthetic and spiritual value.” </p>
<p>The passage indicates Wilson’s long-held view that biodiversity is important because of what it does for humanity, including the resources, beauty and spirituality people find in nature. It sidesteps questions of whether animals and the rest of nature have intrinsic value apart from human use. </p>
<p>His evolving position, as reflected in the half-Earth proposal, seems much more in tune with what ethicist call non-anthropocentrism – that humanity is simply one marvelous but no more special outcome of evolution; that other beings, species and/or ecosystems also have intrinsic value; and that there is no reason to automatically privilege us over the rest of life. </p>
<p>Consider this recent <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/11/141102-edward-wilson-meaning-existence-darwin-extraterrestrials-ngbooktalk/">statement</a> by Wilson: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What kind of a species are we that we treat the rest of life so cheaply? There are those who think that’s the destiny of Earth: we arrived, we’re humanizing the Earth, and it will be the destiny of Earth for us to wipe humans out and most of the rest of biodiversity. But I think the great majority of thoughtful people consider that a morally wrong position to take, and a very dangerous one.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The non-anthropocentric view does not deny that biodiversity and nature provide material, aesthetic and spiritual “resources.” Rather, it holds there is something more – that the community of life has value independent of the resources it provides humanity. Non-anthropocentric ethics requires, therefore, a more caring approach to people’s impact on the planet. Whether Wilson is really leaving anthropocentrism behind, time will tell. But for my part, I at least welcome his opening up possibilities to discuss less prejudicial views of animals and the rest of nature.</p>
<h2>The 50% solution</h2>
<p>It is interesting to note that half-Earth is not a new idea. In North America, the half-Earth concept first arose in the 1990s as a discussion about wilderness in the <a href="http://www.deepecology.org/deepecology.htm">deep ecology movement</a>. Various nonprofits that arose out of that movement continued to develop the idea, in particular the <a href="http://www.wildlandsnetwork.org">Wildlands Network</a>, the <a href="http://www.rewilding.org">Rewilding Institute</a> and the <a href="http://www.wild.org/">Wild Foundation</a>. </p>
<p>These organizations use a mix of conservation science, education and public policy initiatives to promote protecting and restoring continental-scale habitats and corridors, all with an eye to preserving the native flora and fauna of North America. One example is ongoing work to connect the <a href="http://public.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/a2/38/a238356c-4419-4640-b647-e80651253fdf/wild-map.png.">Yellowstone to Yukon ecosystems</a> along the spine of the Rocky Mountains.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/92838/original/image-20150824-17755-t5zhuf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Take it up a notch? The British Columbia Ministry of Transportation recently started to add signs warning motorists when they are likely to encounter wildlife.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tranbc/14372746750/in/photolist-nU55Ss-pbQkd5-pbQfH3-oWn3sn-fsHM5S-fsHPdw-dp7tbU-dp7iSH-dp7rG5-dp7rmJ-dp7e8R-dp7jes-dp7kpt-dp7iBa-dp7pTj-dp7eDR-dp7fdc-dp7qhj-dp7u3A-dp7qMd-dp7jGi-dp7bza-dp7cSk-dp7ftv-dp7r9b-fstuUp-fsHMsf-fsHNgN-fsttpX-fstoqX-fstsDH-fsHQhd-fsHJFu-fstqGa-fsHRgm-fsttHP-fsHLaC-fsHKBG-fsHJqd-fsHQTb-fstocr-fstupX-fsHN49-fsHHQq-fstuB6-fstnYR-oWo8Ff-fsHLNG-fsHJX9-eGUnMz">British Columbia Ministry of Transportation</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When I was a graduate student, the term half-Earth had not yet been used, but the idea was in the air. My classmates and I referred to it as the “50% solution.” We chose this term because of the work of Reed Noss and Allen Cooperrider’s 1994 book,<a href="http://www.islandpress.org/book/saving-natures-legacy"> Savings Nature’s Legacy</a>. Amongst other things, the book documents that, depending on the species and ecosystems in question, approximately 30% to 70% of the original habitats of the Earth would be necessary to sustain our planet’s biodiversity. So splitting the difference, we discussed the 50% solution to describe this need.</p>
<p>This leads directly into my third point. The engagement of Wilson and others with the idea of half-Earth and rewilding presupposes but does not fully articulate the need for an urban vision, one where cities are ecological, sustainable and resilient. Indeed, Wilson has yet to spell out what we do with the people and infrastructure that are not devoted to maintaining and teaching about his proposed biodiversity parks. This is not a criticism, but an urgent question for ongoing and creative thinking.</p>
<p>Humans are urbanizing like never before. Today, the majority of people live in cities, and by the end of the 21st century, over 90% of people will live in a metropolitan area. If we are to meet the compelling needs of human beings, we have to remake cities into sustainable and resilient “humanitats” that produce a good life. </p>
<p>Such a good life is not to be measured in simple gross domestic product or consumption, but rather in well-being – freedom, true equality, housing, health, education, recreation, meaningful work, community, sustainable energy, urban farming, green infrastructure, open space in the form of parks and refuges, contact with companion and wild animals, and a culture that values and respects the natural world.</p>
<p>To do all this in the context of saving half the Earth for its own sake is a tall order. Yet it is a challenge that we are up to if we have the will and ethical vision to value and coexist in a more-than-human world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46121/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>William S. Lynn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Proposals to set aside vast tracts of land for wildlife raise ethical questions, challenging the human-centric view of the value of life.
William S. Lynn, Research Scientist in Ethics and Public Policy, Clark University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/43522
2015-07-29T10:20:09Z
2015-07-29T10:20:09Z
Do you suffer from climate guilt? A dose of philosophy can help
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86606/original/image-20150627-1421-1l2cy7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">René Magritte's The False Mirror (1928).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.moma.org/collection/works/78938?locale=en">© 2015 C. Herscovici, Brussels / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>People cannot engage in something they cannot see or feel. We need concrete reasons to care and act. In this way, climate change presents a threefold intangible challenge:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>we can perceive the weather, but the climate system is something rather abstract, a statistical construct </p></li>
<li><p>we now know climate change is anthropogenic, or man-made, but how can we understand this? One way is to say: mankind is the reason, but this becomes also very abstract. Who actually is represented with mankind? Another way is to say: China or the US is to blame, as if we are speaking of subjects and not concepts. We cannot grasp how you and I contribute to climate change, not by doing something extraordinary, but with our everyday lives </p></li>
<li><p>we cannot perceive how we as individuals can contribute to mitigating climate change. Eighteenth-century philosopher George Berkeley stated that “<a href="http://philosophycourse.info/lecsite/lec-berke.html">To be is to be perceived</a>.” If we can’t see the change in the climate system, nor the reason why it is actually occurring, does it exist in our daily lives? </p></li>
</ol>
<p>This situation requires people to consider how they perceive climate change and what they can do to make climate change more tangible and real in their daily lives. </p>
<h2>The intangible climate</h2>
<p>When talking about the climate system, we have to realize that we are not dealing with something tangible. Climate is not to be seen outside the window; climate is not the weather. It is a collection of data and patterns in a statistical construct. </p>
<p>Furthermore, climate is not here and now. Its only possible way to be perceived is through recognition of patterns, by computer modeling and, most importantly, through representations. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/85639/original/image-20150618-23246-1as1d8u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=628&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A common image to depict global warming. But does it help people internalize the reality of climate change?</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Images can represent the effects of climate change, such as desertification or deforestation, but not climate change itself. However, visual representations of climate change are very common in advocacy groups’ campaigns, showing polar bears, icebergs, deserts or images that show the world on fire. </p>
<p>These images become the referent – that is, climate change – itself, thus shaping our perceptions of it, the importance we give it and our perception of our own capacity to do something about it. This is why, if publicity and science communication campaigns represent climate change with images of deserts or polar bears, the public will perceive it as something distant and unimportant to their cosmopolitan lives. Or, on the other hand, these images may shape their perceptions to think climate change is something so big that individual actions are futile.</p>
<h2>The intangible cause</h2>
<p>The most recent Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) 5th-Assessment Report shows that human influence on the climate system is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Hcu3jH8G4">clear</a>. However, do we feel identified as culprits? Who is represented by mankind? Can we really relate to this?</p>
<p>Another way to see the problem is by saying: OK, the US, China and other countries are the most important producers of carbon emissions, and so they are to blame for climate change. However, there is a very important reason that all these industries are polluting: to satisfy our consumer needs. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89244/original/image-20150721-24295-xld280.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tough times call for…thinking.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/seatbelt67/502255276/in/photolist-LobZJ-LjTJM-3bNwZu-37oPG1-7kfv9-6YPSED-8pxsow-grjT3-3Q4Fb-8fBwp6-a1svqC-bkYmti-f2YHUq-bDbK6p-anC7Rq-K5Mdx-8BctUs-hghp5H-7kfva-q3pBg-5dDeSD-dVmK3J-6RwhiQ-dnocRJ-4Ug4wE-pRPd3-EmBkv-jFgTUZ-dC1gvd-7wx1h5-ugkuch-4L4rGd-cC4uLE-7o7aAu-5BXE86-aG4e4P-4MPC9a-35Gv8m-4JKA1m-avE5rE-87RZg-53CKEn-9g7ncv-8g6V5s-BySDo-3sYsmd-5RTQis-8Wtj45-dstzro-mEvhC">Brian Hillegas/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This ultimately means that anthropogenic climate change is not due to “mankind” or “China’s developmental needs” but because individuals like you and me want to live comfortable lives, with three cars, a big flat-screen TV, a laptop in standby, a fillet waiting in the fridge, etc. How can we connect all these indulgences with the melting of the Arctic or with the displacement of thousands in the South Pacific? </p>
<p>Perhaps, we might think, that ignorance of the consequences of climate change is exactly what makes us behave like we do. Yet the IPCC and many other scientific institutions have warned us over and over about the dire impacts of runaway climate change. </p>
<p>As philosopher David Hume affirmed: “‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” What Hume <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/">argued</a> is that it is not pure reason that drives ethical behavior but passion and feelings. Facts are cold and abstract and difficult to relate to.</p>
<h2>The intangible reason to act</h2>
<p>Even if we understand that the climate system is intangible, and we understand it is not “mankind” but our personal, cosmopolitan lives to blame for climate change, how can we act? Do we see a connection between our consumer patterns and people being dislocated from sea level rise on the far side of the world? Can we act to save people who are not even born yet? Are my actions significant? </p>
<p>Perhaps we can think our individual actions are futile but analogous to our contribution to democracy by voting. No, the president didn’t get elected because of you, but you are part of the percentage that gave him the victory.</p>
<p>The grand majority of people on Earth live and work in urban settlements. In the city we are alienated from nature. We do not see it, and we do not feel connected to it. However, it is crucial for us city dwellers to understand the importance of urban settlements in the cause and mitigation of climate change given that, according to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg2/drafts/fd/WGIIAR5-Chap8_FGDall.pdf">IPCC</a>, a high proportion of the population and economic activities most at risk from climate change, and a high proportion of global greenhouse gas emissions, are generated by urban-based activities and residents.</p>
<p>However, how can we see climate change in the city? We must learn to see our own contribution to climate change. And it comes as easily as this: practically everything we do creates carbon emissions directly or indirectly. </p>
<p>Every action comes with a carbon price tag attached to it. Do you want ice in your soda? It costs. Do you want to keep the computer on the whole night? It costs, too. Learn the carbon footprint of everything you do in your daily <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/series/the-carbon-footprint-of-everything">life</a>. Furthermore, you can learn about the most polluting companies you are contributing to without even <a href="https://www.foe.co.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/mind-your-step-report-76803.pdf">knowing</a>. </p>
<p>By understanding our daily contribution to climate change, perhaps we will finally see its real cause where we couldn’t see it before. As author Henry David Thoreau <a href="http://philosiblog.com/2012/02/10/its-not-what-you-look-at-that-matters-its-what-you-see/">said</a>: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43522/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luis R. Fernandez-Carril does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A philosopher’s thoughts on how an individual can overcome the feeling of helplessness in the face of global climate change.
Luis R. Fernandez-Carril, Faculty member, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.