Philosophers are uniquely positioned to help stop the worst effects of climate change. Most teachers have the ear of large numbers of students, whose interests and priorities we help to shape. Many teachers at the college and university level decide what large numbers of people will read. Many writers take part in larger conversations that have the potential to reach a much wider audience. Philosophers have many of these opportunities, and the skills to use them. We have many years of specific training in assessing arguments, drawing connections between seemingly disparate topics, and articulating a compelling rationale when there is one to be articulated.
In my experience in climate activism, I have seen over and over again how effective our kind of skills can be. Cutting travel, giving up meat, switching to green energy, and other individual changes have strikingly significant impacts on the environment. But we also know that the greatest contributions to climate change are large, collective undertakings — the Alberta tar sands are roughly the size of England — decided on at the level of governments and corporations, who, in turn, face tremendous pressure from public opinion. One of the things that is most sorely needed to stop the worst effects of climate change is rapidly spreading the idea that climate change is important. Most philosophers are people who are trained in making a compelling case for a well-founded idea. We can create, recognize, and spread conceptual changes that can have a lasting effect.
Let me offer a personal example. For a long time, I thought of climate change deniers with a dismissive sense of superiority. My attitude was based on a particular conception of denial. I thought deniers were people who asserted a negation: in this case, that climate change is not real, or not caused by humans. In Chapter 1 of This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein offers a different conception of denial. For her, the sense of ‘denial’ most relevant to climate change is not assertion, but ‘looking away’, or an inability to face something. Here, I would add, climate change denial can be compared to denial in grief. When we lose a loved one, we can usually tell others that the person has died. We rarely assert that she has not. But we can still be in denial, in the sense that we have not yet integrated into our lives what it means that the person is gone. Reading Klein’s chapter brought me one of my most memorable moments of conceptual change. I put down the book and thought: I’m a climate change denier. All my friends are climate change deniers. We are the deniers. That shift allowed me to become more interested, and to look directly at the stunning impacts of climate change. Soon after that, I became an activist.
I tell this story as one example of a conceptual shift that changes someone’s mind and behavior with respect to climate change. As climate change begins to impact almost every aspect of life, many more such changes are becoming possible.
What I would like to ask philosophers is a question I have not fully answered: what does it look like to integrate climate change into our professional lives? In what ways can our teaching and service incorporate concerns about climate change and sustainability more generally? How does climate change fit into our course content, especially courses on less obviously related topics? This week, I used climate change in a course on evil to talk about atrocity, and planned a fall course on diversity that will start with biodiversity and climate change. If we think about the philosophy of science, or collective responsibility, or contemporary racism, while shedding some of our denial, climate change looms large.
I would like to make two proposals. First, I propose that philosophers who care about climate change put a particular emphasis on integrating climate change into what we already do in our work, rather than adding new activities on top of what we already do. Philosophers are, for the most part, exceptionally busy. If addressing climate change is to be sustainable in our own lives, it will need to add relatively few new hours of work. Although few philosophers will be willing to add 20 or more hours a month of work on climate change, most of us can spend 1-2 hours a month thinking about how to incorporate climate change into what we already do. We can then do some of our normal work of syllabus construction, coming up with examples in class, and contributing to departmental life in ways that address climate change while also enriching our work and our personal lives.
Most of us are only beginning to integrate this topic into its rightful places in our writing, teaching, and service work, let alone share resources or best practices. All kinds of cooperation could be useful. And so I propose, secondly, that we get organized. For some philosophers, “grassroots organizing” is an alienating or dirty word. I’m not sure we need to debate the particular phrase. But I would like to propose that philosophers in all areas of philosophy actively coordinate with each other and develop resources for stopping the worst effects of a change that is already impacting everyone, and disproportionately impacting our students and children. Once again, many areas of our work will benefit, from syllabus design to class examples to professional development to larger discussions to advising students to community engagement.
There are many ways to get started, but I would like to offer one possibility. Rebecca Millsop (The University of Rhode Island) and I are co-founding a group called Philosophers for Sustainability, for people in all areas of philosophy who want to work toward environmental sustainability and stopping climate change in practice. We have a few different projects underway, and are actively seeking new projects and new members. If you would like more information or are interested in joining us, you can browse our website at http://www.philosophersforsustainability.com/, or email us at philosophersforsustainability@gmail.com. We would love to hear from you.
According to the United Nations, “Climate change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment”. It would be great to have as many philosophers thinking together about climate change as possible.
Eugene Chislenko
Eugene Chislenko is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His main interests are in moral philosophy and moral psychology, and in related topics in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and the history of philosophy. He founded Philosophers for Sustainability with Rebecca Millsop in 2019.
Thanks for this, Eugene! Right on.
A study of Earth’s environments, vegetation, and fauna make it clear that climate changes. Camels once lived in the Arctic tundra. Baobab trees once grew in Antarctica. During the African Aqualithic the Sahara was very wet. There are thousands of examples such as these. Perhaps we should make a distinction between climate change, a fact, and the theory of catastrophic global warming due to human activity.
The problem is not the theory of global warming, it is the fact that human activity is mimicking the behavior that lead other species to extinction due alteration in the biosphere. Consumerism and profits of the rich and super-population of the poor are extinguishing natural resources, the catastrophe will come with climate change or without it. If there is a natural tendency to climate change, human activity will accelerate the way to catastrophe. If not, the we will have more time for working the problem of natural resources.
Thanks very much for this, Eugene. You are so right, that we need to integrate an awareness of what’s going on into our lives and into our professional practices. And we really need to get over the denial that has for so long made it impolite at best to speak seriously about such things, even among academic peers.
Climate change is coming on faster and faster now, and we are beginning to see its effects all around the globe. But, horrific as it is, climate change isn’t the only problem we’ve created; the bigger picture is a devastation of the Biosphere, a rending of the Web of Life that’s attained staggering proportions over the last half century or so. Everybody’s heard of endangered species—perhaps thought of as a few rare animals that couldn’t make it, really just curiosities that we can live without—but what most people don’t realize is that extinctions generally come only after a long period of population losses, and that entire populations of animals are dwindling and disappearing at an astounding rate. As of 2018, almost 27,000 species were classified as somewhere along the way to extinction (IUCN Red List 2018; https://www.iucnredlist.org/). Almost half of the mammals for which there is detailed data have lost more than 80% of their ranges since 1900, but to put this in less abstract terms, this means that “as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of populations” (Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo 2017; http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1704949114). And to help us comprehend the magnitude of the loss even more starkly, as well as the nature of what’s taken over the planet in their place, is a report from Yinon Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo (2018; http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1711842115), who calculated the total biomass of all currently living wild terrestrial mammals to be, in round numbers, about 0.003 gigatons of carbon (GtC), while that of all humans on the planet is .06 GtC, and that of all livestock (dominated by cattle and pigs) is 0.10 GtC. A little simple math shows this to mean that the total biomass of all wild land mammals—the ones we’re used to thinking of as “out there” somewhere, the lions and tigers and bears, the elephants and rhinos, the gorillas and orangutans, the jaguars and pumas and tapirs, all of them together—is equal to no more than about 5% of the total human biomass, and makes up less than 2% of the total biomass of all humans together with our livestock.
Most of this “Anthropocene defaunation” (Dirzo et al. 2014; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/345/6195/401) is not even the result of climate change, although it will certainly be aggravated by it, as polar bears and other ice-dependent animals increasingly succumb to starvation in the Arctic. Around the world, however, 60% of the world’s largest carnivores and herbivores are now threatened with extinction, mostly as a result of habitat loss and hunting (Ripple et al. 2016a; https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw092). Population declines in these species are especially prominent in the Amazon, central Africa and south/southeast Asia, as what may have once been the “sustainable” hunting of wild animals for meat has “metamorphosed into a global hunting crisis”—the “bushmeat trade,” where wild animals are often killed for “parts” that can be sold to the wealthy living in urban centers—that now threatens “the immediate survival” of over 300 species of mammals as well as other kinds of wildlife (see Ripple et al., 2016b; http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160498). The removal of the large animals at the tops of food webs can have a dramatic effect on ecosystem dynamics, as changes cascade through the system; moreover, we’re losing the animals at the bottom too, and at an at an even more dramatic rate of decline. There have been reports of a decline in insect biomass of up to 80% over the last several decades (Hallman et al 2017; https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809; Lister and Garcia 2018; http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1722477115), and an extensive review of worldwide data shows that what’s going on “may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world’s insect species over the next few decades” (Sanchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys 2019; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.01.020). Some of the insect loss does appear to be the result of climate change, particularly in the tropics, but increasing land conversion by agriculture and increasing pesticide use look to be the major factors in the temperate zones. It seems the Biosphere itself is breaking down, while we humans sit around fiddling with our iphones.
I’m presenting this information—much of it that I’ve only recently come across myself—because I find it absolutely horrific, that our species has so diminished Life on Earth. I’ve been undergoing an acute grief reaction, one that keeps me up at night, having discovered how seriously we’ve injured the natural world. I think it’s a matter of self-honesty, as well as interspecies ethics, to spread the word and refuse to perpetuate denial on any of these fronts: climate change, driven by an obsession with “economic growth” that just can’t let go of fossil fuels; insane consumerism by the wealthy; the increasing land takeover to feed (inefficiently) growing populations everywhere; the organized crime of the bushmeat trade; all of it. I believe that we all do need to integrate this awareness into our understanding of what it means to be a human being living in this Anthropocene epoch, and perhaps help spur the kind of deep paradigm change that is probably the only thing that can reverse this runaway ecocide, if anything can (Eileen Crist took a strong stand on this topic in a recent issue of Science, 2018; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6420/1242/tab-pdf). Best of luck, Eugene, to you and others who will be working toward making that happen!
I am not of the view that activism is our role, insofar as we are philosophers who are supposed to be working in the Socratic tradition. I think this is especially true in the classroom, where our duty is to maintain critical distance and provide the tools by which our students can form their own views, not convince them of the correctness of our own.
The way that we define ideas, and the kind of language we use to talk about the world, already seems to presuppose a position on issues (eg, a word like ‘apocalypse’ or ‘holocaust’ for instance). Because of this, I don’t think that we can totally get away from taking a position at all, even if we try to maintain a critical distance. From the perspective of “nowhere,” it’s all just a part of nature, right? Is humanity really necessary to the universe? Do humans even have a function in relation to it?
However, even if our language presupposes certain positions on issues, and even if philosophers still choose to make arguments to each other and frame the issue in various ways, there’s still the question of how to address the identified situation. And in this regard, I agree that a philosopher qua philosopher may not be the one who is best equipped to decide how best to engage with or handle perceived situations.
Yes, I think this is pretty much right. I didn’t mean to suggest any sort of absolute neutrality, and I don’t hide my views from students, since if one does, they simply guess and often guess wrong. But I don’t think we should be advocating on behalf of specific causes or policies and especially not those that are currently matters of substantive social and political controversy, as a part of our work and certainly not in the classroom. The latter, indeed, in my mind, betrays our primary obligation to students, which is to help them learn how to develop their own views in a critical manner, not to get them to hold the views that we hold.
The Socratic method is wonderful, as long as those being questioned know enough about what’s going on in the world to have insights that can be elicited. If all they think about is “possible worlds” and don’t have a clue about this real one, maybe not.
What do you think Kant, or Schopenhauer, or Nietzsche would have to say, discovering how much we have so diminished the natural world? And the fact that we are still planning on continuing full steam ahead in the same direction?
I can’t help but agree with Daniel’s point. Activism could be done by philosophers, but not qua philosopher. Some philosophers, it seems, turn to more active ways of engaging with current affairs by authoring novels (eg, Ayn Rand) or by switching into other professions (eg, journalism).
That said, I don’t think that there’s a problem with having students read one of your own papers, or a paper authored by someone else who shares similar views with you, so that they may be aware of your view.
Just for fun though, I’ll share my own view of climate change. I agree that it’s a problem. But my proposed solution to climate change would be to severely reduce the human population level, perhaps by 99% of what it is now, by means of reducing global birthrates. At the same time, I would not change anything else about what humans are doing and why. To me, the problem seems to be quantity, not quality, and “too much” of a good thing, just seems to be bad.
Yo Ronnie,
Here’s a useful quote by JS Mill, to remind us that we do have alternative methods that differ from the “Socratic method” of teaching (who tends to end in aporia and possible paralysis):
“If we now suppose this feeling of unity to be taught as a religion, and the whole force of education, of institutions, and of opinion, directed, as it once was in the case of religion, to make every person grow up from infancy surrounded on all sides both by the profession and by the practice of it, I think that no one, who can realize this conception, will feel any misgiving about the sufficiency of the ultimate sanction for the Happiness morality.” (Utilitarianism, Ch.3, par.10)
Kendi Kim: “my proposed solution to climate change would be to severely reduce the human population level, perhaps by 99% of what it is now, by means of reducing global birthrates.” Sure, if we had a population 1% of 7.6 billion–we wouldn’t make a dent in the natural systems of the Earth, climate or otherwise! Oh, if only we could do so, in some magically humane way –or at least roll the clock back 50 years or so, back when the issue of human population growth was first brought up for public discussion, so on a do-over we could take responsibility for stabilizing it well before things got so far out of hand. And, as I recall, J. S. Mill, back in his day, was concerned about growing human populations, because of their effect both on people and on nature. Of course, then there was Derek Parfit . . .
I think these posts take a little time before they’re approved by the mods so I didn’t see this reply. But, I just wanted to say that I appreciate your passion for this issue. I actually agree with you on many points.
That said, I still also agree with Daniel about having a “Socratic” approach when it comes to teaching. But I realize that there’s different teaching philosophies, and perhaps that is the disagreement here, rather than whether climate change might be the most important issue of our time. And that’s kind of interesting…
I’ll try again–what do you suppose Kant or Nietzsche would have to say about what we’ve done to the natural world?
Ronnie Hawkins: I think it’s perfectly fine to teach students what Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche likely would have thought, in light of their writings. What’s wrong is telling students that they were right. The same would be true if the subject was abortion, or war, or anything else over which there is substantial public controversy. We are educators, not indoctrinators.
And there is no “so long as.” Our job is to teach students, so that they can critically develop views of their own. It is not to convince them that our views are correct. That is a betrayal of our charge.
Daniel Kaufman: My question was for the philosophers who read this blog–what do YOU think Kant, Nietzsche, or other philosophers of times past would think about what we humans have done to the natural world, in this Anthropocene epoch, a time of human usurpation of virtually the entire surface of the planet? At one time, philosophers of this caliber made an effort to keep up with the science of their day–and they had a respect for the natural world. I suspect that Kant and Nietzsche would have had quite a bit of difficulty believing that humanity could have let things come to such a pass–and that, once it sunk in, they would have been outraged. But it seems that today we have become so specialized in our knowledge silos, so abstracted from reality in our little conceptual worlds, and so superficial in our ethical concerns, that it hardly registers a blip in our awareness.
But as far as the “as long as” goes, what I meant was, I have my doubts as to how many of the students to be found in classrooms today, at least those I’ve been in contact with in the USA, do know much about what’s going on in the world today, with respect to the natural world or even our socially constructed human world, other than what they get exposed to via their favorite forms of electronic media. And if they don’t even have a basic, working knowledge about what’s going on, I doubt if Socrates himself could get very far with them.
But back to Eugene’s inquiry: “In what ways can our teaching and service incorporate concerns about climate change and sustainability more generally?” Do you think teaching students that a) climate change is going on, and it’s because of our human actions and that b) this is not a good thing (e.g., in light of scientific evidence re all the current and expected future untoward consequences of it), and c) at least putting it on the table for discussion that perhaps we should do something about it, is all a matter of indoctrination? At what point does the discussion become illegitimate? Or could this concern be a matter of seeking justification for avoiding the issue, reinforcing the denial of which Eugene speaks?
Dear Ronnie,
I don’t know whether you get notifications about any of the other posts here that aren’t necessarily in response to yours, so I’ll just reply to this one and ask you to read what I wrote above as my “proposed solution” to climate change in an earlier thread. By the sound of things (sustainability, etc), it’s highly likely that you will strongly disagree with me, and perhaps you’d be quite happy if I were not permitted to “incline” students towards my views.
But the reason I shared at all was just so that you to see that there’s really more than one way to “tackle a problem”. Anyways, because we live in a physical, material world, I really do think that “too much” of a good thing, can be bad.
Kendi Kim: “because we live in a physical, material world, I really do think that “too much” of a good thing, can be bad.” Hey, I don’t disagree at all–in fact, I think not realizing this is what’s wrong with the top-heavy anthropocentric value system that so many embrace: human life is infinitely more valuable than any other kind, ergo we must never act to prevent bringing more and more of it into the world. Noble sentiment, were the Earth flat and extending to infinity in all directions.
Your last statement made me laugh. Thank you. I don’t have enough of that these day, I think. But yes, people seem to forget that we live in a material world, and not in a theoretical one.
So, in response to what you said here: “Sure, if we had a population 1% of 7.6 billion–we wouldn’t make a dent in the natural systems of the Earth, climate or otherwise!”
Presumably, this means that you agree that if human population were 1% of what it currently is now, all persons/humans could live in a free-spirited way and/or continue to pursue their ideals of excellence without worrying that this practice would inevitably end up being ultimately self-contradictory or self-harming. Well, I don’t know how much of your response means that you agree with me, but in any case, I do think this.
And next, you said: “Oh, if only we could do so, in some magically humane way…”
In response to this, what if I said that it could be done in a “humane” way, if the “humaneness” of the method were the issue. It kind of depends on what you consider “humane”, but if it means that it is sensitive to our pleasures and pains, then one could say that: If happiness, according to Mill, who is a utilitarian, is not only pleasure, but also relief from or absence of pain, then reasonable assistance with a painless and quick suicide/death would be a right that all Americans have, and the government may be constitutionally required to provide reasonable means for citizens to exercise these rights. Experts would know best how to end life human life nonviolently, and “humanely”, such that there is little to no pain involved in the process.
But now, if you said that “humane” means something like “respecting autonomy” or something like that, then a deontological moral theory might say that so long as suicide/death was chosen by a rational agent, and it is their will (perhaps to preserve beauty or dignity?), then we can say that there is no transgression against a person if experts could help them to effectively die, and to die without excessive violence and/or pain, so long as the rational agent wills it.
I think that there are means that may be the quickest and most effective to accomplishing goals and solving problems, but it’s often the case that there’s other things holding us back from employing those means. You mentioned “humaneness” as one criteria for judging the quality of methods. But if we already have “humane” methods, then it must be something else that’s holding us back from using those methods. And I wonder what ‘that’ is. Fear? Greed? Love? Sentiment? Disbelief? Ignorance? Uncertainty? Taking a step back from the situation, you must admit that it is almost as though “we” don’t truly want to solve problems; “we” just want to find ways to keep the inevitable from happening sooner rather than later (ie, “sustainability”). The human condition is truly a curious thing.
And then, the question is, where does philosophy come in in all of this? What is its role?
In any case, I think that reducing world population levels is the best solution. And I think that there’s lots of humane ways to do this. One humane way would be to reduce global birthrates, until we reach the “right” size of humanity for this Earth. But we’d have to hurry, I think, if we’re going to employ this method. Because this method would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years based on my calculations.
My guess is that you will probably disagree with nearly all, if not all, of what I’ve said. I’m not usually the popular one at a party — and it’s probably because of the things that I tend to say.
I clearly misunderstood your question. With regard to your restated version, I think you should rest more easy. Philosophers strike me as being overwhelmingly on the side of taking this seriously and among the young — and thus, among our students — environmental questions rank far higher among their concerns than they did for mine.