Kathleen Dean Moore's Blog, page 4
June 21, 2012
BENEDICTIO
Benedictio: For my students
You arrived at the University on a brilliant fall day, with your bike in a box. I watched your mother carry the desk-lamp, trailing its cord, and the laundry bag of clean clothes, watched her wrestle the box of shoes and surge-protectors up the stairs. She looked at you with confidence and pride, and when she looked away, her face tightened against tears.
You arrived in spring on a day of rain-showers, alone and wary, unimaginably far from home. From open windows in Benton Hall, a trumpet climbed the musical scale, up and up. Rhododendrons bent under heavy buds; maybe you knew the weight of that expectation. Maybe you had seen those same shining leaves on the other side of the ocean, trembling to a different musical scale.
In a September rain-squall, you arrived with your brother and a photo album you protected under your coat. Students with name-tags crowded to meet you. They swept you up, loading your stuff onto a push-cart. When you disappeared through the door of the dorm, your brother shrugged and drove away, turning up the volume on the stereo. Then you were back in the doorway again, watching him go.
Maybe you're surprised how closely your professors watched you come and, now at graduation, how intently we watch as you leave. Do you have any idea how desperately we believe in you? If there is hope to be found for this beautiful, bewildering world, it will be in your decisions.
Wherever you go, may you find good work of real substance--not to buy your dream car, because that will not satisfy you or your obligations--but to be creative and caring, so that when you come to the end of your time, you can say, this life was a great gift to me and I have returned the gift in full.
May you be completely, incurably, joyously curious. May you live with an open mind and an open heart, understanding that there are many ways to come to know, many ways to be a human being, many ways to love the world.
May you be delighted by other people's joy and saddened by the sorrow of strangers.
May you have the courage to make your life an expression of what you believe is true and good and beautiful, resisting what is easy, resisting what others press on you, rejecting what is degraded and shameful. When the time comes, as it will, may you have the strength to say, this is not the way I live.
May you be generous and just, knowing that your personal well-being depends on healthy communities and inventive cultures, knowing that your life depends on thriving ecological systems--the winds and rivers and fresh fields that sustain us, body and soul.
May you take comfort in the constancy of the earth, daylight and moonlight, meadow and forest, the healing water, the reliable return of frogsong and soft rain. May you be forever surprised by its mystery and grace.
May you be grateful and glad.
May you live responsibly, knowing that your decisions, large and small, shape the future for people you will never meet, creating a new world where children will dance in the doorway or cower in hunger and fear.
The world cries out. May you be one who answers.
Copyright © 2012, Kathleen Dean Moore
June 17, 2012
PRESILIENCE
PRESILIENCE (OF EGGS AND BASKETS )
Kathleen Dean Moore
June 13, 2012
Here’s what I want to know: What did the farmer do after he put all his eggs in one basket and then tripped over a hay-rake?
This has been the world’s project for the last few centuries, has it not?
The growth economy has narrowed and narrowed future options by building infrastructure for the exclusive use of fossil fuels, while killing off competitive sources of energy; dramatically reducing biodiversity among living things as humanoids convert their biomass into human flesh; eliminating cultures, languages, indigenous life-ways and lives and replacing them with the global economy; growing one genetically modified variety of corn and lopping the heads off any stalk of wheat that grows to a non-average height; making sure that each Big Mac is exactly like the other 47 billion; demeaning any ways of loving or living that differ from the ‘norm’; measuring all value in US$; and -- all together now -- singing the same song (“I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke”).
So here’s what I see, scrolling in slow motion: The farmer hurries across the farmyard, whistling. A basket of eggs swings from his hand. Because his eyes are on the kitchen door, he doesn’t see the hay-rake. He trips and sails forward -- a giant leap. His legs pedal air. The hand holding the basket reaches forward, as if it were holding a lantern. The eggs bound out of the basket, one after another -- twelve eggs flying. And one after another, they flatten against the pounded earth. Soon after, the farmer’s body smacks full-length onto the ground. There is stunned silence in the barnyard. Then, wide-eyed, the man lifts his head. He has egg on his face, and blood in his nostrils.
No point in belaboring the analogy; we all breathe through the smell of blood. More important, what can the analogy teach us? Mark Twain famously said, “Put all your eggs in one basket . . . and watch the basket!” This is the strategy pursued with lethal seriousness by those in power. The more perilous the single path, the more viciously they insist on it. Consider the fossil fuel industry’s strangle-hold on Congress. Consider the attacks of the solipsistic self-righteous on working women, gays, black voters, the desperately poor, and immigrants (take your pick: this is a war against difference, which takes many forms). Consider the relentless campaigns against climate science, against all science. Consider the concentration of well-protected money. Consider the hegemony of the individualist, capitalist worldview.
But listen, everybody: Mark Twain was a very wise man, but “put all your eggs in one basket . . . and watch the basket”? That was a JOKE, for God’s sake. He wasn’t SERIOUS.
There’s a different lesson to learn, an obvious one: We need lots of baskets, a wild abundance of baskets. Willow baskets, pink beach baskets, grocery baskets, baskets woven of spruce roots in the dark winter or carved from stones and stories. We need to cherish and protect them all. And eggs? How many kinds of eggs can we find or create? Lizard eggs, egg heads, embryos in dark places, seeds, always seeds, spider eggs carried on the wind, even golden eggs laid by geese. Nurture and protect all of these. That will at least give humanity a chance to answer the world’s desperate call for the greatest exercise of the human imagination the world has ever seen.
Our challenge is not only resilience, which is the power to rebound (re- "back" + salire "to jump, leap"). Our challenge is also what we might call presilience, the courage to take this great, stumbling leap into a world unlike any we have ever seen, knowing that we will not be back. Not ever. But (and this is the important point), we can decide what we hold in our hands as our legs pedal air.
Here’s what I want for the world’s baskets:
1. The greatest possible abundance of living things, who hold in their DNA, in their wings and eye-stalks (and in the tangled connections among all beings), an infinite and never-ending variety of ideas about how to thrive in changing conditions.
2. The greatest possible diversity of human beings, who hold in their stories -- their life-ways, their hard-won wisdom, their languages, their lived songs of love and grief -- an irreplaceable heritage of ideas about mutual flourishing, even at the ends of the Earth.
3. Fresh, clean water, immortal ice, dependable rain, fertile soil -- all the beautiful material conditions of abundant life.
4. Tools and skills of every kind (how to catch a codfish or calm a child).
And, most of all, number 5. Respect for all these, abiding love for all these, and the moral courage to protect them fiercely, maybe tragically, but without rest or fear, knowing that our baskets hold the origins of the next lives.
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October 27, 2011
AN ETHIC OF THE EARTH, BY THE EARTH, AND FOR THE EARTH
“Something as important as an ethic is never [invented], conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote. “It evolves in the mind of a thinking community.” At the end of September, we convened twenty-four people in the ancient forests of the Oregon Cascades for the Blue River Quorum. As a sort of ad hoc thinking community, our goal was to jumpstart the evolution of a new ethic to respond more powerfully to the environmental emergencies we face. Ecologists, philosophers, novelists, poets, theologians, social scientists -- we were a disparate group. But we were united by two shared insights:
First, that old, human-centered moral systems are based on an out-dated science that separates humans from the world and exempts them from its limits. That worldview allows humanity (maybe even encourages us) to ransack the Earth, to our own peril and the peril of countless ecosystems and species.
Second, that contemporary ecology describes an interdependent world in which humans are deeply of the Earth, kin to its other lives, and members of its communities of interdependent parts. That worldview requires us to live in concert with the ways of the world.
Can these perilous times, we asked ourselves, give birth to a better set of ideas about our moral responsibilities to one another, to the Earth, to the future? I’d like to share what we came up with:
The Blue River Declaration: An Ethic of the Earth
A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth. A civilization that ignores the deep constraints of its world will find itself in exactly the situation we face now, on the threshold of making the planet inhospitable to humankind and other species. The questions of our time are thus: What is our best current understanding of the nature of the world? What does that understanding tell us about how we might create a concordance between ecological and moral principles, and thus imagine an ethic that is of, rather than against, the Earth?
What is the world?
In our time, science, religious traditions, Earth’s many cultures, and artistic insights are all converging on a shared understanding of the nature of the world: The Earth is our home. It will always be our only source of shelter, sustenance, and inspiration. There is no other place for us to go.
The Earth is part of the creative unfolding of the universe. From the raw materials of the stars, life sprang forth and radiated into species after species, including human beings. The human species is richly varied, with a multitude of persons, cultures, and histories. We humans are kin to one another and to all the other beings on the planet; we share common ancestors and common substance, and we will share a common fate. Like humans, other beings are not merely commodities or service-providers, but have their own intelligence, agency, and urging toward life.
We live in a world of nested systems. Living things are created and shaped by their relationships to others and to the environment. No one is merely an isolated ego in a bag of skin, but something more resembling a note in a multidimensional symphony.
The world is dynamic at every scale. By processes that are probabilistic and often unpredictable, the world unfolds into emergent states of being. Our time of song and suffering is one such point in time. The life systems of the world can be resilient, having the ability to endure through change. But changes create cascades of new events. When small changes build up and cross thresholds, sudden large transformations can occur. Thus the world in its present form -- the world we love and inhabit -- is contingent. It may be, or it may cease to be. If the Earth changes in ways that undermine our lives, there is nothing we can do to change it back.
The Earth is finite in its resources and capacities. All its inhabitants live within its limitations and by its rules. And although life on Earth is resilient and robust, rapid irreversible changes and mass extinction events have occurred in the past. As a result of ignoring the Earth’s boundaries, we are on the brink of causing a transformation of the Earth and the sixth great mass extinction.
Our knowledge of the Earth will always be incomplete. But we know that the world is beautiful. Its life forms, unique in the universe, are wonderful in their grandeur and detail. It follows that the world is worthy of reverence, awe, and care.
Who are we humans?
We humans have become who we are through a long process of biological and cultural evolution. As do many other social species, we possess a complex and sometimes contradictory set of possibilities. We are competitive and cooperative, callous and empathetic, destructive and healing, intuitive and rational. Moreover, we are creatures of consciousness, emotion, and imagination, beings through whom the universe has evolved the capacity to celebrate its own beauty and explore its own meaning in the languages of science and story.
We are dependent on the sun and the Earth for everything. Without warmth, air, water, and fellow beings, we would quickly die. At the same time, we are co-creators of the Earth as we know it, shaping with our decisions the future of the places we inhabit, even as our relation to those places shapes us. In this way, we are members of a community of interdependent parts.
Humans are beings who search for meaning. Our beliefs about the origins of the cosmos influence the way we relate to each other, to other living things, and to the habitats we both depend upon and constitute. Sometimes, we experience wonder and awe at the mysteries of the universe, and fall silent in reverence. Yet, as we strive to comprehend the world, we often divide it into hierarchies of value ― pure/impure, spiritual/material, human/subhuman. Although we often exclude and exploit those we judge less valuable than ourselves, we yearn for belonging.
We are born to care. From the first moments of our lives, we seek connection. We deeply value loving and being loved. We find comfort in close connection to other people, other species, and to the wild world itself.
We are adaptable and resilient. Our imagination gives us the ability to envision alternative futures and to adapt our behaviors toward their achievement. When we are at our best, we develop cultural systems in which we, other living beings, and ecosystems can flourish.
We are moral beings. We have the capacity to reason about what is better and worse, just and unjust, worthy and demeaning, and we have the capacity to act in ways that are better, more just, more worthy, more beautiful.
Because we are these things, we can change. Because we are these things, change will be difficult.
How, then, shall we live?
Humanity is called to imagine an ethic that not only acknowledges, but emulates, the ways by which life thrives on Earth. How do we act, when we truly understand that we live in complete dependence on an Earth that is interconnected, interdependent, finite, and resilient?
Given that life on Earth is interconnected, we are called to affirm that all flourishing is mutual, and that damage to the part entails damage to the whole. Accordingly, our virtues are cooperation, respect, prudence, foresight, and justice. We have the responsibility to honor our obligations to future generations of all beings, and take their interests into account when we reflect on the consequences of our actions. To discount the future, to take all we need for our own well-being and leave nothing for others, is unthinkable. We should take only what the Earth offers, and leave as much and as good as we take. To live by a principle of reciprocity, giving as we receive, re-creates the richness of life, even as we partake of it. Then, our harvests are respectful and thoughtful. We learn to listen, which means that we learn to value congeniality, patience, fairness, and moral courage, which creates the possibility of heroism in the face of disagreement and discord. Moreover, the new ethic calls us to remedy destructive distributions of wealth and power. It is wrong when some are made to bear the risks of the recklessness of others, or assume the burden of others’ privilege, or pay with their health and hopes the real costs of destructive practices.
Given that humanity is inescapably dependent on the Earth for gifts both material and spiritual, we are called to be grateful and humble. To be grateful is to express joy for the fertility of the Earth, to be attentive to its gifts, to celebrate its bounty, and to accept responsibility for its care. Humility is based on an understanding of our own roots in the soil; we recognize the danger we face and the damage we do when we get that wrong. So we are well-advised to be humble about our claims to knowledge; and with art and heart and science, to strive for continuous learning that is open to evidence from all ways of knowing and from the Earth itself. The generosity of the Earth models generosity in our relations with others, and calls for collective outrage when we fail in that duty. A new ethic calls us to defend and nurture the regenerative potential of the Earth, to return Earth’s generosity with our own healing gifts of mind, body, emotion, and spirit. We can find joy and justice in sustaining lives that sustain our own.
Given that the Earth’s resources and resilience are finite, human flourishing depends on embracing a new ethic of self-restraint to replace a destructive ethos of excess. Greed is not a virtue; rather, the endless and pointless accumulation of wealth is a social pathology and a terrible mistake, with destructive social, spiritual, and ecological consequences. Limitless economic growth as a measure of human well-being is inconsistent with the continuity of life on Earth. It should be replaced by an economics of regeneration. Simple life styles that include thriftiness, beauty, community, and sharing are pathways to happiness. Celebrated virtues are generosity and resourcefulness.
Given that life on Earth is resilient, humanity can take courage in Earth’s power to heal. We can find guidance in the richness of diverse cultures and ecosystems, if we honor and protect difference. Equality and justice are necessary conditions for civilizations that endure, and truth-telling has strong regenerative power. Virtues we can embody are human courage, creative imagination, and perseverance in the face of long odds. The effect of humans on the land can be healing; our obligation is to imagine into existence new ways to live that create resilient and robust habitats. If we can undo some of the damage we have done, this is the best work available to us. On the other hand, damaging the natural sources of resilience ― degrading oceans, atmosphere, soil, biodiversity ― is both foolhardy and an offense against the future, not worthy of us as rational and moral beings. If hope fails us, the moral abdication of despair is not an alternative. Beyond hope we can inhabit the wide moral ground of personal integrity, matching our actions to our moral convictions. Through conscientious decisions, we can refuse to be made into instruments of destruction. We can make our lives and our communities into works of art that express our deepest values.
The necessity of achieving a concordance between ecological and moral principles, and the new ethic born of this necessity, calls into question far more than we might think. It calls us to question our current capitalist economic systems, our educational systems, our food production systems, our systems of land use and ownership. It calls us to re-examine what it means to be happy, and what it means to be smart. This will not be easy. But new futures are continuously being imagined and tested, resulting in new social and ecological possibilities. This questioning will release the power and beauty of the human imagination to create more collaborative economies, more mindful ways of living, more deeply felt arts, and more inclusive processes that acknowledge the ways of life of all beings. In this sheltering home, we can begin to restore both the natural world and the human spirit.
The Blue River Quorum
October 2011
Meeting in the ancient forests of the Blue River watershed in Oregon, the Blue River Quorum includes J. Baird Callicott, Madeline Cantwell, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Kristie Dotson, Charles Goodrich, Patricia Hasbach, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Mark Hixon, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Katie McShane, Kathleen Dean Moore, Nalini Nadkarni, Michael P. Nelson, Harmony Paulsen, Devon G. Pena, Libby Roderick, Kim Stanley Robinson, Fred Swanson, Bron Taylor, Allen Thompson, Kyle Powys Whyte, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Gretel Van Wieren, and Jan Zwicky. The Quorum was convened by the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word (springcreek@oregonstate.edu) with funding from the Shotpouch Foundation, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and the USDA Forest Service.
October 24, 2011
OCCUPY YOUR MORAL GROUND
The Occupy Wall Street movements and climate action movements stand on the same moral ground and affirm the same moral principles: It’s wrong to wreck the world. It’s wrong to wreck the health and hopes of others. An economic system that forces the people to bear the risks of the recklessness of a few powerful profiteers, to assume the burdens of others’ privilege, and to pay the real costs of destructive industries in the currency of their health and the hopes of their children -- that system is immoral. And when, to enrich a powerful few, that system threatens to disrupt forever the great planetary cycles that support all the lives on Earth? This is moral monstrosity on a cosmic scale.
Both movements affirm that all flourishing is mutual. The world is deeply interconnected and interdependent; damage to any part undermines the thriving of the whole. Accordingly, every person, no matter how rich, and every system, no matter how entrenched, has the responsibility to honor affirmative obligations of justice and compassion to present and future generations of all beings. Not only in principle. On the ground.
The Occupy Wall Street Movements are connecting the dots on a map of dysfunction and injustice. Climate change. Toxic neighborhoods. Financial recklessness. Jobs despair. Concentrated wealth. Pointless war. The dots all connect to one central social pathology, which is funding (one might say, buying and selling) of elections (and, of the elected) by powerful centers of wealth -- mostly corporations, mostly destructive and extractive corporations. Our erstwhile democracy has now developed a futures market in politicians. This has created a situation where the government is fundamentally controlled by those who would risk or wreck the (name your favorite: economy, environment, children’s futures) for their own short-term gain.
The consequence is, of course, that the destructive few now control the regulatory agencies and potential regulations that might have limited their recklessness and greed. They have the consequent power to close off options for resolving the environmental and economic emergencies. They have the power to block federal actions that might prevent injustices. They have the power to bulldoze the natural systems that sustain our lives.
This is what demonstrators' homemade signs are saying: Get the money out of politics (and politician’s pockets), so we can be a democracy again, so we can enact the measures that will save us from personal and global catastrophe. Self-created environmental catastrophe has taken down many civilizations before ours. But this time, the self-inflicted catastrophe of climate change will take down also the hydrological cycles and relative climate stability that have allowed the evolution of the world as we know and love it. We can draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide to livable levels. But not until we draw down the power of those who are enriched by destroying the conditions of human and ecological thriving.
We are all in this together. The lines that connect climate change-jobs-environment-education-health-justice are strong and undeniable. The time has passed for an environmental movement. The time has passed for a climate change movement. The time has passed for isolated grassroots movements. We stand on ground that trembles with tectonic movement. Along the straining fault lines of our civilization, we feel the forces building for justice, sanity, and lasting ecological and cultural thriving. This, finally, is The Big One – the coming together of all of us who care about the future and do not want to gamble it away. The Big One will shake the world.
August 7, 2011
LEARNING HOPE: WHEN THE STUDENTS TEACH THE TEACHER
Last term, I taught a university class on “Ethics and Climate Change,” using MORAL GROUND as a reader. It was the most moving teaching experience of my life. My students were mostly graduate students, most from the science and natural resource fields. They didn’t know, or need to know, much about ethics, but they all cared deeply about the future of the Earth.
Like any diligent professor, I began with a clear list of the goals of the course: To examine the moral issues that we face as the climate changes; to learn how worldviews and values, together with science, can shape decisions about what we ought to do; to reason cogently about our obligations to honor intergenerational rights and the rich abundance of life on Earth; and so to acquire the skills and concepts to navigate in the choppy waters of a global moral discourse of literally world-changing importance. But, as I soon learned, the most important outcome of the course was not on my list.
On the first evening, I asked the students to rank themselves on a scale of one to ten, where one meant they had no hope and ten meant they had no concerns. The students fell on the downhill side of the middle range -- four to five.
All term we read essays from the world’s most respected moral leaders and most beautiful writers, all calling for a moral response to climate change. For ten weeks, we questioned each other, challenged the writers, debated the ideas and their real-life consequences. The best discussions were the ones the students led.
Laurie, a horticulture student, asked us all to pledge to make one positive change in our eating habits, and we did: Eat no beef. Buy only local fruit. Raise your own vegetables. Swear off bottled water. Kate, a city planner, led us in a role-playing discussion about how the moral sentiments -- love of place, desire for legacy, concern for children -- can inform decisions in local government. Allegra explained how she lived, worked, raised her children, and even went to college in another town, all without a car. Students shared recommendations for videos and books, they shared music, they shared their own experiences as activists, they shared homemade bread, they shared their hopes and fears, and as we read a child’s appeal for the future, they shared tears.
On the last day of class, we returned to the question of hope. One by one, students told where they now stood on the scale between “no hope” and “no concerns.” There wasn’t a dramatic difference between the start of the course and the end. But every student had inched up on the hopefulness scale so that the class as a whole tipped over onto the uphill side of middle, say 5 to 6. What accounts for the change? Each student cited the same reason: they were lifted by the energy of the class, which had become a community of people who cared as much as they did, and who were educating themselves to make a difference in the world.
As for me, I will admit now, although I did not tell the students, that I began the term at a desperate starting point, a zero, there is no hope. But in the presence of these dedicated young people, my spirits rose to the thin, trembling edge of hopefulness -- call it a four. Who could not find hope in the open hearts and determination of these students?
So I believe in the joy and power of moral discourse -- public discussions of our deepest values and highest aspirations. I believe in the power of the essays in MORAL GROUND. Most of all, I believe in my students.
All the materials from my course, and all the materials anyone would need to lead a similar set of discussions, are available to be downloaded from moralground.com -- Discussion Guide to MORAL GROUND: Ethical Actions for a Planet in Peril. I hope you will go there and find the inspiration (and the practical steps) to create your open community of caring and hope.
February 8, 2011
HOW SHOULD WE RESPOND TO CLIMATE CHANGE? What I Tell My Students
Those scientists were so wrong back in 1980. When they climbed from the helicopters, holding handkerchiefs over their faces to filter ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption, they did not think they would live long enough to see life restored to the blast zone.
Every tree was burned and ruined, every ridgeline buried in ash, every stream clogged with broken limbs and landslides. If anything would grow here again, they thought, its spore and seed would have to drift in from the edges of the devastation, long dry miles across a plain of cinders and ash. The scientists could imagine that -- spiders drifting on silk threads over the rubble plain, a single samara spinning into the shade of a pumice stone. It was harder to imagine the time required for flourishing to return to the mountain -- all the dusty centuries. But here they are: on the mountain only thirty years later, these same scientists on their knees, running their hands over beds of moss below lupine in lavish purple bloom. Tracks of mice and fox etch a muddy streambank, and here, beside a ten-foot silver fir, a coyote’s twisted scat grows mushrooms. What the scientists know now, but didn’t understand then, is that when the mountain blasted ash and rock across the landscape, the devastation never touched some small places hidden in the lee of rocks and trees. Here, a bed of moss and deer-fern under a rotting log. There, under a boulder, a patch of pearly everlasting and the tunnel to a vole’s musty nest. Between stones in a buried stream, a slick of algae and clustered dragonfly eggs. “Refugia,” they call them: small places of safety where life endures. From the micro-environments of the refugia, mice and toads emerged blinking onto the blasted plain. Grasses spread, strawberries sent out runners. From a thousand, ten thousand, maybe countless small places of enduring life, meadows returned to the mountain.
I have seen this happen. I have wandered the edge of vernal pools with ecologists brought to unscientific tears by the song of meadowlarks in this place. So I am careful when I talk to my students. They have been taught, as they deserve to be, that the fossil-fueled industrial growth economy has brought the world to the edge of catastrophe. They don’t have to “believe in” climate change to accept this claim. They understand the decimation of plant and animal species, the poisons, the growing deserts and spreading famine, rising oceans and melting ice. If it’s true that we can’t destroy our habitats without destroying our lives, as Rachel Carson said, and if it’s true that we are in the process of laying waste to the planet, then our ways of living will come to an end -- some way or another, sooner or later, gradually or catastrophically -- and some new way of life will begin. What are we supposed to do? students ask me. How can we do any good, when the job is nothing less than saving the world? These are terrifying questions for an old professor, and it has taken me some months to think of what to say.
I have decided to tell them about the volcano. I tell them about the rotted stump that sheltered spider eggs, about a cupped rock that saved a fern, about all the other refugia that brought life back so quickly to the mountain. If destructive forces are building under our lives, then our work in this time and place, I tell them, is not to stop the mountain from cracking apart -- no one can do this -- but to create small refugia of the imagination to reseed the ashy plain. Refugia: places where new ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow.
Even now, we can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect their life, so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world. Doesn’t matter what it is, I tell my students, or how small; if it’s generous to life, imagine it into existence. Create a bicycle cooperative, a seed-sharing community, a wildlife sanctuary on the hill below the church. Write poems for children. Sing duets to the dying. Tear out the irrigation system and plant native grass. Imagine water pumps.
Dig a community garden in the Kmart parking lot. Study corn. Teach someone to sew. Learn to cook with the full power of the sun at noon.
We don’t have to start from scratch. We can restore pockets of flourishing life-ways that have been damaged over time. Breach a dam. Plant a riverbank. Vote for schools. Introduce the neighbors to each others’ children. Celebrate the Solstice. Slow a rivercourse with a fallen log. Clean the grocery carts out of the stream.
Maybe most effective of all, we can protect refugia that already exist: they are the small pockets tucked into every corner. Protect the marshy ditch behind the mall. Work to ban poisons from the edges of the road. Save the hedges in your neighborhood. Boycott what you don’t believe in. Refuse to participate in what is wrong. There is hope in this -- an attention that notices and celebrates thriving where it occurs, a conscience that refuses to destroy it.
This is integrity, I tell my students, which is whole, which is healthy, which is holy. This is consistency of belief and action. And that is the answer to powerlessness -- to do what you think is right, knowing that your actions will be the well-spring of the new world. You’ll know you have achieved this integrity and torn loose from hypocrisy, I tell them, because the relief of it will bring you to tears.
From these sheltered pockets of moral imagining and from the protected pockets of flourishing, new ways of living will spread across the land, across the salt plains and beetle-killed forests. Here is how we will start anew -- not from the edges over centuries of invasion.
Rather, from small pockets of good work, shaped by an understanding that all life is interdependent, and driven by the one gift humans have that belongs to no other -- practical imagination, the ability to imagine that things can be different from what they are now.
“Your calling,” philosopher Frederick Buechner said, “is at the intersection of your great joy and the world’s great need.” Go to that place, I tell my students. Do that work.
THE PERFECT MORAL STORM, WHEN THE LIFE RAFTS ARE ON FIRE
So much. But here are three new ideas:
A. The climate crisis and its attendant environmental disasters have caught the world in the dangerous crosswinds of ecological disruption and human irresponsibility. We are challenged to make world-altering decisions about our current life choices and our obligations to planetary and human futures. But when philosophers race across the pitching deck to launch the moral theories that we have long relied on in times of difficult choices, we find that the life rafts themselves are on fire. It is possible to argue that among the coming casualties of the climate change crisis may be western ethics-as-usual. For we find that our usual ways of thinking about moral obligations may not be robust enough to define our obligations at a time when the usual ways of thinking have allowed us to drift into the teeth of this terrible storm.
B. If there is any one theme that emerges from Moral Ground, it is that the Western world is undergoing a fundamental change in our answers to basic philosophical questions: What is the world? What is the place of humans in the world? How, then, shall we live? We once might have thought that the Earth was created for our use alone and drew all its value from its usefulness to us, or that we had no obligations except to ourselves, as individuals or as a species. We might have thought that humans find their greatest flourishing as individuals in competition with one another. But ecological science and almost all the religions of the world renounce human exceptionalism as simply false and deeply dangerous. Rather, humans are part of intricate, delicately balanced systems of living and dying that have created a richness of life greater than the world has ever seen. Because we are part of the Earth's systems, we are utterly dependent on their thriving. As humans, we are created and defined by our relation to those great systems; we find our greatest flourishing in cultural and ecological community.
We should probably not be surprised that moral theories devised to fit the prior worldview are not serving us as well in the world that the ecologists describe.
C. However we come to justify claims about our moral obligation to avert the worst effects the environmental emergencies, a number of ideas emerge from the testimony of Moral Ground’s writers to suggest the general shape of future moral arguments.
First, there is the matter of match between what is and what ought to be. Philosophers work hard to be sure that moral theories are internally consistent, a minimal requirement for any system that might guide us. But the efficacy of theories depends also on external consistency. Just as Christian ethics gain their moral authority from religious worldviews, other ethics are necessarily linked to particular understandings of the human condition. To the extent that (an important caveat) an ecological explanation of the planet and the place of humankind in its systems gains traction, moral arguments in the future will need to be at least consistent with an ecological understanding of the interconnection of all being. It will not do to have a view of the world that is frankly ecological, while holding moral views drawn from human exceptionalism. A sign of the times to come is the effort we see in the Moral Ground arguments to re-cast moral reasoning (Christian, Buddhist, utilitarian, virtue-based, etc.) in ecological terms.
Second, even as they work within the common framework of ecological thinking, it seems likely that moral arguments about the responsibilities to avert the climate emergencies will be many and varied. One challenge of Western philosophy will be to find a way to make room in the moral world for dozens of reasons. Lawyers call this approach “parallel pleading”: when their clients’ lives turn on the efficacy of argument to shape the judgments of judges and juries, attorneys do not trust only one approach. They offer them all, as many appeals to law and precedent and justice as they can muster, on the principle that if one argument doesn’t work, maybe another will.
Or put this differently (the reader will see parallel pleading at work here): The enormity of the crisis might well be better answered if philosophers shifted their understanding of their work: not to look for the one most defensible reason to act, but to find a way to embrace all the reasons. What I call the “dead-duck theory of truth,” whereby philosophers shoot at arguments until there’s only one crippled and wing-shot bird left standing, may be a way of working that we can no longer afford.
Third, the importance of a wide variety of moral approaches to climate change issues is underscored by sociologists’ work on framing issues. It may or may not be the work of philosophers to change the world. But surely we can offer good ideas that might do that job. Persuasion, sociologists are increasingly convinced, is a matter of fitting an argument to the core values of the audience. Speak to Christians about the sacred and holy Earth. Speak to Utilitarians about the future of their grandchildren. Speak to egoists about their legacy. To formulate a wide variety of arguments as carefully and as honorably as we can and to put them into the hands of change-agents may be our most important work.
So off we go, Michael and I, to Wisconsin and Iowa now, then Montana and Georgia, to learn what we can learn from people who give up an evening to talk with their neighbors about the moral principles that might guide them into the next way of living justly and joyously on earth for a very long time. By the time we get home, leaves will have fallen off the trees and darkness will be descending before supper. Snow storms will build over the airports. There is hard work to be done.
CLIMATE CHANGE: LOVE IT OR DENY IT?
Full disclosure: What half of me wants to say is, I’m not especially worried about the people busily denying climate change or closing their bank accounts. I’m worried about us, the believers -- people like me (and you) who shake our heads at the dangers we face, truly worried, unable to sleep, and don’t do a damn thing of any meaning whatsoever. Lunatics aren’t the problem; hypocrites are. But that wasn’t the question, so here I go.
What about those Rapture-Ready people? Honestly, what about them? How many are there? Compassion would advise us to let them wise up on their own. People aren’t irredeemably stupid, and time is the great teacher. It’s possible that at some glorious moment in time, a few of the believers will float, grinning, to heaven, while an equal number of them are sucked into hell, disappearing like astonished gophers into the bowels of the earth. Or maybe none of this will happen. It’s not on my Top Ten List of Things to Worry About.
But what about those people – more than half the population – who distrust climate change science and deny the dangers we face? That’s a truly interesting and important question that goes to the heart of the nature of science and human nature. So first, a story; then a short discursus on the practical syllogism.
The story: So. I ask my brother if he’d like to drive to Ashland to see a performance of Hamlet. What, he says? Ashland is a seven-hour drive, and the hotels there cost hundreds of dollars a night. We can’t do that. Okay, so Ashland is in fact four hours away, and nice rooms cost a hundred dollars. What gives? The deal is that a discussion about the facts is easy – we’re used to talking about what is true. But talking about values is hard – nobody knows how to address the question of whether watching Hamlet is a good use of time. So we debate the facts, endlessly, avoiding altogether the harder conversation about what is good, what is worthy, what is of value.
The syllogism: Every argument that has as its conclusion a statement about what we ought to do, will have two premises. First, it will have an empirical premise, a descriptive premise that comes from scientific or other observation. It is a statement of fact. It says, this is the way the world is, this is the way the world will be. (For example, global climate change is real, it is dangerous, it is upon us.) But you can’t get to a conclusion about what we ought to do on the basis of facts alone; you need a second premise.
The second premise is ethical. It is an affirmation of what is worthy and worth doing, of what is right in human actions, of what is of deep value. It says, this is good, this is sacred, this is what I believe in, this is what it means to be fully human. (Say, for example, this world is worth saving).
From the descriptive premise and the ethical premise, but from neither alone, a conclusion follows about what we ought to do.
Climate change will undermine the well-being of future people. (statement of fact)
It’s wrong to undermine the well-being of future generations. (statement of value)
Therefore, we ought to take action to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
This logic explains, I believe, why people work so hard to deny the reality of climate change. I think people intuitively understand this logic. They understand that if you don’t want to accept a conclusion about what we ought to do, there are two ways to refute it. One is to challenge the facts. The other is to challenge the values.
It’s easy to challenge facts. We know how to do this. We know a variety of fallacious ways to do it – challenge the character of the persons making the claim (argumentum ad hominem), generalize from one scientific mistake to all of science (fallacy of over-generalization), or simply refuse to believe on the evidence (the fallacy of invincible ignorance). But we also know how to debate facts honorably, and that is happening too, although it’s hard to hear over the ruckus. The point is that from kindergarten on, we are trained in empirical reasoning, bringing evidence to bear to establish a claim.
It’s more difficult to challenge the values. We don’t know how to have reasonable discussions about competing values (cf. the shouting on Fox News). Do we have a moral obligation to the future? Is our profligate use of fossil fuels an intergenerational or international injustice? How to we weigh values like personal freedom against values like compassion and justice? Do we have an absolute liberty to serve our own interests? How do we weigh the interests of our own children against the interests of others’? Do others have any claim against us at all? Do we have an obligation to what is beautiful and life-giving on the planet? These are tough questions, deeply ethical questions.
What I think is happening is that those who do not want to take action against climate change, for whatever reason, find it easier to undercut the science than to engage in real dialogue about the values. So we have a national climate-change debate that is marked by a furious, often fallacious, certainly futile debate about facts. But the national discourse about values – the conversation about what we most deeply value in our lives, about what we most owe the future – has gone missing.
America has a long tradition of public moral discourse. Think of the debates that resulted in the affirmation of human values of life and liberty of conscience that are encoded in the Declaration of Independence. Think of the movement to abolish slavery, which turned on arguments of human liberty and worth. Think of the civil rights movement, the dream, the national debate about what is worthy of us as moral beings. We have done it. We can do it. We must do it again.
Do we have a moral obligation to the future to leave a world as rich in possibilities as the world we live in? Let’s talk.
WHAT SHALL WE GIVE THE CHILDREN?
In early September, we were all sitting on the porch of our family’s cabin in southeast Alaska, watching a glittering morning, keeping an eye out for feeding whales. When I went around the back of the cabin to pick huckleberries, I heard a sound I didn’t recognize. I scanned the nearby forest, then the sharp peaks behind. Nothing that I could see. It sounded like a thousand trumpets underwater, playing Fanfare for the Common Man. No. It sounded like a thousand nestling ravens speaking German. No. It sounded like:
Sandhill cranes, said my daughter-in law.
Sandhill cranes, said my son.
Sandhill cranes! said my granddaughter, Zoey, who is three years old.
We ran our eyes up the forest, up the granite cliffs and tundra, past the clouds until we saw them, a thousand cranes kettling at the top of the blue sky. They swirled there in a disordered gyre, calling and calling. Zoey promptly lay down on her back so she could see straight up. I lay down beside her. We watched the cranes as they gained altitude, the wind cranking the big circle of flopping wings. People had told us the cranes would come on the first north wind in September. I should have been expecting them.
The sky was so blue it seemed white. The cranes seemed enormous, even though they were tiny crosses, so high in the sky. Their calls shook down like autumn leaves. Next to me, Zoey murmured and laughed and called out to these astonishing birds who were flying south as they have done for nine million years.
Oh, may there always be sandhill cranes, I remember praying. And may there always be children who delight in them.
I worry about this. I worry that we have made the world unsafe for cranes and the delight of children. The poet Robinson Jeffers warned us, writing of the heart-breaking beauty that will remain when there is no heart to break for it. But what if it’s worse than that? What if it’s the heart-broken children who remain in a world without natural beauty?
Which brings me to Question #7. A large man, crisply dressed, came up after all the questions were asked and all the answers were blurted out. He didn’t have a question. He had something to tell me, and he wanted to say it in my face: I love my daughter more than anything else in the world. I am not going to sacrifice her future. I am going to make as much money as I can, in whatever way I can, so that she can be safe and comfortable all her life. That’s all, he said, and he walked away.
I too love my children and grandchildren more than anything else in the world, and by some kind of commutative principle whereby one instantly loves someone who loves what you love, I wanted to embrace this man. I wanted to talk about our shared love for children and what that asks of us. But he was gone, and so I will say it here.
Sometimes I don’t know what to do, I would tell him: what to hope and what to fear, what to invest in and what to give up, what to insist on and what to refuse, how exactly to love my children. But I do know that whatever I do, it has to nourish the lives and the joy of children.
But look at us. We are harming children, even as (especially as) we believe we are acting to provide for them. Think of what we do for our own privileged children. To give them big houses, we cut ancient forests. To give them perfect fruit, we poison their food with pesticides. To give them the latest technologies, we reduce entire valleys to toxic dumps. To give them the best education, we invest in companies that profit from death. To give them peace, we kill other peoples’ children, or send them to be killed, and build enough weapons to kill the children again, kill them twenty times if necessary. It’s a tragic irony that the amassing of material wealth in the name of our children’s futures – all these things we work so hard to do because we so desperately love them – will harm our children in the end and undermine their chances for a decent life.
This says nothing of what our decisions do to the children who are not privileged. This is not just an irony, it’s a moral abomination. These children, in other countries and in the distant country of the future, will never know even the short-term benefits of misusing fossil fuels. But they are the ones who will suffer as the seas rise, as fires scorch cropland, as freshwater becomes desperately scarce, as diseases spread north, as famine returns to lands that had been abundant. The damage to their future is a deliberate theft, a preventable child abuse.
If we have a moral obligation to protect the children, I would tell him, and if environmental harms and climate change are manifestly harmful to them, then we have a moral obligation to expend extraordinary effort to immediately stop those harms and redress the wrongs that we have already done in their names.
What shall we give the children? Sandhill cranes, surely sandhill cranes. And the sweet whistle of the varied thrush in the morning. Frog calls, owl calls, trumpeting whales. Fresh cold water to drink at the end of a saltwater day. Deep green shade. Starfish, and a child’s delight in these. Blueberries and potatoes. Safe nights. A sense of decency and fairness that will last them all their lives. Far-sighted love.
December 30, 2010
THE NO-HOPE FALLACY: THAT’S NO EXCUSE FOR FAILING TO ACT
First I want to shake the student. Then I want to give him a hug. But I’m a philosophy professor, so I challenge his reasoning. “What kind of logic is that? You don’t do the right thing because it will have good results. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing. What would you say to a slave-owner who made the same kind of argument? Alas, I could free every one of my slaves and it wouldn’t make a dent in the slave trade. The institution of slavery is so much bigger than one little owner. So I’ll just keep on working these people in the day and chaining them up at night. No point in sacrificing for nothing. What would you say to that? You’d say, It doesn’t matter if you can or cannot change the world. What matters is that you can change yourself. And that’s what I say to you.”
If it’s wrong to take more than your fair share of the Earth’s resources and possibilities, leaving what’s left of a degraded and destabilized world for people in other nations or other times (and I believe it is); if it’s wrong to reap the benefits of the profligate use of fossil fuels and foist off the costs on other people, especially future people who are completely powerless to defend themselves (and I believe it is); if it’s wrong to bulldoze what is beautiful and life-giving and billions of years in the making (and I believe it is); if poisoning the water and the air is an utter betrayal of the children, whom we love more than anything else in the world (and I know it is) -- then we shouldn’t do it. Period. End of question.
We in the western world have inherited a bizarre moral tradition. It’s an aberration in the moral history of the universe. But because it has infused our ways of thinking, we think it’s the normal – or the only -- way to think. The name of the tradition is consequentialism, and its central principle is that an act is right if it has good consequences; otherwise it is wrong. If that’s how we judge right and wrong, by this complicated cost-benefit analysis, then we have to be always “fixated on the future,” as my friend and co-editor Michael P. Nelson writes, “perpetually . . . justifying means by their ends. So we have built a society that can be readily disempowered.” And of course, the student is completely disempowered – but not by hopelessness. He’s disempowered by this bizarre idea that the only acts worth doing are those that will have some sort of payoff.
What I want to tell the student is that there is a huge, essential middle ground between hope and despair. This is not acting-out-of-hope, or failing-to-act-out-of-despair, but acting out of virtue, an affirmation of who we are and what is worthy of us as moral beings. This is integrity, which is consistency between belief and action. To act lovingly because we love. To act justly because we are just. To live gratefully because this life is a gift.
If you are horrified by the gyre of plastic in the middle of the Pacific, I want to tell the student, don’t buy plastic. If you think it’s terrible, what beef cattle are doing to the rivers, don’t buy beef. If you don’t like the thought of Chinese children boiling out the heavy metals in a junk pile of discarded electronics, don’t buy the latest in electronic equipment. If you are sickened by reports of oil slathering the ocean floor, use alternative energies. Like conscientious objectors in any other war, do not allow yourself to be made into an instrument of death and injustice. When all is said and done, make sure that you are able to say you lived a life you believe in, conscientiously refusing what is wrong and destructive, exhibiting in your life choices what is compassionate and just. Even if hope is rapidly failing that you can make a difference to the future of the Earth, you can always make a difference to who you are.
Standing at the podium, trying to steady my voice, here’s what I say to the student: “Don’t ask, will my acts save the world? Maybe they won’t. But ask, do my actions match up with what I most deeply believe is right and good? This is our calling – the calling for you and me and everybody else in the room: To do what is right, even if it does no good; to celebrate and care for the world, even if its fate breaks our hearts.”
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