Photo: Shane McCorristine
This photo was taken a few months ago at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre in northern Canada.
The sun is currently in a period of solar maximum and Churchill lies directly in the auroral zone, allowing for a series of fantastic displays in February and March. In this photo Shane is standing under the Aurora Borealis.
(Please click the picture for a larger image.)
Last week, Warwick Fox gave a lecture at the RCC entitled “General Ethics and the Theory of Responsive Cohesion”. Below is a (subjective and unofficial) summary.
Why is Warwick Fox proposing a General Theory of Ethics (with capital letters)? Because, in his view, previous theories have had too narrow a focus.
Environmental ethicists extended ethical considerations from the human world to the non-human, biophysical realm. Peter Singer, among others, developed the notion that humans had ethical responsibilities not just to each other but to animals as well. Subsequently, plants and other biophysical entities were included in this discussion. The notion emerged of a duty towards ecosystems.
Yet this, for Fox, does not go far enough. Why is the human-constructed world, the built word, not part of our ethical framework? We have all seen buildings that “stick out like a sore thumb.” We find them objectionable: “There should be a law against that kind of thing.” But can we say that they are just plain wrong? Is there an ethical theory that justifies such a statement?
Photo: Christof Mauch
Dalton Highway, Alaska, on the way to Deadhorse, near the Arctic Ocean.
This photo was taken close to an oil pumping station. Dalton Highway was built to transport oil. Before the highway, the area looked like the top half of this photo.
(Please click the picture for a larger image.)
Post by Rachel Shindelar
If we are going to stop producing greenhouse gases and successfully mitigate climate change, we do not have time to wait around for individuals to become virtuous. Governmental coercion is our only hope.
At least, this is what Oxford University professor John Broome claimed before launching into his lecture on “The Public and Private Morality of Climate Change” at LMU Munich on Friday, 3 May 2013. Although this statement was not the central message of Broome’s talk, it is worth revisiting.
Photo: Christof Mauch
This is a beach in Malibu. It is one of the most expensive places on the planet: the smallest bungalow is a multimillion dollar property.
The sea is eating the land away. The sand is public but the owners are protecting their properties by shovelling up public sand and putting it in plastic bags to protect their private properties. The workers who do this are generally Mexican and often illegal. Some of them wear uniforms to give the appearance of legitimacy but they are not allowed to be in the US. They are badly paid and wary of photographers.
Two weeks after this photo was taken, a heavy storm hit the coast and some of the bags were washed back into the pacific ocean.
(Please click the picture for a larger image.)
The Rachel Carson Center has produced a series of video interviews with fellows and associates regarding their work. Below is one video from this series.
For the complete playlist (55 videos), click here.
Post by Christopher Sellers
As we approach the forty-third Earth Day, American climate activism has finally gotten feisty. Hopes have arisen that its sway can approach that of the antipollution movement of the 1960s, out of which the first Earth Day sprang.
A recent “Forward Climate” protest on February 17 drew an estimated 35–40,000 people to the mall in Washington, D.C. – the largest non-Earth Day environmental protest to happen there since the 1979 antinuclear rally after Three Mile Island. While this activism may not stop the Keystone pipeline, the Bill McKibben-led but otherwise youthful 350.org team has much more in store for the summer, from an “Earth Night” to a campaign for divestiture from top fossil fuel companies that is gathering momentum. On this new climate movement’s dilemmas and prospects, that earlier movement against pollution that was so profusely successful sheds an instructive light.
