Mark your calendars! Panel discussion on Climate Change and Justice

We have the amazing good fortune to have people who can talk substantively about the climate change talks and (in)justice issues that climate change brings to the forefront. I really encourage everyone to go to this talk.

Last fall I served on a panel with Dr. Tuana about sustainability and the need for interdisciplinary work at the Educating for Sustainability Conference. Dr. Brown was the moderator. It was a pretty interesting panel that reinforced my strong conviction that we need to integrate traditional disciplines, examine our assumptions about what we do as citizens and professionals, and evaluate our collected work with conviviality and the common ecological good in heart and mind. Additionally, I have had the good fortune of working with Don Brown (a regular contributor to Climate Ethics) as an assistant for the Pennsylvania Environmental Resource Consortium. Dr. Brown is the current chair. Erik Foley is our new sustainability coordinator at Penn State. I've had several meetings with him and he has quite a job to do - "greening" our university so to speak. I have not yet met Dr. Tschakert.

Check it out.

Stewardship or Sacrifice?

Penn State's Center for Ethics and Religious Affairs is hosting a conference on religion and the ethics of climate change, titled Stewardship or Sacrifice? It goes from today to tomorrow (Oct. 8th and 9th). From the site:

"The purpose of the conference is to explore the role of religion in helping solve the climate change crisis. A panel of climate scientists will provide the latest understanding of how climate change impacts our world; theologians will reflect on the scriptural bases for ethics response; members from congregations across Pennsylvania will describe concrete actions that they have taken to reduce their carbon footprints, and workshops will focus on how Pennsylvania religious institutions can mitigate threats to human health and the environment from climate change.

Keynote addresses from the Rev. Canon Sally Bingham, founder of Interfaith Power and Light, and Michael E. Mann, a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report, will detail the scope of the ethical challenges we face and the urgency of immediate action to build a more sustainable future. The conference invites wide participation from members of Pennsylvania faith communities interested in responding to climate change or simply learning more about this issue. For more information on the conference contact Jonathan E. Brockopp, Department of History and Religious Studies.

This conference is part of a week-long series of events at Penn State, including a co-sponsored conference on "Educating for Sustainability" October 5 and 6, 2009, at Medlar Field at Lubrano Park, organized by theSchreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, Schreyer Honors College, theCenter for Sustainability, and theRock Ethics Institute."

If you have time check it out please. I think that one of the things that we need to recognize is the sheer power of some portions of the religious community in American life. If we want to take meaningful action to curb climate change and reduce some of the potentially catastrophic change then we are going to have to work with and within our faith communities to do more and do better. This includes churches, mosques, temples, etc. reducing their carbon footprints through reduction and retrofitting their operations. These can come about through the investment of time and money by the congregation in new technologies and pledging to reduce their own consumption for ethical and theological reasons.

Additionally, this can mean actively engaging the most corrosive brands of anti-reason climate change denying sects among us. As many of you know, I am an avid follower and opponent of the creationist movement in the United States. The Venn Diagram of creationists and climate change deniers overlaps too much. To my mind, there is an urgent call for the Christian faithful who understand the science of climate change to engage, educate, and persuade the deniers among them that they need to change as well. The status quo cannot stand.

As we have seen with other big social movements - notably the abolition and civil rights movement - religion CAN play a very constructive role. Until now, it has been lagging behind on this most crucial of issues. Will the religious communities help us? Or will too many continue to hinder the greatest transformation our country has ever needed to make? This conference might bring us some hope.

The ethics of climate change: James Garvey

I listen to a weekly podcast called Ethics Bites through the BBC's Open University. Recently, the practical philosopher James Garvey (pictured at right courtesy of BBC) who works at the Royal Institute of Philosophy spoke with host Nigel Warburton about the ethics of climate change. He considers climate change as an ongoing event, the role that the "developed" world has played in catastrophic climate change, the role that the "developed" world should play, and what individual people can and should do to prevent possible global calamity.

Nigel: The topic we’re focusing on today is ethics and climate change. I know you’re not a scientist but you have done a lot of research into the effects of climate change; I wonder if you can sketch what’s going to happen unless we take very serious action.

James: Well the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has done a lot of surveys of the literature and they give us a range of 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsius as the amount of warming we can expect in the next century. The bottom end of that is associated with a world in which we don’t emit another whisper of carbon dioxide. The changes that are already underway are things like retreat of snow cover. That’s worrying because 1/6^th of the population gets its water from melting snow and ice. Hot extremes will become more frequent. Typhoons and hurricanes will become more intense. Precipitation will change throughout the world – places that are already wet will become more so, and there’ll be more flooding. Places that are dry will experience more drought. There’s a possibility of worse to come; things like the gulf-stream could shut down in the future if things carry on as they are. And also of course the sea level will rise. If you think in terms of plants and animals, something like 15% to 37% of plants and animals will be locked into extinction by 2050. We’re living through the 6^th major extinction our planet has experienced. The last one did in the dinosaurs. In 2003, 35,000 people died as a result of just heat in Europe, so the heat alone can kill us. And it’s also true that as the sea level rises, peoples’ lives will have to change: half the people on the planet currently live on the coast...

So it continues. To listen to the podcast, click here to download the mp3. If you want to read it, click here.