scholarly journals Do No Harm: A Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Cultural Climate Ethics

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Casey Rentmeester
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Ethical Issue ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Climate Ethics ◽  
Do No Harm ◽  
Cultural Climate

Anthropogenic climate change has become a hot button issue in the scientific, economic, political, and ethical sectors. While the science behind climate change is clear, responses in the economic and political realms have been unfulfilling. On the economic front, companies have marketed themselves as pioneers in the quest to go green while simultaneously engaging in environmentally destructive practices and on the political front, politicians have failed to make any significant global progress. I argue that climate change needs to be framed as an ethical issue to make serious progress towards the path to a sustainable human civilization. In an effort to motivate the urgency needed to confront climate change, I argue that climate change seriously affects human beings living here and now, and if one cares about unnecessarily harming fellow innocent living human beings, then one should care about one’s own environmental impact related to climate change. Since this argument does not depend upon any specific philosophical, religious, or ethical tradition but applies regardless of one’s particular background, I hope to induce genuine concern among all human beings regarding this issue.

Utilizing the Dynamic Role of Objects to Enhance Cross-Cultural Climate Change Collaborations

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott E. Kalafatis ◽  
Julie C. Libarkin ◽  
Kyle Powys Whyte ◽  
Chris Caldwell
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Native American ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Research Effort ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Expert Elicitation ◽  
Boundary Object ◽  
Cultural Climate

Abstract Engagements between climate scientists and communities feature challenges but are also essential for successfully preparing for climate change. This is particularly true for indigenous peoples who are proactively responding to the threats that climate change poses by engaging in collaborations with climate decision-support organizations. The potential for risks and rewards associated with engagements like these makes developing tools for comprehensively, consistently, and equitably assessing cross-cultural climate collaborations a critical challenge. This paper describes a multicultural team’s efforts to develop a survey that can assess collaborations between Native American tribes in the United States and climate science organizations. In the process, the developing survey’s oscillations between acting as a boundary object and acting as an epistemic object in the project revealed common ground as well as existing differences across the cultural, disciplinary, and professional divides involved. Delphi expert elicitation was shown to be an effective approach for negotiating a cross-cultural research effort like this one because of its ability to establish consensus while delineating gaps. This experience highlights that assessing cross-cultural climate collaborations requires that both researchers and the tools that they use have the capacity to identify both common ground and distinctions between climate scientists and the communities with which they collaborate.

scholarly journals Abandoned aquariums: Online animal attractions during quarantine

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 5.1-5.8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Zoonotic Diseases ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Online Videos ◽  
Historical Moment

In this article, I argue that popular online animal videos during the coronavirus pandemic are emblematic of the political stakes of animal documentary in the era of climate change. Conceived in response to James Leo Cahill’s ‘A YouTube bestiary: Twenty-six theses on a post-cinema of animal attractions’, I claim a broad public is currently navigating its hopes and fears over an oncoming posthuman future through differing deployments of what Cahill calls the ‘animal attractions’ of online videos. Comparing several recent examples, I analyse these images as documents of an era defined by interactions between humans and nonhumans (such as zoonotic diseases like COVID-19) and as fabulist visions of a future without human beings. Here, emptied aquariums embody the concerns of our current historical moment, evoking anxieties over environmental degradation and speculation about our unknown future.

Diabetes Technology and Waste: A Complex Story

2021 ◽  
pp. 193229682110223
Author(s):  
Lutz Heinemann ◽  
David C. Klonoff
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Plastic Waste ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Pressure ◽  
Huge Amount ◽  
Diabetes Therapy ◽  
Medical Products ◽  
Diabetes Technology ◽  
Patients With Diabetes

Medical products are used increasingly by patients with diabetes as they make diabetes therapy more safe and efficient; subsequently such products are produced and used millions of times each day. This in turn means that the products themselves and the packaging adds up to a huge amount of waste, mainly plastic waste. Not only patients are well aware of this and start to complain about this, in view of the climate change the political pressure to change the situation is high and will increase further. A better balance between performance of the products and their environmental impact has to be found; however, diabetes technology and waste is a complex story with many different aspects.

A Responsibility to Revolt? Climate Ethics in the Real World

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Dan Boscov-Ellen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Emissions Reduction ◽  
Economic Dynamics ◽  
The Real ◽  
Climate Ethics ◽  
Structural Character ◽  
Structural Drivers ◽  
Political Economic

Mainstream ethical debates concerning responsibility for climate change tend to overemphasise emissions and consumption while ignoring or downplaying the structural drivers of climate change and vulnerability. Failure to examine the political-economic dynamics that have produced climate change and made certain people more susceptible to its harms results in inapposite accounts of responsibility. Recognition of the structural character of the problem suggests duties beyond emissions reduction and redistribution - including, potentially, a responsibility to fundamentally restructure our political and economic institutions.

scholarly journals Cross-Cultural Insights into Climate Change Skepticism

2013 ◽  
Vol 94 (11) ◽  
pp. 1707-1713 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Rudiak-Gould
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Change Communication ◽  
Just World Belief ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Nature And Society

With an eye toward developing more effective climate change education, social scientists have attempted to diagnose the reasons for lingering public skepticism of anthropogenic climate change. But rarely is the question addressed with the benefit of cross-cultural research. Geographer Simon Donner has demonstrated the utility of such an approach: drawing on a vast ethnographic and historical record, it is possible to surmise to what extent anthropogenic climate change skepticism stems from panhuman cognitive habits versus culturally and historically specific circumstances, with deep consequences back at home for climate education and citizen–climatologist dialogue. While building from this method, this article departs from Donner's reading of the ethnographic record as demonstrating a cross-culturally pervasive human intuition that the weather is beyond human influence, arguing instead for the role of culturally specific commitments such as the distinction between nature and society, “just world” belief, faith in progress, and system justification. Various climate change communication strategies based upon these alternate reasons for skepticism are suggested, and ultimately it is argued that the ideologically fraught nature of these beliefs takes the matter beyond the realm of “science education” into the arena of democratic dialogue.

scholarly journals Transcending the Adaptation/Mitigation Climate Change Science Policy Debate: Unmasking Assumptions about Adaptation and Resilience

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 238-248 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tori L. Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
The Political ◽  
Policy Debate ◽  
Environmental Strategy ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Adaptive Comanagement ◽  
The Individual

Abstract The two principal policy approaches to global climate change include mitigation and adaption. In recent years, the interest in adaptation and “resilience” has increased significantly in part because anthropogenic climate change appears unavoidable and mitigation agreements are difficult to achieve. This article takes a critical look at the emerging discourse over climate change adaptation and resilience. By drawing upon critiques of environmental resource management and adaptive comanagement, this paper argues that taking the concept of adaptation for granted as an appropriate bottom-up strategy for coping with anthropogenic climate change not only ignores the political and economic contexts in which this environmental strategy developed, but might also unintentionally subvert the vulnerable communities it intends to benefit. Using an ethnographic case study of the 2004 Boscastle Harbour flood in North Cornwall, England, this paper explores the paradoxical way in which adaptation and resilience work within the apparatus of the neoliberal state, which aims to shift responsibility for social and environmental problems to the individual. By better understanding the political and economic processes embedded in the concepts of adaptation and resilience, researchers will be more effective at finding equitable solutions to human ecological problems. Adaptation to the adverse effects of climate change is vital in order to reduce the impacts of climate change that are happening now and increase resilience to future impacts (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).

scholarly journals Ecological Destruction and Consumerism

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 28-46
Author(s):  
Clarisa Novello
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Public Agency ◽  
Current State ◽  
Human World ◽  
State Of Affairs

Literature that engages with the theme of anthropogenic climate change carries the potential of awakening the reader’s curiosity by creating a dimension in which the effects and impacts of the crisis are tangible. The urgency and unpredictability of climate change are articulated through reflections that combine societal, cultural and political issues associated to the phenomenon, hence encouraging a deeper understanding of the environmental crisis in today’s society. The article examines the novel EistTau by Ilija Trojanow to navigate the political and economic aspects of anthropogenic climate change. I reflect on the employment of fiction in finding ways to develop attentiveness to nature, whilst exposing how EisTau questions the power relations between culture, politics and economy, in a bid to influence the current state of affairs.  I argue that the depiction of the effects of climate change and the melting of glaciers enable public agency, whilst encouraging the rethinking of the environmental crisis and the acknowledgment of its connection to capitalism and to the constant accumulation of goods.  I observe how the exposure of the interconnectedness of climate change and capitalism encourages behavioural changes that lead to the adoption of alternative lifestyles that can halt the disastrous effects of climate change and prompts readers to develop a sense of care for the non-human world.

Kant, Chakrabarty, and the Crises of the Anthropocene

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-67
Author(s):  
David Baumeister ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Environmental Philosophy ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
The Core ◽  
Critical Insight ◽  
Insight Into

Dipesh Chakrabarty has identified Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the human’s moral and animal dimensions as an underlying source of the failure of the humanities to respond to the ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Although relevant for the environmental humanities generally, Chakrabarty’s critique is especially germane to contemporary environmental philosophy. It shows how the reality of anthropogenic climate change renders central aspects of Kant’s influential conception of human nature untenable. While closer examination of Kant’s writings corroborates the core of Chakrabarty’s reading, there nonetheless remain positive resources in Kant’s philosophy for contemporary environmental thinking, for, although Kant does regard the human’s moral and animal dimensions as conceptually separable, he also understands them to be inextricably bound within the nature of human beings. Attending to the interplay between these Kantian commitments, a new critical insight into one of the basic tensions of the Anthropocene era can be attained.

scholarly journals Form and perception of nature in Elizabeth bishop’s “questions of travel”.

2021 ◽  
pp. 281-296
Author(s):  
Yazdanmehr Gordanpour ◽  
Tahereh Rezaei
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Presence ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Formal Features

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is acutely form-conscious and human perception informs its descriptions of nature; critics who study Bishop’s poetry refer to her use of poetic artifice and note in passing the ethics of restraint and impersonality in her poetry. However, Bishop’s poetry is rarely discussed in the sphere of ecocriticism; and the formal significance of human perception infused with the descriptions of nature in her poetry is conveniently overlooked. Likewise, anthropogenic climate change is underrepresented in traditional ecocriticism which insists on removing form—and with it, any trace of the human—from the text. This article proposes that a study of Bishop’s travel writing and exploring the significance of concern for nature in conjunction with form-consciousness can contribute to a more profound understanding of both human-nature relationship and Bishop’s ecopoetic sensitivities. “Questions of Travel” is one of Bishop’s poems that directly grapples with the ethics of human presence in nature. The article explicates the textual and formal features of this poem to elucidate the function of form in its ecopoetic descriptions. The article shows how Bishop accepts the inevitability of human perception of nature and its literary corollary in ecopoetry as form-consciousness, and, thus, by implication, points to the importance of such poetry for a deeper understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature in the context of climate change.

scholarly journals Climate Ethics

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-70
Author(s):  
Vesak Chi
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Moral Obligation ◽  
Intrinsic Value ◽  
Tragedy Of The Commons ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Individual Action ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Climate Ethics ◽  
The Commons

Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has been described as a tragedy of the commons (T of C) by Baylor Johnson. Johnson argues that solutions to T of C scenarios reside in collective action rather than individual action, and that our moral obligation is to advocate for collective solutions to ACC. Marion Hourdequin argues that individual action can serve to promote collective action and in doing so it can also serve as an ethical obligation. I contend that individual action holds intrinsic value in lieu of its ability to counteract our susceptibility to the kind of moral corruption espoused by Stephen Gardiner.

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