Category: On the Environment

Throughout the recorded history of the human species, several societies have faced existential crises that mandated major cultural shifts in opinion and philosophical outlook. In fact, I would argue that all major philosophical paradigm shifts have coincided with major social upheaval and crisis. The most recent and poignant example of such a shift was the advent of the postmodern era as a reaction against modernism. The beginning of the end for modern thought was the advent of nuclear technologies. As the Cold War progressed and people were faced with a growing insecurity in their existence brought about by the nuclear arms race and the ability of few to destroy many, the flaws of modern thought became progressively apparent.

Today, we have come to face a similar crisis, and in fact the crises that brought about the advent of postmodernism overlaps significantly with the crises that may end it. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have been steadily increasing in number and carbon output due to over-consumption of goods. This increased carbon output has steadily warmed the globe through the greenhouse effect, and if we do not stop it, the effects of climate change will be devastating to humans in coastal and warmer areas. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus on the matter, some still cling to ignorance regarding our culpability for this problem.

Climate change is an issue of major contention amongst politically engaged individuals in America and across the globe. The question of climate change, its relationship to human activity, and policies surrounding environmental concerns raises deeper questions about the nature of truth, the specter of modern philosophy in today’s technology, and our ethical responsibilities regarding the planet. Humanity is facing its first crisis that threatens the existence of not only our culture locally, but our survival as a species. A change in cultural attitude will either rise up to meet the challenges posed by climate change, or we will die out and the questions raised will no longer require an answer.

The global atmosphere and climate are a public, common good insomuch that no one may claim ownership of them; this means that the problem of climate change can be understood through a version of the Prisoners’ Dilemma known as the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy starts with two basic premises: 1) it is in everyone’s best interest to maintain and preserve common goods so that they are not exhausted, and 2) everyone can benefit individually from exploiting common goods. If the lesson taught by the Prisoners’ Dilemma is followed, that as individuals it is in our best interest to act selfishly, and we do not change our approach to such ethical topics as to consider more than our individual well-being, then the tragedy plays out as it is named, tragically, with the common good being exhausted completely.

The developed nations of the world have been the largest beneficiaries to greenhouse gas emissions, and have contributed the most to anthropogenic climate change. This seems to suggest that, when splitting the bill for climate change mitigation, the largest portion (nearly all) of the bill should be passed to the Western, developed nations, especially the United States. The issue with this approach is that the Western world, in contributing to greenhouse emissions, has also built the largest economy, and with that, has assembled the most political power. Any international political power looking to mitigate climate change must offer up solutions that developed nations would agree to participate in, and if a solution demands that the developed world pay its fair share towards mitigating climate change, there is little hope of ever getting the cooperation of nations like the United States. This politically aware approach demands an even more prudent solution due to the “America First” rhetoric of the Trump administration. Despite growing scientific evidence supporting the conclusion that climate change is anthropogenic and a threat to human survival, the epistemic surety of the United States has fallen into such disarray that at least enough of the public does not believe in scientific evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change to elect a climate change denier into the office of the President. As such, a brief examination of climate evidence is mandated by our current political climate.

In search of a valid source that supports the existence of anthropogenic climate change, one need not look far. In my research on the topic I found a total of zero sources claiming anything other than anthropogenic climate change, and these sources date back to at least 1991, when Shell (the oil company) produced a documentary called Climate of Concern, reporting on U.N. and in-company research about the effects burning fossil fuels have on the global temperature. Despite being publicly aware of climate change concerns, Shell and other oil companies continued to invest heavily in oil production. Some oil companies have even hired the same research firms who raised doubts about the health effects of smoking to create reports designed to raise doubts as to whether climate change is anthropogenic. [1]

In response to further bleak reports on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to create an authority consensus on climate change and its effects. This panel has significant input from countries with high interest in the success of the fossil fuel industry like the United States and Russia, but in spite of this conflict of interest, the IPCC still reports a bleak outlook if nothing is done about our carbon emissions.[2] Furthermore, we are now witnessing the effects of climate change on local markets and agriculture. The production of maple syrup has slowed considerably in the northeast United States, where maple syrup used to be a large agricultural force. Now, the industry has been forced northward into Canada, where the climate has warmed enough to make maple syrup production more economically viable.[3]

Several international agreements have been made regarding the mitigation of climate change in the past. The first of these was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, which provided the groundwork for other international agreements to be made. The second was the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, which extended the UNFCCC and provided emissions targets to member countries, the United States failed to ratify it in the Senate. The last, and most recently famous, is the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement does not mandate a punishment for member countries that fail to meet emissions regulations, but it does require that member countries analyze and report the findings on their domestic emissions and their relationship to the goals of the UNFCCC. The United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement because of a question regarding how our membership was ratified. Nonetheless, these international efforts, while moving us in the correct direction, have done very little to move us towards solving the issue at hand, especially without cooperation from the United States.[4]

The arguments that normally revolve around the topic of climate change raise questions as to whether we can really be certain of anything we hear secondhand and do not experience ourselves. This distinctively postmodern mindset being applied to such an existential crisis has led to a sudden awareness of the failures of postmodernism in providing enough guidance to the mostly unphilosophical public in terms of action and truth. Postmodernism works in such a crisis only if everyone is equally informed, otherwise it ensures that we can never agree enough to work together. Unfortunately, the primary reactions to this realization of the failures of postmodernism in guiding the uninformed have been either a re-entrenchment of the fundamentalist modern mindset or a nihilistic skepticism without the counterbalance of the existentialist search for meaning. Neither of these systems of thought alone can provide an adequate solution to climate change, and a new paradigm shift is required if the problem of climate change is to be dealt with.

Before I present my view on this potential paradigm shift, it is necessary to examine two other possible solutions to the problem of climate change. The first of these solutions is that offered by the modern mindset. This solution could be called the superhero, deus ex machina, solution, but the more accurate name for it is the geoengineering solution. This solution requires that we treat the earth’s biosphere as one large, potentially devastating laboratory.[5] We are currently capable of technical, engineered, high-tech solutions to the climate issue, but in order to implement these solutions, we would need to roll the dice on potentially catastrophic outcomes should any factors be unconsidered in predicting how these solutions might affect the biosphere in the long-term. Some of the proposals of the geoengineering solution are injecting the earth’s atmosphere with reflective particles to reflect a portion of sunlight away from the earth, effectively putting a sunshade on the entire planet, allowing us to continue the emissions of greenhouse gases without further warming effects. Other solutions involve satellite arrays which can deploy to reflect sunlight, and carbon removal machines.[6]

The second potential solution is to consider the role of the individual in climate change mitigation. Most people are uninformed about the role they play in climate change and are overwhelmed by the controversy surrounding the topic. Yet, when Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, several mayors and local communities voiced that they would still fulfill their obligations to the goals of climate change mitigation. If proper education and discussion on the topic of climate change can rise above the level of heated argument, then people have shown that they desire to be a part of the right side of this issue. No one wants to be the bad guy of the story, even if that means they have to sacrifice. The ethical pressure on individuals to cut back on carbon emissions needs to be made known in a compelling manner. The zero emissions year (year in which we can no longer emit greenhouse gases) for avoiding the bulk of damage that would be caused by continued emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases is fast approaching, in fact it is somewhere between 2030 and 2050, depending on how quickly we cut back on our emissions now. If we cut back more now, it allows us a greater amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the future, buying us precious time in which to find a better solution. We each have a role to play in maintaining a lean carbon budget for the betterment of future mankind, and the cause of the problem in the first place, while almost entirely corporate greed, is also due to complicit individuals and conspicuous consumption.[7]

Joseph Grange presents a peculiar amalgamation of American philosophy and Confucianism in his article, Healing the Planet. He argues that both Western and Eastern philosophies contain, within their past, the philosophical toolkit necessary to properly address the issue of global warming. This toolkit can be found in the American philosophical approach to ethics in that, finding little value in empirically-based ethics that cannot reach beyond nihilism, most American philosophy looks to aesthetics to shape our ethics. This view is best expressed by Charles Saunders Pierce, who regarded aesthetics as the ground of ethics, epistemology, and even logic. Thus, feeling, which is the driving principle behind aesthetics, also becomes the ground of intelligence. Knowledge without praxis (the embodiment/actualization of knowledge) is not intelligence.[8]

Thus, Western philosophy provides a framework for understanding Confucian non-dualism in today’s context. Confucius places the role of knowledge in intimate conversation with that of feeling in his idea of xin, the heartmind.[9] On each side of the conflict caused by climate change we see a form of dualism that has ceased to be helpful in our context of potential risk to human existence. The artificial division between us and our environment hinders our ability to see how small daily decisions relate to the systematic exploitation of the environment. Our interdependence on our environment goes further than merely our material sustenance. Our very consciousness and identity arises because of our consideration of that which is not us (our environment), and thus our identity is the gap between us and our environment. To say it briefly, our consciousness is the space between that which we are, and that which we are not. Without both of these components, we are nothing.

This non-dualism applies to the situation of climate change in several different ways. It provides a foundation for claiming earth-care as an ethical duty, since the border between individual and nature is no longer clear in non-dualism. This paradigm shift is mere speculation, but no other ethical system can adequately answer the questions raised by anthropogenic climate change. Non-dualism provides a basis to rethink our relationship with each other as well as with property and consumption. Ignoring climate change is no longer a viable option in non-dualism, let alone an ethical one.

Works Cited:

Deady, Erin L. “Why the Law of Climate Change Matters: From Paris to a Local Government Near You.” The Florida Bar Journal 91, no. 9 (2017): 54-58. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

Fuente, de la Alberto, Rojas, Maisa, and Lean, Claudia Mac. “A human-scale perspective on global warming: Zero emission year and personal quotas.” The Public Library of Science One 12, no. 6 (2017): 1-16. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

Grange, Joseph. “Healing the Planet.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40 (2013): 251-269. Philosopher’s Index, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

Romar, Edward J. “Snapshots of the Future: Darfur, Katrina, and Maple Sugar (Climate Change, the Less Well-Off and Business Ethics).” Journal of Business Ethics 85, (2009): 121-132. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

Steadman, Hugh. “Climate Catastrophe.” New Zealand International Review 42, no. 4 (2017): 19-23. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

Stilgoe, Jack. “Geoengineering as Collective Experimentation.” Science and Engineering Ethics 22, no. 3 (2016): 851-869. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

1. Hugh Steadman, “Climate Catastrophe,” New Zealand International Review 42, no. 4 (2017): 19-23, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
2. Hugh Steadman, “Climate Catastrophe,” New Zealand International Review 42, no. 4 (2017): 19-23, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
3. Edward J. Romar, “Snapshots of the Future: Darfur, Katrina, and Maple Sugar (Climate Change, the Less Well-Off and Business Ethics),” Journal of Business Ethics 85, (2009): 121-132, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
4. Erin L. Deady, “Why the Law of Climate Change Matters: From Paris to a Local Government Near You,” The Florida Bar Journal 91, no. 9 (2017): 54-58, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
5. Jack Stilgoe, “Geoengineering as Collective Experimentation,” Science and Engineering Ethics 22, no. 3 (2016): 851-869, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
6. Jack Stilgoe, “Geoengineering as Collective Experimentation,” Science and Engineering Ethics 22, no. 3 (2016): 851-869, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
7. Alberto de la Fuente, Maisa Rojas, and Claudia Mac Lean, “A human-scale perspective on global warming: Zero emission year and personal quotas,” The Public Library of Science One 12, no. 6 (2017): 1-16, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
8. Joseph Grange, “Healing the Planet,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40 (2013): 251-269, Philosopher’s Index, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).
9. Joseph Grange, “Healing the Planet,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 40 (2013): 251-269, Philosopher’s Index, EBSCOhost (accessed November 15, 2017).

“In activity man feels himself free, unlimited, happy. Activity is the positive side of one’s personality…. And the happiest, the most blissful activity is that which is productive…. Hence this attribute of the species – productive activity – is assigned to God; that is, realized and made objective as divine activity.” – Ludwig Feuerbach

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“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the Earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’ Then God said, ‘I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole Earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the sky and all the creatures that move on the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food.’ And it was so.” – Genesis 1:28-30

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 ^“Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. ¹⁹ And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’“This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” – Luke 12:18-21

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^“If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still. The increase from the land is taken by all; the king himself profits from the fields.

Whoever loves money never has enough;
    whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with their income.
    This too is meaningless.

As goods increase,
    so do those who consume them.
And what benefit are they to the owners
    except to feast their eyes on them?

The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
    whether they eat little or much,
but as for the rich, their abundance
    permits them no sleep.

I have seen a grievous evil under the sun:

wealth hoarded to the harm of its owners,
    or wealth lost through some misfortune,
so that when they have children
    there is nothing left for them to inherit.
Everyone comes naked from their mother’s womb,
    and as everyone comes, so they depart.
They take nothing from their toil
    that they can carry in their hands.

This too is a grievous evil:

As everyone comes, so they depart,
    and what do they gain,
    since they toil for the wind?
All their days they eat in darkness,
    with great frustration, affliction and anger.” – Ecclesiastes 5:8-17

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“Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.” – Frederick Douglass

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Normally I would not begin with so many quotes, but why say it differently when it has been said so clearly already? Let me explain why I have chosen these quotes.

Everyone feels in themselves their worth when they are at work. This is what ties us most directly to humanity, because what makes us distinctively human is our ability to bring order out of disorder. To apply category, logic, reason, and purpose to indifferent objects is the uniquely human task set to us by God in Genesis. We name the animals, categorize them to better understand them, how and why they were made, and it is for our survival and enrichment that we cultivate the Earth. If there were no humans to do this work, existence itself would be meaningless. We are the universe understanding itself; made of dust taken from the ground and the stars (proof). Although my last post could be taken to say that this work is a morally negative act, I mean the opposite. What I am attempting to say is that the work itself is good, but the regulation of our relationship to the objects we are stewards of through the economy has turned the work against us. This is because the relationship is no longer stewardly, it is exploitative. We exploit the environment for our personal luxury. We do not cultivate, we own. This is the purpose of the first four quotes.

Now the last quote and the quote from Ecclesiastes start to pick at another aspect of the problem: labor. The way corporate business works in our economy is to destroy the relationship between us and our work, that which God has given to us as our uniquely human task. When you work for someone else for a set wage, the value of your work is always greater than your earnings. Were you to work the exact same job for yourself, you would take home exactly how much you had earned for the corporation. Some will defend this relationship as fair on the grounds that without the corporation the organized work of many would be impossible, and I consent this point. However, I am not saying that everyone working in an organization should earn the same wage, I am saying you should earn what you produce. Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, has 114.4 billion dollars. To put that in perspective, if Jeff worked at $15/hr. it would take him 870,624 years of working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to earn all of his money. No one can earn that much money, other people earned it for him. In harsher words, Jeff stole other people’s labor. At the end of their last quarter, Walmart made $5.8 billion dollars as a corporation. Those earnings are passed on to the executives and shareholders of Walmart. If Walmart took 3 billion of those earnings and paid it out to their employees, they could give all 2.2 million of their employees a raise of $5,454. This is not annual income, this is quarterly income. This is why Frederick Douglass, a man who intimately knew the evils of slavery, called wage labor slavery.

This goes further. In 2010 the Supreme Court of the United States of America came down on the side of corporations in the historic Citizens United vs. FEC case. This case allowed corporations the unfettered ability to donate to political elections in the name of freedom of speech. Politicians are now able to take massive donations from corporations which do not represent the people. Politicians are now representatives of corporate interests, not that they weren’t before 2010, but it is now official law. The power of the people to stand up to corporations which only want to exploit their labor for the enrichment of their shareholders is null and void. If we want to eat, we must work for the corporations and enable their exploitation of mother Earth. The GDP must grow because if it does not, those with power will not ‘trickle down’ enough money for us to survive. Indeed, people are already dying.

I firmly believe there are ways to do this better, but inaction is getting us nowhere.

Gross Domestic Product is a measurement of all economic activity in a given time period and region. Basically, anytime anyone spends money in America, it increases our national GDP. In another frame of mind, GDP represents the exact deduction our economy has made from the ecosystem. Understanding how the GDP works is vital to understanding how our economic choices effect the Earth. This is due to the fact that the value of our currency is directly related to our GDP. Remember that the value of a fiat currency is determined by two factors alone: that we all agree it has value, and what amount of any given commodity a dollar (in the case of America) can buy. There is no real value until the commodity has been bought, thus raising the GDP. GDP is the new version of the gold standard in American economics. If no new bills are printed and GDP rises, it means that the buying power of the dollar has risen, and prices drop. There are not very many new bills introduced in the economy each year, but there are some. Thus, if the GDP doesn’t increase each year, the buying power of a dollar decreases and inflation occurs.

All of this adds up to say that our economy demands that our GDP increase each year. This is a direct result of the entire system that controls almost every aspect of our public lives. Productivity must increase or the system that distributes food, healthcare, housing, clothing, etc., falls apart at the seams very quickly (see the 1930s). So what about dear old mother Earth?

When GDP rises, Earth loses value. That value is added to the economy, but it is frequently used to further insulate us and the system from the ecosystem. This is especially true when that GDP comes from single-use commodities like energy or disposables.  However, even if these single-use commodities were completely done away with we would still be in a system with a definite end: ecological death.

The Earth has a limited amount of value. There’s only so much gold, cobalt, nickel, oil, copper, etc. on the planet. Once that value is completely used, GDP has nowhere to withdraw from, and you end up in a global, ecological depression. On an individual level we can only effect real disruption of this system by refusing to spend money in excess. If we only buy that which we need and forgo luxury the GDP that we contribute decreases. Spend less money, produce less GDP. Unfortunately a decreased GDP does not mean added value to the ecosystem; only if a GDP was negative would it mean that value was actually returned to the ecosystem, but that is impossible. So decreasing our GDP and increasing the portion of the GDP that comes from sustainable practices lengthens the amount of time until the ecological collapse of the Earth, but it does not prevent it. The unfortunate consequence of decreasing the GDP is that those who end up paying the most for the decrease are those who are already without the means to absorb additional costs.

If only there were a way to reconcile our relationship with mother Earth so that we weren’t so abusive of her and each other….

The purpose of this post is to introduce some basic principles that will be vital to our consideration of our relationship to the Earth, a topic that has become increasingly important to me the more that I have learned. This relationship has become regulated and controlled by the economy, and thus money and its connection to the planet is the first key idea to understand.

In our country and in the global marketplace we use a peculiar type of currency known as fiat currency. For those who do not remember from their high school civics class, fiat currencies are odd because they have no physical standard of value. Other currencies of the past have been tied to some kind of physical commodity, like gold, silver, or even grain. Thus, if the demand for gold increases, the value of a gold-standard currency increases. However, if gold becomes more available, the value of gold-standard currency decreases. The amount of value in a commodity based economy is dictated by the amount of value in the particular commodity. In other words, commodity economies are regulated by our communal relationship to the commodity. The two major players in this type of system are the Earth, who provides the commodities, and the decentralized will of the people.

Thus, before we switched to a fiat currency system, the dollar had real value because it represented a certain amount of the gold held by the United States government. This gold was essentially owned by the people in the form of the dollar, anybody could own it, and the amount of gold which your particular dollar could be exchanged for was controlled by the amount of bills in the economy and the amount of gold in the U.S. Treasury. In terms of alienation from actual value, commodities themselves are the least alienated because they are identical with the value they represent. Representative currencies are more alienated because their value is artificially controlled by the amount of bills in circulation, and fiat money is the most alienated. Fiat money only has value because the government says that it has value and we all agree to abide by what the government says regarding its value.

This presents the first breakdown in our relationship with Earth. The economy’s job is to distribute commodities among the people. We do not produce commodities by our own work, but in partnership with the Earth. In the end the Earth provides, we simply cultivate and reap according to our needs. In a commodity economy, even if you were not a farmer or miner, your work was directly connected to the Earth. This relationship is reality, even today, we have simply covered over this truth by insulating ourselves from nature. Even programmers are shaping the way physical products behave, much like potters shape clay to perform certain tasks. Teachers of old, who produced nothing and shaped nothing, were still tethered to Earth by the system in which they were paid. No matter how far technology can progress, we will always rely on nature. Fiat currencies hide this reality by untethering our work from Earth in terms of its monetary value. The dollar has no ecological value until it is spent on products derived from the ecosystem.

The point of considering our currency is to find a better, more accurate way of thinking about us and the Earth. It is to start thinking of the goods and services we buy and sell as deductions from the natural environment so that we realize that our wealth is limited by the availability of natural resources.