earth day 2016 (1)
TRANSCRIPT
Earth Day 2016Glimmers of hope
Dr. Phil Oliver
300 JUB
Thanks to Evan and SEAofMTSU for the invitation, I’m happy to return. Two years ago on this occasion I debated a Rabbi, today I guess I’ll just debate (or agree with) myself… pending your questions and comments of course.
But lately the voices of darkness and despair seem to have the upper hand. For instance,
A New Dark Age Looms nyt
IMAGINE a future in which humanity’s accumulated wisdom about Earth — our vast experience with weather trends, fish spawning and migration patterns, plant pollination and much more — turns increasingly obsolete. As each decade passes, knowledge of Earth’s past becomes progressively less effective as a guide to the future. Civilization enters a dark age in its practical understanding of our planet.
To comprehend how this could occur, picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence. Significant global warming has occurred, as scientists predicted. Nature’s longstanding, repeatable patterns — relied on for millenniums by humanity to plan everything from infrastructure to agriculture — are no longer so reliable. Cycles that have been largely unwavering during modern human history are disrupted by substantial changes in temperature and precipitation...
...Civilization’s understanding of Earth has expanded enormously in recent decades, making humanity safer and more prosperous. As the patterns that we have come to expect are disrupted by warming temperatures, we will face huge challenges feeding a growing population and prospering within our planet’s finite resources. New developments in science offer our best hope for keeping up, but this is by no means guaranteed.
Our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today. This is not a legacy we want to leave them. Yet we are on the verge of ensuring this happens.William B. Gail is a founder of the Global Weather Corporation, a past president of the American Meteorological Society and the author of “Climate Conundrums: What the Climate Debate Reveals About Us.”
Apple just found a powerful new way to make people care about the planet...The company is rolling out “Apps for Earth,” in which the App Store will, for 10 days, feature 27 popular apps — including Angry Birds 2, Jurassic World: The Game, and SimCity BuildIt — that have added new environmental content for Earth Day.Money spent buying one of these 27 apps, or making purchases within them, will then support the World Wildlife Fund, to help advance its climate and environmental initiatives. And given the size of the App store itself — which has many million users across 155 countries — and the huge reach of some of the apps (Angry Birds 2 has been downloaded 85 million times, for instance), it just might one of the corporate world’s farthest-reaching green initiatives… (continues)==This may be a modest source of hope, but it could be emblematic of a huge shift in consciousness towards a greater and wider sense of our responsibility for the fate of the earth than we’ve seen before.
Up@dawn, 4.22.14. After class, in celebration of Earth Week, I get to debate my friend the Rabbi (who happens also to be a regular on the interfaith panel circuit, and an adept rhetorician) on God. Oh boy.
I've been assigned the "negative" proposition. I can do that, just barely, if allowed (like my esteemed opponent) to stipulate a non-standard definition. He'll redefine "God," to affirm the resolution. I'll redefine (or maybe just evade) "possible" to deny it, and to affirm what in my opinion is incontestable: our species' urgent need to find common ground in addressing the environmental challenges of our time.
I'll borrow E.O. Wilson's tone and temper in The Creation...
“I am a secular humanist. I think existence is what we make of it as individuals. There is no guarantee of life after death, and heaven and hell are what we create for ourselves, on this planet. There is no other home... For you, the glory of an unseen divinity; for me, the glory of the universe revealed at last. For you, the belief in God made flesh to save mankind; for me, the belief in Promethean fire seized to set men free. You have found your final truth; I am still searching.”
“I may be wrong, you may be wrong. We may both be partly right. Does this difference in worldview separate us in all things? It does not. You and I and every other human being strive for the imperatives of security, freedom of choice, personal dignity, and a cause to believe in that is larger than ourselves.
Let us see, then, if we can, and you are willing, to meet on the near side of metaphysics in order to deal with the real world we share…”
My brief, though straying from the letter of our forensic charge, is simple: there's no indication that extra-human help is on its way. In fact, every indication suggests we're on our own, without practical recourse to any "final truth." We've got to find it within ourselves to conform our personal behaviors and public policies to ameliorative, sustainable alternatives.
If God-talk (including the sort of God-talk Spinoza and Einstein and maybe Rabbi Rami have sponsored) brings more of us on board with that message, then it's "possible" - which by high redefinition I interpret to mean constructive and pragmatically, experimentally, provisionally vindicated.
But, and it's a big but: in my experience, those who embrace that sort of God and talk that sort of talk tend, in the words of "Miss Generosity," to "decide no more than God." That is, they walk away from a firm commitment to finding human solutions to overwhelming anthropogenic challenges. They render God impossible, in the stipulated sense.
That's what I think I'm going to say. But I don't get to speak first, so I may have to improvise. In the larger sense, we all have to improvise a world our kind can continue to live in.
Happy Earth Week!
“Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.”
“You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.”
“Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.”
“Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.”
“In the end ... success or failure will come down to an ethical decision, one on which those now living will be judged for generations to come.”
“It often occurs to me that if, against all odds, there is a judgmental God and heaven, it will come to pass that when the pearly gates open, those who had the valor to think for themselves will be escorted to the head of the line, garlanded, and given their own personal audience.”
“Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends upon that understanding. We have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live, and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendent moral precept concerning the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say: Do no further harm to the biosphere.”
“...to save biodiversity, we need to set aside about half the earth’s surface as a natural reserve. I’m not suggesting we have one hemisphere for humans and the other for the rest of life. I’m talking about allocating up to one half of the surface of the land and the sea as a preserve for remaining flora and fauna.” nyt
Environmental Ethics Fall 2016
Returning to MTSU, Fall 2016-
Environmental Ethics Priority registration for Fall '16 is coming soon. If you're interested in/concerned about the health and future of "the only home we've ever known," consider registering for PHIL 3340, Environmental Ethics - TTh 4:20, BAS ___ MW 2:20, JUB 202 More info at http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/, or email [email protected].
Some presidential candidates' recent statements* give plenty of cause for concern. Climate change, says one, is "very low on the list... we have much bigger problems.” Another explicitly rejects the science of global warming as just a flawed "computer model." And another admits the science but says jobs matter more.
And yet there are important glimmers of hope, as sustainable alternatives to the fossil industry continue to make unprecedented forward strides. Our focus in the course will be on the political opposition to an effective response to environmental degradation, AND on genuine reasons for optimism that such a response is still within our reach.
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs.
The Climate by Naomi Klein
Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.
Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? the answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”
Because of our endless delays, we also have to pull off this massive transformation without delay. the international energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock in” extremely dangerous warming.
...if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image ceaselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics.
Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for
Solutions to the Climate Crisis by
Tim Flannery
Time is running out, but catastrophe is not inevitable. Around the world people are now living with the consequences of an altered climate—with intensified and more frequent storms, wildfires, droughts and floods. For some it’s already a question of survival. Drawing on the latest science, Flannery gives a snapshot of the trouble we are in and more crucially, proposes a new way forward, including rapidly progressing clean technologies and a “third way” of soft geo-engineering.
18 months after Apollo 8’s famous “Earthrise” picture was first seen on earth in December 1968, the first Earth Day was organized... One of the most essential facts about the climate crisis has to do with the sky.
As this picture illustrates, the sky is not the vast and limitless expanse that appears when we look up from the ground. It is a very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. That right now is the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently organized. We are spewing 110 million tons of heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every 24 hours, free of charge...
...the accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year.
...we're having record-breaking temperatures. Fourteen of the 15 of the hottest years ever measured with instruments have been in this young century. The hottest of all was last year.Last month was the 371st month in a row warmer than the 20th-century average. And for the first time, not only the warmest January, but for the first time, it was more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. These higher temperatures are having an effect on animals, plants, people, ecosystems.
So the answer to the question, "Must we change?" is yes, we have to change. "Can we change?" This is the exciting news! The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over. We see an exponential curve for wind installations now. We see the cost coming down dramatically. Some countries -- take Germany -- one day last December, got 81 percent of all its energy from renewable resources, mainly solar and wind. A lot of countries are getting more than half on an average basis.
More good news: energy storage, from batteries particularly, is now beginning to take off because the cost has been coming down very dramatically... With solar, the news is even more exciting! The best projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt per year by 2010. When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. This year, we're on track to beat it 68 times over.
This is the biggest new business opportunity in the history of the world, and two-thirds of it is in the private sector. [Something we’ll definitely talk about in connection with Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.]
We are seeing an explosion of new investment. Starting in 2010, investments globally in renewable electricity generation surpassed fossils. The gap has been growing ever since. The projections for the future are even more dramatic, even though fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 times larger than renewables. And by the way, if you add the projections for nuclear on here, particularly if you assume that the work many are doing to try to break through to safer and more acceptable, more affordable forms of nuclear, this could change even more dramatically.
Last and biggest question, "Will we change?" Paris really was a breakthrough, some of the provisions are binding and the regular reviews will matter a lot. But nations aren't waiting, they're going ahead. China has already announced that starting next year, they're adopting a nationwide cap and trade system. They will likely link up with the European Union. The United States has already been changing. All of these coal plants were proposed in the next 10 years and canceled. All of these existing coal plants were retired. All of these coal plants have had their retirement announced. All of them -- canceled. We are moving forward. Last year -- if you look at all of the investment in new electricity generation in the United States,almost three-quarters was from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar.
When I was 13 years old, I heard that proposal by President Kennedy to land a person on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. And I heard adults of that day and time say, "That's reckless, expensive, may well fail." But eight years and two months later, in the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, there was great cheer that went up in NASA's mission control in Houston. Here's a little-known fact about that: the average age of the systems engineers, the controllers in the room that day, was 26, which means, among other things, their age, when they heard that challenge, was 18.
When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women's Suffrage and Women's Rights Movement met endless no's, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final "no" comes a "yes."
"After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends" - Wallace Stevens
On Christmas Eve of 1968, the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission, orbiting the moon, took a photo with the gray, craggy surface of the moon in the foreground and the bright blue Earth coming up behind, only half of it visible. That photo was called "Earthrise," and it really shook people up because it made the Earth look so fragile, and because the photo was taken by actual people, not just a satellite.
December 7 is normally commemorated "in infamy," but it deserves to be celebrated for a relatively-unsung photograph that has the power to transform consciousness and expand identity. "It was on this day in 1972 that astronauts on the Apollo 17 spacecraft took a famous photograph of the Earth, a photo that came to be known as "The Blue Marble." Photographs of the Earth from space were still relatively new at this time.
It's known as "The Blue Marble" because that's how the Earth looked to the astronauts. It was the first clear photo of the Earth, because the sun was at the astronauts' back, and so the planet appears lit up and you can distinctly see blue, white, brown, even green. It became a symbol of the environmental movement of the 1970s, and it's the image that gets put on flags, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and posters. WA
Tuesday, April 21, 2009Hope
I have a bumper sticker on my car: "Evolve - every day is Earth Day." It's a message of hope. A better, cleaner, safer world inhabited by evolved, evolving humans who care deeply about the conditions of life for themselves and their progeny is imaginable. But we must not be content merely to dream it. The inestimable Wendell Berry says if we care about creating a livable future we must "give all to the present."
And so, it's very sad to learn that many young people say they're presently hopeless. That's what Earth Day can and must address: the need to give children authentic grounds for hope. "Yes we can" etc. Just as Al Gore says political will is a renewable resource, so is a spirit of hopefulness. Expect the worst, hope for the best, Berry says:
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the
facts.
And consider the fact that our own
hopeful disposition, even in the teeth
of disappointment and setback, may be
one of the conditions of ultimate
success.
Thursday, April 22, 2010Happy 40th Earth Day!
Earth Day's founder was a senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson. His goal was to force environmental issues onto the national agenda.
Before 1970, stories about the environment were almost never reported. One Earth Day organizer said that back then, "Environment was a
word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news."
In 1969, an oil pipe ruptured just off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, causing 200,000 gallons of crude oil to burst forth and then slowly
leak out and spread over an 800-square-mile slick. It took 11 days to plug the hole. The oil poisoned seals and dolphins, whose corpses
washed up onto California beaches, and it killed thousands of seabirds as well. Senator Nelson visited the site of the enormous ecological
disaster and was outraged that nobody in Washington seemed to be concerned about the great devastation to the natural environment. And
then he realized that many people simply didn't really know.
So he proposed a national "teach-in," an event to take place on universities campuses around the nation, one that would educate the public, raise awareness on environmental issues, and make politicians pay attention to these things, so that they would make laws to protect the environment in order to, as he said, "stem the tide of environmental disaster."
He saw how successful the anti-war protestors were at getting media coverage — and therefore, making politicians take notice — and he
decided to base his campaign for environmental awareness on their model. He also hoped to infuse the same student anti-war energy
into the environmental cause. He proposed setting aside one day a year as a national day of observance about environmental problems.
The New York Times picked up the story in late September 1969, a great boon to the grassroots organizers of the campaign, who had no
Internet to spread the word.
At first, Senator Nelson called it National Environment Teach-In Day, but his friend, a New York advertising executive suggested "Earth
Day," especially catchy since it rhymes with "birthday," and that's what the press began to call it. Historian Adam Rome has called Earth
Day the "most famous unknown event in modern American history."
About 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. They gathered at assemblies in high school gyms, at university
plazas, in suburban city parks. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Gaylord Nelson had graduated from law school, people met up at 4:45
a.m. for an "Earth Service," where, according to one report, they "greeted the sunrise with a Sanskrit invocation and read together from Aldo Leopold,
Rachel Carson, Thoreau, and the Bible." Girl Scouts distributed pamphlets that Wisconsin grad students had written, which gave household tips for
helping to preserve the environment. Tens of thousands met up in Philadelphia's Fairmont Park — and stayed there for days — and 100,000 streamed
into Fifth Avenue in New York City. People celebrated spring weather and gave impassioned political speeches about environmental issues.
Though unstructured and somewhat incohesive, Earth Day was hugely successful. Environmental issues found a prominent place on the political agenda. Earth Day in April 1970 helped lead to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency by the end of that year (the EPA was created December 2, 1970), as well as to the passage of legislation like the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species acts. Writer's Almanac
Saturday, April 23, 2011Earth is home
Earth Day is every day. Yann Arthus-Bertrand at TED:
This Earth is four and a half billion years old. These plants, several hundred million years old. And we humans have been walking upright for only 200 thousand years... For the past 30 years I've been closely watching the earth and its dwellers from high up in the sky.Our life is tied to the wellbeing of our planet.We depend on water, forests, deserts, oceans.Fishing, breeding, farming are still the world's foremost human occupations. And what binds us together is far greater than what divides us. We all share the same need for the earth's gifts. The same wish to rise above ourselves, and become better. And yet we carry on raising walls to keep us apart.
Today our greatest battle is to protect the natural offerings of our planet. In less than 50 years we've altered it more thoroughly than in the entire history of mankind. Half of the world's forests have vanished. Water resources are running low.Intensive farming is depleting soils. Our energy sources are not sustainable. The climate is changing. We are endangering ourselves. We're only trying to improve our lives. But the wealth gaps are growing wider. We haven't yet understood that we're going at a much faster pace than the planet can sustain. We know that solutions are available today. We all have the power to change this trendfor the better. So what are we waiting for?
Friday, April 22, 2011Happy Earth Day
In honor of Earth Day 2011, here's 350.org's Bill McKibben. "The only thing that a morally awake person can do when the worst thing that’s ever happened is happening is try to change those odds."
No more small steps for the climate and economic justice movement: now is the time to leap. A conversation with Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis (This Changes Everything), Bill McKibben (350.org) and Asad Rehman (Friend of the Earth UK) and special guests.
I decline to accept the end of man… I believe that man will not merely
endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a
spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's,
the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help
man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and
honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which
have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be
the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him
endure and prevail. William Faulkner
"A New Dark Age Looms," says a currently-popular Times op-ed, on the eve of my Earth Week talk to the Students for Environmental Action which I'm calling "Glimmers of Hope."
Inveterate optimism may not sell newspapers, may in fact be delusional - "Drumpf Wins New York" is today's big headline - but we've all gotta be what we're gonna be. My glass remains half full.
Why do I discern hopeful glimmers where others detect only the impending darkness? I follow the same prompt that fills William Gail with Gloom, but it takes me to a better place. "Picture yourself in our grandchildren’s time, a century hence." My grandchildren are going to be geniuses, maybe yours are too. Deep pessimism is an indulgence we owe it to them to forego, out of loyalty to their genius.
That's not to deny the truth of Gail's analysis, "that disrupting nature’s patterns could extend well beyond extreme weather, with far more pervasive impacts" on the predictive models that allow us to project and manage food production, develop adequate infrastructure, anticipate oceanic impacts, and generally just stay a step ahead of catastrophe.
But it is to insist that while "our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today," they could also commit themselves more intelligently and willfully to new and better patterns of living that we've not even imagined, and to technologies we've not taken seriously enough. Electric cars, rockets to Mars, the wind, the sun, and who knows what else are all theirs for the harvesting. I'm betting on them, on the future. As Mr. Faulkner said, it is the poet's, the writer's, the philosopher's
duty and privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. [His] voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
A glimmer of hope is still hope.
I got a gracious note the other day from the student who invited me last time I spoke to SEAofMTSU, giving me too much credit for helping him get accepted by ten graduate programs. Good luck, William! Students like you are our greatest source of hope and optimism for the Earth.
My generation’s mistakes, your generation’s epic challenge
By Stewart L. Udall
To My Grandchildren—
This is the most important letter I will ever write. It concerns your future—and the tomorrows of the innumerable human beings who share this vulnerable, fragile planet with you.
It involves changes that must be made if environmental disasters are to be avoided. The response to this challenge will shape the future of the entire human race… (continues)
Why am I so optimistic about your future? Because the world has had its fill of fear and is hungry for hope. Because an educational revolution has been underway for the past two decades in several countries and has enhanced the capacity of nations to deal with unprecedented challenges. As documented by Thomas L. Friedman in his book, The World Is Flat, the doubling and prospective tripling of the number of highly trained, selfless scientists and engineers has produced a pool of brainpower and moral power that is ready to create the building blocks of a new and better world.
The challenges that your generation faces will test your ingenuity and generosity. Your eyes will scan horizons that human beings have never contemplated.
Whether you are a person of faith who believes the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, whether you are an individual who has had mystical experiences that link you to the network of eternity, or whether you are a fervent conservationist who wants to leave a legacy for your progeny, the earth needs your devotion and tender care.
Go well, do well, my children! Support all endeavors that promise a better life for the inhabitants of our planet. Cherish sunsets, wild creations, and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth!
More info at http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/, or email [email protected].