ABSTRACT
In his book on the moral history of the twentieth century Jonathan Glover wrote: “Most of the time what matters is the personal and the local. But the great public disasters can strike the most unlikely places” (Glover 1999, 42). He was referring especially to genocide and war, which were the great problems of the last century, but the same principle applies equally well to the emerging social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. Climate change currently has centre stage, though waiting in the wings are chronic poverty, epidemics of emergent and reemergent diseases, widespread water scarcity, ethnic conflict, the end of cheap energy, and increasing possibilities of technological error. Many of these challenges have diffuse, or global, origins and potentially widespread consequences, but there is little question that their impacts will be felt most directly in the particular places of everyday life and will have to be managed in those places.
