ABSTRACT
Let’s assume that these notes sketch out an elective course with no prerequisites and open to all students, not a required course in an environmental studies program centered on climate change. Right off the bat: Global climate change is the most urgent environmental prob-
lem of the twenty-first century and will probably remain so for the following centuries. Not only does it eclipse all other environmental issues, it also entrains them. Biodiversity loss, to take but one example, is exacerbated by climate change because the habitats of many organisms may migrate northward more rapidly than they can-or disappear altogether. Desertification is another example. Environmental philosophy has been heavily skewed toward environmental
ethics and this is certainly true of the philosophical response to climate changecalled “climate ethics.” Most of the existing work in climate ethics, however, has been done less by those philosophers long invested in environmental ethics than by those steeped in mainstream twentieth-century Anglo-American moral philosophy. Environmental ethicists have been slow to address climate change in large part
because climate change has radically expanded the spatial and temporal scales that have framed the field from its inception. When academic environmental ethics emerged in the 1970s, it was scientifically informed primarily by evolutionary biology and ecology and has been scaled accordingly. Aldo Leopold, the most influential precursor of academic environmental ethics, famously urged us to “think like a mountain.” In his day, that was thinking big. When he turned that phrase in the mid-1940s, Leopold was making a plea on behalf of big, fierce predatorswhich coevolved with their prey to the mutual benefit of such interrelated species. He notes that a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced (through reproduction) in three years, but a range, over-eaten by deer, will take as many decades to recover (through ecological succession). The temporal difference between deer reproduction and range recovery is a neat order of magnitude. Now, however, we must think like a planet, and that requires us to think in temporal terms of at least another order of magnitude more. And the spatial scale of global climate change is, well, global. And how many mountains are there on the globe? Therefore, existing environmental ethics-such as the Aldo Leopold land ethic, focused on the
integrity, stability, and beauty of biotic communities-cannot simply be scaled up to address climate change ethically. Further, the sciences informing climate ethics are biogeochemistry and Earth systems science. So environmental philosophers have to come up to speed in these sciences, as they once had to do in evolutionary biology and ecology. And that’s no easy task. Thus the first thing will be teaching the basics of climate science: greenhouse
gases; rising average global temperature; heat-expansion of seawater + melting glaciers and Arctic and Antarctic sea ice = rising sea level; acidification (carbonic acid) of the oceans and the impact of a downward pH shift on shellfish; increase in the frequency and violence of storms, floods, droughts, northward migration of tropical pathogens. The most general characterization of the phenomenon is not “global warming” but a shift to a more energetic planet. This initial part of the course is not science-no advanced mathematics, no modeling software-but science literacy, a humanities. Homing in on a fitting temporal scale for climate change is the second thing.
