Kathleen Dean Moore's Blog

Don’t Call Us Grannies.

Don’t call us Grannies. We are white-haired women who are doing everything we can to stop the suicidal cruelty of the fossil-fuel economy. We are experienced. We are courageous. We are smart and sometimes even wise. We are truth-tellers. We are, in my town, about the only ones who are showing up for the struggle.

‘Grannies’ is the last pejorative label standing, after polite society has thought better of racist and sexist name-calling. ‘Grannies’ conjures false and degrading images of rocking chairs and whiskey; just as racists insults carry false and degrading images.  And don’t call us ‘women of a certain age,’ as if ‘sixty’ or ‘seventy’ were dirty words. We are Elders, and we carry with us the wisdom of many decades.

We have lived long and learned much. We know the courage it takes to stand against the status quo – we’ve been doing it all our lives. We know how silencing works, and the costs of telling the truth. We know how brutal hierarchies can be – we’ve stood on the bottom rungs. We know what it means when sickened children suffer –we have held their hands and wiped their spit through long nights. We know how thoroughly extractive industries have poisoned the world  – we carry the toxins in our breasts. We know the teenagers’ despair, looking into a ruined world – we have hidden their deadly pills.

Meanwhile, we have watched young parents working so hard to get ahead, to get ahead, never looking ahead. We have watched the newly retired – stubbornly claiming the right to be useless.

We also know the miracle of a healthy baby, and a child’s delight in birdsong. We know the wonders of a tideflat and the gift of fresh water. We know the magic of human imagination, creating new lifeways of renewal and redemption. We believe it is possible to live on this beautiful planet without wrecking it. That civilization has not managed this breaks our hearts.

As for me, I am no longer a young woman. I carry my years on thick yellow bones. My hair has faded to the color of milk. My feet are wide. My knees crackle like flames. The tides no longer ebb and flow in my body. But from where I stand, I can clearly see the future. It is a betrayal of the past. It breaks the promises we made to the children: I will keep you safe. I will give you the world.

If we women climate activists have only a few decades left on this lovely, reeling planet, then grant us the respect we earn when say what is in our hearts: Climate change is a betrayal of the children; we will not allow it. Grant us the dignity we earn when we tell the truth: It is wrong to wreck the world. And to do that for runaway selfish gain is a cosmic crime that will echo through the galaxy, long after there are no men to profit and their bitcoins and diamonds have all gone to dust.

Call us women. Call us angry. Call us heartbroken. Call us relentless. Just don’t call us ‘Grannies.’

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In early morning fog, all I can see is a skim of silver on the water – no trees, no island, no boats.  I climb down wet rocks to the edge of the bay and haul on the rope.  Pulleys squeak and boats thump on rocks.  In time, the bow of the little rowboat noses through the fog, glistening with dew.  I pull it to shore, unhook the line, lower myself into the inevitable puddle on the seat, paddle softly and disappear into the fog.  The people I love will be lying in warm sleeping bags in their tents on the island, listening for the lap of my oars on the water.  But all they will hear are red-throated loons yipping like coyotes somewhere off in the whiteness, and a raven, muttering to himself.  I love this.

I’ve come out to watch fog rises over the islands and to think about what it means to love a place.  At the university, my son studies ecology.  He wants to know how islands change the sea and how sea-life shapes the wooded shore – trees fallen into the bay to shelter broken-back shrimp, the living nutrients in a dead salmon carried by a bear to the base of a tree – all the beautiful, complicated connections that make life flourish over time.  This is what I want to understand too: the beautiful, complicated ways that love for people and love for places nourish each other and sustain us all.  The ecology, one might say, of caring.

I’m trying to be quiet so I don’t startle the loons, but I brought the wrong boat – the rowboat with its loose and clanky oars.  I ship the oars and let the tide tangle me in a pile of kelp.  My boots are jammed between the gas can and the anchor, my notebook is on my lap, and little pains are fluttering like moths up and down the muscles of my back.  The island is a place of lifting and pulling; hosting anchors and crab pots and buckets of stream water.

I open my notebook.  Let’s put the gathered evidence in front of us and let it speak.

Love has as its object: daughter, son, sudden quiet, a certain combination of smells – hemlock and salt water, mist swimming with light, purple kayak, fog-bound island, hidden cove, and my husband, the man who can drive a boat through any squall.  The list is, of course, incomplete.  Add silver salmon.  Add unexpected sun.

I stretch my back and start two lists.  What does it mean to love a person?  What does it mean to love a place?  Before long, I discover I’ve made two copies of the same list.  To love – a person and a place – means at least this:

Number One: To want to be near it, physically.

Number Two: To want to know everything about it – its story, its moods, what it looks like by moonlight.

Number Three: To rejoice in the fact of it.

Number Four: To fear its loss, and grieve for its injuries.

Number Five: To protect it – fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise.

Six: To be transformed in its presence – lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new.

Seven: To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it.

Number Eight: To want the best for it.

Number Nine: Desperately.

Love is an anchor line, a rope on a pulley, a spruce root, a route on a map, a father teaching his daughter to tie a bowline knot, and all of these – a complicated, changing web of relationships, taken together.  It’s not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel.  It’s a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence.  We are born into relationships with people and with places.  We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them.  And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations.  That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.

I know there’s something important missing from my list, number ten, but I’m struggling to put it into words.  Loving isn’t just a state of being, it’s a way of acting in the world. Love isn’t a sort of bliss, it’s a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work.

To love a person is to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs.  To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to regret every bootprint, to attend to its needs.  Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.

Number Ten, I write in my notebook: To love a person or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its thriving.

I turn the rowboat toward camp, tugging on the clanking oars, scattering the reflections, picturing my family gathering one by one to explore the bay as the tide falls.  They will be stumbling over rocks and calling out to each other.  “Look, here, under the kelp.”

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We have met the enemy and it’s not us, says Occidental Petroleum’s CEO. It’s YOU. But here’s why blaming oil and gas consumers for climate breakdown is bogus.

By Kathleen Dean Moore, November 24, 2022

At the COP27 meetings in Egypt, Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub attempted to shift much of the blame for climate-destroying carbon emissions from the oil and gas industry onto the consumers who use their products. “Everybody that uses a product that was generated from oil and gas has a part in this and is also responsible,” she said. “If you flew over here, you are responsible for what you used here. The nice clothes you are wearing right now, you are responsible. Don’t ask me about oil and gas…”

I am thoroughly sick of this bogus argument. Every time I give a public talk about the need to put the brakes on the oil and gas industry, I get the same self-silencing comment: We don’t have the moral authority to criticize the oil and gas industry, because we are burning oil and gas in our cars, furnaces, jet engines. The argument is fallacious — a nasty non sequitur (Latin; literally, “it does not follow”). And yet it has a terrible staying power. Can we, today, while oil and gas company earnings and global fossil-fuel emissions both set all-time records, finally put this argument to rest?

I first heard the just-blame-me argument from a little opossum in a bent stove-pipe hat. On the first Earth Day, 1970, Walt Kelley published a cartoon showing a porcupine chatting with the opossum, whose name was Pogo. “Ah Pogo,” says Porkypine, “the beauty of the forest primeval gets me in the heart.” The frame pulls back to reveal that the forest is filled with junk. “We have met the enemy,” says Pogo. “And he is us.”  And so, for fifty years, we have been Pogo-ized, lured into blaming ourselves for problems that are systemic and highly profitable.

It may be one of the biggest triumphs of Big Oil, to make customers blame themselves for burning fossil fuels, even while the corporations are spending billions to trap consumers into a fossil-fuel economy where they have few non-polluting options. It’s a clever business plan: create dependence on fossil fuels, earn a fortune selling their products, and then blame the buyers. It’s the business plan of heroin dealers. Except that heroin dealers aren’t taking down the world.

Let us ask Ms. Hollub, why are there no alternative modes of transportation to the meetings in Egypt? Why are even clothes a petroleum product, made of plastic from milk jugs? How has the oil and gas industry created a society that is utterly dependent on fossil fuels?

The fossil fuel industry is very happy to claim that it is simply responding to public demand. But it has, in fact, cleverly created that demand. They convince politicians to kill or lethally underfund alternative energy or transportation initiatives. They spend 1.4 billion dollars over the last ten years to convince the public that we can’t live without fossil fuels. They increase demand for energy-intensive products through advertising. They create confusion about the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels. They influence elections to defang regulatory agencies that would limit Big Oil’s power to impose risks and costs on others. They convince legislatures to impose terrible criminal penalties on anyone who objects. BP even sent out the carbon footprint calculator, so consumers could calculate exactly how much they are to blame. They do everything they can to be sure that people have no choice but to participate in the oil economy.

Of course, in every way we can, we should refuse to let Big Oil conscript us as foot-soldiers in its deadly and explosively profitable war against the world. That means moving forcefully into renewal energy, alternative transportation, and plastic-free markets. Of course, negotiators at COP 27 should spurn oil and gas lobbyists’ attempts to broker agreements that would solidify its illicit gains and forestall efforts to force a withdrawal from the territory it has gained by force, lies, money, and unholy alliances with corrupt governments, including our own.

We have met the enemy, and I am going to do everything I can to make sure it isn’t me. But while the oil industry is externalizing the costs of pollution and global destruction onto me and all the world’s children, I will not allow it to externalize its shame.

The post Oh no. Not the Pogo Fallacy again. appeared first on Riverwalking.

In an important article on environmental outrage and human rights1 my colleague, Tom Kerns wrote that a Latina student in his course on environmental toxins had been enduring serious health problems since she was born. One day in class, she put two and two together – as students so beautifully do. “Do you think my health problems might be because my mother, when she was pregnant, was a spotter?”

A spotter? Yes, a spotter is the person who stands at the edge of the berry field while the crop-dusters come in low, spraying poison. Her job was to wave her arms so the spray plane would sweep around and head the other way. Pass after pass after pass, she waved her arms as the crop-duster buzzed her, glazing her with pesticides.

That story made me furious. What sort of sorry son of a bitch . . . It made me even madder because I was pretty sure the practice was widespread and perfectly legal, approved by all the right agencies. Do we have the words to express this indecency, this disgust?

Of course, we have a couple of words, and they are useful, as Tom points out.

When an agency or official has an obligation to protect someone from injustice – say a field worker — and they not only fail to do that, but rather injure the worker at exactly the point when they should have been protecting her, we have double-injustice. This, the philosopher Schopenhauer calls, “treachery.”2

And we have another extraordinarily helpful word, for instances when the failure to protect is not just random cruelty, but the quid pro quo for a bribe, or a corporation’s campaign donation (which in America can no longer be distinguished). That word is “corruption.”

But two words are not enough. What we need is the moral framework to express how wrong this is. And against what standard.

The world had a similar problem after WWII, when terrible atrocities were committed in a modern nation-state with a government that had been democratically elected. The horrific acts were, as Tom writes, “implemented according to that country’s legally enacted statutes and were regulated and overseen by administratively legitimate government ministries (as are many environmental assaults today). And yet they were clearly abhorrent and inhumane.”3

What was needed was a clear statement of universal standards of human decency that were higher than the law, universal standards against which the government practices themselves can be measured, and censured.

So, seventy years ago this month, all the nations of the world came together and wrote the standards down. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Imagine this, an agreement among every nation in the world, the first universally recognized moral code in the history of the world.

All persons have the right to life, liberty, and security of person.

It is the responsibility of governments to prevent violations of those rights.

If persons have a right to life, liberty and security of person, then they have, ipso facto, the right to air that has not been poisoned, water that has not been poisoned, food that has not been poisoned – the material and necessary conditions for the exercise of their fundamental rights.

And with that, the divide between environmental thriving and social justice snaps shut. There can be no social justice in a degraded and dying world; and there will be no environmental thriving unless there is justice – equal protection from thugs and oligarchs who would wreck the world and impose the costs on the poor and silenced.

Now, as the world reels under the effects of global warming, we face the greatest violation of human rights the world has ever seen. Fortunately, we now have the language and the moral authority to condemn it.

We have the moral framework that explains the enormity of the wrong done to that mother and her daughter and to millions like them: It was a violation of their human rights, compounded by the failure of the government to protect them. Treachery.

We are able to boldly name this collusion of governments in the ruthless expansion of international agribusiness, Big Oil, and others, and the massive violations of human rights that follow. Corruption.

With human rights, we have the moral language, we have the narrative structure, (1) to understand the basis of our fury, (2) to measure the scale of the wrong-doing, and (3) to stand on the moral sensibility of the whole world.

With human rights, we have made the connection between social justice and environmental thriving. As Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si, “Our work is to link social and ecological wrongs, the desperate instability of the poor and the fragility of the planet. We have to integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so we can hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

We have become the Spotters.

Our work is to stand in the field and wave our arms, calling out, “You have come to the end of the row! The end! Turn around! Turn around.”

1. For the full argument, see Tom Kerns, “Schopenhauer’s Mitleid, environmental outrage and human rights,” Thought, Law, Rights and Action, ed. Anna Grear and Evadne Grant (UK: Edward Elgar, 2015). 2. Ibid. 3. Kathleen Dean Moore and Tom Kerns, “Introduction,” Witness: The Human-rights Impacts of Fracking and Climate Change (forthcoming).

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Okay, folks, the people at the IPCC tell us that the world has twelve years to cut carbon emissions in half. Sounds like you and I need a plan. So, here’s a Climate Defender’s Calendar. Of course, we have to do all these things, all the time, forever – but this might help get us organized.

“DUCK RE-INFLATING A DEFLATED ACTIVIST”
by Bob Haverluck

2019. The Year of the Girding of the Loins

In the long tradition of battle, we will begin with self-purification. Basically, you just have to make sure you’re not fighting for the wrong side, a dutiful foot-soldier in the war against the world. So this is the year to dump all investments in fossil fuels, stop eating meat, save a chunk of Arctic ice the size of a minivan by cancelling your international eco-tour, tithe to environmental justice organizations that don’t take oil money, and make sure that all your electricity comes from renewable sources.

2020. The Year of The Election

Be clear: the world is not fighting climate change. The world is fighting those men (they are men and they are villains) who are blocking the world from implementing the changes that will restrain climate change. They are doing this for cold, hard cash, what we used to call “bribes”. This is the election in which you become a one-issue voter: It’s the Climate. Give your all to the brave climate-friendly politicians who promise to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and put a true price on carbon. Identify the oil-soaked pols, their pockets stuffed with dark and dirty money, and hold their feet to the fire. This is your one and only duty this year. Everything depends on it, and that is not an exaggeration.

2021. The Year of the Tree

There’s a fun way and a not-so-fun way to spend the year of the tree. The fun way is to plant trees obsessively, everywhere, preferably with a bunch of kids – in your front yard, your churchyard, the lawn at the old folks’ home, the prison yard, the school yard. Especially the school yard; the kids don’t need a jungle gym, for God’s sake; they need a forest. The planet needs 3 billion new trees, not one fewer, to suck up carbon dioxide. Less fun, but surely more important, is to protect the forests and grasslands that remain. Join up with the organizations that are supposed to be doing this, and straighten their spines. Their tools will be taxes and subsidies and lawsuits, yes, but also moral outrage. Stand in the threatened forest with a choir and a conscience. Actually, that sounds fun too.

2022. The Year of the Cow

You want to know something gross? Of the biomass of mammals on this planet, 4 percent are wild animals, 36 percent are human beings, and 60 percent are cows and other livestock. That 60 percent is belching and farting up a methane storm and grazing on the burnt remains of rainforests. By now, you are of course a vegetarian, so your work turns to making the whole world hostile to cows and other bloviating things. Does this mean political action to stop destructive subsidies and replace them with hefty taxes? Yep. Join up with others on this one; good, creative work is happening all around the world to help ranchers find a better way. And in your spare time, hang out at the meat counter and shame customers.

2023. The Year of the Sun

You could organize a campaign to put solar power on every school in your town. You could organize a community solar project for your neighborhood. But why would you, when you could spend this year (remember, there are only seven left) enacting laws that require every new building to be energy-neutral and providing negative and positive incentives for doing the same for existing buildings? We’ve got to scale up, people. We’ve got to work as hard to block coal and natural gas power as the thugs are working to block renewables. Harder. Greed will actually help us on this one, since renewables are now far cheaper than coal. Yay, greed.

2024. The Year of Another Election

Oh dear God. Okay. As Barbara Kingsolver says, “If you run out of hope at the end of the day, get up in the morning and put it on with your shoes.” So our work, the hard work of the entire year, is to elect people who will make bribery and corruption illegal again. That’s the only way to wrest the government from the grip of corporate control and force it to protect the rights of present and future beings to life, liberty, and security of person, which is, actually, its job. (Remember, “that to ensure these rights, governments are instituted among men…”?). By now, you are old pros at political action, and you know what to do. Just do it harder.

2025. The Year of the Sabbatical

And on the seventh year, we rest. This will be a time to give thanks for the great gifts that the reeling world continues to provide. We blighters don’t deserve fresh water and clean air and nourishing food, but the poor old Earth keeps on working to give them to us, although its back is blistered from the sun and half its fingers are missing.

2026. The Year of the Great Sucking

By this year, it will be manifestly clear that everything we have done is not enough. By now, the world will need to be deploying a hundred, a thousand, different technologies to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. That’s okay; the human intellect is endlessly inventive. That’s how we got into this mess. This year, the great work will be to invest in, speak out for, lobby for, insist on, demonstrate for, write songs in celebration of the Great Sucking. And, in your own backyard, install the best carbon-sequestration machines the world has ever invented (see 2021, above).

2027. The Year of Abstinence

Now that we have reduced the planetary biomass of cows, we can turn our attention to the world population of humans, which will have reached 8,334,801,643. To feed ourselves, we’ve been destroying habitats and the creatures who live there, driving them to extinction; we are in effect turning 150 species a day into human fat and gristle. So, sorry: no sex this year, no new babies. There is a good side to this: it will give you lots of time and energy to do everything you can to educate women, empower them, provide them with the information and the medical care that will give every woman control over her own body and her own fate, for the first time in the history of the universe. Sheesh.

2028. The Year of Another Election

Really? Already?

2029. The Year of Kindness Justice

This is the year that the number of climate refugees is predicted to reach 150,000,000 – people driven from their homes by thirst and starvation caused by global warming. Or maybe their homes are submerged by sea-rise or blown to slash by hurricanes or burned to ash. They didn’t do anything to deserve this. They just happened to be on the wrong continent, at the wrong time, bearing the consequences of the North’s profligate and disdainful use of fossil fuels. Damn. One might say, then, that this is the year of compassion, opening our hearts and homes. But actually, it’s not. This is the year of justice, when our work is to reach out to those we have harmed, to create meaningful programs of recompense, resilience, and restorative justice.

2030. The Year of Parties

Time’s up! This year, we will celebrate meeting the deadline set by climate change. We will load the table with lemons and warm bread. We will sing old “Peter, Paul, and Mary” songs. We will gather the small children around our arthritic knees. In their sweet voices, they will say, “I guess we don’t hate you after all.” We will weep in exhaustion and relief. Their small arms will embrace us.

The post The Climate Defender’s Calendar: The Twelve-Year Plan appeared first on Riverwalking.

The morning after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, this old climate warrior climbed out of bed feeling better about the chances of the sizzling, souring world than I have for months. Not just feeling better, feeling positively energized. The worst climate policy news had broken, and suddenly the sense of possibility and power was overwhelming.

Why? The 17th century poet Mizuta Masahide has the answer: Barn’s burnt down – now I can see the moon.

Yes, exactly. For years, everything about US climate-change policy has been hidden and confused, just a mush. Oil companies painting themselves green. Deniers pretending they believed that hoax shit. Government agencies doing stuff, but not really, not soon enough. Dark money hiding in every knothole. Environmental organizations dancing around the C-word, leaving activists in inarticulate misery. Politicians lying, “jury’s still out,” and running for the door. Who could push against that murky pall? It was frustrating as hell.

That’s over. That barn of confusion is in ashes, the smoke has cleared in the high wind, and the truth of our situation is gleaming, bright and full on the horizon. Here’s what is clearly revealed.

The petrochemical industry is in control of federal energy and environmental policy in the United States. According to Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, billionaire oil guys Charles and David Koch’s dad warned them to act secretly, to stay below the surface, because “it’s the whale that spouts that gets harpooned.” But now it’s impossible to hide the fact that Trump’s decision answered to the industry, even as it directly contravened the view of majorities in every single state, the seven in ten Americans in favor of remaining in the Paris Accords.Legislators, who might have stopped them, are bought off in a monstrous corruption scandal rendered legal by the Supreme Court. Over the last three years, according to the Guardian, gas, oil, and coal interests gave $2,465,910 to Ted Cruz, $10,694,284 in toto to the 22 Senators who asked Trump to withdraw from the Accords, and about $90,000,000 in dark money. The level of corruption is staggering enough that we have to prod ourselves to remember that paying piles of cash for votes is called “bribery,” and it’s a betrayal of the public trust. If it weren’t for Citizens United, it would also be a felony.In its frenzy for short-term profit, the petrochemical industry will not control itself for the public good, for the sake of the future of life on the planet, not even to avoid inevitable financial ruin not so far down the road. It’s not just that fossil fuel industries run roughshod over Lakota Sioux or families in fracked-up Ohio, they are now revealed in their determination to do anything in order to continue to make money without legal or moral constraint, and damn the consequences – especially if the consequences are born globally by poor people, or babies, or plants and animals, or future generations – the ones who have a hard time complaining.There is no longer reason to think that regular democratic processes – townhall meetings, petitions, even elections – will turn the tide. This clears the way for irregular but long-respected democratic processes, including the sort of non-violent demonstrations, civil disobedience, and varieties of ‘creative disruption’ that unsettle the industries’ business-as-usual complacence and increase the costs and uncertainty of operation. The courts are more likely now to go along with activists, letting them plead the ‘necessity defense,’ justifying their otherwise illegal actions on the grounds that they had exhausted the usual legal channels for responding to an emergency.In the absence of a meaningful federal government response, major US actors in the struggle against climate change will have to be the long-standing civic and moral institutions – states, cities, businesses, universities and churches. The anti-slavery campaigns, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement, so many more, have been led from the conscience of the streets – people walking from a church, holding hands and singing – not from sudden moral awakening in the federal government. Signs are that this now is how it shall be – see, for example, all the entities now vowing to uphold the US commitment to the Paris Accords.Now that the US has withdrawn from the Paris Accords, the nations of the world are positioned to claim leadership of global climate policy. They don’t have to weaken global climate agreements to appease oil-soaked US Senators – not anymore. As the redoubtable Angela Merkel said: “Now more than ever we will work for global climate policies that save our planet.” The irony is that for decades, we climate activists wished for a global leader who would mobilize all the nations to take decisive action; we just didn’t imagine it would be a petulant ‘leader’ who would blunder backwards into that role.For reasons of justice, the moral responsibility of the US to take meaningful action is clear. We can see plainly that the United States got extraordinarily rich by burning fossil fuels, and in the process made a terrible mess of the whole world, especially nations who had no part, or profit, in creating that horror. To stiff them, to leave them with the bill, which will be paid in the suffering and lives of their children? – that may fly in Trump’s business empire, but not in the moral world.For reasons of prudence, the moral obligation to take action is clear. Now that the smoke from this barn-burning has cleared — revealing that it is greed, not ambiguous scientific evidence, that raises doubts about the effects of climate change — we can see into the future. “Unless we take immediately action,” wrote 300 scientists led by a team from Stanford, “by the time today’s children are middle-aged, the life-support systems of the planet will be irretrievably damaged.” Allowing this to happen is a betrayal of the innocent children and of this lovely, life-bedazzled world.Change is in the wind – climate change, sure, but political change as well. Trump (and his Congressional minions) now own the coming climate catastrophes. Next Super-storm hits the East Coast, next flood wipes out Iowa farmers, next drought closes up California, next Alaskan village washes into the Bering Sea – they will have to explain why they chose to protect the oil industry, rather than the people. It probably won’t work for them to show their cash receipts.

Given this scandal, it’s a disgrace to hold petrochemical investments. Not a university, not a bank, not a retirement fund is going to want to have anything to do with them. It’s dirty money. Filthy.

10. There is a new determination that Trump’s spasm of cosmic cruelty will not be allowed to destroy the world. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords brought into stark relief the decision we all must make. Which is more important? Oil-company profits and the continuous flow of huge money into politics? Or the chances of the world’s people for a decent life, one blessed by fresh water and abundant food, homes safe from storms and floods, healthy children, and a reasonable chance that humans can thrive on Earth for a very long time. Donald Trump made his decision. But he did not decide for me. All signs are that he did not decide for the nation. And he surely did not decide for the world.

 

The post Barn’s Burnt Down: After the Paris Accords, Ten Things We Can See Clearly appeared first on Riverwalking.

When a fearsome storm is bearing down on a great ship – the first winds shuddering in the sails, the first waves burying the bowsprit, sullen clouds obscuring the horizon – the captain shouts the order. “All hands on deck.” Every sailor knows what that means. Each person on board, no matter their rank or watch, has an absolute duty to rush from their gambling tables or bunks to their stations, to do whatever has to be done to save the ship.

What if sailors don’t respond? – “Give me a minute, I’ve got some lucky dice for once.” Or, “wake me if it gets really bad.” Under the old laws of the sea, that would be a flogging offense, or worse. But the failure to respond would be a moral transgression as well – in two ways. First, the crew members who do not respond become free riders, taking unearned advantage of the actions of those who do answer the call. But worse, those who do not respond say, by their lassitude, that they don’t believe the crisis is real and immediate. If their inaction persuades too many others, who will right the ship?

The analogy is a harsh one. The climate disruptions that are bearing down on the planet – intense heat, failed crops, waves of desperate refugees, extinctions and acidified seas – are a planetary emergency. Unaddressed, they are likely to take down the ship: “Unless immediate action is taken,” 300 scientists recently wrote, “by the time today’s children are middle-aged, the life support systems of the planet will be irretrievably damaged.” This is a call for all hands on deck. But the order is not coming from any captain. In the face of the perfidy of reality-denying government “leaders,” the call is coming from all quarters – scientists, religious leaders, human rights activists, national security advisors, economists, parents, and local government officials, including indigenous people worldwide. Turning back this crisis, if it is still possible, will take the greatest and most determined public collective action that the planet has ever seen.

The danger is that inattentive citizens might not step up to help, not enough of us. And that is a moral failure; let us say it straight. Those who stand aside are taking advantage of the actions, often sacrifices, of those who step up to demand or offer solutions. If the children of the inattentive have fresh drinking water, if their grandchildren have enough to eat, if their coastline property fends off the rising seas, it will be because of the courage of others, not their own. But the inattentive are not just doing nothing. It’s worse than that. Their silence reinforces the message that this climate disruption is no big deal – exactly the message the fossil fuel industries and their government minions want to convey. In that way, those who fail to respond to the emergency call, distracted or dozing, become part of the storm itself.

Here’s the point: Democracies are governments by and for the vociferous – the shouters and tweeters, yes, but also the people who pack the meeting halls and pick up the phones. When people show up for the cause, they win, as we have seen again and again, for better or for worse. When they don’t, they lose. In the United States, a significant majority, sixty-one percent of voters, think that climate disruption is an “extremely,” “very,” or “moderately” important issue. But of those, more than half “rarely” or “never” talk about it. They never even talk about it.

Climate change is a call to all hands to rush on deck, to “come alive” to help save what they care about the most, by doing what they do best. Is it writing? Public speaking? Is it singing? Organizing? Is it walking in a parade? Is it even blocking a bulldozer? There might have been a time when our work for the world was quiet work in our private lives, focused on exemplary living and careful consumption. That time has passed. Our work now is in the streets, in the state houses, in the college quad, in the grocery line, speaking out. Speaking out against the corporate plunder of the planet. Raising our voices to defend the endangered beings who have no voice to defend themselves – future generations, plants and animals, the desperate poor, the children.

Adapted from my afterword in Coming Alive, by Brorby et al.

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Concerned ecologists recently made the case for the ecological urgency of action to save the world’s terrestrial megafauna (Ripple et al. 2016). These large mammals, desperately endangered by human depredation and habitat destruction, are critical to the functioning of the world’s ecosystems, and thus critical to human survival. To the extent that we value human survival, then, we ought to value the survival of the great beasts.

Here, we make the case for the moral urgency of action to save the world’s megafauna. It’s not just that the great mammals are ecologically useful, a fact that creates a pragmatic and self-regarding interest in saving them. In addition, they are morally worthy, and so we have an affirmative moral duty to preserve them.

With their immense size and strength, long life spans, and complex behaviors, megafauna capture the human imagination, earning the honorific “charismatic,” a word that comes from the Greek kharisma, meaning “divine gift.” This intuition of value is borne out by the world’s ethical traditions, which provide at least three different types of reasons why we ought to defend terrestrial megafauna — reasons derived from utilitarian values, from moral duties, and from human virtues. When so much is at stake in the survival of the great beasts, it is essential to state clearly all the reasons – moral as well as ecological — why megafauna ought to be saved. Fruitful public discourse about the best policies depends on both a clear understanding of the facts and a clear affirmation of what is of value.

Deontological arguments: An act is right if it honors one’s duties.

The duty to honor the sanctity of life. Whether one believes that the great mammals are created by God, or that they evolved from the creative urgency of life, unfolding – the obligation is the same, to protect their thriving. If God created them, as monotheist traditions have it, then we are called to honor our duties as stewards of divine creation. Other religious and indigenous wisdom traditions, almost without exception, understand lives as sacred and sacrosanct. If animals are sacred, then every extinction, every destruction, is a profanity.

If, on the other hand, the animals are part of the flowering of evolution over millions of years, then wonder at the chance that the universe has produced creatures who are extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious, awe-inspiring, and irreplaceable. If the good English word for this combination of characteristics is ‘sacred,’ then the great mammals are sacred though secular. Or, using different concepts, put it this way: The lives of the great mammals are of infinite and intrinsic value; the duty to honor and protect them is a duty of reverence.

The duty to act compassionately. Compassion is the capacity to imagine oneself in another being’s place, to feel their suffering as if it were one’s own, to feel their urgency toward life, as one feels one’s own striving to live. A compassionate person, intently listening to the cries of other beings, strives to create a world in which suffering is reduced. The more that ethologists learn about the capacity of the great beasts to feel pain, to cringe, to grieve, to engage in rituals of mourning, to seek what will sustain their families – which is to say, the stronger the analogies become between the behaviors of animals and of humans – the stronger is the duty to treat their suffering as one’s own.

The duty to protect beauty. Beauty is a positive value. To say that something is beautiful is to say that it is worthy of love, admiration, and respect — the arc of a giraffe’s neck, the speed of a herd of gazelles. The human pleasure in the perception of this harmony, this wholeness, is one source of its value. But beauty has value in itself, as an ideal of harmony and the perfect blending of form and function, so manifest in the great beasts of the Earth. A judgment of beauty thus makes a claim on a person. It calls one to live up to one’s value judgment by protecting what is beautiful.

Duties of reciprocity. Consider that this world and its rare and endangered megafauna are great and life-sustaining gifts from a fecund Earth. We did not earn these gifts; we have no claim upon them. If they were taken away, there would be nothing we could do but mourn their loss and scramble, perhaps futilely, to replace their ecosystem benefits. What is the appropriate response to a gift? This we know, as our parents taught us: a gift requires, at the least, gratitude, which calls us to attentiveness, celebration, and careful use. To ruin, waste, or grind it into the ground is to dishonor the gift and violate our duty as a recipient. Gratitude for a gift also implies reciprocity, that we give in turn, using our gifts to benefit the Earth and its terrestrial megafauna.

Duties based on wonder and awe. Some ecological stories reveal the astonishingly improbable unfolding of a world that brings forth the Earth’s great mammals, while others shine a light on the unfathomable, pulsing, tangled web of relationships tied to the great beasts. Stories of complexity and improbability of this magnitude elicit wonder and awe. The sources of wonder and awe merit respect, even reverence. At the barest of bare minimums, the wellsprings of wonder and awe deserve protection.

Deontological arguments: An act is right if it honors one’s duties.

The duty to honor the sanctity of life. Whether one believes that the great mammals are created by God, or that they evolved from the creative urgency of life, unfolding – the obligation is the same, to protect their thriving. If God created them, as monotheist traditions have it, then we are called to honor our duties as stewards of divine creation. Other religious and indigenous wisdom traditions, almost without exception, understand lives as sacred and sacrosanct. If animals are sacred, then every extinction, every destruction, is a profanity.

If, on the other hand, the animals are part of the flowering of evolution over millions of years, then wonder at the chance that the universe has produced creatures who are extraordinary, beautiful, mysterious, awe-inspiring, and irreplaceable. If the good English word for this combination of characteristics is ‘sacred,’ then the great mammals are sacred though secular. Or, using different concepts, put it this way: The lives of the great mammals are of infinite and intrinsic value; the duty to honor and protect them is a duty of reverence.

The duty to act compassionately. Compassion is the capacity to imagine oneself in another being’s place, to feel their suffering as if it were one’s own, to feel their urgency toward life, as one feels one’s own striving to live. A compassionate person, intently listening to the cries of other beings, strives to create a world in which suffering is reduced. The more that ethologists learn about the capacity of the great beasts to feel pain, to cringe, to grieve, to engage in rituals of mourning, to seek what will sustain their families – which is to say, the stronger the analogies become between the behaviors of animals and of humans – the stronger is the duty to treat their suffering as one’s own.

The duty to protect beauty. Beauty is a positive value. To say that something is beautiful is to say that it is worthy of love, admiration, and respect — the arc of a giraffe’s neck, the speed of a herd of gazelles. The human pleasure in the perception of this harmony, this wholeness, is one source of its value. But beauty has value in itself, as an ideal of harmony and the perfect blending of form and function, so manifest in the great beasts of the Earth. A judgment of beauty thus makes a claim on a person. It calls one to live up to one’s value judgment by protecting what is beautiful.

Duties of reciprocity. Consider that this world and its rare and endangered megafauna are great and life-sustaining gifts from a fecund Earth. We did not earn these gifts; we have no claim upon them. If they were taken away, there would be nothing we could do but mourn their loss and scramble, perhaps futilely, to replace their ecosystem benefits. What is the appropriate response to a gift? This we know, as our parents taught us: a gift requires, at the least, gratitude, which calls us to attentiveness, celebration, and careful use. To ruin, waste, or grind it into the ground is to dishonor the gift and violate our duty as a recipient. Gratitude for a gift also implies reciprocity, that we give in turn, using our gifts to benefit the Earth and its terrestrial megafauna.

Duties based on wonder and awe. Some ecological stories reveal the astonishingly improbable unfolding of a world that brings forth the Earth’s great mammals, while others shine a light on the unfathomable, pulsing, tangled web of relationships tied to the great beasts. Stories of complexity and improbability of this magnitude elicit wonder and awe. The sources of wonder and awe merit respect, even reverence. At the barest of bare minimums, the wellsprings of wonder and awe deserve protection.

Virtue ethics: An act is right if it is grounded in virtue

The duty of humility. Apart from the loss of so much of the Earth’s megafauna, perhaps the greatest loss in the modern era has been the loss of human humility. The latter of course contributes to the former. Humility is the virtue by which humans understand themselves as they truly are: not lord and master over the world, but only one of the amazing species on the planet. We owe our being and the prized qualities of our humanity to that world. Understanding our essential relatedness to all life, we turn away from the arrogance that allows us, perhaps encourages us, to toss the world’s megafauna into the abyss of non-existence.

Duties based on moral integrity. Integrity is perhaps the greatest of all virtues. People of integrity match their actions to their beliefs about what is right, and so achieve a oneness. They “walk the talk.” They understand the importance of the world’s megafauna, appreciate their beauty, their improbable ecological history, and celebrate their ability to inspire awe and wonder. People of integrity say “this is of value, this must remain” and then they make it so. In this, people of integrity become whole as their world becomes whole again.

The survival of the great beasts is thus a great and essential moral test for us. If humans can act with good sense, honor, and virtue – sharing the world with the elephant and gazelle, the tigers and bears – perhaps we can earn our own humanity, even as we find a way for this astonishing world to continue.

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“The Moral Case for Divestment from Fossil Fuels”

I’ve just returned from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Gustavus is a pretty campus in the rain, with blue and yellow banners flapping to celebrate their MAYDAY! Symposium on divestment from fossil fuels.

 

Divest. Etymologically, di-vest means “take off your clothes.” In an ethical context, it means, take a moral stand by shedding investments in immoral practices. In the context of a university’s endowment fund, it means a conscientious and forward-thinking Foundation officer standing up and saying something like this:

“Fossil fuels are disrupting the climate in ways that, if left unchecked, will wreck the world — and our students’ futures. That is flat wrong. The harm to our students is real and ugly and intentional. We will have no part of it. We will not profit from it. We will not trade our students’ futures for any amount of money – and especially not for a dirty dribble of profits from a destructive and dying industry.”

Thank you, Gustavus, for giving me the chance to build the moral case for divestment, gathering and giving voice to the wisdom of many people of conscience. Because I am a philosopher, I worked with a philosopher’s tools, which are ethical discourse, logical analysis, and what David Hume calls the “moral sentiments” among them, outrage, yearning, and ferocious love.

I decided to share my speaking notes here, because I want to put these arguments in the hands of people – students and investment officers alike – who are urging their schools to do the right thing. There should be no mistaking the moral import of this moment. Please read this text, quote it, crib from it, use it in every way that serves the lovely, reeling world.

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