PHIL 12- Environmental Ethics

Albert Scweitzer's view

"Reverence for Life says that the only thing we are really sure of is that we live and want to go on living. This is something that we share with everything else that lives, from elephants to blades of grass—and, of course, every human being. So we are brothers and sisters to all living things, and owe to all of them the same care and respect, that we wish for ourselves."

world poverty and Singer's solution and personal efforts

A recent article about Singer in The New York Times revealed that the philosopher gives one-fifth of his income to famine-relief agencies. "From when I first saw pictures in newspapers of people starving, from when people asked you to donate some of your pocket money for collections at school," he mused, "I always thought, 'Why that much — why not more?"' Going out to nice restaurants, buying new clothes because the old ones are no longer stylish, vacationing at beach resorts — so much of our income is spent on things not essential to the preservation of our lives and health. Donated to one of a number of charitable agencies, that money could mean the difference between life and death for children in need. All of which raises a question: In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one — knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?

land ethic

Aldo Leopold's "Land Ethic" asks for moral standing to land/bio- community and not just individuals; consider whole and not individuals; humans not more intrinsically valuable than rest; future of all life forms (not just ours considered) Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" demands that we stop treating the land as a mere object or resource. For Leopold, land is not merely soil. Instead, land is a fountain of energy, flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.

greenhouse

Any gas in the atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation in the thermal infrared range, is called a greenhouse gas. The greenhouse effect is a process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface, is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases, and is re-radiated in all directions. This process repeats over and over again, trapping radiation in the atmosphere. This is one of the major causes of global warming. Global warming is causing the Earth to lose its snow cover; glaciers are melting, the sea-level is rising, and a lot of arctic floral and faunal species are on the verge of extinction.

ecological consciousness

Australian philosopher Warwick Fox says that the field of environmental ethics is not limited to realizing our moral obligations towards the environment. It is about realizing what he calls ecological consciousness advocates of this ideology believe that once a state of 'environmental consciousness' is attained, humans will feel obligated to protect the environment.

what is Earth Day?

Earth Day established in 1970 on April 22 set up by Senator Nelson of Wisconsin; coast to coast rallies with 20 million Americans involved Scientists like Rachel Carson and environmentalists who led philosophers to consider the philosophical aspect of environmental problems, pioneered in the development of environmental ethics as a branch of environmental philosophy

acid rain

Gases like carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide, can react with water to produce corresponding acids. When this happens in the atmosphere, we get rain that has an acidic pH. The gases are released into the atmosphere by certain natural processes like lightning, volcanoes, etc. However, the amount of these gases released due to factories, vehicles, and different industries, surpasses that which is produced naturally. It goes beyond a level that can be tolerated by nature. Acid rain causes stone, rocks, steel, and other kinds of corrosive metals, to erode; paint also peels off from surfaces exposed to this destructive rain. This means monuments, statues, bridges, and buildings, all are at risk. Going at the current rate, there may come a time when people won't be able to step out into the rain, because of the damage it can cause to one's skin.

Arne Naess' deep environmentalism

Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess classified environmentalism as shallow and deep. While shallow ecologists follow anthropocentrism, deep ecologists recommend the development of a new eco-philosophy. The word "deep" in part referred to the level of questioning of our purposes and values when arguing in environmental conflicts. The "deep" movement involves deep questioning, right down to fundamental root causes. The short-term, shallow approach stops before the ultimate level of fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes (e.g. recycling, increased automotive efficiency, export-driven monocultural organic agriculture) based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of the industrial economy. The long-range deep approach involves redesigning our whole systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems.

Ted Talk main points

One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. We're using up about five planets. If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. And, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. And people simply do not have enough to survive. This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing it's a very young planet. A third of the people on this planet are kids. And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. And they may not want to live exactly like us. They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. -the idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology -The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call "serious play." We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. This is from "A Force More Powerful." It's a little screenshot. "A Force More Powerful" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. How do we help people like that? Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet.

when and how did the environmentalist movement begin?

Roots pre-date 1960-1970s with Albert Schweitzer's Reverence for Life Some 1960 books set it in motion: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (pesticides as harmful to ourselves and environment); Paul Ehrisch's The Population Bomb (effects of human growth on planet) Distinct field in 1970s

global warming live science article

The globe is heating up. Both land and oceans are warmer now than record-keeping began in 1880, and temperatures are still ticking upward. This temperature rise, in a nutshell, is global warming. Here are the bare numbers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): Average surface temperatures rose a total of 1.71 degrees Fahrenheit (0.95 degrees Celsius) between 1880 and 2016. The pace of change has been an additional 0.13 degrees F (0.07 degrees C) per decade, with the land surface warming faster than the ocean surface — 0.18 degrees F (0.10 degrees C) versus 0.11 degrees F (0.06 degrees C) per decade, respectively. The Paris Agreement, ratified by 159 nations as of the summer 2017, aims to halt that warming at 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C) above Earth's average temperature during preindustrial times — a goal most scientists and policy makers agree will be a challenge to meet. (The United States participated in the crafting of that nonbinding treaty under President Barack Obama, but President Donald Trump has said that his administration will not participate.) Here's how humanity has managed to heat up the planet. The Greenhouse Effect The main driver of today's warming is the combustion of fossil fuels. These hydrocarbons heat up the planet via the greenhouse effect, which is caused by the interaction between Earth's atmosphere and incoming radiation from the sun. "The basic physics of the greenhouse effect were figured out more than a hundred years ago by a smart guy using only pencil and paper," Josef Werne, a professor of geology and environmental science at the University of Pittsburgh, told Live Science. That "smart guy" was Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist and eventual Nobel Prize winner. Simply put, solar radiation hits Earth's surface and then bounces back toward the atmosphere as heat. Gases in the atmosphere trap this heat, preventing it from escaping into the void of space (good news for life on the planet). In a paper presented in 1895, Arrhenius figured out that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide could trap heat close to the Earth's surface — and that small changes in the amount of those gases could make a big difference in how much heat was trapped. Advertisement Greenhouse gases Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, humans have been rapidly changing the balance of gases in the atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels like coal and oil releases water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), ozone and nitrous oxide (N2O) — the primary greenhouse gases. Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas. Between about 800,000 years ago and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, its presence in the atmosphere amounted to about 280 parts per million (ppm). Today, it's about 400 ppm. (This number means there are 400 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air per every million air molecules.) Levels of CO2 haven't been that high since the Pliocene epoch, which occurred between 3 million and 5 million years ago, according to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In 2015, CO2 accounted for about 82 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to an EPA inventory. "We know through high-accuracy instrumental measurements that there is an unprecedented increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation [heat] and the global mean temperature is increasing," Keith Peterman, a professor of chemistry at York College of Pennsylvania, and his research partner, Gregory Foy, an associate professor of chemistry at York College of Pennsylvania, told Live Science in a joint email message. CO2 makes its way into the atmosphere through a variety of routes. Burning fossil fuels releases CO2 and is by far the primary way that U.S. emissions warm the globe. According to the EPA's 2015 report, U.S. fossil fuel combustion, including electricity generation, releases just over 5.5 billion tons (5 billion metric tons) of CO2into the atmosphere annually. Other processes — such as non-energy use of fuels, iron and steel production, cement production and waste incineration — boost the total annual CO2 release in the U.S. to almost 6 billion tons (5.5 billion metric tons). Deforestation is also a large contributor to excessive CO2 in the atmosphere. In fact, deforestation is the second largest anthropogenic (human-made) source of carbon dioxide, according to research published by Duke University. When trees are killed, they release the carbon they have stored during photosynthesis. According to the 2010 Global Forest Resources Assessment, deforestation releases nearly a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere per year. Methane is the second most common greenhouse gas, but it is much more efficient at trapping heat. In 2012, the gas accounted for about 9 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. The EPA reports that methane has 20 times more impact than carbon dioxide on climate change over a 100-year period. Methane can come from many natural sources, but humans cause a large portion of methane emissions through mining, the use of natural gas, the mass raising of livestock and the use of landfills, according to the Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks report from 1990 to 2012. In fact, according to the EPA, humans are responsible for more than 60 percent of methane emissions. There are some hopeful trends in greenhouse gas emissions. Though U.S. emissions increased by a total of 7.7 percent between 1990 and 2014, according to EPA data, they have declined 8 percent in the timeframe between 2005 and 2014. Much of the reason for this recent decline is the replacement of coal with natural gas, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The U.S. economy is also transitioning from manufacturing-based to a less carbon-intense service economy. Fuel-efficient vehicles and energy-efficiency standards for buildings have also improved emissions, according to the EPA. Effects of global warming Global warming doesn't just mean warming — which is why "climate change" has become the trendier term among researchers and policy makers. While the globe is becoming hotter on average, this temperature increase can have paradoxical effects, such as more serious snowstorms. There are several big ways climate change can and will affect the globe: By melting ice, by drying out already-arid areas, by causing weather extremes and by disrupting the delicate balance of the oceans. -extreme weather - ocean disruption how to solve global warming The most ambitious effort to forestall warming is the Paris Agreement. This nonbinding international treaty entered into force in November 2016 However, President Trump said in June that his administration will not honor the Paris Agreement. Shortly thereafter, more than 1,000 mayors, governors and business executives said they would continue to abide by the promised emissions cuts, Inside Climate News Reported. Solving climate change will require big shifts in energy production, from fossil fuels to less carbon-intensive sources. Some scientists even think geoengineering will be needed to cool the planet.

CFC

chlorofluorocarbon any of a class of compounds of carbon, hydrogen, chlorine, and fluorine, typically gases used in refrigerants and aerosol propellants. They are harmful to the ozone layer in the earth's atmosphere owing to the release of chlorine atoms upon exposure to ultraviolet radiation.

Hank Green's five ways we negatively impact the environment

human activity can be responsible for extinction of 1000 organisms to date we need these organisms having them intact we rely on them support services, provision services, water, regulating services, kind of awesome, places to play, places to inspire (cultural services) it would cost us 46 trillion per year that ecosystems do for us 66 trill for globe biodiversity -we danger biodiversity impact many ecosystems -deforestation -desertification- overgrazing, overwatering --> gobi desert carbon dioxide -global warming - introducing non-native species - overharvesting organisms

anthropocentric view

human centeredness; obligations to natural environment as it impacts humans; moral standing applied to humans; instrumental value of nature (Aristotle can fit here with the statement: "nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man"; pollution, depletion, climate change impacts us and our future generations

astronaut's environmentalist view having returned to earth

look back at earth... might be the most important reason we went to the moon dynamic alive place you see glowing all the time glance back at our planet was just tremendous i can only describe what i can see line that separates day and night flying over thunderstorms cities lighting up the colors the beauty the motion we are stardust awesome, experience of awe to let go of yourself they were experiencing interconnectedness with that blue-green ball much of their free time is "Earth-grazing" they can change for hours-- they have an incredible aesthetic impact. overview effect... see earth as a planet, see sun as a star see sun with a black sky larger perspective on earth next natural evolution... see space we are in space already, we need to bring that awareness we live on planet and all the implications on earth earth looks extremely fragile thin line that is barely hugging the surface of the planet paper thin layer protects everything from death. overview effect... oneness and unity of earth of all consciousness western tradition- emphasis on separation eastern traditions-- world and species are a manifestation of a larger whole the sense of the living reality becomes obvious... overview effect- cognitive effect that can produce a spiritual effect some of astronauts- religious explanation, science explanation there is going to be a greater interest. act as one species, with one destiny, we are not going to survive if we don't its who we are thats what at stake to shift our behavior to a sustainable approach shift our approach to our view as opposed to a destructive approach if we dont work together, everything that affects one side of the ecosystem affects the other side of the ecosystem

euthrophication

means excessive growth of phytoplankton in a water body. Almost all natural water bodies (unless intentionally protected), are subject to water pollution; this adds a number of 'substrates' such as phosphates, nitrates, sewage waste, etc., to water sources. All these substances boost the growth of plants (especially fast-growing plants) to such an extent that it completely depletes the water body of oxygen, and other nutrients. Algal bloom is one of the effects of eutrophication. The depletion of oxygen (or hypoxia) can lead to death of many fish species and other forms of aquatic life. On the other hand, it may lead to an increase in the number of undesirable aquatic species, thus completely throwing nature off balance.

non-anthropocentric view

moral standing applied to non-human natural world; intrinsic value of nature (individual living organisms and holistic entities); perhaps Spinoza can fit here; Schweitzer does with his Reverence for Life (all living things have a "will to live" as "teleological centers of life" ---movement towards development

Poverty and Responsibility and Materialism video

selfishness is at the core of singers ethical thinking he questions what is the responsibility of people in luxury to help those in poverty he asks you imagined to invested on retirement money on an expensive automobile if you pulled a switch to save child or save car by the way people spend, people are killing the child two charities mentioned in the piece oxfam, unicef 3.25 million everybody should keep money for basic necessities and give the rest to poor people most of the world's population would never get to the point of spending $50 at a meal singer doesnt lives up to his ideals peter singer is guided by oldest rule of all considering actions by all of those who are affected by it golden rule, how would you like it if it has been done to you

future of environmentalism field

solutions to problems, obligations at grass roots Obligations at grass roots (change the way we think; bottom up solution) instead of top down (government) · Scientific understanding of the environment should be promoted · Business ethics: power of consumer and so business ethics will have to address these concerns · "Environmental consciousness" as we see our connection with nature and hence an obligation will grow to protect it

environmental ethics

the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. A third of the people on this planet are kids. And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live

solutions to problems

walk/bike plant take care of vehicle save water and energy recycle renewable sources of energy change habits go green when gardening such as organic and compost be informed/educated! from article... plant more trees walk more, drive less maintain your vehicles change the way you drive save water Use CFC-free products: CFCs are released from aerosol sprays, air conditioning systems and refrigerators. Some cosmetic products too, contain CFCs. Some countries have already banned the use of CFC products. CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and greenhouse effect. Using CFC-free products is the simplest way to prevent the harm they cause to the environment. save energy recycle and reuse harness renewable energy change habits save animals go green when gardening or farming create awareness

cowspiracy

without using any gases oil or fuel, we will still exceed carbon emissions by the year 2020 all simply by eating, raising lifestock if you reduce methane emissions, , the level of atmosphere goes down quickly within decades 100 years or so in carbon emissions deforestation, land use, poverty free living used to be 95% of biomass 1%humans now 98% of biomass is human beings and animals we own 2%free living animals we stole the earth from free living animals concerned researchers agree that the primary cost is overgrazing, habitat lost, overfishing, mass extinction from 65 million yeras cutting down forests to graze animals and grow soy beans to feed cows chickens pigs 91% of the lost of rainforest in the Amazon forest is due to raising livestock