A perfect moral storm

I've been traveling and reading an outstanding book while on the road.  Stephen Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm:  The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change should be a must-read for anyone interested in sustainability issues.  He tackles the issue head on:  human-caused climate change is creating a huge inter-generational problem and we have to try to understand it and fix it. While fascinating, the book is a pretty difficult read and I may re-read some parts of it.  

He starts with the assertion that we must be concerned about what we leave for future generations because they're not present now to help us manage our decisions yet they will certainly be effected by them.  With this, and little else, as a starting assumption, he defines the perfect moral storm as one that has three main components:

1) a global problem (climate change acts on the earth as a whole, but the rich are creating the problem and the poor are suffering now and are likely to suffer more in the future--this is immoral)

2) an intergenerational element (those who will be impacted in the future have no say in what we do now and it's immoral to do things that we know will cause more suffering in the future)

3) a theoretical component (we don't, he argues, have a good theory of intergenerational ethics to guide us and this makes us susceptible to rationalizations and justifications that will cause inaction or insufficient action).

He warns us about how easy it is to slip into complacency and put off tackling some hard questions head on, but that if we profess to be moral, we must be concerned with protecting life on earth in the future. He also discusses the non-trivial issues of trading off real costs now (which may cause some discomfort) with unknown benefits in the future.  However, the lack of certainty, he argues, shouldn't and can't be an excuse for inaction today and those that block action are likely to be morally corrupt.

The rub, ultimately, will be to translate lucid arguments into meaningful political action and he traces the failures, to date, of our attempts to enact meaningful global legislation that might control/reverse the worst impacts of increased atmospheric CO2.

There's a LOT in this book; but it's well worth struggling over.  I want to have some friends read it and then talk about it.  I suggest you do the same.

Jonathan Gold on shark fin soup

LA food writer Jonathan Gold has a great essay about the problems with shark-fin soup and the extinction risk sharks face from a rising Chinese middle class.   Check it out at the LA Times.  He (and I) support a ban on this barbarous waste.

What happened to Obama?

In a really interesting Op-Ed in the New York Times, Drew Western, critiques President Obama's lack of developing a 'story line' and sticking to it, and by doing so has squandered an opportunity for true change.

Regardless of your politics, read it, talk about this over a Sunday dinner, and ask yourselves this:  how can we, the citizens, empower our politicians to create the future we want?

How do we value nature?

Michael Gross, reporting in the scientific journal Current Biology has a really interesting article on valuing nature.  Much of the article is devoted to reporting on a UN Environmental Program study called The Economics of the Environment and Biodiversity and a recent meeting at Oxford of the World Forum for Enterprise and the Environment.  While NGOs, businesses, and academics want to develop ways to estimate the value of nature, there are implementation problems. Among several interesting points was the one that it's really difficult to value the oceans' bounty and it's even more difficult to conserve oceanic biodiversity.  It's likely, thus, that this particular common is likely to continue to be exploited.

Should healthy food be a privilege of those who can afford it?

Have a look at this article about food security and discuss the following:

How can we work to make healthy food more accessible to the poor?  How can we work to eliminate 'food deserts' in urban areas where residents are unable to buy fresh fruits and vegetables?  What is the relative role of individuals, industry and government in developing solutions? 

Plastic Bag Wars from Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone has just published a really interesting piece by Kitt Doucette on plastic bags and the struggle to regulate them.  While an estimated 25% of the world's population is living in areas with plastic bag bans, the US is slow to act, in part because of strong industry opposition.  Indeed, the plastics industry is suing municipalities that try to enact plastic bag bans, effectively delaying or preventing implementation.  Read and learn...

The tragedy of cognition...by Dominic Johnson

My friend and colleague Dominic Johnson just wrote a nice essay on how psychological biases may be one of the real impediments to soloving our climate problems.  I'm reproducing it below...

From:  http://www.dominicdpjohnson.com/blog/

The Tragedy of Cognition

July 11th, 2011

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, several reports have been published that investigated the causes of the disaster, who was to blame, and the legal obligations for compensation. Beyond these important issues, however, is a perhaps more striking fact: many of the numerous deficiencies and risks were long known and yet nothing was done to deal with them. It took a disaster of this scale to trigger a systematic rethink of priorities, rules, and regulations about offshore drilling.

President Barack Obama declared in June 2010: “In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come.” It is remarkable that (just as in the case of counter-terrorism in 2001) such a disaster was necessary to stimulate such a clearly needed overhaul of planning, management, and regulation.

A psychological perspective lends insight here, because it turns out that there are good reasons to expect that humans do not, or cannot, make radical revisions to our ways of working until dramatic events or disasters shake us out of a range of biases and traps that preserve the status quo. In our recent article in Current Science, entitled “The tragedy of cognition: psychological biases and environmental inaction“, Simon Levin and I explore this problem and its implications for society’s ability to recognize, let alone act to mitigate, the impending problems of climate change, environmental destruction, and dwindling energy resources.

In an ideal world, people would tackle major crises such as global climate change as rational actors, weighing the costs, benefits and probabilities of success of alternative policies accurately and impartially. Unfortunately, human brains are far from accurate and impartial. Mounting research in experimental psychology reveals that we are all subject to systematic biases in judgement and decision-making. While such biases may have been adaptive heuristics that promoted survival and reproduction in the Pleistocene environment of our evolutionary past, in today’s world of technological sophistication, industrial power and mass societies, psychological biases can lead to disasters on an unprecedented scale. Beyond the exploding ecological and socio-economic research on climate change and how to deal with the ‘tragedy of the commons’, it is a better understanding of human psychology – ‘the tragedy of cognition’ – that may ultimately tip the balance against the seeds of our own destruction.