Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change
272
Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change
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Overview
Philosopher and nature essayist Kathleen Dean Moore takes on the essential questions: Why is it wrong to wreck the world? What is our obligation to the future? What is the transformative power of moral resolve? How can clear thinking stand against the lies and illogic that batter the chances for positive change? What are useful answers to the recurring questions of a storm–threatened time – What can anyone do? Is there any hope? And always this: What stories and ideas will lift people who deeply care, inspiring them to move forward with clarity and moral courage?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619027565 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2016 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 976 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
the power of moral affirmation
My neighbor is a practical man. "Look," he says to me, "if you want to call people to action on climate change, talk to them about what moves people to action — self-interest, money, and fear. Don't tell them it's wrong to wreck the world. Tell them it's stupid or expensive or dangerous. Tell them that unless this nation moves faster on solar energy, the Chinese are going to eat our lunch. Tell them that climate change will make the cost of California lettuce go through the roof. Scare the shit out of them if you have to: Tell them that the most likely way that global warming will end is when nuclear winter seizes the world — a long, cold night for the human prospect when nations drop atomic bombs in battles over water and food. But don't talk to people about morality. People don't like to be preached at. Ethics never changed anything, and it's a waste of time when time is short."
At that point, I really have my back up. I want to tell him what moral discourse is. I want to describe the power of moral affirmation to change history. It's true that morality has had a bad reputation lately. Blame it on TV preachers, if you want, shouting about sin. Blame it on the confusion of ethics with religion. Blame it on the effect of a press that would rather expose the titillating horror shows of private lives than engage in a discourse about what is right and what is good. Blame it on the viral pathology of this non sequitur: that because I have a right to believe whatever I want, whatever I believe is right. Poor ethics, struggling to be truly seen, when it has been so terribly disfigured.
First, let us distinguish between the morality of prohibition and the morality of affirmation. True, there's something repellent about an ethic based on prohibitions — thou shalt not, and if you do, which of course you will, you are bad, which of course you are. The morality of affirmation, on the other hand, is a soaring invitation to affirm what you believe is good and just and beautiful and right, and to align your life to those values. When my colleagues and I do public events about climate ethics, we gather people in small groups and ask them to address these questions: "What do you care about most? What would you die for? What would you be willing to spend your whole life taking care of?" Then we ask, "What follows from the fact that you hold these values? Values have consequences in the real world. If you value this more than anything else, what will you do — or never do? How might you make that value evident and real and powerful in your life?" That's the morality of affirmation.
Distinguish also between moralizing and moral reasoning. Nobody likes moralizing. But the civilized world depends on moral reasoning. The distinction is tricky. Moralizing is foisting your beliefs onto others, without offering any good reasons: "You should believe X. Period." Pontificating is similar. It's foisting your beliefs onto others, while offering a very bad reason — namely, your own assumed authority: "You should believe X because I believe X and I'm a moral savant." Both of them are very different from witnessing ("I believe X").
All of these are different from moral reasoning, which is an essential social and logical skill that this nation seems to have lost in all the shouting and piety. Moral reasoning is discourse in which people affirm what they think is true or good or right and then, the crucial step, back their claims with reasons. This is an invitation to respectful dialogue, to listening, and even to changing your mind. This is civil discourse, with its power to test beliefs against experience, your own and others', and revise and improve them.
Think of the eighteenth-century conversations about basic principles of the "rights of man" that flew through the streets and meeting halls of Europe. Think of the debates about life, liberty, and the moral responsibilities of revolution that took place in Philadelphia, even as they were taking place in the country towns. This was moral discourse, on every corner. Moral reasoning is that kind of conversation. "We can do this," I tell my neighbor. "We can talk reasonably about ethics."
And this claim that ethics never changed anything? I think that is a misreading of history. When you look at the times in American history when our society has turned on a dime, making huge social change, you'll find it was motivated by a great rising tide of affirmation of a strongly held moral principle.
No one says that moral affirmation is a sufficient condition for change, but I believe it is a necessary one. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" — a moral principle if there ever was one, and the old monarchies fell like dominoes from Europe across the Atlantic. "All persons held as slaves within any state ... shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free" — a moral affirmation of the equality of all people, and the direction of history changed its flow. "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up" — and the troopers and the growling dogs fell back. The nation is constantly involved in moral discourse, reasonable or not. So the question is not whether we should have a public discourse about ethics. The question is whether we can stop the ruin of Earth's ecosystems without the same affirmation of a widely held moral principle: "All beings have intrinsic value, and so have a right to a healthy and life-sustaining planet. And this right overrides the presumed right of the few to plunder the common heritage and destabilize the Earth's future without restraint."
And one more thing, I tell my neighbor: Ethics is a trump card, so it has a strong strategic value in social change — a value higher than that of the economic-gain card. "We can make a lot of money by enslaving our neighbor's children," one might say. The sentence that is sure to end that conversation is this: "But it would be wrong."
CHAPTER 2why it's wrong to wreck the world
Some years ago, my colleague Michael P. Nelson and I were at a gathering of environmental philosophers in the ancient forests of the Oregon Cascade Range. It was raining, I'm sure of that; these five-hundred-year-old red cedars and Douglas firs are so tall that they catch on the clouds. Even if it wasn't raining from the sky, it was raining from the mats of moss and old man's beard that drape every branch and from the licorice ferns that grow in every crack and joint of the bigleaf maples.
Michael is different from most philosophers. He's funny and irreverent and worried about the world, and especially about wolves. He's philosopher-in-residence at the Isle Royale wolf study in Lake Superior and a professor in the College of Forestry at Oregon State.
We had gathered these people to bring good minds to the problems of the environmental crises but were frustrated almost to fury by the tendency of our colleagues to stand in one of the most heart-achingly beautiful places in the world and debate whether the green color, that vibrating, nourishing green, was present in the forest itself or merely in the eyes of us philosophers.
Michael and I drew away and pounded our heads to think of how we, as philosophers (or qua philosophers, as we philosophically said), could make a difference. Scientists did a heroic job of telling the public that climate change is real, it is dangerous, and it is upon us. Nothing happened. So they redoubled their efforts, speaking more loudly, in more resonant venues, even taking classes in communications, the dears, convinced that if people had sufficient understanding of the science, they would take action. Again, what happened? Not much. That, we realized, was because the scientists were making a basic logical error.
Consider the practical syllogism, brought to us by none other than Aristotle. Any argument that ends with a conclusion about what ought to be done is going to have to have two premises. The first is a factual premise, usually based on science: This is the way the world is, and this is the way the world is likely to be if civilizations continue on this course. But you can't reason from a claim about what is to a claim about what ought to be without a second premise. This is a normative premise, a premise that sets a standard: This is the way I believe the world ought to be. From these two, but from neither alone, you can discern what ought to be done.
So this is the point. Scientists have reached an overwhelming consensus about the facts of climate change. What is needed is a corresponding consensus about the moral urgency of climate action, backed up by a clear idea of our values. What we need, then, is a global conversation about the second premise: What do we dream? What do we cherish? What do we seek? What do we value? What is a good world? If we don't know this, we don't know where to aim our policies, or how to change our lives.
Michael and I set out to create a global conversation about the second premise. We wrote to one hundred of the world's truth-tellers — people such as Desmond Tutu, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, Wangari Maathai, the Dalai Lama, Wendell Berry, N. Scott Momaday, and Sheila Watt-Cloutier — and asked them to answer a single question, in two thousand words or less: Do we have a moral obligation to the future to leave a world as rich in possibilities as our own? They sent back beautiful essays, full of conviction and light, and we published them in a book, Moral Ground. Although the reasons they gave were as many and varied as the soils or ice or sheep's-wool carpets on which these people walk, the reasons fell into a pattern woven from thirteen different threads. Michael and I summarized them this way:
THIRTEEN GOOD REASONS TO SAVE THE WORLD
First, think about the consequences that acting, or failing to act, will have on what we deeply value. And isn't this what it means to live a moral life — to do what you can to protect and nurture what you believe is good and beautiful and of great worth?
1. We must act for the sake of human life and thriving. This is as basic as it gets. If human life and thriving are fundamental values, and if climate disruption will have terrible costs in human lives and prospects, then we have a moral obligation to avert climate disruption. There are those who deny the value of human life, arguing that the Earth would be better off without the hominoid "plague," and there are those who deny the dangers of climate change. But if you value humans and fear climate change, there is no excuse for not acting.
2. We must act for the sake of the children. It may be their innocence. It may be their promise — children holding the future of the human race in their little bodies. It may be our love for them. Or maybe it's just the driving force of evolution — the urge to leave something of ourselves to the world. For whatever reasons, humankind shares a universal moral imperative to prevent harm to children. But we are harming children, even as (especially as) we amass wealth to provide for them, destabilizing and denuding the world they will inherit. If we have an obligation to protect children from harm, and if climate disruption is manifestly harmful to them, then we have an obligation to expend extraordinary effort to prevent its worst effects.
3. We must act because all flourishing is mutual. Ecological science, ancient wisdom, and almost all the religions of the world tell us that life is interconnected. Humans are shaped and nourished by intricate relationships with air, climate, animals, soil, sun. Accordingly, human life is utterly dependent on the thriving of other beings and the stability of other systems — and anyone who professes to care about humans but not about "nature" is profoundly misguided. If we have an obligation to protect human thriving, then we have an obligation to protect the thriving of all the parts of the systems on which we depend — from the smallest ecosystems to the grandest workings of time and wind.
4. We must act for the sake of the Earth, its great systems, and its abundance of lives. The failure to do what we can to stabilize Earth's systems is, of course, a great imprudence — a cosmic cutting-off-the-limb-you're-standing-on stupidity. But it is also a moral failure. That is because the Earth as we have found it, a lonely green jewel in the solar system, has value beyond its usefulness as the substrate of human lives. Sparrows and seagrass, newborn whales and tons of krill, fish on coral reefs, lingonberries and bears, all living things — could they have value only as they serve human needs? Only a colossal self-centeredness could lead one to think so. Rather, they have intrinsic value, value for their own sake. We have an obligation — even beyond our own interests — to protect a planet of inestimable and unique worth.
The preceding set of four reasons to act on climate change is based on the consequences of acting, or failing to act. But we are also called to act honorably, regardless of the consequences. These are the reasons for acting that are grounded in our moral duties.
5. We must honor our duties as stewards of divine creation. "And it was good," God said of His creation. "And it was very good." The fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every living thing that creeps on Earth — all of these are good in the eyes of God. Imagine the fury and grief of the Creator, to see His creation trampled under the march of human greed. "To commit a crime against the natural world," Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew said, "is a sin." Religious institutions and their believers have a sacred responsibility to protect divine creation from what threatens it. And the greatest of these threats are human-caused climate and ecological disruption.
6. We must honor our duties to protect human rights. If all people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then the perpetrators of climate change are embarked on the greatest violation of human rights the world has ever seen. Millions will be denied the most basic of human rights as they are driven from their homes by heat, drought, or flood; threatened by thirst, famine, and disease; and undermined by upheaval and war. Denial of human rights is a crime on any scale, in any legal system. So we all, corporations and governments especially, must end the policies that destabilize the climate — or be held to moral and legal account.
7. We must honor our duties to act justly. Those who are reaping the benefits of the profligate use of fossil fuels are casting off the terrible burden of their actions on those least likely to benefit and least able to defend themselves — future generations, poor and marginalized people everywhere, voiceless plants and animals. This is unjust.
8. We must honor our duties to future generations. The moral principle of "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" applies with particular force in the face of the climate changes we have unleashed on the next generations. Our own lives rest securely on the acts and forbearance of our ancestors. Like us, our children will need clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, food to eat, room to stand, and natural beauty to lift and comfort them. These are the conditions of thriving that we minimally owe the children, and each of these is threatened by climate disruption.
9. We must honor our duties of gratitude and reciprocity. We did not earn this world. If it were taken away, there would be nothing we could do to get it back. The Earth, its life, and our lives are a gift. The gift calls us to defend and nurture the regenerative potential of the Earth, to return Earth's generosity with our own gifts of healing.
* * *
As reasons one through nine make clear, moral action can stem from a sense of duty and from a calculation of the consequences of acting or not acting. But when all is said and done, moral action stems from human virtue. Who are we, when we are at our best? What actions grow from what is best in us?
10. We must act because we are compassionate. Compassion is the capacity to imagine oneself in another person's place, to feel their suffering as if it were one's own. But innocent suffering is the currency in which humankind will pay the price of the reckless use of fossil fuels — suffering from disrupted food supplies, degraded habitats, contaminated drinking water, infectious disease, terrific storms, destructive floods. A compassionate person will not allow the future to become a plague of sorrows.
11. We must act because we love the world. Like loving a person, loving a place is a way of feeling — joyous, connected, at peace. But that's not all. Loving is a sacred trust. To love is to affirm the absolute worth of what you love and to pledge your life to its thriving. A person who loves this world in all its beauty and comfort will not let it slip away through indifference or preoccupation, nor betray it for a passion for lesser things.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Great Tide Rising"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Kathleen Dean Moore.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: Learning to Navigate Amid Loss,
PREFACE: At Low Tide, Watching the World Go Away,
PART I: it's wrong to wreck the world,
The Power of Moral Affirmation,
Why It's Wrong to Wreck the World,
Because the World Is Wonderful,
Because We Love the Children,
Because We Honor Human Rights and Justice,
PART II: a call to care,
A Love Story,
On Joyous Attention,
An Old Worldview, a New Worldview,
An Ethic of the Earth,
An Ethic of the Cosmos,
Ethics and Extinction,
The Rights of Nature,
PART III: a call to witness,
Breaking the Silence,
Invincible Ignorance,
False Promises and Dead Ends,
The Work of Democracy,
The Work of Science,
The Work of Nature Writers,
The Work of Wilderness,
PART IV: a call to act,
Really Hard Questions,
We Have Met the Enemy, and Is He Us?,
What Can One Person Do?,
After Hope, the Roar of the Lion, the Great Rising Wave,
AFTERWORD: Ring the Angelus,
NOTES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,