Roger S. Gottlieb

Deeply thoughtful and reasoned, Morality and the Environmental Crisis by Roger S. Gottlieb is a profound work that draws from all areas of human thought and experience.

Gottlieb proposes an argument then offers the counterarguments in a complex ladder of understanding that is nevertheless so well presented that the reader can follow the progression of thought.

Some years ago I participated in a small group study on energy use and climate change. The participants were all of a like mind and voiced frustration with 'those people' who remained unresponsive to arguments to change their lifestyle. The antagonism and anger weighed heavy in the air.

We cannot change the world or even change all the people around us.

We can only do what we can do. I have used tote bags for shopping for years. I have decided to make bags for produce instead of using the plastic ones at the stores. I have recycled glass and cans and paper for forty-seven years. I rarely buy red meat. When we turned in our leased car we had clocked only 10,000 miles over three years. We insulated our house and bought all LED bulbs. We compost and avoid pesticides.

It isn't enough.

We support candidates that work to save the Great Lakes and who are concerned with climate change.

It isn't enough.

As Gottlieb writes, we are still complicit--I am still complicit.

I buy yards of cotton fabric to make quilts as a creative outlet--cotton that requires fertilizers and pesticides and factories to make it into fabric and chemicals to treat it and trucks to get it to the quilt shop. Just so I can cut it up and sew it into something new, tossing the bitty scraps into the trash that goes into a landfill.

I am part of the problem. We all are. Our entire society, economy, and culture make us so. As a society, we are more interested in technology than nature. Jobs instead of preservation. Maintaining our lifestyle than worrying about oil spills somewhere else.

We need widespread collective and political action to change society. Maybe it can happen--we got a man on the moon and people sacrificed to support the war effort during WWII. Nothing less can alter the course we are headed on.

I continue to do what I can because it feels like a moral imperative, like not leaving untended fires in the forest or tossing trash along the roadside, a habit based in reason and science and tradition and personal values.

Do we love nature enough--know nature personally enough to care to preserve it? Not just the puppy mill dogs and the lab rabbits, but also the forests and the marshlands?

How can we save the natural world from our collective brutality if we do not love it? If we do not know it, how can we love it? and if everything else--work, ease, moral limits, the dominant institutions of our society--removes us from it? from Morality and the Environmental Crisis

Gottlieb ends the book by employing the ageless use of story to show the choice we each must make: we can embrace despair or gratitude. Gratitude does not negate despair, it makes life worth living in the face of awful realities.

Learn more about the book and author and see the table of contents at

https://www.kriso.ee/cambridge-studie...

I was given access to a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.… (lisätietoja)

The Book of Arguments

The arguments over environmental issues are well known. How they fit into everyone’s thinking less so. Roger Gottlieb has been teaching this subject for years. He has all the questions, from both sides and is enormously fair about them. He describes the dilemma as right vs. right. Morality and the Environmental Crisis is a book of arguments. A very different kind of environmental book. And still no real way out.

Gottlieb presents a lot of positions throughout the book. Hundreds of them. Some are part of the daily news grind. Others will give pause. Sometimes you can dismiss an argument out of hand. Sometimes, even Gottlieb does. But the morality underlying the positions on both sides merits a good long look:

-In a society capable of two world wars within 25 years of each other, that is capable of believing in systems whose lack of reason is palpable, it is not hard to see that “an environmental crisis can arise, be neglected or denied, and even when responded to get only a fraction of the attention it requires,” he says.
-Man thinks the whole world is at his command, including all of nature. Therefore, he can act willfully badly without concern for the effect it will have on nature.
-Because of his newly acquired distance from nature, not even knowing where his food or ability to breathe comes from, it is of no concern.
-The same people who told us Roundup was safe, sonar never hurt anything, took a chance that the atomic bomb wouldn’t ignite the whole atmosphere (and got lucky), and proudly gave us whole body spray deodorant , Pringles and electric air fresheners, now want us to believe we are changing the climate. Why should anyone believe them this time?
-We cannot establish the ultimate morality or rationality of any given position. We can only point to the consequences.
-The Israelites had no luck convincing the ancient Egyptians there was only one god. Protestants and Catholics are still mutually exclusive in their beliefs in the same god. Buddhism split 23 centuries ago and still has not reconciled. So why does anyone think deniers and environmentalists can ever come together?
-Polluters are like cigarette smokers who claim their right to smoke, to foul the air, to become sick and rely on health services to keep themselves going. As a society, we must choose whether or not to ban polluters. We have the long, unfortunate precedent of smokers to work with.
-Nature suffers in silence.
-There is bizarre artificiality in the legal system that has seen people sue on behalf of animals, rivers and totally inanimate objects to have person rights in order to have standing in court. Otherwise, no one could speak for nature.

Gottlieb gets tied up in definitions, of course. What is nature, what is Man, what is their relationship, why does nature merit separate consideration from Man when nothing else on Earth works that way? It is the nature of philosophy to micromanage the conversation, and is a necessary evil to get to the arguments. There is also too much religion, which doesn’t really have the firepower to stay in this argument. But religion is really foundational in philosophy, and Gottlieb can’t just ignore it.

He eventually admits he is an environmentalist, and dismisses some of the arguments of the deniers himself, but for the most part, he is even-handed, until the end of the book and a dystopian future.

The problem is massively complex, so most arguments don’t do the subject justice, and most people can’t get their heads around the immensity of it. The book is thorough and engaging and admits to this condition. But it doesn’t go the full length of the crisis. What if it is too late, as many think, and climate change is going to run its course, no matter what we belatedly decide? How does that affect the morality? How will the arguments shift and what positions will arguers take? After this exhaustive examination, maybe that’s too much to ask.

David Wineberg… (lisätietoja)

I believe in a "horizontal" kind of approach to spirituality where closeness is established not with some sort of supreme, distant being, but with tangible entities around me, as equals. I don't really like the idea of disguising suffering and hardship as contributing to some ultimate goal or looking to the promise of some other, future reality to accept things happening now. Resistance -- "the refusal to accept the world's evil, the commitment to act against it" -- appeals to me.

The tone and strange dialogs remind me of Hofstadter.

"If we cannot trust to an essential worth that persists regardless of our measurable social accomplishments, if we cannot find a way to connect to others that does not depend on achievement, if we do not escape our slavery to an endless need for recognition, if we cannot rest in the sense that what we have done is enough, if we cannot see that trying to accomplish in the social world can be a very dangerous business, especially given the society we live in, if our actions in the public realm do not spring from a moral and spiritual center rather than a conventional ego of accomplishment, if we don't realize that society creates effects out of our actions that we ourselves don't choose -- if all these things remain the way they are, then how can we not, even against our will, contribute to the damage around us?"

"The destruction of resources, the overconsumption of stocks, and the endless drive to do just one thing and do it for the highest short-term gain wastes our world."

"For me, a spiritual view will be authentic only if it can celebrate its peacefulness not only despite personal disappointment, but also as it faces the full range of the world's moral horrors."… (lisätietoja)