Abstract
Environmental changes can bear upon the environmental virtues, having effects not only on the conditions of their application but also altering the concepts themselves. I argue that impending radical changes in global climate will likely precipitate significant changes in the dominate world culture of consumerism and then consider how these changes could alter the moral landscape, particularly culturally thick conceptions of the environmental virtues. According to Jonathan Lear, as the last principal chief of the Crow Nation, Plenty Coups exhibited the virtue of “radical hope,” a novel form of courage appropriate to a culture in crisis. I explore what radical hope may look like today, arguing how it should broadly affect our environmental character and that a framework for future environmental virtues will involve a diminished place for valuing naturalness as autonomy from human interference.
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Notes
From Jackson’s presentation at Ethical, Cultural, and Civic Dimensions of Global Climate Change hosted by the Center for Humans and Nature in Charleston, SC, 28 November 2007. In personal communication Jackson attributed the first point to (Cohen 2005).
It may be the “greening” of our energy infrastructure, e.g., the production of huge numbers of photovoltaic panels or windmills, etc., will itself require an outlay of CO2 emissions sufficient to trigger positive feedbacks and make global warming unstoppable. See (Monbiot 2008).
This is how Lear interprets Plenty Coups’s declaration that “[w]hen the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not life them up again. After this, nothing happened” (Lear 2006, 2, italics added).
“If, roughly speaking, we believe that ought implies can: if we think that in these challenging times people ought to find new ways—not just of surviving—but of living well, we need to give an account of how it might be psychologically possible to do so” (Lear 2006, 64).
I have been influenced in my description of radical hope by listening to Jonathan Lear and Hurbert Dryfus discuss the work in an author-meets-critics session at the 2007 Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
“The end of nature,” is an allusion to (McKibben 1989), which I discuss in the next section.
I outline and defend a version of the natural goodness approach in Thompson (2007).
By analogy, we may distinguish between forms of excellence in the midst of an unfolding but more ordinary catastrophe, like the sinking of the Titanic, and what excellence requires in the aftermath.
It is likely that “consumerism,” as commonly understood, involves a faulty conception of the good. A conception of the good as a life of material wealth has long been the target of philosophical criticism. In the context of this paper “consumerism” is not meant to pick out only some subset of our society but to characterize the whole of it. What is at risk is what many of us conceive to be, mistakenly or not, at least part of the good life.
On the evidence on consumptive dispositions and their relation with subjective well being, see (Sandler 2007, 55 ff).
For example, see the discussion of the red-cockaded woodpecker in (Thompson 2009).
In personal correspondence on 28 January 2007. As another example, Philip Cafaro writes: “The [Crow] analogy with environmentalists might go like this: ‘Maybe we will be able to save our own hides and somehow figure out ways to survive, maybe even with some of our dignity and ability to do good intact. But the things that we really want to save as environmentalists, like wild nature? Forget it! Like the buffalo, they’re on the way out.’ But if this is all we can hope for (“radical hope”), then I for one might rather just throw in the towel” (personal correspondence on 17 November 2008).
See the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, AR4.
Martha Nussbaum remarked that one central disanalogy between our situation today and the plight of the Crow is that the Crow were in no way responsible for the utter catastrophe that befell them.
One notable exception is (Willimas 2008). Williams notes that “the question of whether adults of sound mind are responsible by virtue of, say, free will does not help with the question of how some better exemplify responsibility than others, nor how collective bodies might manifest [the virtue of] responsibility” (Willimas 2008, 458 footnote #6).
“It is the hall mark of the wishful that the world will be magically transformed—into conformity with how one would like it to be—without having to take any realistic practical steps to bring it about” (Lear 2006, 150).
In such cases, “[s]ymbolic rituals, [perhaps like shopping]… take over life—whether in an individual’s private life or in the group activity of a culture—and they become a way of avoiding the real-life demands that confront one” (Lear 2006, 151).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Human Flourishing and Restoration in the Age of Global Warming conference at Clemson University, the International Society for Environmental Ethics during the 2009 American Philosophical Association (Central Division), and the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on The Environment at the University of Idaho. I am grateful to those audiences and to Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Philip Cafaro, Baylor Johnson, Jason Kawall, Andrew Light, Kathryn Norlock, Martha Nussbaum, Ronald Sandler, Sarah Wright, and three anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments.
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Thompson, A. Radical Hope for Living Well in a Warmer World. J Agric Environ Ethics 23, 43–59 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9185-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-009-9185-2