The dangers of global warming and hope for the future

Just in case you haven’t read the latest U.N. report on global warming, it’s not as bad as scientists have been predicting — it’s worse.The ocean is turning into a hot vat of nitrogen that’s killing off plankton and the fish that eat them. Droughts and hurricane Katrina-size storms will become more frequent on almost every continent around the world

But to listen to philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore; there is actually hope. She’s explored ideas, modernity and the astonishing beauty of the Northwest in Riverwalk, Holdfast and Pine Island Paradox.

As the featured speaker at last week’s Sustainability Project, Moore announced, “I’m going to give an optimistic talk … it’s a survival characteristic. Optimism is a belief; it’s hoping with good reason.”

Moore says repairing ecosystems is coming from the ground up, from grassroots organizations.

“Evidence of this ‘great turning’ is not coming, in case you hadn’t noticed, from the White House or from Exxon Mobil,” she said. “It’s coming from the growing army of individuals and community groups who, planting one tree at a time, or cleaning up one neighborhood at a time … are literally planting seeds of change.”

Moore has her feet in two worlds. She’s a philosophy professor at Oregon State University, and she spends summers up in the Alaskan archipelago, immersed in the natural world. It’s from one of the islands there that she wrote Pine Island Paradise.

In an environmental ethics class she teaches, she has students choose a place within walking distance to campus, and they then recommend how to remedy an environmental justice issue of habitat loss or pollution.

She says her students, like society as a whole, can feel overwhelmed by the scale of biological degradation around them.

“In my classes, students ask, ‘How can I change the world? I’m onl one person,'” she said. “You live a life you believe in, and you can change the world.”

Moore takes the old bumper sticker adage, ‘Think Globally; Act Locally,’ and only half-jokingly puts her students through a 12-step program she’s entitled “Consumers Anonymous.”

“We are so disconnected from community [that consuming] is a reaction to grief and stress,” she said. “Step 3 of Consumers Anonymous really is to reduce what we buy.”

Through her teaching and writing, she invites her students and her readers to do what she does: to start noticing the natural world around them, before it’s all gone. Yet, she does not dispair, as she believes that individuals and even whole countries are out of denial about how human activity is poisoning the planet.

Moore’s work reflects what has been the truly interdisciplinary nature of the Sustainability Series: biology, oceanography and literature. So, it’s fitting that a philosopher would quote historian Stephen Ambrose, who declared, “The primary task of the 21st century will be environmental restoration or nothing at all.”

by Fufkin Vollmayer
The Clackamas Print