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Ethics Around the Table: Richard Andrews
March 29, 2016 @ 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
Join us for a Parr Center “Ethics Around the Table” event!
Managing the environment, managing ourselves:
How should we manage our uses of nature in an ‘Anthropocene’ world?
Ethics Around the Table (EAT) Discussion
March 29, 2016, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
University Room, Hyde Hall
Richard (“Pete”) Andrews is professor emeritus of environmental policy at UNC, and author of Managing the Environment, Managing Ourselves: A History of American Environmental Policy (Yale University Press 1999, 2nd ed. 2006; 3rd ed. in progress).
The 400-year history of American environmental policy has been dominated by policies encouraging management of the environment to extract resources for human wants, to transform landscapes for human settlements and infrastructures, and to protect ourselves from diseases and other natural hazards. More recently we have added policies curbing some of the damaging effects of human overuse and waste disposal practices, and protecting some places and species for more appreciative uses, but these policies fall far short of stable and sustainable management of our ecosystems and natural processes.
The increasingly vast scale of these human demands, and the increasingly global markets through which they are expressed, have now created what some scientists have called the “Anthropocene era,” in which humans themselves have become a dominant force changing the Earth’s geology, climate and ecosystems. There are important arguments about this term: whether it is a valid claim, how it should be defined, what time period it actually describes, and most important, how to act ethically if one accepts the reality of it.
Can we (or even must we) continue to try to manage the environment to suit human preferences, or must we manage our own wants and behavior to fit within the natural systems of a finite planet? For whose environment: how should we act so as to share equitably the finite resources of the planet and the technologies and financial resources to use them? And finally, how should we act so as to respect also the beauty of its diversity, its complexity, its landscapes and other species and forces larger than ourselves, and to accept with appropriate humility the limits of our own understanding of it?
Lunch will be provided, and registration is kindly required.
Questions? Please email Katie at kbunyea@unc.edu.