Philosophers Fight Climate Change
This interview series highlights the exciting ways philosophers engage the public to combat a central crisis of our time.
Formerly University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, Kathleen Dean Moore is now a writer and activist, author of Great Tide Rising.
What type of public philosophy do you do?
As Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, I taught environmental ethics for many years. Although I believed that empowering students for climate action was important work, it was slow and indirect—too slow and too indirect, given the urgency of the climate catastrophe. So, I left the university and began to write and speak out about the moral imperative of climate action, dramatically increasing my audience and dramatically sharpening my message. My first climate book was Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, co-edited with Michael P. Nelson, in which one hundred of the world’s moral leaders give powerful reasons for climate action. Another is Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change. These books are finding their ways into Climate Ethics/Climate Studies courses, so I suppose I have not left the classroom after all.
Give an example of a successful project.
Here’s one—a multi-pronged campaign to make human rights into a powerful tool to demand climate action:
Premise 1: Climate change is poised to create the greatest violation of human rights the world has ever seen. Fracking, in addition to the fuel it adds to global warming, in itself violates the rights of people in front-line communities to health, information and participation, and security of person—all violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Premise 2: Asking an international human-rights court to hear testimony and issue an opinion on the human rights violations would provide publicity, precedent, and “soft law” for other court action to block Big Oil.
Conclusion: So with the help of the Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University, my colleague Tom Kerns and others took the case to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Rome, which issued a broad and damning ruling in May 2018, condemning an “axis of betrayal” between Big Oil companies and governments, in collusion to violate human rights on a massive scale.
How does this work benefit the public(s) you engage with?
With colleague Tom Kerns, I have published Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change—that gathers the eyewitness testimony, moral and legal expert testimony, and the text of the stunning Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Advisory Opinion. These materials are very helpful for others who want to bring Big Oil to court. Further, under the leadership of the Spring Creek Project, we created a documentary film, “Bedrock Rights: A New Foundation for Global Action Against Climate Change.” The film lays out, with powerful language and images, the human-rights case against Big Oil and its government accomplices. It’s right there, for students, lawyers, activists to put to use as a tool to demand climate justice. Here’s the link to the film, free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUgXyGuxDo8&t=26s
In what ways does the work inform your philosophical reflection?
It has been transformative for me to see, in the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal powerful Advisory Opinion, the necessary connection between climate health and social justice, and the racism and treachery built into the very structure of fracking and other forms of oil and gas drilling, refining, and transporting. I have travelled through North Dakota’s fracking fields and seen the man camps, the fleets of white trucks, the methane flares next to IBM silos, the devastated towns and misogynistic, racist messages on T-shirts and hats. I have listened to eyewitnesses struggle to put their desperation into words. The judges echo Ibram X. Kendi, all of them saying that racism—a disregard for the interests of whole groups of people—is systemic in the fracking industry, which could not proceed without it.
If someone wanted to take on public philosophy work like yours, what steps or resources would you recommend?
People often ask me, What can one person do? The answer is, Stop being one person. My advice is:
1. Ask yourself, what are the assets and abilities that I can bring to the struggle? The assets of a philosopher are very useful—the ability to think and speak clearly, the ability to make powerful moral arguments, etc.
2. Ask yourself, what issue do I care about the most?
3. Find the organization(s) that are doing the best work on that issue. Use your skills and abilities to empower them.
What motivates you to do this work?
At a meeting in Aspen a couple of decades ago, environmental thought-leader Gus Speth, then a Dean at Yale, said this: “All we have to do, to leave a ruined world for our children and grandchildren, is to keep doing what we are doing now.” Then, I read a consensus statement signed by 520 scientists, led by Stanford University researchers: If we don’t act quickly, “by the time today’s children are middle-aged, the life-support systems of the planet will be irretrievably damaged.” That’s it, I said. I’m not going to do anything in my professional life that doesn’t help make the world safe for my children and the children of all species.
How did your department help you?
They didn’t help at all.
But it is important for young philosophers to understand that everything is changing, and the university will have to change too. It has to. The University is one of the great truth-generating institutions of this civilization, and it is failing its moral responsibilities to engage great and pressing contemporary issues. That’s not a surprise: When wealthy donors and powerful industries control the universities’ agendas, when bureaucratic complexities waste professor’s time, when established professors control the academic progress of the young, then the result is predictable: To some large extent, philosophy wallows in the old questions and punishes people who want to do work that creates positive change.
This cannot continue. The danger is that young professors will be condemned to a life as a free rider, a louse—asking trivial questions, doing shamefully unimportant work, as the hard questions, the essential questions, go unanswered. My advice to young professors is to insist on the right to ask questions that matter. Insist on an education that will empower you to answer them. Then, take those answers to the poor, trembling planet and put them to work.
What is your favorite quote and why?
It comes from Joanna Macy, an eco-Buddhist philosopher: “You don’t have to do everything. Do what calls your heart; effective action comes from love. It is unstoppable, and it is enough.”
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