When I was five, a pond and thicket area down the street from my house was filled in and leveled while I was away. I remember coming home and finding my beloved ecosystem denuded of all greenery, and completely empty of the beavers and their dam, the minnows, the birds, and the countless rabbits and squirrels that had been a comforting and valued presence. I was devastated. Consumed and overcome by grief and loss. I did not want to eat, or (...) play, or go to school. I felt as though I had lost something deeply important, and intimately a part of the fabric of my life. It was the first time in my short life that I became aware of the fragility of life—mine and others—and from that moment, I found myself in a different .. (shrink)

Characterizations of the Anthropocene often indicate both the challenges that our new epoch poses for human well-being and a sense of loss that comes from a compromised environment. In this paper I explore a deeper problem underpinning both issues, namely, that decoupling humanity from the world with which we are familiar compromises human flourishing. The environmental conditions characteristic of the Anthropocene do so, I claim, by compromising flourishing on two fronts. First, the comparatively novel conditions of the Anthropocene risk rupturing (...) our narratives, putting at risk our sense of self and connections to familiar environments. Second, by undermining the connections between our environmental background and the sense of well-being conditioned by that background our ability to exercise options that constitute a recognizable good life are compromised. This paper argues that to the extent humanity is decoupled from their environments humans are not only less able to access opportunities our understanding of who we are, our identities, and our capacity to make sense of the world around us through those identities is compromised. I conclude that the Anthropocene does more than challenge our ability to utilize resources, it challenges our understanding of who we are in the world. (shrink)

The values-based approach to welfare holds that it is good for one to realize goals, activities, and relationships with which one strongly (and stably) identifies. This approach preserves the subjectivity of welfare while affirming that a life well lived must be active, engaged, and subjectively meaningful. As opposed to more objective theories, it is unified, naturalistic, and ontologically parsimonious. However, it faces objections concerning the possibility of self-sacrifice, disinterested and paradoxical values, and values that are out of sync with physical (...) and emotional needs. This paper revises the values-based approach, emphasizing the important—but limited—role consciously held values play in human agency. The additional components of human agency in turn explain why it is important for one’s values to cohere with one’s fixed drives, hard-wired emotional responses, and nonvolitionally guided cognitive pro- cesses. This affords promising responses to the objections above. (shrink)

Several recent authors have recommended that “sense of place” should become an important concept in our evaluation of environmental policies. In this paper, we explore aspects of this concept, arguing that it may provide the basis for a new, “place-based” approach to environmental values. This approach is based on an empirical hypothesis that place orientation is a feature of all people’s experience of their environment. We argue that place orientation requires, in addition to a home perspective, a sense of the (...) space around the home place and that this dual aspect can be modeled using a “hierarchical” methodology. We propose a “triscalar,” place-oriented system for the analysis of environmental values, explore the characteristics of place-orientation through several examples, and employ these characteristics to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable aspects of the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) idea. (shrink)

For better or worse, places matter to us. Especially the familiar places we call home—the ones that embody our personal and cultural histories, give our lives a sense of stability, and support the routines of everyday life. Global Climate Change (GCC) poses an existential threat to these places, engendering nonmaterial losses that threaten subjective well-being and overall mental health. Unfortunately, these nonmaterial losses are often overlooked or underappreciated. My aim in this article is to counter this tendency and explore the (...) relationship between people and place in a way that sheds light on the nonmaterial threat of GCC. I approach this task from the lens of everyday aesthetics. While finding adequate compensation for these nonmaterial losses is unlikely, I suggest that sensitivity to the aesthetic texture of everyday life can provide a source of aesthetic consolation that can make the challenges of GCC easier to manage. (shrink)

This paper explores what is meant by ‘loss and damage’ within the area of climate policy focused on loss and damage. I present two possible understandings of loss and damage, one of which connects it to harm and one of which connects it to value. In both cases, I argue that the best contemporary philosophical understandings of these concepts suggest a much broader range of losses and damages than is currently being considered within the usual discussions in this area. I (...) argue that a broader understanding of loss and damage would allow a more complete assessment of potential climate impacts. I conclude by offering recommendations for evaluating loss and damage according to this broader understanding. (shrink)

There are many uncertainties concerning climate change, but a rough international consensus has emerged that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide from its pre-industrial baseline is likely to lead to a 2.5 degree centigrade increase in the earth's mean surface temperature by the middle of the next century. Such a warming would have diverse impacts on human activities and would likely be catastrophic for many plants and nonhuman animals. The author's contention is that the problems engendered by the possibility of (...) climate change are not purely scientific but also concern how we ought to live and how humans should relate to each other and to the rest of nature; and these are problems of ethics and politics. (shrink)

Despite the substantial research into the peculiar political and legal status of climate migrants, there is comparatively little exploration of the particular forms of loss such migrants might face or how efforts might mitigate such loss. This paper aims to begin filling that void by characterizing such loss, using the framework of the UNFCC’s Warsaw Mechanism, as agential harm. Using existing models for thinking about the preservation of values and links with the past, I aim to use this idea of (...) a threat to agency to discuss how migration could occur to better preserve the agential control of displaced populations. (shrink)

The peculiar features of the climate change problem pose substantial obstacles to our ability to make the hard choices necessary to address it. Climate change involves the convergence of a set of global, intergenerational and theoretical problems. This convergence justifies calling it a 'perfect moral storm'. One consequence of this storm is that, even if the other difficult ethical questions surrounding climate change could be answered, we might still find it difficult to act. For the storm makes us extremely vulnerable (...) to moral corruption. (shrink)