by Eugene Chislenko

Philosophers are uniquely positioned to help stop the worst effects of climate change. Most teachers have the ear of large numbers of students, whose interests and priorities we help to shape. Many teachers at the college and university level decide what large numbers of people will read. Many writers take part in larger conversations that have the potential to reach a much wider audience. Philosophers have many of these opportunities, and the skills to use them. We have many years of specific training in assessing arguments, drawing connections between seemingly disparate topics, and articulating a compelling rationale when there is one to be articulated.

In my experience in climate activism, I have seen over and over again how effective our kind of skills can be. Cutting travel, giving up meat, switching to green energy, and other individual changes have strikingly significant impacts on the environment. But we also know that the greatest contributions to climate change are large, collective undertakings — the Alberta tar sands are roughly the size of England — decided on at the level of governments and corporations, who, in turn, face tremendous pressure from public opinion. One of the things that is most sorely needed to stop the worst effects of climate change is rapidly spreading the idea that climate change is important. Most philosophers are people who are trained in making a compelling case for a well-founded idea. We can create, recognize, and spread conceptual changes that can have a lasting effect.

Let me offer a personal example. For a long time, I thought of climate change deniers with a dismissive sense of superiority. My attitude was based on a particular conception of denial. I thought deniers were people who asserted a negation: in this case, that climate change is not real, or not caused by humans. In Chapter 1 of This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein offers a different conception of denial. For her, the sense of ‘denial’ most relevant to climate change is not assertion, but ‘looking away’, or an inability to face something. Here, I would add, climate change denial can be compared to denial in grief. When we lose a loved one, we can usually tell others that the person has died. We rarely assert that she has not. But we can still be in denial, in the sense that we have not yet integrated into our lives what it means that the person is gone. Reading Klein’s chapter brought me one of my most memorable moments of conceptual change. I put down the book and thought: I’m a climate change denier. All my friends are climate change deniers. We are the deniers. That shift allowed me to become more interested, and to look directly at the stunning impacts of climate change. Soon after that, I became an activist.

I tell this story as one example of a conceptual shift that changes someone’s mind and behavior with respect to climate change. As climate change begins to impact almost every aspect of life, many more such changes are becoming possible.

What I would like to ask philosophers is a question I have not fully answered: what does it look like to integrate climate change into our professional lives? In what ways can our teaching and service incorporate concerns about climate change and sustainability more generally? How does climate change fit into our course content, especially courses on less obviously related topics? This week, I used climate change in a course on evil to talk about atrocity, and planned a fall course on diversity that will start with biodiversity and climate change. If we think about the philosophy of science, or collective responsibility, or contemporary racism, while shedding some of our denial, climate change looms large.

I would like to make two proposals. First, I propose that philosophers who care about climate change put a particular emphasis on integrating climate change into what we already do in our work, rather than adding new activities on top of what we already do. Philosophers are, for the most part, exceptionally busy. If addressing climate change is to be sustainable in our own lives, it will need to add relatively few new hours of work. Although few philosophers will be willing to add 20 or more hours a month of work on climate change, most of us can spend 1-2 hours a month thinking about how to incorporate climate change into what we already do. We can then do some of our normal work of syllabus construction, coming up with examples in class, and contributing to departmental life in ways that address climate change while also enriching our work and our personal lives.

Most of us are only beginning to integrate this topic into its rightful places in our writing, teaching, and service work, let alone share resources or best practices. All kinds of cooperation could be useful. And so I propose, secondly, that we get organized. For some philosophers, “grassroots organizing” is an alienating or dirty word. I’m not sure we need to debate the particular phrase. But I would like to propose that philosophers in all areas of philosophy actively coordinate with each other and develop resources for stopping the worst effects of a change that is already impacting everyone, and disproportionately impacting our students and children. Once again, many areas of our work will benefit, from syllabus design to class examples to professional development to larger discussions to advising students to community engagement.

There are many ways to get started, but I would like to offer one possibility. Rebecca Millsop (The University of Rhode Island) and I are co-founding a group called Philosophers for Sustainability, for people in all areas of philosophy who want to work toward environmental sustainability and stopping climate change in practice. We have a few different projects underway, and are actively seeking new projects and new members. If you would like more information or are interested in joining us, you can browse our website at http://www.philosophersforsustainability.com/, or email us at philosophersforsustainability@gmail.com. We would love to hear from you.

According to the United Nations, “Climate change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment”. It would be great to have as many philosophers thinking together about climate change as possible.

Eugene Chislenko is an Assistant Professor at Temple University, specializing in ethics and moral psychology, and a volunteer for 350.org and The Sunrise Movement. His personal website is http://www.eugenechislenko.com/.