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Mari Jorstad

Mari Jørstad provides support for Facing the Anthropocene, a project under the Ethics and Environmental Policy program area. She is originally from Norway and spent a decade in Canada, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in art & art history and political science and an MA in religion before coming to Duke to work toward a PhD studying the Hebrew Bible.

Tradeoffs and Air Conditioners

Posted on by Mari Jorstad

Ethics is always, to some extent, about tradeoffs. It is not about purely good decisions or bad decisions, about choosing between doing things that are definitely right and things that are definitely wrong. Even the clearest of ethical situations always involve weighing tradeoffs. Prioritizing some goals, groups, or issues come with costs and consequences. Ethical deliberation is more about being clear about what those are and what kind of tradeoffs are acceptable, than it is about finding an ideal, utopian solution to every problem.

But maybe we sometimes turn to talk of tradeoffs too soon. Or accept that are not necessary. For example, I remember that when I was in high school, a Norwegian political party (I am Norwegian, hence the example) argued that we couldn’t use tax money on refugees, because the money was needed for elder care. The argument struck me as in bad faith. Surely the person knew that Norway was wealthy. It sounded to me like a way of replacing “I don’t like immigrants” with the more palatable “we should take care of our elders.”

Even tradeoffs considered in good faith may need rethinking. This is what Radhika Khosla, in her Facing the Anthropocene webinar on April 1, suggested about the much talked-about tension between the environment and development. Do we need to pit improved quality of life for the many people who live without basic necessities against reaching the temperature goals required to stave of climate disaster?

Khosla acknowledged that it can seem as if development and protecting the environment are inevitably in conflict. For example, models predict that, globally, ten new air conditioners will be sold every second for the next 30 years. Currently, 1.1 billion people face immediate risks from lack of access to cooling – those 10 air conditioners sold every second meet real needs. But air conditioners release climate gasses that contribute to the heating of the planet. The increased use of air conditioners means we will need even more air conditioning in the future. And as Khosla pointed out, CO2 lives in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, so this increased need for cooling will be with us for a long time.

This seems like a tradeoff if ever there was one! But Khosla urged us to consider what is lost when we use the language of tradeoffs too quickly. When we think of tradeoffs we lose a moral claim – morality pushes us to do better. Perhaps we can work both for development and for the climate.

Khosla suggested that we have a unique opportunity to do so at this moment. Two thirds of total CO2 emissions are connected to households, she said, to mobility, residences, and food. Each of these make up about 20% of global CO2 emissions. If we can change household energy demand, we can cut CO2 dramatically. But household energy usage is connected to infrastructure, and infrastructure creates lock-in energy consumption patterns. To make it worse, infrastructure lasts. Once it is built, it is difficult to change.

China and India are currently undergoing massive urbanization waves. Many of our future cities are being built right now. Their energy consumption patterns haven’t been set yet, which means they can be influenced and changed. We can build cities that make possible lower energy demands. These cities need not be cities in which quality of living is low. Instead, such cities may make possible lives in which we use nature and the natural environment in more reciprocal and respectful ways, and that also allows for better relationships among humans.

Khosla did not argue that we need to do away with talk of tradeoffs entirely. When speaking of responsibility, she pointed out that the riches 1% of the world’s population are responsible for the same level of emission as the poorest 50%. She also compared countries based on annual emissions, cumulative historical emissions, and per capita emissions, to show that responsibility for the climate crisis is not equal for all nations or individuals. This is perhaps where talk of tradeoffs is necessary. Can the world sustain lives that produce the kind of CO2 emissions currently emitted by the 1%? And are there ways that we might change our lives, in order to emit less? For example, Khosla said she is encouraged by the number of students she encounters who are vegetarian for environmental reasons. Tradeoffs are necessary, as are lifestyle changes. But what is not necessary, Khosla argued, is abandoning many of the world’s poor to their poverty in the name of the environment. We need both drastic reduction in emission and further work to improve the quality of life of people who live without basic necessities. And we need the imagination and moral courage to see these not as tradeoffs, but as twin goals.

The Song of the Meadow Lark: A Conversation with Norman Wirzba

Posted on by Mari Jorstad

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

  • How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

  • What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

  • Where is there reason for hope?

Can the land forgive? This was the question with which Norman Wirzba began the last of the Facing the Anthropocene webinars on April 15th.

To answer this question, Wirzba started out by talking about what it means to hope. Hope is born from nurturing life with others, he said, not from knowing what the future will be. Hope grows when people commit themselves to furthering the goodness and the beauty of the world. Citing Wendell Berry, he argued that hope lives in the means, not the ends. We can work to make hope for ourselves and others, even if the future looks bleak.

Hope, in our context, requires learning to confess, to repent, and to seek forgiveness. So much of our environmental crisis is anthropogenic. Though not every person or community is responsible in the same way or to the same extent, repentance is still a useful practice. Repentance, the attempt to right a wrong, communicates a desire to be in right relationship with others. This desire does not operate on a contractual basis: the seeking and the granting of forgiveness is always is a gift beyond deserving. It requires shedding self-defensive strategies that keep people from living well with the wounded and a commitment to being open to and instructed by the pain and suffering of the past. It can create an opening for a form of life in which people can live together with less shame.

Wirzba illustrated what this means by telling the story of Ruzicka Sunrise Farm in Killam, Alberta. Like many farmers, Don and Marie Ruzicka adopted the methods of industrialized farming in the eighties. That meant cutting down woodlots, draining wetlands, and growing grain monocultures dependent on heavy input of fertilizers and pesticides. In order to support this form of agriculture, Don and Marie took out loans. Each year their debt grew. The stress of the work and their financial situation became so serious that Don developed Crohn’s disease.

By 1995, Don and Marie could no longer avoid the question: should they quit the farm or farm in a different way?

By chance, they received a flyer about a course in holistic management in the mail. Holistic management is a way of farming that seeks to restore land to health while also allowing farmers a good life. Don and Marie decided to give it a try, even though it involved enormous risks. They sold all of their grain equipment and a large portion of their land. With their remaining 600 acres, they kept livestock, restored wetlands and native prairie land, and began using rotational grazing and organic methods.

By 1999, they had paid down their debt. Don no longer felt like he was a hostage to the banks. When they first bought their farm, they had a sense of freedom based on being able to do whatever they wanted with the land. In 1999, freedom meant something else, the freedom to serve the land, to restore its health.

Don is able to date the moment at which he knew the land had forgiven him. On May 21st, 2000, at 6am, he was moving chicken pastures to new grass. He heard the song of the meadow lark. He had not heard its song since 1989, when the bird stopped visiting the farm. Now, here it was! In its song he heard the land say, I forgive you.

The meadow lark’s song was part of a journey of self-transformation for Don and Marie.  In switching from industrial farming to holistic management, they made a commitment to stop mining and abusing the land. This went hand in hand with a growing appreciation for the land and its creature as kin. They began to see the land as a being with integrity and sanctity, one that had a moral and intimate claim on their life. Instead of their lives being an imposition on the land, their lives were now a conversation and joining with the land, a dedication to the flourishing of the land, a kind of matrimony.

Wirzba explained that the complex set of practices adopted by Don and Marie together were a way of communicating hospitality. Industrial methods are fundamentally inhospitable. They push out indigenous plants and animals. The new methods adopted on Sunrise Farm created habitats for plants, insects, birds, and mammals. We can interpret the meadow lark’s song, said Wirzba, as a form of forgiveness. The bird welcomed Don’s welcome, and intertwined its life with his.

It is not necessary, said Wirzba, to live on a farm in order to seek the land’s forgiveness. For example, in response to an audience question, Wirzba suggested practices for someone living in suburbia. Suburban places are often extremely placeless, he said. The antidote to this, Wirzba said, is first to try to understand and learn about suburbia. What is it, what is it trying to achieve? What is the history of the land on which the suburb is on?

Having learned about the history of your place, the next step is to consider how can you transform it. Can you find ways of making the history of the land a presence in your community? Wirzba suggested several possibilities: creating greenspace, growing food, and building educational programs. In more urban settings, he suggested transforming abandoned spaces to spaces for shared life. It can be as simple as tetting to know neighbors and learning to look out for each other. Seeking the forgiveness of the land can be about having better relationships with other people, about coming into the presence of each other.  

Seeking the land’s forgiveness is about living together. Living together is not just about creating hope for the future, Wirzba said, it is a fundamental good. By living together, we open ourselves up to the goodness and the beauty of the world, and by so doing, we might learn not only that the land forgives us, but that it loves us and takes care of our needs.

The Sacred Anthropocene – A Conversation with Willis Jenkins

Posted on by Mari Jorstad

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

  • How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

  • What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

  • Where is there reason for hope?

How are Anthropocene relations bearing on religion, and how are religious processes shaping Anthropocene futures? These were the questions with which Willis Jenkins began his talk on April 8th, 2021. Thinking about these questions, Jenkins said, who is trained in religious studies, Christian theology and environmental ethics, has made him realize that traditional academic disciplines are not well suited to answer his questions. Disciplines and their words, including words like “environment,” “ethics,” and “religion,” divide and lump entangled Anthropocene relations in ways that obscure more than they illuminate.

Jenkins argued that instead of staying within disciplinary boundaries, the way to get at the questions that interest him is to work across disciplines. At the University of Virginia, Jenkins does this by participating in transdisciplinary labs. The goal of these labs is to try to make better inquiries about the relation of planetary stresses and cultural change. For example, Sanctuary Lab gathers researchers from arts, sciences, and humanities to ask how planetary stresses are experienced, interpreted, and managed from places set aside as special – as sacred.

One such site is Yellowstone National Park. The labs always involve local experts. At Yellowstone, they spoke with the climate modeler for the Park, Mike Tercek. After giving them an overview of climate science, Tercek also explained how long periods in backcountry forest were central to his understanding of himself. “I’m not religious,” he said, “but I sense a presence here. In the deep wilderness, I feel known and healed. My ego is overcome there.”

Jenkins argued that Tercek’s experience of the Yellowstone wilderness performs religion-like functions of belonging, self-understanding, and orientation. Climate change, however, is threatening these functions. Tercek’s own models predict that within a few decades, more than 100% of the park will burn every ten years. Yellowstone is likely to lose all of its forest. Tercek lives with the anxiety of that loss, to the extent, he said, that it makes him feel physically sick. He hikes into the backcountry forest now and, instead of feeling known and healed, he experiences nausea, vertigo, fragmentation.   

But treating Yellowstone as a kind of secular sacred place also has troubling aspects. Consider, said Jenkins, the prominence of “planetary stewardship” as lead metaphor in major science papers about the human role in an Anthropocene planet. Indigenous peoples were interacting with the high plateau for 9000 years before it became Yellowstone National Park, and that the Crow People maintain that the land remains their territory. The settler imagination of wilderness, as a special place without people, has often been a genocidal idea.  So has the settler idea of stewardship: that only certain societies can be entrusted with the land. If a research team frames climate change with an unthinking stewardship ethic, it could contribute to the implicit idea that the most “advanced” societies have a noble obligation to take control of ecological systems, while at the same time marginalizing Crow ways of interpreting climate change. But, offered Jenkins, if the teams studying planetary change included researchers who could frame Crow cosmopolitics as plausible research premise for thinking about planetary responsibilities, then different futures open and different pathways might be modeled.

Jenkins concluded by suggesting how research itself can become a place of refuge for people. We might, said Jenkins, contribute to public understanding by cultivating practices in which to experience and hold the stresses of this epoch of crises. Perhaps these practices will open ourselves to otherwise ontologies. Perhaps they will teach us practices shaped by people with different ways of knowing the changing world.  

Join us on April 15, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the final installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Suzanne Shanahan, the Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and Associate Research Professor in Sociology, will interview Dr. Norman Wirzba. To register for this webinar and to learn more about the series, click here.

Reconsidering Tradeoffs – A Conversation with Radhika Khosla

Posted on by Mari Jorstad

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

  • How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

  • What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

  • Where is there reason for hope?

At the Kenan Institute for Ethics, we often talk about trade-offs. Ethics is not about good decisions and bad decisions, we tell students, about choosing between doing things that are definitely right and things that are definitely wrong, but about weighing trade-offs. Prioritizing some goals, groups, or issues always come with costs and consequences. Ethical deliberation is more about being clear about what those are and what kind of trade-offs are acceptable, than it is about finding an ideal, utopian solution to every problem.

But maybe we sometimes turn to talk of trade-offs too soon. Or accept trade-offs in situations in which they are not necessary. This is what Radhika Khosla suggested about the much talk-about tension between the environment and development. Do we need to pit improved quality of life for the many people who live without basic necessities against reaching the temperature goals required to stave of climate disaster?

Khosla acknowledged that it can seem as if development and protecting the environment are inevitably in conflict. For example, models predict that, globally, ten new air conditioners will be sold every second for the next 30 years. Currently, 1.1 billion people face immediate risks from lack of access to cooling. In other words, air conditioner sales are driven by real need, a need that insisting people live without AC won’t do away with. But air conditioners release climate gasses, further contributing to the heating of the planet. The increased use of air conditioners means we will need even more air conditioning in the future. And as Khosla pointed out, CO2 lives in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, which means that this increased need for cooling will be with us for a long time.

That seems like a tradeoff if ever there was one. But Khosla urged us to consider what is lost when we use the language of tradeoffs and synergies too quickly. When we think of tradeoffs and synergies we lose a moral claim – morality pushes us to do better in a way that escapes us if we minimalize everything to a cost or a tradeoff. Perhaps we can work both for development and for the climate.

Khosla suggested that we have a unique opportunity to do so at this moment. Two thirds of total CO2 emissions are connected to households, she said, to mobility, residences, and food. Each of these make up about 20% of global CO2 emissions. If we can change household energy demand, we can cut CO2 dramatically. But household energy usage is connected to infrastructure, and infrastructure creates lock-in energy consumption patterns. To make it worse, infrastructure lasts. Once it is built, it is difficult to change.

China and India are currently undergoing massive urbanization waves. In other words, many of our future cities are being built right now. Their energy consumption patterns haven’t been set yet, which means they can be influenced and changed. We can build cities that make possible lower energy demands. These cities need not be cities in which quality of living is low. Instead, such cities may make possible lives in which we use nature and the natural environment in more reciprocal and respectful ways, and that also allows for better relationships among humans.

Khosla did not argue that we need to do away with talk of trade-offs entirely, but only that the assumption that there is a necessary trade-off between development and the health of the environment. When speaking of responsibility, she pointed out that the riches 1% of the world’s population are responsible for the same level of emission as the poorest 50%. She also compared countries based on annual emissions, cumulative historical emissions, and per capita emissions, to show that responsibility for the climate crisis is not equal for all nations or individuals. This is perhaps where talk of trade-offs is necessary. Can the world sustain lives that produce the kind of CO2 emissions currently emitted by the 1%? And are there ways that we might change our lives, in order to emit less? For example, Khosla said she is encouraged by the number of students she encounters who are vegetarian for environmental reasons. Trade-offs are necessary, as are lifestyle changes. But what is not necessary, Khosla argued, is abandoning many of the world’s poor to their poverty in the name of the environment. This is a failure to take moral questions seriously, not a hard but imperative course of action. We need both drastic reduction in emission and further work to improve the quality of life of people who live without basic necessities. And we need the imagination and moral courage to see these not as trade-offs, but as twin goals.

Join us on April 8, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Willis Jenkins, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. To register for this webinar and learn more about the series, click here.

The Bite of the Material – A Conversation with Jedediah Purdy

Posted on by Mari Jorstad

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

  • How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

  • What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

  • Where is there reason for hope?

If you ask Jedediah Purdy about the potential of the human imagination, he is pretty optimistic. The last 5-6 years, he said in his talk on March 25th, has seen an effervescence in visions for common life and in what people are willing to call for. Human imagination remains free in terms of what it can envision. The problem, according to Purdy, is that the material world constrains our visions.  

For every human being in existence, said Purdy, there exists about 2000 tons of built world: highways, cables, powerplants, factory farms, parking garages, etc. This is our footprint, the weight on the planet that we have made. This vast infrastructure is thoroughly integrated into every facet of our lives. We have become an infrastructure species. Meeting our basic needs, socializing, providing for those we love; all these require tapping into and participating in infrastructure.

Our infrastructure creates an ecological script that is more or less mandatory, even if you ascribe to conscious consumerism, small scale living, zero waste, and so on. To participate in this world as workers, citizens, and family members, we rely on these infrastructures, which have ecological consequences.

That is the crisis, said Purdy: we can choose so many things, but we can’t choose not to be part of this world whose achievement is in many ways the undoing of the world on which it relies. This is the bite of the material. We have not found a communal or common way to exit that world, to live together in a different way.

So how do we change the world? Purdy says that change tends to happen through changes in consciousness, changes in technology, and changes in politics and collective decision making. Purdy focused on the last of these, and the challenges that arise when you try to effect change through politics.

The good news, said Purdy, is that one commonly cited problem, the mismatch between the global reach of environmental issues and national politics, is not necessarily a problem. National governments can change global politics, even in the absence of global institutions. For example, the liberal market network was achieved without any true global politics.

There is a significant difference between the creation of the global liberal market and the change we now need, however. Purdy argued that the global liberal market spread because people were convinced that it offered a positive sum game, a situation in which every boat would rise on its tide. The global market has not fulfilled that promise, but the promise was nonetheless central to its spread. Global ecological transformation cannot credibly promise a similar positive sum situation. The change we need will require allocation of sacrifices, costs, and burdens, a much less attractive package.

Convincing communities to take on costs and make sacrifices require institutions that can generate decisions and make them binding, while also generating legitimacy for those decisions. Legitimacy, said Purdy, makes people willing to live by terms they have not necessarily chosen. It is at the heart of politics, the willingness to live with collectively chosen leaders and legislative agendas, even if they differ from what you desire. This is exactly what is lacking in the US today, and the reason Purdy remains pessimistic about the current political landscape, even as there are signs of positive change. Politics in the US, he said, have become about the promise to save you from the intolerableness of living under other side. Because politicians can’t credibly promise to deliver on their legislative agendas, all they can do is promise that at least you don’t have to live under the guy the other side chose.

These are not politics adequate to our times. Instead, said Purdy, we need a politics that can rethink the fundamental questions. What is value? What is harm? What kind of costs are necessary, and what kind of costs should we not risk or permit? These kinds of questions require both a criticism of institutions and the wielding of institutions. We must find a way to hold together two thoughts: on the one hand, a critical approach to institutions, and on the other, an openness to the possibility that the ability to do much better might reside within institutions. Though it is difficult to see how we are going to generate the kind of public conversation necessary to effect change, all other alternatives are scary. Politics may be hard, but politics is the only route to a world in which all of us, humans and non-humans, can flourish.

Join us on April 1, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Radhika Khosla, Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and Research Fellow at Somerville College and a Senior Researcher at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, at the University of Oxford. To register for this webinar and to learn more about the series, click here.

History and the Anthropocene – A Conversation with Joyce Chaplin

Posted on by Mari Jorstad

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

  • How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

  • What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

  • Where is there reason for hope?

What should our relationship to the past be? And how does the past inform the future? These were the central questions of Joyce Chaplin’s talk on March 18. Or, to put it another way, what do we do with history as we enter the distinctively new era of the Anthropocene?

Chaplin outlined several ways of relating to the past, some of which are inadequate or unhelpful.

Nostalgia, for example, can be an uncritical hankering for a time when women were in the kitchen and other people (people of color) did the hard work that sustained our economies. To simply go back to a pre-fossil fuel age, without changing the oppressive structures of that time, is neither feasible nor desirable, argued Chaplin.

Chaplin also cautioned against an understanding of technology that blames it for societal changes or expects it to solve issue for us. For example, she described theories that argue that the cotton gin caused slavery and plantation agriculture. In a nutshell, such theories argue devices makes people do things and so let us off the hook. And, conversely, others argue that the invention of the steam engine made abolitionism possible by providing an alternative source of labor. But, Chaplin argued, black Americans sought their own liberation long before the steam engine, white abolitionism emerged prior to its invention, and, crucially, the steam engine did not turn most white people into abolitionists. Nor did the cotton gin turn all people, all over the world into slave holders. Technology exists within a complex set of societal forces. It does not create our moral and cultural ideas and ideals on its own.

Chaplin tied this to concerns and hopes related to contemporary energy markets. Some fear that if we transition away from burning fossil fuels, we will be plunged back into the suffering and misery of the preindustrial era, when everyone was cold, sick, and constantly chopping wood. Chaplin argued that there is no reason a post-fossil era should look identical to the pre-fossil past. Others hope that renewable energy will solve our other societal issues. But racism and inequality will not go away simply because we shift technology, said Chaplin. We must do cultural work to achieve cultural change. We cannot expect our technology and devices to do that work for us.

Chaplin suggested a couple of ways forward. Energy has always been tricky for societies, Chaplin argued. In order to have as equitable and calm transition away from fossil fuels, Chaplin argued for greater public awareness of the costs of different energy processes and of where in the process things are likely to get messy. The cost of energy options should be part of a public conversation, rather than simply decided by experts.

Chaplin also argued for restoration of land to its original owners. One critique of the concept of the Anthropocene is that it suggests that all humans everywhere are equally culpable for climate and environmental crises. But many indigenous societies have lived and continue to live sustainably on their land. It is not that they haven’t changed or molded their land, but that they have done so without doing damage to other species. Restoring land to original owners and relying on their wisdom about how to live well on land would be one way of learning from the past. Indigenous stewardship now is obviously central to maintaining health of planet, she said.

Understanding how original owners were denied ownership of their lands is a roadmap into the past, but it can also be a roadmap into the future as we consider how to restore land.

Chaplin concluded by drawing together the strings of environmental, technological, and cultural histories. Some of the worst foundations of the Anthropocene were built in the early modern period by exploitation of indigenous peoples and lands. We must face the Anthropocene, she said, by undoing two connected kinds of damage: damage to the natural world and damage to other humans.

Join us on March 25th, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Jedediah Purdy, William S. Beinecke Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School. To register for this webinar and learn more about the series, click here.