Christopher J. Preston

Public engagement on solar radiation management and why it needs to happen now

There have been a number of calls for public engagement in geoengineering in recent years. However, there has been limited discussion of why the public should have a say or what the public can be expected to contribute to geoengineering discussions. We explore how public engagement can contribute to the research, development, and governance of one branch of geoengineering, solar radiation management (SRM), in three key ways: 1. by fulfilling ethical requirements for the inclusion of affected parties in democratic decision making processes; 2. by contributing to improved dialogue and trust between scientists and the public; and 3. by ensuring that decisions about SRM research and possible deployment are informed by a broad set of societal interests, values, and framings. Finally, we argue that, despite the nascent state of many SRM technologies, the time is right for the public to participate in engagement processes.

Beyond the End of Nature: SRM and Two Tales of Artificity for the Anthropocene

In 1989, Bill McKibben wrote a now famous book declaring that anthropogenic climate change marked the ‘end of nature.’ Like threatened species, McKibben claimed, ideas can go extinct. The idea of nature untouched by human influence is one such idea, McKibben suggested, an idea now being extinguished by climate change. Until the advent of recent global warming, nature stood for ‘the separate and wild province, the world apart from man to which he adapted and under whose rules he was born and died’ (McKibben, 1989, p. 48). In today’s warming world, ‘each cubic yard of air, each square foot of soil, is stamped indelibly with our crude imprint, our X’ (McKibben, 1989, p. 96). With anthropogenic climate change ‘the meaning of the wind, the sun, the rain – nature – has already changed’ (McKibben, 1989, p. 48). As a result, humans face an unprecedented and disorienting loss. Published just as citizens and their leaders were starting to awaken to the reality of global warming, McKibben’s thesis has faced a number of challenges from academics. These include the complaint that he puts too much emphasis on the idea of pristine nature (Cronon, 1995), that his approach is unnecessarily dualistic (Vogel, 2002), and that it is excessively concerned with nature’s independence (Borgmann, 1995). Whatever philosophical shortcomings the original thesis contained, the success of the book makes it clear that McKibben had touched a nerve on something the public deemed important. He pin-pointed how climate change ratchets up the extent of human influence on natural processes. Climate impacts represent a more comprehensive disruption of nature than previous human influence such as the destruction of rainforests or the building of vacation homes on coastal lands. Anthropogenic warming creates a more fundamental type of change, altering what McKibben characterized as ‘the most basic forces around us’ (1989, p. 47). Since everything on earth operates under the influence of these forces, anthropogenic warming has the potential to shape the totality of nature in a fashion quite unprecedented in human history.

Skewed Vulnerabilities and Moral Corruption in Global Perspectives on Climate Engineering

Ethicists and social scientists alike have advocated for the inclusion of vulnerable populations in research and decision-making on climate engineering. Unfortunately, there have been few efforts to do so. The research presented in this paper was designed to build knowledge about how vulnerable populations think about climate engineering. The goal of this manuscript is to bring the ethics literature on climate engineering into dialogue with emerging social science data documenting the perspectives of vulnerable populations. The results indicate some concerns among vulnerable populations may resemble those outlined by ethicists. However, the perspectives expressed by interviewees also extend previous ethical treatments by indicating ways in which climate engineering could compound existing injustices.

Moral Knowledge: Real and Grounded in Place

Recent work in ethics and epistemology argues that physical surroundings have normative force. The ideas of ‘grounding knowledge’ and ‘real ethics’ provide an important way to understand sense of place. This paper uses this work to argue that there is a moral structure to material culture, and that the existence of this moral structure makes it necessary for us to pay attention to the epistemic import of the physical environments we create and live in. Since environments are thick with moral norms, it is incumbent upon us to figure out what kinds of environments are most conducive to our shared visions of the good life.

Restoring Misplaced Epistemology

Grounding Knowledge is written partly out of a sense of celebration and partly out of a sense of consternation. The celebration is generated by the feeling that epistemology has started to explore some fascinating territory. A whole range of contemporary epistemologists, from feminists to science studies theorists to cognitive scientists to phenomenologists, have become interested in studying knowledge as a thoroughly embodied and embedded phenomenon, contrived by fleshy and fallible humans operating out of social and institutional contexts that influence the kinds of things that they are likely to say. This seems like an important breakthrough. It is not that the more traditional analytic ‘S is justified in believing P if and only if . . .’ approach to epistemology is entirely wrong, it is just that such an approach simply cannot tell the whole story about the way people go about knowing things. An epistemic perspective is never as faceless, pure and detached as analytic epistemology pretends it to be and so those traditional approaches fail to illuminate a whole host of factors relevant to the knowledge process. There is something refreshingly real and down to earth about the turn towards embodied and embedded knowledge. Above all, it emphasizes the importance of worldly context. This means more attention paid to social, physiological and material considerations, connecting epistemology instantly to other areas in philosophy and also to other relevant disciplines, such as history, psychology and sociology. These changes all look like good reasons to celebrate. Alongside these reasons for celebration, there are also some reasons for consternation. For in the very moment that these new breakthroughs are connecting epistemology to real life situations and to a suite of other disciplines, the new directions often seem to unwittingly retain one of the worst features of epistemology’s previous detachment. Feminists and science studies theorists seem willing to talk about the social/political, the historical and the scientific contexts that

Swimming upstream: Engaging the American public early on climate engineering

Calls for public participation in climate engineering research and governance have appeared in numerous scientific and policy reports on the topic, indicating a desire for transparency and public oversight. But meaningful public engagement can require more of scientists and regulatory agencies than many realize. Over the past several decades, researchers and practitioners have developed many different methodologies to enable citizens to productively engage with experts and policy makers about emerging scientific and technological issues such as climate engineering. In fact, the United Kingdom has already convened several public participation exercises on climate engineering. Now is the time for federal agencies in the United States to start similar processes. The public is ready to discuss climate engineering. Are American scientists and decision makers ready to reciprocate?

Challenges and Opportunities for Understanding Non-economic Loss and Damage

Abstract A decision was made at the UNFCCC, COP-18 meeting in Doha in 2012 to create a work programme on loss and damage. Part of this programme was to include the production of a technical paper to enhance the general understanding of non-economic losses from climate change. The following article looks carefully at that paper in order to discover whether it provides an adequate conceptual understanding of non-economic losses. Several shortcomings of the paper’s conceptualization of these losses are identified. An alternative ethical framework with methods better suited for capturing a fuller range of non-economic losses is considered. This framework is likely to be most useful if used prospectively for the purpose of devising better adaptation policies to head off potential future losses rather than if used retrospectively for quantifying losses that have already occurred for the purposes of providing compensation.

De-extinction and Taking Control of Earth's “Metabolism”

In a laboratory on a university campus in Santa Cruz, California, Ben Novak is doing everything he can to bring Ectopistes migratorius back from the dead. Using techniques now available in genome reading and gene synthesis, he and paleogenomicist Beth Shapiro hope that, by 2032, a flock of passenger pigeons ten thousand or more strong will have resumed an ecologically significant role in the mast forests of the Eastern United States. Novak knows-and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) affirms-that the challenges involved in making de-extinction work are far from solely genetic. Novak is doing an ecological risk assessment of passenger pigeon reintroduction to figure out whether flocks of the resurrected species would pose any special hazards to ecosystems. Ecological harm is one of several worries attending the prospect of de-extinction. Among other concerns are the possible harm that individuals born through this process might suffer and the possible introduction of disease vectors. But I want to step back from these immediate questions and think about some conceptual ones that operate in the background. Technology can be a grand shaper of cultural norms and expectations, and de-extinction should be looked at in relation to a number of emerging technologies. This paper will examine the degree to which de-extinction is part of a more widespread restructuring of ethical relationships to the surrounding world that are under way at the hands of emerging technologies. This restructuring is part of an ongoing shift in how to think about conservation in the new epoch of the Anthropocene.

Philosophical Clarity and Real-world Debate

Morrow’s (2014) central conclusion is that the argument for using solar radiation management (SRM) to reduce the risks of climate change is ‘weaker than it appears’ (p. 1). The work done towards that conclusion is methodical and well argued. But there are reasons not get too immersed in the disciplined elegance on display. One might question whether the argument for using SRMwas ever particularly strong in the first place. When some of the world’s leading advocates for research into SRM concede that the ‘common first response to geoengineering is revulsion’ (Keith, Parson, & Morgan, 2010, p. 427) and other advocates confess that SRM initially looks ‘loony’ (Caldeira, 2013), you know that this technology has a tough case to make in the court of public opinion. The argument that the doctrines of ‘doing and allowing’ and ‘double effect’ ‘ . . . set the bar higher than it would otherwise be’ (p. 3) affirms basic intuitions about SRM that are by no means new. Nearly 15 years ago, geoengineering advocate David Keith drew attention to the fact that SRM would effectively be a ‘doing’ while climate change is merely an ‘allowing’ (Keith, 2000). Others have suggested that intentionally altering the climate, rather than having it change as a double-effect of industrial and commercial activities, creates a ‘presumptive argument’ against geoengineering based on a widely shared principle of non-interference (Jamieson, 1996; Preston, 2011). More importantly, the risk profile argument faces deep challenges not only due to ‘the deep uncertainties involved in climate science’ (p. 9) but also because of a ‘shifting calculus’ phenomenon embedded in the decision-making process for SRM. Morrow legitimately reminds us that policy makers should support SRM research ‘only if SRMmight someday be morally permissible’ (p. 4). Certainly the decision to support research ‘depends partly on whether it could ever be morally permissible to use SRM as a form of climate engineering’ (p. 2), but the ‘partly’ qualification is extremely important for at least two reasons. First, there could be rationales independent of the moral permissibility of SRM deployment that count against today’s research. For example, research could be extremely expensive, it could disproportionately harm certain populations, or it could interfere with important tasks by diverting human and other resources from different research projects. As we well know, not every morally permissible research project should be pursued.

Environmental Knowledge: Courteous Yet Subversive, Grounded Yet Surprising

The essays assembled in Anthony Weston’s The Incompleat Eco-Philosopher, more than anything else, convey a provocative message about method in environmental philosophy. This message includes numerous fresh-faced suggestions and provocations about the different places environmental philosophy might engage with the world, how it might dance in the environmental arena (and who it might dance with), and what those of us who self-identify as environmental philosophers might best do with our time, energy, creativity, and alliances. There is an underlying provocation in the book that many academics should be doing things a little differently while still enjoying the appellation of ‘environmental philosopher.’ And lurking throughout this lively collection is the subversive claim made explicit in the preface that this struggle for a more genuine environmental philosophy ‘‘may also be the struggle for the soul of philosophy itself’’ (Weston, 2009, p. x). Weston requests an approach to environmental philosophy that is at different times ‘artistic,’ ‘exploratory,’ ‘heretical,’ ‘pluralistic,’ ‘comedic,’ ‘engaged,’ ‘metaphorical,’ and ‘experimental.’ He asks that, for the most part, philosophers avoid environmental philosophy that is systematising and detached. In this spirit, the remarks below are intended to be adequately heretical and maybe a little playful as they focus on the three recurrent and important themes in the book—conversational etiquette, grounding knowledge, and subversiveness. The question of proper etiquette is central to the approach Weston advocates. With the help of Jim Cheney, Weston requests a reversal of the traditional methodological assumption that epistemology comes prior to ethics. As those of us who accept ourselves as creatures thoroughly embodied and embedded in the world all recognise, there is no knowable world ‘in-itself’ or ‘as it is’ and so it is misguided to try—once and for all—to establish the facts about the world and then later to start thinking about our obligations. Experience is not epistemically neutral. How a person acts or chooses to engage with the world, already influences the facts by constraining or channeling what gets experienced. Experience is always already thick,