Martin Schönfeld

A Daoist response to climate change

Climate change is now a global problem that can no longer be ignored. As climate change signals a civilization failure, the emerging reality will spur cultures everywhere to re-examine their traditions and rediscover the ecological wisdom of the ancients. Daoism will be no exception. This paper tries to explain the Daoist response to climate change by focusing on the manifestation of Dao, the responsibility of humankind and the ideal life. It shows that in its tenets and practices, Daoism articulates ideas that emphasize conservation, envision a post-consumerist existence and inform a climate ethics, which can help with the cultural adaptations that are now necessary for a sustainable future.

Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences

This paper is a review of the breakthroughs in the empirical study of animals. Over the past ave years, a change in basic assumptions about animals and their inner lives has occurred. (For a recent illustration of this paradigm change in the news, see van Schaik 2006.) Old-school scientists proceeded by and large as if animals were merely highly complex machines. Behaviorism was admired for its consistently rigorous methodology, mirroring classical physics in its focus on quantiaable observation. In the old analytic climate, claims that animals are sentient raised methodological and ideological problems and seemed debatable at best. Bolder claims, that animals are intelligent, or even self-aware in a way that is for all practical purposes human, were regarded as unfounded. Empirical trials to substantiate such claims were nipped in the bud, since it appeared that such inquiries would unduly humanize nonhuman beings. Scientists are not supposed to project their own intuitions, feelings, or thoughts on objects of their investigation. Studying the afanities of humans and animals would appear to violate this well-established rule, and would risk sliding down the slippery slope from fawns to Bambi, from rabbits to Thumper, and from science to myth. The task of science in the past four centuries had been to demythologize the past. Erasing myths had been the hallmark of progress; it turned astrology into astronomy, alchemy into chemistry, and natural philosophy into natural science. Naturalists, aeld workers, and experimenters who disagreed or who resisted the reduction of life to

World Philosophy and Climate Change: A Sino‐German Way to Civil Evolution

The environmental crisis is the collision of civilization with biospherical limits. Its sign is climate change, which is brought about by a cultural maladaptation, and which threatens to lead to scarcity, displacement, and violence. The solution will have to be a global transformation—a civil evolution—to a postcarbon and sustainable world order. China and Germany, I argue, are well positioned to achieve this new adaptation to living within limits, whereas the United States may have difficulties to respond adequately to the new realities. Here I explore cultural and historical reasons for this Sino-German convergence.

Plan B: global ethics on climate change

This introduction to the special issue on climate puts individual contributions in context. Climate change is the result of the current civilization paradigm and its modes of cognition. This suggests a failure of conventional ways of thinking, including mainstream philosophy. The articles in this issue illustrate alternative philosophical approaches, which point to civil evolution.

On deeper human dimensions in Earth system analysis and modelling

While humanity is altering planet Earth at unprecedented magnitude and speed, representation of the cultural driving factors and their dynamics in models of the Earth system is limited. In this review and perspectives paper, we argue that more or less distinct environmental value sets can be assigned to religion – a deeply embedded feature of human cultures, here defined as collectively shared belief in something sacred. This assertion renders religious theories, practices and actors suitable for studying cultural facets of anthropogenic Earth system change, especially regarding deeper, non-materialistic motivations that ask about humans’ selfunderstanding in the Anthropocene epoch. We sketch a modelling landscape and outline some research primers, encompassing the following elements: (i) extensions of existing Earth system models by quantitative relationships between religious practices and biophysical processes, building on databases that allow for (mathematical) formalisation of such knowledge; (ii) design of new model types that specifically represent religious morals, actors and activities as part of co-evolutionary human–environment dynamics; and (iii) identification of research questions of humanitarian relevance that are underrepresented in purely economic–technocratic modelling and scenario paradigms. While this analysis is by necessity heuristic and semi-cohesive, we hope that it will act as a stimulus for further interdisciplinary and systematic research on the immaterial dimension of humanity’s imprint on the Earth system, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The shifting patterns of progress

Publication of the final issue of Journal of Global Ethics for 2017 is an opportunity to look back at an eventful year and reflect on what might be in store for us next. As Martin Schönfeld, who is an environmental philosopher, is now co-editor of the journal, we thought this is a good opportunity to focus on environmental issues in our editorial article – particularly as the events of this year illustrate an ideological polarization on how to respond to Earth system overshoot. In 2017, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 2. This is the illustrative calendar date when annual total consumption exceeded annual planetary capacity. The overshoot is a quantitative measure and it works like this: divide what the Earth system assimilates and produces in a year (environmental services plus biotic productivity) by what civilization puts in and takes out from it (ecological footprint), and multiply the resulting fraction with the number of days in a year. Ideally, the value of the fraction ought to be 1 or greater, but since the 1970s, it has been less than that, and it keeps falling. This signals a crossing of system limits. Civilization overshoots system capacity when collective human demand exceeds environmental supply. A sustainable civilization would run out of a year’s supply by December 31, if ever. Unsustainable cultures, however, do run out. How much eco-debt they rack up is told by the date. In 1971, global demand exceeded supply for the first time and civilization edged into unsustainable territory. Overshoot Day that year fell on December 21. In 1988, 30 years ago, civilization used up a year’s worth of system capacity by October 16. When Journal of Global Ethics was founded in 2004, with volume 1 released in 2005, the overshoot date was September 2. This year’s date, August 2, is the earliest yet. We now operate as if we lived on 1.7 planets. The global average glosses over national differences, and these differences don’t quite match long-standing expectations anymore – as if, for instance, rich countries must have big environmental footprints and incur large ecological debts, and poor countries would have to be their direct opposites. Of course, to an extent, the old pattern still persists. Norway, for instance, ranks highest on the UN Human Development Index (HDI) and had its national overshoot day already on April 18 –months before the global average. Honduras, by contrast, operated within planetary boundaries in 2017 and didn’t run out of supply until December 31, but its HDI rank is only a modest #130 (out of 188 ranked countries). On the one hand, these differences align with conventional expectations. Consider the contrast in sustainability, with wealthy Norwegians being wildly in overshoot, and modest Hondurans staying within Earth system limits. Location surely matters. Societies exposed to subarctic and arctic climate are bound to consume more energy and materials per capita and year than societies with a mild climate that varies from tropical at the coasts to temperate in the mountains. Furthermore, and unlike Honduras, Norway is a major oil producer, and extractive industries are notoriously energy-intensive. This adds to Norway’s overshoot and large carbon footprint. At the same time, oil production also partially explains Norway’s high level of human development – just as the lack of oil wealth accounts for the relatively modest development of Honduras. Before discovering oil in 1969, Norway’s postwar economy had amounted to little more than fishing and farming, quite similar to the Honduran economy of the time. Since then, crude oil extraction and the production of petroleum gases have become the central sources of Norway’s wealth, while the Honduran economy shifted from

The Future of Religion: Global Boundaries and the Fork in the Road

The question of how religions will look like tomorrow is speculative. But this is not the case with the boundary conditions, or limits, of the future trajectories of world religions. Answers can be found in the intersection of three disciplinary perspectives. The disciplines are anthropology, philosophical ethics (or its political equivalent, international law), and the environmental and climate sciences. Anthropology has gained an understanding of the past development of religions, especially about its shifting functions in successive stages of civilization: among prehistoric bands and tribes, in ancient chiefdoms and medieval kingdoms, and in modern secular states. We know what social purposes religions served in the past, what kind of shifts occurred, and what the trend of religion from prehistory to today had been. Based on the empirical record, anthropology tells us what it means for religion to slide back to a less developed stage of civilization. This is one set of boundary conditions. Ethics discusses the meaning of right and wrong, but its debates cluster around normal, middle-of-the road issues. There is little disagreement over extremes. International institutions (e.g. International Criminal Court), treaties (e.g. Geneva Conventions), and metrics (e.g. Human Development Index) give a clear picture of the limits of right and wrong. As the moral assessment of genocides illustrates, there is no confusion over what counts as evil. We also have a clear idea of what constitutes a life that is safe and dignified. In this way, ethics and international law can tell us whether the social manifestation of faith is acceptable or not, whether it is good or evil. This is another set of boundary conditions. The environmental and climate sciences, finally, have arrived at a conclusion: civilization is maladapted to its environment. The ecological overshoot of humankind has worsened to the point that degradation of ecological integrity is tangible in accelerating extinction rates; that deterioration of environmental services is tangible in climate change; and that depletion of natural resources is tangible in rising prices (compared to incomes) of food, land, and rare earths. Since civilization relies on a global market economy whose stability needs material growth, and since our ecological overshoot makes such growth unsustainable, our species has arrived at a fork in the road. Either we keep doing business as usual and sink into crisis, or we redesign civilization and move towards sustainability. This fork in the road sharpens the anthropological sense of ＂regress＂ and ＂progress,＂ and tweaks the ethical meanings of ＂good＂ and ＂evil＂. Since religion is integral to the fabric of any society, the dimension of sustainability places a fork in the developmental road of religions, too. One future trajectory of faith is a path that is hopeful. Another is a path that is terrifying. The biophysical fork in the road establishes a third set of boundary conditions. Although we do not know what the future will bring, the environmental crisis and the opportunities for mitigating the crisis tell us what a good future will amount to, and what a bad future will boil down to. Anthropology and ethics tell us what it will mean for civilization to move forward or to slide back, to proceed to a healthier, safer world, or to regress to a harsher, poorer world. The purpose this paper is to use the findings of anthropology, ethics, and the environmental sciences to determine the best- and worst-case scenarios of future religion- how faith may look like along an evolutionary, enlightened, and sustainable pathway, and how it would look like if events and people push faith into the opposite direction. I argue that these two scenarios are clear and justifiable. I contend that only the sustainable pathway is compatible with Chinese cultural wisdom, as in Confucianism, Lao-Zhuang Daoism, and Chan Buddhism. And I suspect that Chinese culture and its spiritual traditions will become more influential globally if and only if civilization moves towards sustainability. But if civilization failed at this project, regressed, and suffered collapse, I fear that Chinese culture would be swept away by Middle Eastern creeds.

Laozi and the New Green Paradigm

A curious feature of this century is that we are facing a biospherical crisis, while the cultural pretense is being made, most remarkably in the United States, that this crisis is either not real (according to the political right) or not requiring real responses (according to the political center). Rightwing climate denial persists together with a bipartisan downplay of the crisis. Meanwhile the crisis is transforming from a threat to the natural environment into a threat for global civilization. It is humanity that is now in the crosshairs. The transformation of the crisis redefines what it means to be green. One can speak of a paradigm shift: there is a distinct before and an equally distinct after. In the 20th century, environmentalism was about wilderness preservation and endangered species protection. Environmentalists fought against pollution and degradation. But in the 21st century, these concerns integrate into a bigger picture, framed by worries such as biospherical stability, and queries of how to bring the requisite socioeconomic sustainability about. Environmentalism today is the struggle to slow down climate change, to rein in resource depletion, and to head off possible social collapse. Current debates, such as the pros and cons of geoengineering, reflect a larger problem, namely how aggressive, invasive or interventionist the needed solutions will have to be.1

Ecosophy in the Climate Age

What is the meaning of ecosophy in the new age of climate change? For the first time in history，civilization is encountering absolute biospherical limits. We have crossed the sustainable yield thresholds of virtually all resources we depend on. The carrying capacity of the land is shrinking worldwide due to climate change. The climate system is destabilizing, the planet is becoming less fertile, and the prospects for food security are dire. A global economic system that must expand merely to remain stable is making things worse, and so does ongoing population growth. Not only are we hitting limits; the walls arc closing in. The old paradigm of the human-nature relationship has entered failure mode. Clearly we must shift to sustainability. This raises the question of what a paradigm of sustainability should involve. Some philosophers contend that repairing the human -nature involvement means we must ease up on scientific scrutiny, overcome technological manipulation, abandon secular conceptions of nature, and return to ancient holistic spirituality. I suspect that ecological intelligence or ecosophy in the age of climate change must aim for a civilization of hard science and high technology, and argue that this soaring of rationality is convergent with ancient holistic spirituality.