“A landmark report from the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought,” Coral Davenport writes, in the December 7, 2018 edition of The New York Times, according to which “avoiding the damage requires transforming the world economy at a speed and scale that has ‘no documented historic precedent’.” Unless we change in altogether unprecedented ways, in other words, we will, in only a few decades, pass a climate-change tipping point on the other side of which humanity becomes at best dystopian, at worst extinct. “But while [the report’s authors] conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required,” Davenport continues, “they concede that it may be politically unlikely.” In the spirit of the previous iterations of the seminar, we would again apply ourselves to confronting this concession.
Our starting point would again be the recognition that giving in to the understandable temptation to respond to those who take the crisis less seriously, if seriously at all, by impressing upon them the doom and gloom that will result, has more often than not a relatively paralyzing effect. Our strategy would instead be Naomi Klein’s: to understand the crisis as a “galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well” (This Changes Everything), and so a more joyful prospect that we may be among those who help to save the day.
Our focus would also again be two-fold. On the one hand, we would review and address watershed analyses of the crisis, such as Klein’s, as well as various popular- cultural reflections of it, using the resources of Environmental Philosophy and Ecocriticism, among others. Our focus would also be, on the other hand, and equally urgently, to work together to develop solutions applicable locally at Rutgers, as an incubator for, and inspiration to the city, county, state, nation, and world in which we reside more generally.
About Trip McCrossin
Professor Trip McCrossin teaches classes in the history and legacy of the Enlightenment, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophy, and in contemporary ethical and political issues and popular culture. He strives to organize them to be as thoroughly conversational and exploratory as possible, and to relate philosophy as often as possible to the cultures we live in, and in this spirit, contributes periodically to essay collections published in several "popular culture and philosophy" series. He studied at the University of Michigan and Stanford and Yale Universities, and before coming to Rutgers in 2003, worked for some years in the labor movement.