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There are no words.

Mountaintop removal in West Virginia. MORE

Anniversary

This time of year I begin to think about New Orleans. It was like this – the students coming back, harvest coming in, the days getting shorter – five years ago. On the high ground of Upstate New York we were enjoying the weather, the relief from humidity, the comfortable sleeping. For us, hurricanes begin far away and rarely affect us much. We were about to be affected.


I went back to the original blog just to remember. On August 27 I wrote:

We have heard the stories for years: it will either be a hurricane or the Mississippi moving. The Army Corps of Engineers has held the river back for years and it wants to change course, as all rivers living a normal life do. Changing course would leave New Orleans landlocked, which economic forces obviously don’t want. So they hold it back with levees and locks. But they know it ... MORE

The Greater Good

I have been hearing lately that we all ought to do one thing or another “for the sake of the greater good.” That phrase adds a lot of moral weight to the argument, calling us to our better, more unselfish selves. Knowing what it means is the critical issue before us in these times and our understanding of it is changing and changing much more quickly than we would wish it to or are comfortable with. But what is the greater good and how do we determine it? I am looking anywhere I can for help in answering these questions. 

The introduction to Boundaries: A Casebook in Environmental Ethics by Christine E. Gudorf and James E. Hutchinson says this:

… virtually every area of ethics today involves taking account of the claims of the environment and that, conversely, environmental ethics involves virtually all other existing areas of ethics.

The authors speak of the boundaries between sub-fields of ethics ... MORE