Global Warming Is A Moral Issue

When Rocky Anderson introduced Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery last week at the City Library and compared him to Rachel Carson, he may have had in mind the galvanizing power Carson's Silent Spring had on the early environmental movement of the 1960s and the potential for Flannery's new book, The Weather Makers, to have a similar power on the growing debate about climate change.

But the comparison was far more apt than Anderson may have realized.

Flannery made a point in his talk, one that even environmentalists don't harp on much these days, that is straight out of Carson. He argued that more than a scientific or political issue, climate change is a moral issue, an ethical issue. In 1963, Carson described her times as the "Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy" that assumes "nature exists for the convenience of man."

She thought DDT an "evil" (her word) for the indiscriminate loss of life it caused. To ignore its effects compromised what it meant to be human.

"By acquiescing in an act that can cause such suffering," Carson asked, "who among us is not diminished as a human being?"

Similarly, Flannery described the potential to world civilization, if we continue on our present course, as presenting a grave moral dilemma: The suffering and loss of life in many major cities worldwide when sea levels rise. The loss of hundreds if not thousands of species as habitats are totally changed with the three degrees of warming that will occur by 2040.

The aerial map from NASA that Flannery had on the screen behind him as he closed his remarks the other night showed the 20 percent loss of the polar ice cap in the past two decades. Outlined in red was the extent of the cap in 1970. Where ice once floated, heat-absorbing water now flows and the melting is accelerating now at a much faster pace. In fact, most of it has occurred in the past six years.

"Among the mammals already severely threatened by loss of

Arctic ice are polar bears and caribou. But the losses are hardly local. In fact, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit leader who spoke recently in Salt Lake City, sees the warming of the Arctic as a 'defining event in the history of this planet . . . the Earth is literally melting.'"

What is the average person to think about all of this? Yes, buy fluorescent bulbs and drive a gas-conserving car. Better yet, don't drive much at all. Turn off lights in your house because in Utah, as in most places, it's dirty coal that is fueling them. Install solar panels if that is feasible where you live.

But what was much more profound in Flannery's message was this: Begin to think about the causes of climate change as questions of ethics, of morality. What is right. What is wrong. The stakes are high.

"In nature nothing exists alone," said Carson. Nature is a "web of life-or-death." Increasingly, as the planet warms and species begin to disappear, as oceans rise near cities below sea level, the death in this equation increases.

Carson wrote Silent Spring to awaken readers to many small, horrible truths about pesticides and one large one: Unless we have more understanding of and reverence for nature, we will end by destroying the Earth.

Now, 43 years after her call to us, Tim Flannery argues that we may well be closer to her prediction than anyone in 1963 could have ever imagined.

Jean Cheney is assistant director of the Utah Humanities Council and directs and teaches in UHC's Venture Course in the Humanities. Her opinion does not reflect a UHC official position.