Allen Thompson Oral History Interview, January 10, 2018

ELIZABETH THORLEY: Today is January 10, 2018. I'm here with Dr. Allen Thompson with the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion at Oregon State University. We're at the Valley Library. Today we're going to be talking about his research as it relates to global warming, but first I'd like to start with your background. Where were you born?

ALLEN THOMPSON: Elizabeth, I was born in Chicago, Illinois.

ET: Is that where you grew up?

AT: I grew up in the suburbs north of the city.

ET: What did your parents do?

AT: My dad was a corporate attorney. He still is alive but retired, a corporate attorney working on international loans for business operations and my mother was largely a homemaker, I would say, but she also has done a lot of things: worked in a bookstore and took a nursing degree while we were growing up.

ET: What were your early interests as a child?

AT: I don't know. Early interests as a child: I did some sports like most kids did. I played football and lacrosse. I guess when I was really young, sort of 00:01:00pertinent to this, I really did imagine when I was probably under 10, it was a lot like war games. We built machine guns out of old pieces of lumber and run around in the woods, rolling and tumbling and stuff like this and thinking that, imagining World War II or Vietnam or something like that, fantasies. I guess I was sort of interested in that, wearing camouflage, stuff like that.

ET: Did you spend time outdoors or have a relationship to nature as a child?

AT: We did a lot of camping as kids outdoors. We would go down to-a friend of the family had a farm, a co-op owned farm outside of Galax, Virginia, I guess that is southwestern Virginia along the New River, and we would ride horses there and do some camping along the Appalachian trail. I think Mount Rogers there is the highest point in the Appalachian trail, we would do that pretty 00:02:00regularly and went out west and did camping. Also we had a pretty big backyard, much of which was forested or the edge of which was forested and continues with forested adjacent yards and we would play in there and build forts and that sort of thing and then also there were ravines coming down in the suburbs there down to Lake Michigan which we were near, which were a nice sort of natural areas as far is I could tell. You could drop off the road and climb under the bridge and drop down into the ravine and find old street signs, or this thing or that. There was always a creek at the bottom and we would spend a lot of time running around in there.

ET: What was your school experience like? Did you anticipate going to college or have people in your life encouraging you to do so?

AT: Yeah, most definitely. The kind of background that I came from everyone was expected to go to college. I think 95% of my high school all go to further 00:03:00education, higher education of some kind or another. Although I was a terrible high school student. I tested very well and I was in advanced classes in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade and I suppose it's puberty somewhere in there that hit and I just started wanting nothing to do with school and I just started giving up on doing any of the work and I barely graduated high school and I did not get into any of the colleges that I had applied to, although I was conditionally accepted at this one school I was interested in. Perhaps these were your other questions lead to about where did you go to college, things like this, at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington which is an alternative school founded in 1968 or the late '60s, something like this. No grades. No tests. Interdisciplinary-you take one course at a time with 3 or 4 different professors. There's no departments. There's no tenure for the faculty, there's only a BA or a BS for the undergraduate level with as I think I said no 00:04:00majors. You're really allowed to design your own education. It was alternative. That was good for me. At the same time, I was living in a group house with a lot of kids who were far more liberal, at least had experiences in liberal lifestyles like following the Grateful Dead and big hippies on a farm and stuff like this than I had had from a rather conservative, suburban experience. There was also a big education going on there in terms of a young person growing up and being exposed to a lot of different things.

ET: Did you have an area of emphasis of study there? Kind of along those same lines, did you do any undergraduate research?

AT: Yeah, I guess to back in some ways I didn't answer your question. We were expected to go to college and I wasn't admitted anywhere but it was conditional. It meant I came there that summer and performed well and was also on probation 00:05:00during the fall and everything went fine.

I did a great books program the first year, sort of more traditional thing, and I did some art appreciation and then largely I just started putting together philosophy areas. I knew I wanted to do philosophy. As I had been skipping school in high school I was sort of under the wing of the Dean of Students at Lake Forest College which was the local college I lived a couple blocks from. He was a sort of a failed Jesuit priest and he'd left that lifestyle but knew a lot about religious thinking, interdisciplinary educated, cross-religious and philosophical ideas. He was a Jesuit and they get a good philosophical education. It was kind of a new age without all the crystals and everything and we went to these adult evening classes between Highland Park and Lake Forest, and Highland Park is largely a Jewish community and Lake Forest is largely a 00:06:00Catholic community and so well-educated housewives, largely, who were the audience for these adult evening classes and I would go and take them with a couple friends when I was supposed to be doing homework for math that I wanted nothing to do with. We studied Aquinas and Anselm and I learned about meditation with him over at the college. Then I got interested-I was reading William James and some David Hume some things, learning about a number of classic European philosophers with him and through one-on-one meetings. Then when I went into college I sort of self-identified as a philosopher. Like I said I took these great book programs and the door was open there for me to say hey you three other students you want to read this book on Descartes or something like that and then we'd find an instructor and just do it. It was self-guided research, 00:07:00largely, and sometimes programmed around classic western philosophical issues and persons.

ET: You decided to pursue graduate studies after that experience at Evergreen?

AT: I did. I thought at the time I might want to go into anthropology. I was pretty interested in the human experience and human beings. I was not getting a very rigorous classical training in the different disciplines or anything like this. It was all this cross-disciplinary stuff. I thought it was all philosophy. But my philosophical mentor who I'd been working with mostly said you know you're pretty much a philosopher: the questions you ask, the stuff you've been reading, the stuff you're into is pretty much philosophy, not anthropology. The methods are different there. You should think about philosophy more. I said I okay. He said well you have some talent. This was in the early '90s, '90 or '91. He said you have some talent doing this. He had come of age in the late '60s 00:08:00where there was a tremendous expansion in the universities and came out there were a lot of jobs available to him. He had a one-year position at MIT and then moved out to this experimental college. So, his views on these things were a little out of date and he said you have some talent why don't you apply to the top 10 programs and you'll probably get into one and you'll go do philosophy there. I said that's great. So, I applied Princeton and Harvard and Stanford and like Brown I think and University of Pittsburgh and all these places.

The other part of the plan was go up to the University of Washington 60 miles up the road in Seattle immediately as a non-matriculated graduate student, which is a limited number of courses. You're not enrolled in a degree-seeking program but you're allowed to take credits. I studied that summer and the next fall to get letter grades on my transcript, because otherwise I had this 180-pages of written self-evaluations and faculty evaluations and stuff like this, get some letter grades, show that you can do graduate work in philosophy and get one more 00:09:00letter of recommendation from someone who teaches graduate students. That was the plan then go apply. I applied to the UW, University of Washington, as a back-up plan and like getting into other things it was just none of these other places wanted someone from the hippy school who had been doing whatever they wanted. You know what I mean? I didn't fit the mold. I couldn't write in the same way that I'm sure the-they take people with much higher pedigree. So, I got in of course to the University of Washington where they'd seen that I could perform and took my graduate degree there from the University of Washington. I paid for my first year out-of-pocket, didn't have any funding, but they liked what I was doing so they started giving me graduate teaching assistant appointments for my second year. I had those then throughout the remainder. I got a master's degree in two years in that program there. I believe still, but at the time, you didn't write a master's thesis.

You wrote three papers that would be publishable in three different areas: ethics and value (ethics and aesthetics), mind and epistemology, and what was the other one? I forget the other-history! History of philosophy to show some breadth and they would be scored each by three different faculty and you get a certain number of points and you have to chart a certain number of parts for different outcomes: released with no grade, asked to revise and resubmit, or given a terminal master's, or invited into the Ph.D. program. I was one of four of the twelve people that came in with me who was then invited to continue as a Ph.D. student there, which I did.

ET: What did you think of being back in a more formal academic, or institution, environment?

AT: It was pretty good. I enjoyed it. I think that, like I said, I alluded to earlier, my writing I think was a little bit more simplistic in a way. There's 00:11:00styles of academic writing, largely that's what I do to keep my job, that are sort of arcane but they're very specialized. They want a certain kind of voice for a certain kind of audience and I was looser than that. I had to work hard on doing that. I had to get up to speed on a lot of the formal logic to pass the advanced logic class, the sort of metalogic stuff, but I very much enjoyed having a bigger group of people who were really interested, sort of exclusively, in western philosophy. As you know, they were largely diverse hippies at Evergreen where I was an undergrad.

ET: How did you enjoy teaching?

AT: I liked it a lot. I was the teaching assistant. Once you pass your preliminary exams for the Ph.D., they can give you your own classes where you're the primary instructor. I enjoyed it. I taught introductory ethics courses at 00:12:00the primary instructor and I taught logic, formal logic, courses and then informal reasoning courses.

ET: Your research-is that where you started to focus more on environmental ethics at that point or environmental philosophy?

AT: It's not. I was working on a dissertation. I was trained in metaethical theory and normative ethical theory, largely theoretical considerations and I wrote a dissertation defending a particular no-Aristotelian view by Phillipa Foot and her 2000 book, Natural Goodness, something or another. It was really a very straightforward theoretical sort of things. I went on the job market several times looking to just apply to all ethics jobs, which is a big category. But through the course of my graduate career I had some interest in environmental ethics. At that time it was not taught regularly, and I worked with one of the faculty there, Robert Coburn, metaphysician Robert Coburn, who was on my graduate committee designing an environmental ethics course to put on 00:13:00the permanent course catalogue, and I was the first person to teach that class and it still exists up there under the same name. They run it more regularly now. In fact, they've hired people to do environmental ethics. It was new at the time and my experience with what I keep calling the hippies at Evergreen, as you can imagine involves a lot of considerations about vegetarianism, social justice, there's considerations of environmental justice, the well-being of non-human animals, destructive practices of logging in the Northwest on the spotted owl, which was all going on then, earth-first activism. There was a lot of environmental stuff in the mix. We lived on a farm growing organic food. I had this sort of stuff in my background. Yeah, so actually in '99 I was spinning 00:14:00my wheels I thought working on my dissertation and teaching for the university but not making a lot of progress in this new Aristotelian dissertation, so I had an opportunity because of a strange automobile accident I had been the victim of in '92, I had some resources, some money, and I bought in on a piece of land cooperatively owned by old deadhead friends of mine in Southwest Colorado, outside of Durango, north of Bayfield near the Weminuche Wilderness near Lake Vallecito and surrounded by BLM land you had to go through. I lived in a yurt out there from '99 until 2003, left my pursuit of the Ph.D. and thought I would do something else. Was off the grid, five miles from a paved road, living in this yurt. We had a market garden and we had some well, 7,500 feet [altitude].

We had plans. I made a non-profit, an educational non-profit and we thought we would bring in Durango area school children for 2 or 3 overnights and show them gardening and putting their hands in the dirt and we'd get an ornithologist to talk about the birds or wildlife watching and I would give little talks in environmental ethics sort of stuff, campfire talks to the little kids. But there's another group in Durango called Durango Nature Studies that already had grant writers on staff, you know, and you can imagine I had the greatest organizational skills of this group of deadheads with dreadlocks and you know doing other things so that we're swamped. We're out-competed by these guys and I had met the woman who would later become my wife and in the interim we got married over the Y2K and into those and we're going to have a baby and I started seeing my only marketable skill was doing philosophy and teaching. So I finished my dissertation, hustling to do that before our son came. We moved off that land 00:16:00and into town in Durango and I was working part-time for Fort Lewis College, which was a four-year liberal arts school in the state system. Did a couple years just contingent faculty, adjunct stuff, finished my Ph.D. They liked me very much and they gave me a full-year appointment. With my degree I started calling myself a visiting assistant professor, but that's a little inflated. A fellow in political science-a joint appointment between philosophy and political science, denied tenure. I thought this is where I will get a job. You know it's a tough job market and I'll stay here. But there was no funding to rehire me as an adjunct the next year. There was no funding. They didn't do a job search, so I had to go on the job market after that. I'm not sure what your next question will be-probably along those lines. I'm trying to track how the environmentalism came into it. Then I got a one-year appointment at Virginia Commonwealth 00:17:00University doing ethics, ethical theory, for them. I drove the whole family across the country. We just moved. We sold our little house and we moved to Richmond, Virginia for a year and then next year I went on the job market again and I would apply for environmental ethics jobs, which were a small percentage of ethics, normative or metaethical theory, so smaller pool.

I could tell them not only that I put this class together and I could speak to the things they wanted. Then I would start telling them about these 3 years that I lived in the yurt at 7,500 feet altitude off-grid where the bear had tried to get in my yurt, a mountain lion jumped over my-all this kind of stuff. Their eyes kind of get wider because it sort of screams authenticity in a way and sets me apart from the other candidates. That landed me a tenure-track job at Clemson University doing environmental ethics where I was for six years and then an 00:18:00opportunity came to apply for this job at Oregon State University, which I thought honestly at the time I was only going to apply-we thought we're making our stand down in South Carolina at Clemson and I thought I would just get an offer and use that as leverage for my dean there to get a retention, a raise, because that's one of few ways to get a bump up in your salary in academia. But they flew me out here for the on-campus interview. Of course, you know, it's drizzling rain and I'm coming down in the hut shuttle from Portland down here you see the mountains and there's like a rainbow. I was like oh, my God. The northwest, this is where I spent many formative years in my young adulthood. I thought I've got to get this job and we have to come here. I'm really in. They liked the story of living in the yurt too and hired me to do environmental ethics. The six years and then I've been here seven years doing environmental 00:19:00ethics but trying to bring all the time my underlying virtue metaethical views to bear on the questions regarding the natural environment.

ET: When did global warming enter your research?

AT: That's a good question. It was there early on in those early environmental ethics books but did not dominate the discussion in the way that it does today. There's a lot more interest just in-we faced a kind of environmental crisis after World War II. It was recognizable that the human impact was growing much larger and the progressive social movements of the baby boomers included environmentalism, but the issues really then were framed about species loss and loss of biodiversity and pollution and so you get the great pieces of American environmental legislation, like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act all passed almost unanimously by a unified congress to fight these things.

Then only in I think it was '98, maybe it was '88. I think it was '88 famously, I can't remember, when James Hansen, the chief scientist for NASA's Goddard Institute, very famous climatologist here in the U.S., chief climatologist, said he was 99% sure global warming was real. We're seeing the effects of it and that sort of stuff. It just trickled. Then with the '92, with the Rio Summit and the initiation of the UNFCCC-early '90s you start getting international political recognition around that and it goes very slowly since then, but of course in some ways it swamps all these other issues because of the enormity of the problem for all future human beings and that sort of thing. It trickled then, as it were.

ET: What were your initial impressions of Oregon State, of the institution and your department?

AT: I am a product of state institutes of higher education. Evergreen's the 00:21:00Evergreen State College. It's a public school. University of Washington is a public school. Clemson is a public school, sort of South Carolina State University, teaching job. Virginia Commonwealth is a state school where I taught. Fort Lewis College is a state school. I'm at home with the nature of the institution. It's a land grant institution. Here we have a great resource, a tremendous college of forestry. We've got good fish and wildlife. The oceanography program. You have all these atmospheric modelers and scientists here. You've got all of the kind of people who are making cutting-edge scientific work on the natural environment which are wonderful colleagues to have to do the kind of interdisciplinary work I was trying to do as an undergraduate. But then when you work as a philosopher, really when you get trained to do it, largely you write and you think alone. You're engaged with this literature. But environmental ethics is really an interdisciplinary program 00:22:00because instead of just thinking about theoretical questions that only philosophers think and being stuck in the literature of philosophy, in a small group of other philosophers, you have to find out about the politics of those annual CUP meetings of the UNFCCC and atmospheric science and what's going on in the cutting edge there or restoration ecology and issues in changing ecosystems there and so I can talk to those people across the campus. I had a strong impression and thought it would be a good place to continue the work that I am doing.

ET: How has your role as a teacher evolved through your career?

AT: I teach environmental ethics regularly. That's a kind of introductory course that talks about its emergence in the 20th century largely starting as an academic discipline in the early '70s, thinking about non-human animals, extending traditional theories and thinking about species or ecosystems as a whole and then other kind of issues. I teach that regularly. I teach intro 00:23:00ethical theory and it's pretty plain teaching that I do, which is nice because it allows me a lot of opportunity to work on the specialized work. I have to read all this other literature I'm not an expert in to begin with to do this interdisciplinary work. Then to diversify my teaching, I do specialized upper-division courses in climate ethics or novel ecosystems that I work on or ecological restoration, more as one-offs usually with a small mix of graduate students from these largely biological, earth science disciplines and some philosophers and try to have that dovetail with things I'm researching and writing on so that it can help support it.

ET: I guess moving more into your research, how do you frame moral responsibility in global warming?

AT: Now to get to the heart of the matter in some ways, responsibility is a complicated concept in the kind of philosophy that I do is interested in just doing conceptual analysis like that. Our paradigms, paradigm cases, our received notion of responsibility largely has to do with liability, would I would call backward-looking, holding persons responsible for, or accountable for, actions that they have performed which cause harms wrongly in specific cases to specific other individuals that are specifiable, right? I swing my fist unjustifiably and I hit you and I knock out some teeth, or something like this. Or I steal your bicycle out from under you and then I'm caught and I'm responsible for damages you suffer due to my actions that I alone have caused and that's the kind of notion of responsibility that we have, right?

We hold our children responsible. So this notion moral responsibility designed 00:25:00for making sense of our giving praise or blame for actions and then rewarding or punishing and fitting in to some sort of story there. That's different than causal responsibility. The wind might blow and be what is responsible for the lamps moving from the table onto the ground and breaking. The wind blows. We say well the wind is responsible, but we don't thereby praise or blame the wind. We don't hold it morally responsible. We don't admonish the wind. It doesn't make any sense, right? But other human beings are the kind of entities, the kind of agents that we think have a freedom that legitimately are the bearers of responsibility constrained in one way or another by youth or other conditions, right? Incapacity, insanity, being drunk, being raised by drug addicts or under 00:26:00harsh conditions. We mitigate the kind of responsibility we hold to them, but we hold ourselves responsible. With global climate change what we recognize is that the fundamental form as a massive collective action problem. No one of my actions as an individual-flipping the lights on or off conserving energy, setting my thermostat here or there, what kind of car I drive, the fuel efficiency it is, drive or bike, what I put on my plate. For example a lot of meat eating has a greater impact on my diet, has a greater impact on my personal carbon footprint. The kind of car I choose to buy. Things like that. Individual actions and even lifestyle choices, although that broadens them in ways, have no measurable effect on global climate change. Our consequence-in terms of causal responsibility, almost inconsequential, mere drops in the bucket, if not drops 00:27:00in the ocean for what's going to happen. The impacts of climate change are from aggregated actions of largely the release of carbon dioxide of the burning of fossil fuels for energy that is produced not only from my lifestyle choices but running of the global economy and providing all the infrastructure and all the manufactured goods that I partake in, so what you get vis-a-vis the notion of moral responsibility is a puzzle. We are all each making the contributions through our lifestyle choices and those of us in the developed first world with the privilege to exercise a lot of power and act as consumers, consume a lot of energy, burn a lot more carbon fuel and release a lot more. Then plenty of other people. They say something like in the U.S. there's 7 or 8 times, the numbers sort of shift, annual carbon emissions compared to people in Bangladesh or in 00:28:00sub-Saharan Africa, or something like this, where the population is growing, but it takes 7 or 8 of them to equal the carbon footprint of just one of us. It looks like we would bear more responsibility with that kind of metric. But still the actions of any one first-world person can't prevent climate change from what the outcome will be, what he future will bring vis-a-vis all the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere. You have this sort of puzzle about it's only the result of our actions aggregated and how am I responsible, how is the responsibility for praise or blame or what I think I should do if I want to be a responsible person, how am I to be held accountable for the harmful effects of climate change. Another problem-so that's talking large about the causes being diffuse across space and also across time because people have been burning carbon since the middle of the 19th century, something like this, right? Through the 00:29:00industrial revolution. Most of the changes we're seeing today are the result of carbon emissions emitted well before our lifetime and there's a lag in inertia in the carbon system. We have diffusion of the causes over space and over time. Most of them are dead, the people who caused extreme weather today. It's a huge conundrum for this notion of responsibility to praise or blame. So that's the agents' bringing about the harm, you've got problems. On the other end, those who suffer harms wrongly are largely in the people who exist in the future, although some people of course insofar as we either the probability or the extremity the strength of the extreme weather events like hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico and the other ones we saw in the Atlantic hurricane season this year, to anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

That's a nascent and evolving science that I do work in, largely its future generations, persons as of yet unborn who will inherit a world that is the result of the carbon emitting we're doing today. How do we characterize those harms? There's no identifiable individuals who suffer a harm. There are no individuals whose rights are violated or whose pleasures or pains are affected wrongly by my actions today. So the string from my setting my thermometer or driving my car, 150 years out to individuals who we know will be migrants, refugees, climate refugees suffering food shortages and harmed because of the actions we undertake today is so tenuous and undiscoverable that the notion of holding us responsible or blaming us for that becomes enormously difficult based 00:31:00on this received conception of responsibility that we have. That is the kind of problem arena in a way. There's ways to come at this through structures of law to think about responsibility, there. Litigation is largely the model that's taken on in the law, but there's other models there, especially for corporate responsibility and collective responsibility. There's questions about distributing the cost of the harms that we do in the future back onto us because we get all the benefits of burning the fuels today. We get all the benefits, but the harms are borne by people in the future. Not us, but unique individuals. There's an asymmetry there. How can we bear some of the cost for the harms that we're causing and that's called the social cost of carbon. They try to calculate that, figure out what that number is, and then build that price into the cost of our burning carbon today as a kind of economic strategy for shifting some of the cost of the harms that we're doing back onto those of us who are doing it. Not 00:32:00very popular, but there's a moral agreements there. A lot of different ways to come at this. Part of my work is to think of a moral responsibility not in terms of backwards looking liability, not as forward-looking, but not in terms of being accountable for certain states of affairs that will be realized in the future, but to think of responsibility as a character trait and as a virtue. When we think about the roles different people have-this is the virtue ethics that came to through my doctoral training in some ways-you know virtues are supposed to be character dispositions to act and emotionally respond in situations in an appropriate way, in an excellent way or in a way that reveals a 00:33:00proper fitting or comprehension of how the good human being would act, doing what the good human being would do. Those character traits are the product of habituation and practice and developments like a skill.

Through the course of our lives we can become more or less virtuous people or develop the vices as a ballast in the ship of our lives to give it stability. We develop these character traits. The core idea here is that responsibility itself is a kind of character trait. To illustrate this I often think about babysitters-having a young family myself-it might be the case that two given babysitters, potential babysitters both satisfy the duties of the role of babysitter in a checked-box fashion. They put the food on the table. They turn of the TV at the right time. They make sure that the dressers don't fall over on 00:34:00the kids. They read the story to them. They tuck them in, something like this. Lock the door, wait for you while they chat with their boyfriend on the phone or something like this. But one of them could still be a better babysitter, a virtuous babysitter, a responsible babysitter. You think what is the character trait that makes-if someone's sort of a more responsible babysitter than the other, if I've granted that they both satisfied the list of duties and in that way are equally morally up to the task, I think the more responsible babysitter will have a kind of capacity to juggle the variety of normative demands that are placed upon them in this role in a right way, handle unexpected things with more grace, be on the lookout for things that the other one might not have been, might be more caring, perhaps, in a certain kind of way, another kind of virtue, right? But you start thinking, it's not duty-bound.

The excellence of sterile or doing well is not satisfied by doing the duties or having certain outcomes-kids are safe when the parents come home. It's doing it in a certain kind of way with a capacity to juggle the demands that are on you and satisfying that particular role. They're a responsible babysitter. So, this is a characterization of responsibility as a character or virtue. A lot of my work is to try to develop the idea of environmental responsibility in that same way. There's other work in environmental virtues that try to think about character traits that would make us a good environmentalist like which would enable us in ways to be habitually disposed to have a lower carbon footprint, a certain kind of-I draw a blank on the kind of word I want. What's the word when you use resources very efficiently? It may come to me in a moment. You know, 00:36:00make due with what you have, be resourceful in a certain kind of way. These are all character traits which make you a kind of good environmentalist in the preservationist sense of having very low impact and needing a certain model of an individual who has low impact for a certain kind of outcome, lowering your impact. But we live in times now of changing ecologies as we move into the Anthropocene. This is another area of my work in which it looks like the traditional goals of the environmental movement in preservation in slowing the human encroachment into wild and historic nature, pristine nature-here in North America we've got it in big parks or protected landscapes, things like this. 00:37:00It's the natural world as much as we can as we have received it through the Holocene the last 12,000 years preservation or conservation keep it the way it was, keep the humans out, try to hold it in historic conditions, in wild and historic compositions or if we've done damage restore it where our goals for intentional intervention are to put it back the way we found it. Something like this. Those character traits of the kind of preservationist environmental mold do that, minimize the impact on wild nature. But if you know enough about the impacts, not only of climate change but a number of very large anthropogenic drivers of environmental change: nitrogen deposition. We install more nitrogen into soils, and then water ways and then oceans than any other natural processes. We move more earth by our Caterpillar tractors than any other natural processes of earthquakes or landslides or anything like this. We're driving 00:38:00species extinct. A lot of it's connected to climate change, but not all of it: land use and planning and all these things, even population pressures and agriculture. There is pervasive and directional forces of anthropogenic, human-caused environmental change such that it's very plausible to think the ecological future will not resemble the past, even if we get climate change under control and hold it at say 2 degrees census as is nominally goal of the UNFCCC international climate policy regime.

Even if we're successful there, there's going to be tons and tons of environmental change, so what am I getting at? The virtue traits that make you a good environmentalist as a preservationist will be anachronistic and only befitting a time in the middle of the 20th century where it still seemed 00:39:00intelligible to hold onto to nature writ large as we have received it. The world will be new for our grandchildren like no other human beings have seen, at least in the last 12,000 years when we came out of the last ice age in the Pleistocene. So, responsibility and climate change that's the discourse here. You might start thinking what is it to be a responsible environmentalist in this moment of transition and change when we're on the cusp of utterly unprecedented environmental changes. It does not look like we will prevent them. Some we can slow, and I do think the preservation and restoration in historic ecosystem goals definitely still have their place. We should do more of that. We should set aside more land for conservation.

We should reduce the rate at which we're consuming natural resources. None of that will hold the received natural world from the Holocene for 200 years hence. All of the ecosystems are moving towards the poles, species are migrating towards the poles from the equator because of the heat and up mountains and there's nothing we can do about really any of that. Novel ecosystems are emerging as a result of human interference of the likes we've never seen before and no one knows what to do with it. That's a big part of my work, the ethics of novel ecosystems. So you think what are the character traits of good-so, I think collectively we are responsible for the changes going on in the planet and I'll try to bring this to a bit of a close. If the aliens were to come down in a spaceship and say what's going on around here. They take a look around and they say who's in charge and who's responsible and it's us. It's not the elephants or something. They'll say human beings, here are the closest smart things to us we hold you responsible collectively. Maybe we're out of our own control. Maybe 00:41:00it's a fantasy that we can do anything about this but we seem to be the responsible party. We're bringing this about.

So, we're causally responsible collectively. What is it then to be a good human being, an excellent human being vis-a-vis the environment for each and every individual insofar as being responsible collectively would be to have a kind of virtue of stewardship. Since we are collectively responsible for the conditions under which all life on the planet will foster or fail, if that it is what it is to be a human being today, then I think that provides grounds for thinking what it is and since I am in the instance of a human being irrevocably so and a member of that group in a way that my identity is bound with it, what it is for me to be a good instance of a human being, there will be a set of virtues that can't be the preservationist virtues only. It's the development of new kind of virtues as being the responsible parties for the biosphere. You can I can't 00:42:00causally do it with our light switches but as we are qua a member of our species humanity, that is itself the kind of thing is responsible for it, what it is to do that in an excellent fashion? That's an open question. It's not clear how to manifest that kind of virtue, to think about the virtue of environmental responsibility as it bears upon us as individuals. I do some work to try to trace that out with the hope of delivering to develop that as a philosophy for my grandchildren to think about what it is to be an environmentalist and to love nature when their concept of nature can't be untouched, pristine wilderness. I grew up thinking the wild American west where the Indians happened to be, was 00:43:00like you know the stuff, God's country, untouched by humanity. That's the stuff and there's humans and there's that, save that, that's nature-that's not going to be a possible idea of nature for them. It will not be coherent.

But we want to think of there being environmentalism, a concept of environmentalism as a good and something valuable that today we can't really form and I see us as on the edge of the collapse of the industrial civilization as it were, not in my lifetime, not in my grandchildren's lifetime. The culture of consumerism-we will either drive it way into the ground but what's going to happen on the other side of the environmental crisis. How will they think of nature? To think about what is it to be responsible environmentalists in that world then and then trying to backtrack a little bit. If we think we're in a period of transition, what are the virtues of transition? What are the environmental virtues of this transition period? I think it has a lot to do largely with political activism, because it's only through political collective 00:44:00action that we can effect a change in the direction of the desires that we might have to reduce the kind of impacts. We're not going to avoid climate change. It's all about the downward curve. We're in climate change now, and so what can we do today. We can politically organize. We can fight in the face of what appeared to be hopeless battles, give up hope of winning the war but develop a kind of courage to go on anyway, a kind of radical hope. I write about that and these are notions of responsibility and virtues in the face of anthropogenic climate change now and in the future.

ET: Can you talk more about novel ecosystems and I guess compare them to classical ecological restoration or that idea?

AT: Yeah.

As I alluded to, early environmental philosophers-Holmes Rolston, James 00:45:00Callicott, and others-were developing ideas that would look in the end to be useful to stem the damage done by human impacts on the environment which they were becoming aware of in the postwar period in the '50s and '60s, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and all that sort of stuff, think of a theory or value to help us in some ways underpin legislation that we got with the Endangered Species Act. So, they got these notions of intrinsic value of nature as valuable for its own sake, independent of its usefulness to us. Intrinsic value of nature is never mentioned in the Endangered Species Act and anyway, but that was sort of the goal and what we start to see now is preserve and conserve nature and the environmental philosophy is designed to explain why that was valuable. When we saw that there was impacts of human beings and we saw that instead of just having negative impacts we could rebuild nature in some way-the bionic man, better, faster, stronger-rebuild the damage that's been done. At first 00:46:00environmental philosophers were largely negative about that. Robert Elliot, key among them, and Eric Katz, for different reasons. The idea was oh this restoration thesis that we can impact and harm nature but don't worry we can put all the value back by rebuilding it to be just as good as it was, would be used for nefarious purposes, would justify developing and cutting up new areas of nature on the idea that whatever value is lost there we can replace with our restoration here and we'll have a one-to-one net zero loss. When they argued against the value equivalence of restored landscapes compared to pristine or historic landscapes, even if they're identical copies, one has a certain kind of history free of human intervention and we value that.

Then we saw there's more benevolent restorations as well. Andrew Light brought 00:47:00out this idea. It's like, look, we know that could go on but those are the purposes it's put to. Also we will be much better if we do restoration here on these mine-tailings or this wasted energy site or something like this. We can make it better. We can get it on its way to natural recovery by doing restoration. We start to see we need that also. Those goals, though, however, when restoration became available, good project still took historic eco-systemic conditions as setting the goals for the interventions. Study reference, sites which means sites that are undisturbed and what we think this site would have been prior to human degradation, measure-take a metric of the species composition and the function of the structure of that ecosystem and then rebuild that over here, the way it was undisturbed. But it turns out that due to a human 00:48:00interference of some kind or another, on site or off-site, some kind of human effect, with an e, many ecosystems get knocked out of their basin of resilience, the form that they can survive different kind of perturbations and re-bounce into a dynamic equilibrium that holds an ecosystem together. There's a lot of ecosystem theory here that I don't want to have to unpack. We do damage to ecosystems in particular places and if it's left alone long enough, it starts to rebound but in ways into a new basin of resilience, into a new functional ecosystem that itself has functional characteristic composition and functional capacity for which there is no analog in the ecological record, that we don't have any analog for. It's not a type that we've seen. This was first a 00:49:00challenge, when I came to this, for restoration ecologists. Well, look at this functioning system here. It's doing things. It's providing not only ecosystem services for human beings, maybe with cleaning the water or the air or something or recreationally, it's also providing services for maybe this endangered species in a new habitat. Maybe there's a non-native berry that's come in, or a non-native animal that has integrated itself into the food chain and now plays a role as a necessary component for the ongoing existence of this other endangered species that's here in the system. You start getting the goals of historic environmentalism pulled apart there: get rid of the invasive. Put the system back the way it was. Take that compositional feature out, because it was not there historically. Get rid of the invasive. But you have to intervene to do that. Then you'd be putting at threat the species you are trying to actively conserve. What's going to have priority here? That's a new problem.

It used to just be set aside the traditional habitat that gives you your wild 00:50:00historic ecosystem and what you can do to preserve the species therein-they start coming apart. Or if we're going to restore it to what's historic, you think really? Should we wipe out this functioning, new, novel ecosystem here that's wild in its own way? That's nature rebounding? For the sake of putting back what was here 100 years ago when we know that the ecosystem here in situ that we found here 100, 200 years ago will not, because of these background drivers, be able to stay here 200 years in the future? That if we want to keep it here the way it is now it will require ongoing and intensive human management making it like a little museum piece? That's not nature. That's not the wild nature we want to save. There's a cognitive dissonance. Should we be doing this restoration at all? What are we restoring when the past fails to give us viable 00:51:00goals for our land management practices and our notions of wild nature and historic nature come apart and you can't have both in these principles of non-intervention. So this is a big, big problem I think for environmentalism. A geographer, Erle Ellis, with Michael Perring has estimated that on the terrestrial non-frozen surface of the planet by some measure or another about 38% of that is in some novel condition already. Most of the ecosystems in Europe are long, deeply cultured ecosystems. There's remnants of historic ones around in the first world, Australia and in the U.S., but they're shrinking and they're changing. We think what do we do with these novel ecosystems? How do we value them? How do we start to, how should we change our land management philosophies which have been conservation and restoration of particular sites in the face of 00:52:00these emerging novel ecosystems, and there's a variety of ideas about how to do that, which require flexibility, a certain adaptiveness, giving up on cherished old ideals, some of which are romantic given the realities that we face, still very alluring. I would like the old wild west to be-my fantasy vision of what that was or something-to be real and all this, but it's not, and it's not going to be in the future so we need new values for that, and that's work that I do on the ethics of novel ecosystems.

ET: What kind of reception do you get from ecologists when you talk with them about this?

AT: That's a great question, because it used to be when I would go speak at-I was brought in on this under a wing of a number of sort of what I think of as cutting-edge ecologists, paleo ecologists (a lot of them are), and restoration ecologists, and when we would go to this Society for Ecological Restoration, big 00:53:00international world meetings and I would talk and talk about some value issues at play it's like being booed off the stage. Small venues and just the vile from so many people whose career and professional identities is preserve or restore the past. Don't give up. That's giving into... it's a Trojan horse of some kind. But over the course of 5 or 6 years you see an evolution of the acceptance of the realities that this has to happen. You get bigger and bigger audiences. You get more people trying to incorporate the new ideas into the toolkit. I'll say we: the group of people working on these novel ecosystems are not advocating a wholesale replacement of the tools of traditional preservation and conservation. There's plenty of species invasions we want to spend money to push out, but accepting some change in some modified ways gives you more flexibility in your 00:54:00land management practice and reidentifying some of the goals and recognizing that anthropocentrism might play a bigger role in there, even if you have the goals of a traditional species conservationist. It might require diverging from the history to think in kind of ways. That's becoming more recognized, I believe, so the reception becomes more friendly and bigger audiences and when I talk with people about it, you get more and more interest from students all the time who are not brought up in the same kind of training that their teachers were when this wasn't on the radar, and it was traditionally backward-oriented looking ecological preservation and conservation. They say change follows the hearse sometimes and I just mean to say there's even more enthusiasm out of today's graduate students than the generation above them.

ET: Given your collaborative work with people in a variety of disciplines, what 00:55:00has your experience been like in communicating with scientists as a philosopher, bringing your perspective to the table?

AT: They very much like to hear it, I think. By training and by professional practice, which becomes tied in with their sources of funding, scientists who work on government grants for this reason represent the public and our model here is that they're just doing purely descriptive science and all the values and moral judgments will be made by the policy makers who are elected representatives, most of whom don't understand the science. But doing the science they methodically work to avoid mentioning in any case norms or values. They try their best to strip it. The whole thing is designed to strip values because it just looks like biases and it threatens their funding and their legitimacy to objective truth and all this sort of stuff, which I really 00:56:00understand. But they're hungry to know how the work they're doing, I mean as citizens and as people largely they are environmentally sympathetic, the natural environment ones and even the atmospheric ones, and they're hungry to know how the work they do applies in policy or has value implications. A lot of my work is the bridge building in that kind of way.

I am bright enough to become scientifically literate in the particulars of the fields that I stick my nose into and I bring all of this language of ethical thinking, normative thinking, policy thinking, value thinking to look for the strands and draw out the normative language there. I then take on that and I can write articles where I make normative claims because that's what I'm trained to do, whereas they can't really do that or are under pressures not to be doing 00:57:00that. The collective work, I haven't thought of-you know they have to say things like when we write things together and there's normative claims. There's always the disclaimers in the front by the scientists who say I write this as Joe Citizen not under the guise of my position as Federally Funded Scientist, these sorts of things. They like doing it, but there's a caution there. Extremely intelligent people teach me lots of things all the time. There's some limitations to doing the work. Sometimes I get a little tired, I'll say. You know, you have a little pet ethical theory. Over here with the philosophers I've developed my little ethical approach to it with a common toolbox but my own special view there. I'm not playing in the sandbox of ethical theory all the time what those guys, I just have my little tool bag and I come walking over. 00:58:00I'm like oh let's see your problem. Ecological restoration? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom-I start unpacking my taxonomy about virtue and responsibility and I make it fit that and I can say things that are of interest to people and they'll eat it up.

What the other scientists can't do largely is say what about the deontological approach to this? The rights based approach? What about the utilitarian maximizing notions of rationality or utilitarianism, a naive consequentialism... they don't push back on me on that stuff right there and usually I'm the token philosopher in a group of a variety of scientists. It has its limitations and of course I cannot answer the subtle questions that we get involved in conceptually. I mean the middle playground is really about the nature of the concepts that are emerging, that they're struggling with. They know the angles where I come at the end of my rope in my scientific training and they have to go 00:59:00off and talk by themselves. Similarly as I explained, they're coming to the end of their rope when there's certain ethical stuff that it's the end of the line for that discussion with them. But in the middle I think there's a lot of productivity because you get imaginative people who are not then constrained by the dogma of those trained in the same way just by the same field. So you get the conditions for sort of fertile work.

ET: What has your experience been as a Carson Fellow?

AT: Oh, at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. That was awesome.

That is largely that's sort of an environmental humanities center funded by the German government, run under at the present time under the Ludwig Maximillian 01:00:00Universitat, LMU, or the University of Munich. It's in Munich, Germany. They do environmental humanities, largely it's environmental history, and so to have a philosopher there was sort of irregular, but the resources and the support are just fantastic. Again, there's interdisciplinary opportunities there. There's a weekly colloquia and engagement and presentations that we do. I got an office and a lot of time away from teaching and away from the U.S. and other normal things to focus on the novel ecosystem work. You get the kind of fertile grounds for that imaginative work that everyone can get from doing interdisciplinary work-not with other scientists, as I just finished describing, but across disciplinary perspectives on environmental issues in the humanities.

ET: What did you think of living in Germany?

AT: That was fantastic. That was southern Germany, in Munich, Bavaria. I took my 01:01:00family: my wife and my kids, which I will say was a fantastic experience for all of us as a family and having young kids there old enough at the time to remember it and engage. They went for a while to German-speaking public schools, each to different ones. Those are going to be very memorable impressions upon them, but not too old so that they would rather me and my wife go and they might stay at home and throw some parties or something. You know, they're going to be disengaged and more connected with their peers the older they get. It was perfect timing for that. We traveled all over. I gave many, many different talks. I would find universities to talk at. I got some funding or it'd be cheap for them because you don't have to do the overseas one. They would just put me on a train and I would use that as an excuse, they'd pay for a night or two of a hotel in someplace. I would bring my family and get another hotel room and then we'd stay for another day or two and explore Prague or Vienna or Kiel up in 01:02:00Germany and Hamberg along the way. We went down also to Venice and to Florence, Italy and things like this. Just fantastic times. It takes away a little bit from the progress I might have aspired to when I pitched my program to the Rachel Carson Center, but they know about those sort of things. It all goes towards the work at the end.

ET: Now I'll move on to some broader questions about climate change.

AT: Okay, yeah.

ET: What were your earliest conversations on climate change like and how have they shifted over time?

AT: Early ones were involved in, of course especially here in the Americas, in North America, against the kind of sociopolitical backdrop we have of there being a class of deniers, or climate change deniers, which is not really characteristic of any other developed country in the world, or I should just say 01:03:00in the world, developed or undeveloped economically. It was the kind of discourse propped up by ideas about that fair journalism presents both sides of the story as if they were equally true. So, you give as much legitimacy to climate deniers who are funded by various kinds of oil industries or other things like this and think tanks and not having peer-reviewed science equal weight in the news presentation so you get a public that says what about these skeptical questions? What about sunspots? What about solar fires? Something like this. Early on the epistemological and philosophy of science issues to say what counts as good evidence? Where should we place our trust? Unpacking some of that story of the pressures of journalists to provide it as though it's a live issue. 01:04:00It's not like we say oh slavery pro and con, you know? There's a decided issue. At one time there might have been a moral dispute, but that time is over and it's also true with I think a lot of questions about sexual orientation used to be in the applied ethics books among the sort of drug use, that's changing. Homosexuality, affirmative action, I don't know what else do you have? Abortion, euthanasia, these sort of applied ethical questions. Like I said, slavery's not on there. And really the sexual orientation drops off. A lot of the recreational drug use starts to drop off because the issues get settled. Similarly with climate change, people in the know as it were. Early on it was a lot of that kind of epistemological philosophy of science stuff.

It changed over the years because, again, with the changing of the guard you get children who were raised knowing and accepting more about that and seeing the 01:05:00recalcitrance of the establishment in propagating a certain denialism and can follow the money on that and know these sort of stories. Naomi Klein and others who do this kind of work-analogies with tobacco and disinformation campaigns, where the funding comes from, from the idea that it's not harmful. All of that has strong parallels in the climate change. Then what starts to happen people accept that climate change is caused and then you think well what's the response? Lighten your carbon footprint. Story's first about what can I do to be a good individual environmental citizen, how can I? You get the early Al Gore stuff, The Inconvenient Truth movie. At the end he's got these bullet points scrolling: make sure your tires are inflated properly, make sure your lightbulbs are CFLs or whatever the, you know. You think God dammit! That's not going to do 01:06:00anything. But that's the mode of like-there's a defense to doing that and it's a virtue. Those are virtues. Do your part. But consequentially it's not that important. Maybe you'll influence others around you. That's the first sort of response. Okay I accept it. Tell me how morally I should behave. I see. There's pretty much one lesson: it's bad because it's harmful either to only human beings or to species and other animals and other ecosystems, whether you're anthropocentric or not, will be harmful in the future, we're responsible, I should act differently, so what should I do? The technocrats will give me the list, reduce my carbon footprint. It seems like a pretty simple moral lesson. It doesn't seem like a lot of philosophical puzzlement in that. I think also then a lot of people start straying away from it.

I taught some climate ethics classes where there were 15 people at first and it went down to 3 people because I believe, and I may be-that there's a period of 01:07:00transition where I project onto students the kind of idea that I already know this is bad. What, he's going to tell me it's wrong? I know it's wrong. I know some of my lifestyles are wrong. I'm guilty enough. I don't want to go to class where we read about the details of why fingers are rightly wagged at me for buying a new iPhone every year and a half or whatever it is. I know I should eat less meat. They typically won't say that. I know I should drive more. There's a kind of defensiveness. It's going to be guilt-ridden. They think that's all that might be. I think there's a transition in one way to try to bring this around from environmental ethics, which in some ways is the development of traditional ethical theories, the expansion of traditional human ethical theories onto topics about the environment as an extension, as the project to bring in more 01:08:00things like this. There was some development of new ways of thinking about intrinsic value and non-anthropocentric. Climate change was brought in. I think now I have an interest in talking more about environmental philosophy, sort of broadening it. There are questions about the sciences. There's questions about politics and social justice, environmental justice and human justice, which isn't just be nice to animals and reduce pressures on ecosystems sort of stuff.

Future generations we don't have a good grasp on thinking morally about our obligations to future generations. There's underdevelopment there in theory. Who am I? What's my role here as we move into the Anthropocene? What is it to be a human? These are questions of metaphysics. Who am I as a member of a society that does this? Or if we fail our first order of ethical obligations to future generations by not doing what we're supposed to be doing today, which we seem to 01:09:00be failing, what should we do? Morally what should we do? That's a puzzling question. There's philosophical content there to unpack that is not what is your principle, tell me what I should be doing given that the things we do collectively cause damage to the environment. Of course all the politics, the dynamics, the diplomacy is also of great interest to political theory and law about climate change and other impacts of the unfolding Anthropocene. It's environmental philosophy for the Anthropocene that's new. Those are new ways. I'm trying to have classes like that. It's not just environmental ethics, it's not just climate ethics as a specialized version of that but environmental philosophy for the Anthropocene thinking.

ET: You touched on this already, but I was wondering if you could speak about the community of climate change researchers here at OSU and maybe how the institution facilitates that.

AT: I always forget the little, this is probably the part you should edit out. I forget the acronyms of the sub-institutions of my colleagues there. There's the CCR, Climate Change Research Institute, that's a state-mandated group of climate scientists that have a job for the state of Oregon. There is here a Pacific Northwest Climate Science Center that is under the USGS, U.S. Geological Society which is a department of the interior, I believe. There are seven federal climate science centers. They have a mission and outreach. It's moving now from here. It was up at the University of Washington. It's moved down here for a while and now they rebid and it goes back up to the University of Washington and their governmental-university partnerships to do things. There are climate 01:11:00modelers and atmospheric scientists here who are doing straightforward research on paleo atmospheric conditions, paleo oceanography and how the climate was then to try to figure out climate sensitivity, what a doubling of the CO2 atmospheric equivalent would be in terms of temperature gradient. We need a kind of metrics so we can measure and have estimates. There's great climate science going on here. There are a variety of people doing different kinds of political stuff over in political science. There are people doing law and there's people doing communication who is heavily involved with communication dynamics of something like international climate negotiations, my colleague Greg Walker does work like that. The philosopher's always kind of the fly on the wall in a way. I will mention all that climate change stuff is largely cast as global level atmospheric things in terms of atmospheric science, but the impacts happen in local places, so you get extreme weather stuff and you get changes to the 01:12:00ecologies because of that. People who do fish and wildlife and forest ecology and bird migration and conservation there, it's the number one thing they think about: what are the fundamental basic conditions because of climate change? How are they changing behaviors and all this sort of stuff. A lot of that goes on over there. I talk with them about novel ecosystems and restoration and that sort of thing. I talk with the climate people largely about something I haven't mentioned here, really the other major branch of my research, is this ability that we have now have greater confidence in picking out the human signal against the noise of extreme weather events, heat waves and droughts largely, but also hurricanes.

We're getting better and better at that through a complicated scientific 01:13:00emerging area of atmospheric science and to try to figure out how that connects to the policy stuff going on under the UNFCCC or those comp meetings, the conference of the parties, of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention. It is fantastic. I drift a little trying to be exhaustive of all the different people working on climate change here at OSU and how I engage with them. I bounce around. I get to meet a lot of different people you know and they don't hear a lot about philosophy and everyone is philosophical in their way, wonders about these things. It's a great privilege I think to have the training I have which enables me not just to talk to other philosophers who know all about philosophical lingo and the kind of insights philosophers generate, which are appealing and fun in their way, I mean to belittle it, or enlightening, enriching of our human perspective. Those guys know all that stuff, all those 01:14:00philosophers. When I can go over and talk to scientists and show that I'm not just gazing at my own navel or something, right? People have ideas about philosophers that they're full of shit. They either have a lot of respect for them or they think it's just a bunch of baloney. As soon as they see that I can listen to their science and ask good questions, they say well what do you have to say? And I sit there like wow, this is great. I'm not used to hearing that. It's enriching in both directions.

ET: Do you foresee being affected by diminishing funding for climate change research under the Trump Administration?

AT: I don't because we in the humanities are largely hard money. Hard money is state, all my money comes, and we don't get very much money, I am paid to teach. I do research to keep my job and to get promoted. But I'm paid to teach. I have a heavier teaching load than my friends in any of the sciences, my colleagues there. They have soft money.

They have to make a living applying for grants and being successful year in and year out in one form or another, which brings in a lot of money but not permanently for them, reduces their teaching. They have research that adds to the body of scientific knowledge. You say what do I anticipate the changes in the current U.S. administration there affecting my ability to carry on in the climate research that I do, and fundamentally I say no because all I need is a laptop and a library card.

ET: This is getting a little boarder, but what kind of policy changes would you like to see happen within the U.S. with respect to climate change?

AT: I guess it depends on the level. U.S. policy I would like to see us come in as a good world citizen, as a nation-state, and rejoin the Paris Accord, or the Paris Agreement-sometimes called the Paris Accord, which I think that we are the 01:16:00only nation now that is no longer party to. I think Sudan and other countries that have low moral standing in the world community are on board with it and the U.S. is squandering an opportunity for world leadership that it has long held and is good for us in the world that it looks to. China will overtake us in this and many things into the 21st century, that's due to mishandling by the president administration. There's a whole politics there I guess I won't go into. I'd like to see that change. We're just foregoing all sorts of wonderful things that we could be doing in making the world move forward completely backwards to have the language of climate change stripped from all these federal agencies. You've seen in the paper perhaps recently it's sort of really been almost exhaustive, the language of climate change is being pulled out of everywhere. I think the head of the EPA, these are not policy changes, but 01:17:00people in the administrative roles all sorts of professional class, the bureaucracy of the government in the EPA and other places in the state department are leaving.

We're weakening our abilities even once the current administration is replaced whenever that is, we'll have a weakened infrastructure to be able to handle these things. The head of the EPA of course is just an industry insider for the oil and gas companies. All that's a tremendous disaster. They've just put a new road for the first time into the wilderness up in ANWR, the Arctic National Refuge with no purpose whatsoever other than as a precursor to start drilling for oil up there as the arctic continues to melt. Besides all that sort of background stuff in the fantasy world I would like to see a price put on carbon. Whether you call it a carbon tax or cap in trade, these really are different 01:18:00ways of doing the same thing. It's putting a price on carbon. Carbon tax can do a better job controlling in certain ways human behavior, but the cap in trade takes care of market mechanisms. Any of that exercise to put cap on carbon is absolutely essential and I would like to see something like that happen.

ET: What about changes to public education that you think maybe could help Americans better understand climate change or potentially change their behavior around it?

AT: I don't know about education. The easy answer is always improve education, make the elementary school teachers who have to sell baked goods to buy pencils and stuff for class for a long time and worse funding under the current 01:19:00administration, you can't put it on their backs to do this. I don't have-I've had a lot to say, I suppose, during this interview but I don't think I have much to say on that front.

ET: My last question I typically ask if you're hopeful about the future of the planet in the context of climate change, but you've written about radical hope.

AT: Right, thank you.

ET: I'm curious if you've always felt hopeful? Maybe you could talk further about radical hope.

AT: Yeah. To personalize it a little, I guess, or to talk about the motivation as the question is in some ways directed, it's not any kind of hope that sort of some catastrophe will be averted. There's certain parallels between the threat of catastrophic, anthropogenic global climate change and the existential threat through the Cold War period that I only saw the very tail end of about nuclear annihilation.

The '50s and the '60s drop and cover under your, you know, and we would hold certain drills. They were called earthquake drills or something when I was a kid in elementary school but we went into these corridors like where the wheelchair ramp went up which were clearly I think the most bomb-proof area of the whole building. I think they're faux nuclear disaster drills: stay away from the windows and all this kind of stuff. I mean to draw that parallel, there are a number of them to put on the table, because there's a certain kind of say well, look that's an identifiable event, thermonuclear war, that's going to happen or not that we're on the brink of or not with your doomsday clock and so far it hasn't happened but there's an identifiable thing to avoid that's clear, you know, it's either on, or it isn't and everyone struggles and the hope is to avoid that with all of its environmental destruction. The existential threat 01:21:00that is to human civilization as we know. Suppose climate change, arguably, is that kind of existential threat to human civilization as we know it, but there's not going to be, there's not anything to hold off like that. It unfolds slowly and continuously so it's all about just slowly amp-ing that stuff down, which will happen sooner or later just be attrition. Could be more or less catastrophic, more or less harm can be done. There's not any event to hope that we avoid. A lot of times people are like can we prevent climate change or not? You think that's a bad way to conceptualize it to begin with. We're in it. It's going to happen. Don't hope for that. You can hope for outcomes that are more progressive if that's your direction, better outcome for the sake of the environment or for future generations, for your own children, for the sake of other biodiversity or whatever it is you want, minimizing the harms that are forthcoming, and because we have our nose regularly, you know my Facebook stream, as you can imagine, is a curated collection of stuff that the algorithm 01:22:00sees I'm interested in and my people post, and it's all bleak all the time, pretty much so. That is harrowing to face every day in its own way.

The novel ecosystem stuff or the ideas of radical hope are to hold on and say how can we in spite of all this can we make a positive spin? Here you don't want the positive spin to be out of, what do I want, a naïve, romanticism, I guess I've set this up enough, of avoiding big, big problems. You're not going to save nature, as you think nature is, the way we've received it in the last 10,000 years. You better start rethinking what it is you want out of the environment to save because it's not going to be that. Accepting some of those realities but finding a way in which the wild is emergent all the time in these novel 01:23:00ecosystems. Some people try to do this. There's this book out recently called Why the Biodiversity Crisis is Not As Bad As You Think, or The Inevitable Rebounding of Nature, or something like that and it's hopeful in ways that are way out of my league because it's an accomplished ecologist who fundamentally says in the long run biodiversity will come back. There's an asteroid wipes out most of the life on the planet but it all comes back in millions and millions of years. Don't worry humans. You think I guess so but what about the next 10,000 years in which humanity might be around. That doesn't provide the support for that sort of thing. I think that is a misdirection to look for hope. We have to deal with what is forthcoming. I'm not sure how still do address my children's 01:24:00concerns about the environment or as they become educated through the system thinking about real diminishment of the natural world as we know it and received it that they will experience more so than I have. I don't really know how to broach that with them and not crush. That's the puzzle. I try to do work in which we think about how hope is possible. Like you said, the radical hope, that's a complicated notion. I guess I mentioned it a little bit about it's really a form of courage, the good will return in a way that we cannot understand today. I have confidence that the phoenix will arise. What can I do to help get between now and then? How can I help the transition and what might we imagine people will be armed with to think about, to be good environmentalists and to love nature as that makes any sense to me conceptually, 01:25:00how will they?

It's thinking into the future. That's sort of hopeful work. Otherwise, you're just walking around like they say, I forget who said it, and people said if you do conservation biology today it's largely the taking attendance at a funeral or something like that. It's cataloguing death row. They go out there and they measure and how soon will this be gone? How quickly is this declining? That's the job. You think, that's not philosophy, Jesus Christ that is conditions for hopelessness. Humanity is remarkable, is resilient, we don't know what we're 01:26:00capable of both good and bad. It's a mystery to us. As history unfolds we see what we do, somehow accidentally, altogether and some of the things are very admirable. I think we could be proud from a universal perspective that the hairless apes that are can organize and respect moral human equality and things like this, even if we don't realize it. That is coming out of the swamp, or whatever, we can stand up and be beings who understand that kind of stuff and do some of it. Still, we are horrible to each other. I guess what I want to say is you never know what we'll do coming through this. Maybe the greatest-they talk about the greatest generation getting through World War II, all the sacrifice of depression and fighting fascism and everything, maybe you get the greenest generation now. It looks like we're going to be the scourge of the future. They'll look back and say why did you continue to buy iPods all the time? But maybe we'll get it together. Things might change, and it can happen very 01:27:00quickly. There's that. I'm hopeful for that.

Then you also think about the people who wake up every day not knowing where their meals are coming from or who will see their families executed by the other ethnic group that comes through with machetes or people who lived in Nazi Germany during World War II, you know are persecuted by acts of genocide and things like that and you think my life is much, much better than that. Me, personally, and even all the story about ecological degradation it's not a horror like that which is constrained in a way. As this guy Rob [Nixon], he's at Princeton now, Rob talks about a slow violence. You get this idea it's harder to perceive the violence we're doing to each other and the natural world because of the nature of the speed at which it unfolds. It's not like bombs fall and that 01:28:00sort of stuff. I'm some ways now from your question about the hope. I've tried to talk about humanity as being a hopeful kind of creature, and we can sustain the hope. It'd be different if we were under conditions of yeah well what time did the bombs fall today? Where's the meal coming from? Many of us a little more secure than that and I think could exercise the power that we have to gear the ship of humanity in a way that's not as utterly disgraceful as it might go. That's my hope.

ET: Well, we've reached the conclusion of the interview. Thank you for participating. I appreciate it.

AT: Okay, thank you.