INTRODUCTION: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS IN THE ERA OF ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

One Planet, Many Worlds

What may be most striking about the incredibly dynamic terrain of contemporary environmental ethics is that while its many, sometimes competing, ideas, theories, and principles are grounded in philosophical thinking about moral issues, they're also driven by a deep-going sense of duty to speak to a world whose planetary conditions are changing in potentially ruinous ways that demand urgent, deliberate, informed, and collective action.1 There are three basic truths to keep at the forefront: first, ecological conditions are existential conditions. Second, the crises we currently face, especially the climate crisis, mass human and nonhuman migration, war over access to clean water, and the potential for future pandemic, clarify the relationship of the ecological to the existential in ways pressing and paralyzing.2 Third, like most other emergencies, environmental, economic, social, and geopolitical, the climate crisis impacts some in dramatically disproportionate ways. Global North and global South, human and nonhuman, rich and poor, women and men, brown, black, and white-no single metric of impact will be comprehensive save the obvious: exceeding the tipping points to measurable irreversible change signaled by Amazon rainforest die-back, Greenland Ice Sheet disintegration, Arctic permafrost melt, West African and Indian monsoon shift, extreme and more frequent weather events, and their ancillary impacts on human and nonhuman migration, food security, geopolitical violence, and species extinction.

Still, we tend to compartmentalize "environmental," segregating it from other domains of moral concern. Yet some of our most difficult moral questions erupt from our reflections in one domain that hemorrhages onto others: trash incinerators built in working-class neighborhoods, mining leases on indigenous lands, food deserts, economically stressed communities washed away by tsunamis or burnt to the ground by firenadoes. We can't avoid these social, economic, and geopolitical intersections. The climate crisis is no more solely an environmental emergency than exploring for oil in the Arctic is solely the province of energy demand, or that the Covid-19 pandemic and its many evolving variants is merely a matter of public health.3 Each threatens serious environmental consequences for every living thing that dwells on the planet's surface, under its soils, in its waters, over its lands, or within the bodies of every creature, living and dead. But as impact is unequal, it may be that our greatest moral crisis is not, at least in the first place, the failure to act, but the refusal to know. A realistic environmental ethic must then make a priority epistemic responsibility, that is, an understanding of the current state of the planet's environmental conditions and its atmospheric integrity is key to formulating personal moral compass, just social and economic policy, and ultimately global consensus about the future sustainability of the only home most of us will ever know: Earth.

Put another way: we may be tempted to think narrowly about climate change, reserving our concern to its environmental impacts, themselves enormous, of melting polar ice caps, shifting bread-baskets, habitat loss, extinctions, firenadoes, extended drought, bomb cyclones, vanishing shore lines, and the like. This seems like quite enough. But the fact is that climate change is a crisis because it poses at least as great a challenge to the ways in which we think about the planet's capacity to support life, its limited resources, vulnerable tenants, and its geopolitical stability as it poses to more immediate and tangible concerns like combatting firenadoes, bomb cyclones, or rapid viral spread. We tend, in other words, to be geared to the crisis right in front of us, but the climate crisis is also, and fundamentally, about the future. It disrupts many of the comforts and conveniences we take for granted in the privileged global "North," and it exacerbates much of the hardship that renders life in the developing world of the global "South" tenuous.4 It raises critically important questions about who all counts as "we" with respect to access to critical resources like clean air, potable water, and food. Dividing those agents, institutions, and governments most culpable for the crisis from those most harmed, climate change makes it all the harder to ignore what we already know about social and economic inequality.5 It alters the planet's capacity to recuperate from the abuse to which we subject it, enthralled as we remain by the myth of its endless treasure trove of resources and inexhaustible atmospheric toilet. It forces us to rethink whether it makes sense to conceive everything as a potential commodity. The climate crisis, in other words, disrupts not only the planet, but the world, or more precisely, the many and diverse worlds of human culture, religion, government, economy, politic-each interwoven with the ecologies upon which their tenants, human and nonhuman, wealthy and poor, entitled and disenfranchised depend.

In short, the climate crisis raises crucial, but difficult questions not only about what we value and why, but about who gets to decide value-and with what authority. Five observations seem certain:

• The climate crisis will impact all of us one way or another.
• Some human communities will bear its brunt in far greater ways than others.
• Environmental crisis tends to provoke new geopolitical antagonisms and worsen old ones. This includes war, as well as the ecological ruin and greenhouse emissions that come with war.
• Capitalism, a system of economic exchange rooted in the largely unchallenged assumption that all value can be converted to exchange or commodity value, plays a central role in environmental destruction, pollution, geopolitical violence, species extinction, and the climate crisis.
• An unprecedented number of nonhuman animal species will confront loss of habitat, starvation, and migration. But one of the most ethically troubling legacies of the Anthropocene, the age of human industrial domination, is extinction.

Climate change simply is the greatest challenge of our times. Yet, for too many it seems not to feel that way. Despite the fact that it's human-made, an anthropogenic crisis, despite the fact that we have decades of science apprising us of its implications, sustained attention to it tends to be eclipsed by emergencies experienced as more immediate, urgent, and visceral: food insecurity, gun violence, human migration, human trafficking, the opioid crisis, pollution, terrorism, viral outbreaks. In one way, it's not hard to see why: compared to the sheer terror evoked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate crisis feels like a problem that can safely be put off to the future.

We often hear the common refrain that we have always had fires, hurricanes, tsunamis; that climate "alarmists" are simply using weather as a rhetorical tool to argue for more restrictive "one-world" government whose aim is to control what we eat, how we live, where we travel. Or, as this line of thinking has begun to fade in the face of more frequent and more extreme weather events, we're invited to replace outright denial with the idea that, just as we put a man on the moon, brought back the Kihansi Spray Toad from the brink of extinction, and developed a highly effective vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) at warp speed, we can "techno-wizard" our way out of the climate crisis. For too many, of course, climate change isn't a future crisis but a daily confrontation with drought, water shortage, food insecurity, and disease-a confrontation whose message is clear: to put off to the future what demands action in the now is nihilistic. That is, insofar as we know that today's emergencies are a harbinger of tomorrow's, and that tomorrow's can only be mitigated, if they can be, by what we do today, failure to act is effectively a concession to death for every living thing on the planet. Ecological nihilism is neither hyperbole nor reckless speculation. It's reality can be made gut-wrenching in the obliteration of towns like Greenville or Paradise California, charred beyond recognition by drought-fueled firenados. Its impacts are inescapable to any objective survey of the capitalist endeavor to monetize human and nonhuman life. Consider the slaughter of Sumatran Elephants for their tusks, toxic chemical dumping by industry to avoid more costly pollution statutes, or outsourcing human labor to the developing world's lower wages and lax safety and environmental regulations.

The Time Is Now

If this assessment of our current planetary state of affairs seems dark, it's because the necessity for a robust, courageous, inclusive, and deeply self-reflective ethic could not be more urgent. Consider a rough analogy: we know that left untreated cancer will metastasize and become calamitous for the patient. Treatment may not eradicate the disease, but early aggressive attention can mitigate against damage to tissues and organs. Imagine, however, that early on in a treatment regimen a patient tests positive for Covid-19, becomes sick, decides to suspend the cancer treatment, recovers from the virus, and then, feeling better, doesn't return to the chemotherapy. Will the patient live? No; and we rightly regard her behavior as self-defeating. Indeed, we'd urge her to return to...