In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Raymond Anthony (bio)

In 2012, the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean melted to 4.10 million square kilometers, the smallest level to date. 2012 has also been marked by extreme weather, intense storms, drought, heat waves, warming oceans and intense precipitation events in many regions of the world. While climate scientists consider the relationship between climate change and large storms like Hurricane Sandy or the 2010 drought in Russia, many still continue to hum and haw over the extent to which human-induced climate change is responsible for the planet’s recent drastic weather patterns. What naysayers and climate change exponents can agree on is just how vulnerable we are to natural disasters. The need for balanced and informed discourses around climate and environmental challenges is urgent. How should we rethink our built environments in the wake of recent environmental and climate events? What long-range lifestyle changes ought we promote so that human activities are more deliberate and responsive to these natural and/or human-induced environmental risks?

While many around the globe still struggle to understand the underlying science well enough to evaluate climate-related controversies, a host of politicians, policymakers and scientists have argued that climate change is first and foremost an ethical issue. Notable thinkers of our generation have echoed that climate change is the most critical environmental challenge facing humanity—a “crisis” riddled with seemingly intractable intra-generational and inter-generational quagmires.

“How should we think about climate change, ethically, socially, and [End Page 1] politically?” “What sort of leadership can and ought philosophers and ethicists provide in helping to shape the discourses around climate change?” This special issue of Ethics and the Environment features important work in climate ethics that addresses these and related questions. These questions were the focus of a two-day climate ethics works-in-progress conference held at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) September 8–9, 2011 that provided the inspiration for this special issue. Participants of the conference helped the public and each other to frame and discuss the ethical and philosophical dimensions of climate change. This volume features five papers that were presented in Anchorage. The current iterations have been reviewed, revised, and expanded. While not in attendance themselves, the essays by Byron Williston, Lisa Kretz, and Stephen Purdey provide additional insights on other ethical and social dimensions of climate change that warrant our attention.

The climate ethics conference at UAA was funded by the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the UAA’s Department of Philosophy. The conference brought together an interdisciplinary group of scientists and philosophers in order to improve understanding both of climate science and ethics, and to draw attention to social and ethical discourses of climate change that usually fall under the radar. The fifteen-member group comprised of graduate students, junior and midlevel faculty, and senior scholars working in the areas of climate science and ethics. The Alaskan public was treated to presentations that canvassed issues related to research ethics, health, animal ethics, epistemology, and scientific uncertainty and risk, as well as concepts of social, distributive, and inter-generational justice related to global climate change, indigenous rights, the well-being of human and non-human communities in the Arctic, eco-technologies, biofuels, and the moral status of mitigation and adaptation strategies.

The conference also sought to assist the public in identifying gaps in their knowledge and to gain insights into their social and moral responsibilities in the wake of thoroughgoing environmental challenges. The participants were also invited to consider implications of their arguments and conclusions for Alaska and the circumpolar region. Senior scholars, Paul Thompson (Michigan State University), Bryan Norton (Georgia Institute of Technology), Clark Work (Iowa State University) and Chrisoula Andreou (University of Utah) highlighted challenges and current trends in climate ethics and environmental bioethics during their symposium. [End Page 2] Readers of this volume can listen to podcasts of the Conference Symposium and find out more details about the conference at http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/nsfclimateethics/public-symposium-september-8.cfm.

One important lesson from the conference is that issues related to climate cut across philosophy, social sciences, and the natural sciences. What seem to be matters...

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