Common threads · 6 books
A demanding environmental ethics course on communities, technological power, future people, and the difficulty of acting on climate responsibility.
Books, curator notes, and what to read next.
Aldo Leopold
Read the land ethic alongside the seasonal essays. Ask what changes when soils, plants, and animals belong to a moral community.
Next: Ecology, Community and Lifestyle
Arne Næss
Næss connects ecological commitments with a picture of the self. Test where that picture agrees with duties to individual creatures.
Next: The Imperative of Responsibility
Hans Jonas
Jonas rethinks ethics for technological power. Consider what uncertainty about future harm should require of the present.
Next: Reasons and Persons
Derek Parfit
Read the sections on identity and future people as connected questions about whose interests matter over time.
Next: A Perfect Moral Storm
Stephen M. Gardiner
Gardiner explains how global reach and delayed harms make climate responsibility hard to assign and easy to evade.
Next: Reason in a Dark Time
Dale Jamieson
Jamieson asks how to act when familiar moral tools fit climate change poorly. Compare institutional duties with habits of living.
Also includes A Sand County Almanac
Compare suffering, rights, kinship, and political membership. The question is not only how to treat animals, but how to live alongside them.
Also includes Reasons and Persons
Start with time as lived experience, then test philosophical accounts of persistence, temporal order, and what it means to exist over time.
Also includes Reasons and Persons
Study the fear of death, the value of a finite life, and our dependence on a future we will never personally see.
