May 19, 2013

Why Climate Change is not an Environmental Issue

Washington Monthly's Ryan Louis Cooper makes the case that climate change is not an environmental issue. Interesting perspective.

He does a good job underlining the reality that while climate change does concern the environment, it concerns a lot more than that:
"I'm not saying that climate change isn't a major threat to the current biosphere (it definitely is), nor am I saying that other species don't have moral worth, but the point is that there is not some kind of easy trade-off between humanity and nature. When we dammed Glen Canyon to create Lake Powell, it was a monstrous crime against all that is sacred, but we humans continued to live our lives largely without disruption. Climate change, on the other hand, is a direct, existential threat to the biosphere AND all of human civilization. It's just too big to fit into something like environmentalism."

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