Niya et al.

Educat onal inst tut ons play an instrumental role in social and polit cal change, and are responsible for the environmental and social ethics of their inst tut onal pract ces. The essays in this volume crit cally examine scholarly research pract ces in the age of the Anthropocene, and ask what accountability educators and researchers have in 'right ng' their relat onship to the environment. The volume further calls at ent on to the geographical, fi nancial, legal and polit cal barriers that might limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from part cipat ng in tradit onal modes of scholarly conversat on.

Edited by Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier, and Geoff rey Rockwell

As such, *Right Research* is a bold invitat on to the academic community to rigorous self-refl ect on on what their research looks like, how it is conducted, and how it might be developed so as to increase accessibility and sustainability, and decrease carbon footprint. The volume follows a threepart structure that bridges conceptual and pract cal concerns: the fi rst sect on challenges our assumpt ons about how sustainability is defi ned, measured and pract ced; the second sect on showcases art st-researchers whose work engages with the impact of humans on our environment; while the third sect on invest gates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour.

This t mely volume responds to an increased demand for environmentally sustainable research, and is outstanding not only in its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-tradit onal formats, spanning academic art cles, creat ve acts, personal refl ect ons and dialogues. *Right Research* will be a valuable resource for educators and researchers interested in developing and hybridizing their scholarly communicat on formats in the face of the current climate crisis.

Cover image by Leanne Olson, The Clay at Ryley, CC-BY-NC-ND Cover design by Emilie St-Hilaire.

This is the author-approved edit on of this Open Access t tle. As with all Open Book publicat ons, this ent re book is available to read for free on the publisher's website. Printed and digital edit ons, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at

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EDITED BY CHELSEA MIYA OLIVER ROSSIER AND GEOFFREY ROCKWELL

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## RIGHT RESEARCH

## Right Research

Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene

*Edited by Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier and Geoffrey Rockwell*

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Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier and Geofrey Rockwell (eds), *Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene*. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0213

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Cover image by Leanne Olson, The Clay at Ryley, CC-BY-NC-ND. Cover design by Emilie St-Hilaire.

This book is dedicated to Doris and Peter Kule for their support for the advancement of social sciences, humanities and arts research. Their gift established the Kule Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Alberta that brought us together.

We are also deeply grateful to the researchers and support teams that made the Around the World conference series such a success over the years.

And we also dedicate this to future scholars, for everything you will do to help weave together our civil society to face the shared challenges of climate change.

## Contents

**Jonathon Allen** is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University (WSU). Jonathon has twenty-fve years' university teaching, research, management and governance experience, the last half of which has been in signifcant leadership and governance roles at Western Sydney University, including Head of The Academy, Provost of Penrith Campus, Director of Academic Program for Visual Communication Design in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, and Associate Head of School of Engineering. His research, teaching and engagement interests typically see him work in collaboration with other disciplines, to progress design's role in bringing together arts, science and technology with a strong social conscience. He has a broad range of research outputs, including traditional publications (book chapters, journal and conference papers), exhibitions and prototypical artefacts, and has a particular interest in material intelligence (smart materials, intelligent use of materials, and in the hidden stories of sourcing and selecting materials); the application of design thinking to address pressing concerns related to food security, climate change, and health; and in the use of Augmented Reality to interact and engage with the physical world.

**Terry Anderson**, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus and former Canada Research Chair in the Centre for Distance Education and the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Centre at Athabasca University. Terry has published widely in the area of distance education and educational technology and has co-authored or edited ten books and numerous papers. Much of Terry's research work revolves around studying interaction amongst and between students, teachers and content. He claims to have organized (in 1992) the frst virtual conference ever held using a variety of networks that preceded the Internet.

**Doug Barlage** has been a Professor in nanoelectronics for the past sixteen years. Prior to this, he was an engineer with Intel where he played a critical role in producing the frst production high-k gate dielectric transistor and the frst trigate transistor. For his role in demonstrating the functional transistors with gate dimensions below 30nm, he was in the MIT TR-35 class of 2002.

**Jessie Beier** is an Edmonton-based teacher, artist, writer and conjurer of strange pedagogies for uncertain futures. Working at the intersection between speculative philosophy, artistic production and radical pedagogy, Jessie's research-creation practice explores the potential for visual and sonic ecologies to mobilize a break from orthodox referents and habits of repetition, towards more eco-logical modes of thought. Beier is currently completing her PhD at the University of Alberta, where she also teaches as an undergraduate instructor in the Department of Secondary Education and the Department of Women's and Gender Studies.

**Eric Benson** is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois. He has worked as a professional designer for such companies as Razorfsh and Texas Instruments. His research as a professor explores how design can be sustainable and consequently how to teach it. Eric has a BFA in Industrial/Graphic design from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Design from the University of Texas.

**Karin Bolender** (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher who seeks 'untold' stories within muddy meshes of timeplaces. Under the auspices of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), she explores dirty words and knotty wisdoms of earthly bodies-in-places through durational performance, writing, video, sound, and experimental books arts. Karin earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College and a PhD in Environmental Humanities from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She has lived and moved with a family herd of mammals and others on the semi-rural fringes of several university towns in the U.S. Southeast and West and presently makes a home in a small timber and rodeo town near a state university in the Willamette Valley/Champinefu Kalapuya territory in Oregon. 3Ecologies/punctum books published *The Unnaming of Aliass*, which reckons with two decades of barnyard becomings, in 2020.

**Nick Byrd** is a philosopher-scientist studying how diferences in reasoning style relate to diferences in judgments, decisions, and wellbeing. For example, Nick examines how refection double checks our intuitions, how our evaluations of arguments and evidence can be biased, how our tendency to unrefectively accept our initial intuition predicts many of our philosophical beliefs, how our sense of identity infuences our reasoning, how to debias our reasoning, and how our happiness can be infuenced by our beliefs *about* happiness. Nick's graduate coursework in cognitive science and philosophy was completed at University of Colorado and Florida State University. Institutions like the US Intelligence Community, the John Templeton Foundation, and universities have funded Nick's research. You can fnd out more about Nick's research on byrdnick.com, social media, *Psychology Today*, the American Philosophical Association blog, podcasts, radio segments, and other venues.

**Hart Cohen** is Professor in Media Arts in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University, Australia. Dr Cohen is a member of the Institute for Culture and Society and supervises a number of MA (research), DCA and PhD students. He has published widely in the feld of visual anthropology, communications and flm studies. Hart has directed three Australian Research Council Projects related to the Strehlow Collection held at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. He is the co-author of the award-winning book, *Screen Media Arts: An Introduction to Concepts and Practices* for Oxford University Press (2009), as well as the founding editor of *The Global Media Journal* (Australian Edition). His most recent book is *The Strehlow Archive: Explorations in Old and New Media* (Routledge).

**Ted Dawson** is an Assistant Professor of Practice in German studies and faculty afliate at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He researches and teaches Austrian and German literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing especially on environmental humanities, digital humanities and sound and media studies. Before coming to Nebraska,

he was Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, where he helped establish an interdisciplinary environmental humanities research community.

**Petra Dolata** is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, Canada. From 2014-2019 she was Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in the History of Energy. She holds an MA degree in American Studies from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where she also received her PhD in International Relations with a study on U.S.-German (energy) relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s which was published in 2006 with VS Verlag (*Die deutsche Kohlenkrise im nationalen und transatlantischen Kontext*). She is the co-convenor of the Energy In Society research group at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. Petra's current research focuses on European and North American energy history after 1945 as well as the history and politics of the Canadian and circumpolar Arctic. She has published on Canada's natural resources, foreign and Arctic policies, and the concept of energy security.

**Christa Donner** is an artist, mother, curator and organizer who investigates the human/animal body and its metaphors through a variety of media, from large-scale drawing and installation to guided visualizations and small-press publications. Her practice often incorporates social exchange and collaboration rooted in personal narrative and sensory experience. Christa's work is exhibited widely, including projects for the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany), The Worldly House at dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel, Germany); BankArt NYK (Yokohama, Japan); Chiaki Kamikawa Contemporary Art (Paphos, Cyprus); the Museum Bellerive (Zurich, Switzerland), ANTI Festival of Contemporary Art (Kuopio, Finland), the Centro Columbo Americano (Medellin, Colombia), and throughout the United States. Her work can be found at www.christadonner.com.

**Lai-Tze Fan** is an Assistant Professor at Waterloo University, Canada, and a Faculty Researcher of the Critical Media Lab. She researches digital storytelling, media theory and infrastructure, research-creation or critical making, and systemic inequalities in the design of tech and tech labour. She makes digital and material art about e-waste and crafts. She is the Co-Editor of 2020 collection *Post-Digital: Dialogues and Debates* from electronic book review, and her research appears in *Mosaic*, *Convergence*, *Digital Studies*, and elsewhere. Fan serves as an Editor and the Director of Communications for *electronic book review*, one of the oldest academic journals on the Internet, and Co-Editor of the digital review.

**Priscilla Ferronato** is a Lead User Experience Researcher and PhD candidate in Informatics at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign with over fve years of experience in qualitative user experience research. Currently, she works with a fntech leading the research on the future of automation in fnances and its impact on human behavior. Her PhD dissertation investigates the infuence of individual diferences on the formation of trust in autonomous systems.

**Alison Gill** is Senior Lecturer in Design at Western Sydney University. Alison's research interests in design philosophy, cultural theory and socio-material studies are evident in publications about social practices of repair, alternative conceptions of use and visual narratives; sports product advertising; deconstruction fashion; audience/user practices and sustainable design education. Her current research projects investigate cultures of everyday resourcefulness like sharing, reuse, customization, and repair to encourage transitions to more sustainable economies.

**Amanda Starling Gould**, PhD (she/her) is currently the Senior Program Coordinator for Educational Programs & Digital Humanities at the Duke University John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. She directs the Duke Story+ Interdisciplinary Humanities Research program, consults on digital humanities projects and innovative pedagogical interventions for Duke's Humanities Labs and Digital Humanities Initiative, and collaborates with partners across Duke (and beyond) to design creative—and sometimes remote—research and storytelling experiences. She teaches graduate and undergraduate classes on environmental humanities, critical digital practice, redesigning futures, and 'learning to fail'.

**Maryella Hatfeld** is a Lecturer in Screen Media (SoHCA) at Western Sydney University. She is also a flmmaker, and the director of *The Future*  *Makers*, which tells the story of key Australians leading the way on the world stage in renewable energy (broadcast on Discovery Channel, 2008-2010). A graduate from the AFTRS in directing, her work has been shown with a range of international festivals and broadcasters. *Eden*, a short environmental documentary, was highly commended in the Dendy Awards. *Range of Experience* was nominated for an AFI Award, and was screened in numerous festivals including Sydney and Melbourne Film Festivals, LA Women in Film Festival, Portugal's Fantasporto Festival, Flickerfest et al. She worked as an independent director/producer over many years, and brings this experience to her work in higher education. The Living Lab project at South Vineyard Creek was highly commended in the Australasian Green Gowns Awards in 2020.

**Mél Hogan** is the Director of the Environmental Media Lab (www. environmentalmedialab.com) and an Associate Professor in Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. Her work on data storage and cloud imaginaries has been published in journals like *Ephemera*, *First Monday*, *Television and New Media*, *Big Data and Society*, *Culture Machine* and the *Canadian Journal of Communication*, among others. Website: www.melhogan.com; Twitter @mel\_hogan /@ EnvMediaLab

**Joshua Korenblat** is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. Prior to joining the Art Department faculty at SUNY New Paltz, Joshua worked as an art director, artist, writer and educator. Joshua has an MFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art, an MA in Teaching from Brown University and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. Also, Joshua has a dual-degree BFA and BA from Washington University in St. Louis. From 2007 until 2014, Joshua was on the Graphic Design faculty of the Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts, Washington, DC campus. Professionally, Joshua has seven years of experience in the Art Department at *National Geographic Magazine* and *Science News*. In 2012, Joshua helped to co-found Graphicacy, a data visualization design frm based in Washington, DC. Today, Joshua works as an Art Director with the team at Graphicacy.

**Kristine Kowalchuk** is an Adjunct Professor with the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and an instructor of English and Ethics at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT). Her research focuses on ecological humanities, including writing on food and farming systems. In 2017 she published *Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books* through the University of Toronto Press.

**Michael Leung** is an artist/designer, researcher and visiting lecturer. He was born in London and moved to Hong Kong in 2009 to complete an MA in Design. His projects range from collective urban agriculture projects such as The HK FARMers' Almanac 2014-2015 to Pangkerchief, a collection of objects produced by Pang Jai fabric market in Sham Shui Po. Michael is a Visiting Lecturer at Hong Kong Baptist University where he teaches Social Practice (MA). His research focuses on Insurrectionary Agricultural Milieux, rhizomatic forms of agriculture that exist in local response to global conditions of biopolitics and neoliberalism.

**Abby Mellick Lopes** is an Associate Professor in Design Studies at University of Technology, Sydney. Abby's collaborative research focuses on the relationship between design and social arrangements to support the transition to more sustainable cultures and economies, with recent projects tackling the social impacts of heat and development trends on the urban commons; civic trust in drinking water; and food and waste economies and cultures of repair, with a particular focus on the communities of Western Sydney. Abby has published in *Design Studies*, *Design and Culture*, *Cultural Studies Review*, *ACME*: an international e-journal for critical geographies and elsewhere, and written several book chapters on design, sustainability and transdisciplinarity. Her work has been presented in the UK, the USA, Canada, Cyprus, Spain, Malaysia and China.

**Natalie S. Loveless** is Associate Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory, at the University of Alberta, where she directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory and co-leads the Faculty of Arts' Signature Area in Research-Creation. Loveless is author of *How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation* (Duke UP 2019), editor of *Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in*  *Research-Creation* (University of Alberta Press 2019), and co-editor of *Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem* (Intellect Press 2020). Loveless has held fellowships and visiting positions in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University (Montreal), the Centre for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, and Western University (London, Ontario). In 2020 she was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists) for her scholarship at the intersection of research-creation and social and ecological justice.

**Chelsea Miya** is a PhD Candidate and CGS SSHRC fellow in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where her work focuses on the cultural history of data. She is a researcher and podcaster with the SpokenWeb, a multi-institutional interdisciplinary project dedicated to the discovery, preservation, and analysis of sonic artifacts.

**Howard Nye** is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. He works primarily in the areas of normative ethics, practical ethics, and metaethics, and has related interests in political philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and decision theory. One line of Howard's current research investigates challenges to the common assumption that life is less of a morally important beneft to beings who lack the intellectual abilities of typical human adults. Another line of his research concerns the ethics of collective action, focusing on the argument that individual actors and institutions should reduce their contributions to harmful practices because their contributions have small chances of making very important diferences. A third line of Howard's research investigates what it takes for an entity to have beliefs, desires, and sensations that represent or are about the world in a sense that admits of genuine, underivative error, with applications to the sentience and mental lives of various non-human animals, intellectually less able humans, and possible future artifcial intelligence systems.

**Leanne Olson** is an artist, educator and writer. She has maintained a near two decade self-taught and community engaged art practice since completing a BA in Film Studies in 2003 at the University of Alberta. In 2019, she returned to campus and is an MFA candidate at the University of Victoria. Olson's work focuses on land and water bodies that are tasked with jobs, such as landflls, sulphurous springs, and recreational lakes. Her practice includes repeat visitation and empathic documentation of these sites as they are entangled in massive change. The subjects in her images are often micro captures of ecosystems adapting to human odds and responding to the efects of time. Olson received international media coverage for her recent exhibition at the Mitchell Art Gallery at MacEwan University and for her 2018 residency with the Edmonton Waste Management Centre.

**Allison Paradise** has inspired thousands of people to see themselves, their relationship to others, and their relationship to the planet in a new way. She is the founder and former CEO of My Green Lab, a nonproft organization with a mission to build a culture of sustainability through science. Under her leadership, My Green Lab established the frst-ever sustainability criteria for laboratory operations and products, transforming an industry half the size of the automotive industry into a paragon of sustainability. My Green Lab was founded on the philosophy of questioning our own behavior, and this continues to be the guiding philosophy behind her most recent project, Open Spaces, Open Minds (OSOM). In her work at OSOM, Allison empowers children and adults to question, explore, and connect with themselves and nature with true curiosity and joy. Allison is a frequently invited speaker at sustainability events and scientifc meetings. She holds degrees in neuroscience from Brown and Harvard.

**Geofrey Rockwell** is a Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities, Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study and Associate Director of the AI for Society signature area at the University of Alberta. He publishes on textual visualization, text analysis, ethics of technology and on digital humanities including a co-authored book, *Hermeneutica*, from MIT Press (2016). He is co-developer of Voyant Tools (voyanttools.org), an award-winning suite of text analysis tools.

**Oliver Rossier** has a BA in History and Political Science, and an MA in Communications and Technology, both from the University of Alberta. He has over twenty years of post-secondary administrative experience, facilitating collaborative research projects and strategic initiatives. He is committed to helping research teams fnd the right tools and techniques

to navigate transitions caused by the tandem tsunamis of COVID-19 and signifcant budget reductions.

**Gem Shoute** has a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Alberta. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Synthergy, a company which aims to improve the efciency and sustainability of the nanomanufacturing technique used to make semiconductors and advanced coatings.

**Francesca Sidoti** is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on the role of place, particularly in the lives of young adults in regional New South Wales.

**Scott Smallwood** is a sound artist, composer, and performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, feld recording, and improvisation. In addition to composing works for ensembles and electronics, he designs experimental instruments and software, as well as sound installations and audio games, often for site-specifc scenarios. Much of his recent work is often concerned with the soundscapes of climate change, and the dichotomy between ecstatic and luxuriating states of noise and the precious commodity of natural acoustical environments and quiet spaces. He performs as one-half of the laptop/electronic duo Evidence (with Stephan Moore) and has collaborated with many artists and ensembles including Continuum Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, Seth Cluett, Mark Dresser, Cor Fuhler, John Butcher, Pauline Oliveros, Cindy Baker, Jen Mesch, Sean Caulfeld, Sydney Lancaster, Yanira Castro, Marilène Oliver, and many others. He teaches as an associate professor of composition at the University of Alberta, where he also serves as the director of the Sound Studies Institute.

**Deb Verhoeven** is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics at the University of Alberta. Previously she was Associate Dean of Engagement and Innovation at the University of Technology Sydney, and before this she was Vice Chancellor's Library Fellow and Professor of Media and Communication at Deakin University. Between 2008 and 2011 she was Inaugural Deputy Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She currently serves on the boards of the Canadian research infrastructure organisations CANARIE and NDRIO.

**Andrew S. Yang** works across the naturalcultural fux by way of the visual arts, natural sciences, and expanded research. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. His writings have appeared in *Leonardo*, *Biological Theory*, *Art Journal*, and in the forthcoming books *Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations* and the *Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies*. He was recently inaugural artist-in-residence at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, is a Research Associate at the Field Museum of Natural History, and an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Educational institutions have long been at the fore of social and political change, a fact that was reafrmed by the historic student-led Global Climate Strikes in the fall of 2019.1 Universities help to generate ideas and foster critical thought. That is why, in the face of the current climate emergency, the academy is uniquely positioned to take action. This collection—*Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene*—asks what responsibility do we, as educators and researchers have, in 'righting' our relationship to the environment? What does it mean to 'do research' sustainably? How can we refect on and adjust our own institutional practices?

This anthology was inspired by an annual virtual conference at the University of Alberta, whose innovative online format was specifcally chosen to minimize its carbon footprint. Organized by co-editors Chelsea Miya, Oliver Rossier, Geofrey Rockwell and others, the Around the World (AtW) econference ran for six years between 2013 and 2018 and resulted in the production of an econference handbook and the establishment of a special virtual conference grant program to fund econferences at the University. The theme of the fnal AtW conference was 'Sustainable Research: Modelling Nearly Carbon-Neutral Practices in the 21st Century.' Researchers from around the world came together to discuss sustainable research in its many forms and to address the question of how we as an academic community can work together to learn how to better mobilize ideas without fying so many people. We

<sup>1</sup> Eliza Barclay and Brian Resnick, 'How big was the global climate strike? 4 million people, activists estimate', *Vox* (September 22, 2019), https://www. vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/9/20/20876143/climate-strike-2019 september-20-crowd-estimate; Matthew Taylor, Jonathan Watts and John Bartlett, 'Climate crisis: 6 million people join latest wave of global protests', *The Guardian* (September 27, 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/27/ climate-crisis-6-million-people-join-latest-wave-of-worldwide-protests

also called attention to the geographical, fnancial as well as legal and/or political barriers that limit scholarly dialogue by excluding researchers from participating in traditional conferences. We asked how we might consider alternative or hybrid formats that are more inclusive and ultimately more sustainable.

The works in this collection were inspired by the conference theme of sustainable research, but also extend the conversation beyond the original event. There has been increasing interest in scholarship that foregrounds the role of academia in fghting climate change. Recent scholarly works include Julian Keniry's *Ecodemia* (1995), Geofrey Chase and Peggy Bartlett's *Sustainability on Campus* (MIT, 2004), Mitchell Thomashow's *The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus* (MIT, 2014), Patrizia Lombardi and Giulia Sonetti's *News from the Front of Sustainable University Campuses* (Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 2017), Walter Leal Filho et al.'s *Towards Green Campus Operations* (Springer 2017) and *Sustainability on University Campuses* (Springer 2019) and Ken Hiltner's *Writing a New Environmental Era* (Routledge, 2019). The demand for research in this area refects both the urgency of the current climate emergency and academics' growing desire to refect on their own practices and take the lead in modelling solutions.

What sets this anthology apart from similar collections is not only its interdisciplinarity, but its embrace of non-traditional formats. In order to refect the diverse ways that sustainable-thinking manifests in research, particularly in practices of research-creation, these 'interventions' include not only academic articles, but also creative works, personal refections, and dialogues.

*Section One: Re-defning Sustainability* challenges our assumptions about how sustainability is defned, measured, and practiced. Howard Nye makes an ethical argument for why our individual actions still have meaningful impact. Petra Dolata exposes the complex and contradictory history of sustainable thinking as it arose in connection with the unsustainable practices of the energy sector. Kristine Kowalchuk and Amanda Starling Gould each argue that the humanities has a unique role 'righting' our relationship to the environment. Doug Barlage and Gem Shoute consider the carbon impact of the digital revolution. The section concludes with a dialogue between Mél Hogan and Deb Verhoeven on the ecological promise of DNA computing.

*Section Two: Art in/and the Anthropocene* showcases artist-researchers whose work responds to and engages with the impact of humans on our environment. Joshua Korenblat ofers a new approach to data visualization informed by Goethe's 'tender empiricism'. Eric Benson and Priscilla Ferronato experiment with ways of incorporating systems thinking into design education. Michael Leung's photo essay documents the struggle of rural farmers in China and India to maintain their connection to the land even as they are being forcibly displaced by developers. Lai-Tze Fan refects on the makings of the 'e-waste peep show,' an installation that ofers a voyeuristic glimpse of labour conditions inside an e-waste dumpsite. The section concludes with a series of interludes that refect on creativity in the face of climate catastrophe; series editor Natalie Loveless is joined by artists Andrew S. Yang, Karin Bolender, Christa Donner, Scott Smallwood, Leanne Olsen and Jessie Beier.

*Section Three: Sustainable Campuses* investigates how academic spaces can model eco-conscious behaviour. The section begins at the intersection of virtual and physical space: Ted Dawson's case study of digital centres asks how researchers can become more conscientious of the environmental impacts of computer technology. My Green Labs founder Allison Paradise then refects on the push to help science laboratories kick unsustainable habits. Hart Cohen is joined by Abby Mellick Lopes, Jonathon Allen, Maryella Hatfeld and Alison Gill in a survey of experimental eco-initiatives at Western Sydney University, the result of making a culture of sustainability and 'repair' central to the university's mandate. Of course, academic spaces include not only environments for conducting research but also environments for exchanging and disseminating ideas. With that in mind, the section on sustainable campuses closes with a trio of articles—by authors Terry Anderson, Nick Byrd, and Oliver Rossier, Chelsea Miya, and Geofrey Rockwell—on 'greening' academic gatherings by moving conferences online.

## SECTION ONE: RE-DEFINING SUSTAINABILITY

## 1. Why Should We Try to Be Sustainable?:

Expected Consequences and the Ethics of Making an Indeterminate Difference

*Howard Nye*

Why should we refrain from doing things that, taken collectively, are environmentally destructive, if our individual acts seem almost certain to make no diference? According to the expected consequences approach, we should refrain from doing these things because our individual acts have small risks of causing great harm, which outweigh the expected benefts of performing them.  But this approach has recently been challenged by authors like Bernward Gesang and Julia Nefsky. Gesang contends that it may be genuinely impossible for our individual emissions to make a morally relevant diference. Nefsky argues more generally that the expected consequences approach cannot adequately explain our reasons not to do things if there is no precise fact of the matter about whether their outcomes are harmful. In the following chapter, author Howard Nye defends the expected consequences approach against these objections. Nye contends that Gesang has shown at most that our emissions could have metaphysically indeterministic efects that lack precise objective chances. He argues, moreover, that the expected consequences approach can draw upon existing extensions to cases of indeterminism and imprecise probabilities to deliver the result that we have the same moral reasons to reduce our emissions in Gesang's scenario as in deterministic scenarios. Nye also shows how the expected consequences approach can draw upon these extensions to handle Nefsky's concern about the absence of precise facts concerning whether the outcomes of certain acts are harmful. The author concludes that the expected consequences approach provides a fully adequate account of our moral reasons to take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints.

### 1. Environmental Destruction and the Ethics of Collective Action

Why should we try to reduce our destructive impacts on the environment, when it can seem that the efects of our individual acts are too small to make an ethically important diference? As Walter Sinnott-Armstrong puts the challenge, why, for instance, should one seek to reduce one's emissions of greenhouse gases [GHGs] by cycling and taking public transit instead of driving, if it seems that 'Climate change occur[s] on such a massive scale that my individual driving makes no diference to the welfare of anyone'?1

This is an instance of a general ethical problem about collective action, which is of great practical as well as theoretical importance. The view that our own reductions of GHG emissions will have too small of an efect to make an important diference appears to be the last line of defense of those inclined to oppose action to address climate change—if at any point they do tire of denying the overwhelming

<sup>1</sup> Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, 'It's not my fault: Global warming and individual moral obligations', in *Perspectives on Climate Change: Science, Economics, Politics, Ethics*, ed. by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Richard Howarth (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), pp. 285–307 (p. 301), https://doi.org/10.1016/S1569-3740(05)05013-3.

evidence that the climate is changing, that the change is anthropogenic, and that the change is extremely harmful.2 But even those who accept the overwhelming evidence for harmful anthropogenic climate change and agree that we should do something about it at the level of social policy can (like Sinnott-Armstrong) be sorely tempted—including as a rationalization for personal inaction—by the thought that individual attempts to act in less environmentally destructive ways are futile.

The theoretical importance of such problems of collective action concerns whether in general there are moral reasons in these cases for individuals to act, and what sort of moral theory best accounts for this. For instance, according to the

**Expected consequences approach**: in *collective action cases* where our acts together are collectively harmful (or benefcial), our individual acts do in fact have a chance [often small] of causing harm (or beneft) [often large] to others. As such, the moral importance of avoiding this risk of harm (or securing this chance of beneft) typically outweighs the possible benefts to us of performing (or failing to perform) these acts.3

<sup>2</sup> For an authoritative guide to this overwhelming evidence see IPCC 2014, *Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change*, ed. by Core Writing Team, R.K. Pachauri and L.A. Meyer (Geneva: IPCC, 2014), https://www.ipcc.ch/ site/assets/uploads/2018/05/SYR\_AR5\_FINAL\_full\_wcover.pdf. For discussion of the 'it won't make a diference if we reduce our emissions' objection by those who oppose action on climate change, see e.g. Michael Mann, *The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines* (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), https://doi.org/10.7312/mann15254. A vivid recent example of this rationale for inaction is the National Highway Trafc Safety Administration's defense of its fuel efciency rollbacks on the grounds that other actors' GHG emissions will cause harmful climate change regardless of what the NHTSA does (National Highway Trafc Safety Administration, *Draft Environmental Impact Statement for The Safer Afordable Fuel-Efcient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule for Model Year 2021–2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks* (2018), pp. 5–30, https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/ fles/documents/ld\_cafe\_my2021-26\_deis\_0.pdf.

<sup>3</sup> Defenders of this approach include Peter Singer, 'Utilitarianism and vegetarianism', *Philosophy and Public Afairs*, 9 (1980), 325–337 (pp. 335–336); Derek Parft, *Reasons and Persons* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 73–86, https://doi.org /10.1093/019824908x.001.0001; Gaverick Matheny, 'Expected utility, contributory causation, and vegetarianism', *Journal of Applied Philosophy*, 19 (2002), 293–297, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5930.00223; Alastair Norcross, 'Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal cases', *Philosophical Perspectives*, 18 (2004), 229– 245 (pp. 231–233), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2004.00027.x; Shelly Kagan,

If this is correct, then we can explain our moral reasons to omit being complicit in harmful practices and contribute to benefcial practices in terms of familiar principles of non-malefcence not to harm others, benefcence to beneft others, and responsible decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. We need not add any fundamentally distinct ethical principles to those acknowledged by moral theories like Rossian pluralism, according to which there is a plurality of basic moral reasons to act, including non-malefcence and benefcence;4 and act consequentialism, according to which our moral reasons to do something are proportional simply to the amount of good it will do.5 Nor need we fnd any fundamentally new principles of responsible decision-making under conditions of uncertainty beyond the teachings of standard decision theory, according to which (very roughly) we should weigh in favour of an act the benefts it may bring in proportion to their magnitude and likelihood of occurring (its 'expected benefts'), and weigh against it the harms it may produce in proportion to their magnitude and likelihood of occurring (its 'expected harms').6

Advocates of the expected consequences approach have argued convincingly that it provides a plausible account of the moral case

<sup>&#</sup>x27;Do I make a diference?', *Philosophy and Public Afairs*, 39 (2011), 105–141, https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01203.x; Avram Hiller, 'Climate change and individual responsibility', *The Monist*, 94 (2011), 349–368, https://doi.org/10.5840/ monist201194318, and 'Morally signifcant efects of ordinary individual actions', *Ethics, Policy and Environment*, 14 (2011), 19–21, https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085 .2011.561588; John Broome, *Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World* (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2012), pp. 73–78; and Christopher Morgan-Knapp and Charles Goodman, 'Consequentialism, climate harm, and individual obligations', *Ethical Theory and Moral Practice*, 18 (2015), 177–190, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10677-014-9517-9.

<sup>4</sup> See e.g. W. D. Ross, *The Right and the Good* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 16–64.

<sup>5</sup> See e.g. Henry Sidgwick, *The Methods of Ethics*, 7th edn (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1907), pp. 337–361 (373–390, and 418–459); and Shelly Kagan, *The Limits of Morality* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), https://doi.org/10.1093/0198239<PHONE_NUMBER>.

<sup>6</sup> Classic statements of which include Frank P. Ramsey, 'Truth and probability' (1926), reprinted in *Decision, Probability, and Utility: Selected Readings*, ed. by Peter Gärdenfors and Nils-Eric Sahlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 19–47, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511609220; John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, *Theory of Games and Economic Behavior* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944), pp. 15–31, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400829460; and Leonard J. Savage, *The Foundations of Statistics* (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1954).

for individual acts that can help to reduce our ecological footprints. As I discuss below, these include voting for policies that will reduce our countries' GHG emissions, eating plant-based diets, reducing our air-travel and car-travel by substituting econferences for in-person conferences, and walking, cycling, and taking public transit instead of driving. But this account has recently been challenged by Bernward Gesang, who contends that it may be not only unlikely but genuinely impossible for our individual GHG emissions to make a diference to morally important outcomes.7 Moreover, Julia Nefsky has challenged the general adequacy of the expected consequences approach by arguing in efect that it cannot explain our reasons not to do things in certain collective action cases where there is no precise fact of the matter about whether their outcomes are harmful.8

In this chapter I defend the expected consequences approach against these challenges. I argue that Gesang has shown at most that our emissions could have metaphysically indeterministic efects that lack precise objective chances. But the expected consequences approach has been extended to cases of indeterminism and imprecise probabilities by authors like Krister Bykvist and Susanna Rinard.9 I show how these extensions vindicate the application of the expected consequences approach to the scenario that Gesang attempts to describe. Moreover, I argue that these extensions of the expected consequences approach can be used to respond to Nefsky's challenge by appropriately explaining our reasons not to do things in collective action cases where there are no precise facts about whether their outcomes are harmful. I conclude that these extensions of the expected consequences approach enable it to provide a fully adequate account of our moral reasons to take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints.

<sup>7</sup> Bernward Gesang, 'Climate change—do I make a diference?', *Environmental Ethics*, 39 (2017), 3–19, https://doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics20179261.

<sup>8</sup> Julia Nefsky, 'Consequentialism and the problem of collective harm: A reply to Kagan', *Philosophy and Public Afairs*, 39 (2012), 364–395, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2012.01209.x.

<sup>9</sup> Krister Bykvist, 'Normative supervenience and consequentialism', *Utilitas*, 15 (2003), 27–49, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0953820800003757; Susanna Rinard, 'A decision theory for imprecise probabilities', *Philosophers' Imprint*, 15 (2015), 1–16, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0015.007.

### 2. The Expected Consequences Approach to Collectively Destructive Acts

One of the great advantages of the expected consequences approach is that it explains our moral reasons in collective action cases in terms of extremely plausible general principles of non-malefcence, benefcence, and standard decision theory's injunction to weigh acts' expected harms against their expected benefts. These entail that there can be a decisive moral case against performing an act because it carries a small risk of causing a great deal of harm in return for relatively small expected benefts. This seems to be an excellent explanation of why there is a decisive moral case against such acts as speeding through residential areas when late for work, bouncing a ball around a nuclear missile's launch button just for fun, and shooting into an occupied building just for target practice.

At the same time, these principles provide an extremely plausible and helpful way to determine when an act that would otherwise be wrong in virtue of its risks becomes permissible, namely when its expected benefts are great enough in comparison to its expected harms.10 There is, for instance, no decisive moral case against—but plausibly one in favour of—such acts as driving at high speed through a residential area and shooting into an occupied building if these are the only ways to rush someone in need of urgent care to the hospital or difuse a bomb about to explode and kill someone.

The expected consequences approach can be applied straightforwardly to the collective action case of voting. Consider the *Simpsons*-inspired case of

*Voting for Kang*. It is revealed that one of the major party candidates for president in the United States is actually an evil alien named

<sup>10</sup> This can be true whether or not one subscribes to the view that there are constraints on harming, or that certain harmful upshots of our conduct are in themselves harder to justify than certain of their failures to have benefcial upshots. One must only avoid the extremely implausible view that there is an absolute prohibition on harmful upshots that translates into an absolute injunction to avoid any risk of harm no matter how small in return for any chance of beneft no matter how great (see e.g. See Kagan (1989), pp. 87–91; and Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, 'Absolutist moral theories and uncertainty', *The Journal of Philosophy*, 103 (2006), 267–283, https://doi.org/10.5840/jphil2006103614.

Kang who will enslave and torture everyone in the country (with no benefts to anyone other than US citizens) if and only if he wins the election. The other candidate (unlike in 'Citizen Kang') is a typical politician who will maintain the status quo. Kang has, however, rigged voting booths to pay out \$50 to everyone who votes for him.

It seems clear that one has decisive moral reason to forgo the \$50 and omit voting for Kang—and indeed vote against him. As Derek Parft showed, this intuition can be justifed by the expected consequences approach.11 Updating Parft's calculations, there are about 326 million US citizens, and the average probability of one's vote deciding a presidential election is one in 60 million.12 The expected harm to others of voting for Kang is thus (1/60 million)×*h*× (326 million) = 5.43×*h*, where *h* is the percitizen harm inficted by Kang. Very clearly, the certain beneft of \$50 to you (which we may assume can be spent before Kang takes power if he wins) is absolutely trivial in comparison to the per-individual harm inficted by Kang on one other individual—let alone an expected harm more than fve times as great.

To appreciate the expected beneft of voting for sustainable policies, we can consider a more realistic scenario of an election between Superior and Inferior. If Superior wins, she will implement a Green New Deal that will reduce the emissions of the US to net zero by 2050 while beneftting most workers by providing jobs and stimulating aggregate demand. If Inferior wins she will maintain the status quo on US emissions. While the Green New Deal's economic benefts would

<sup>11</sup> Parft (1984), pp. 73–74.

<sup>12</sup> Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver and Aaron Edlin, 'What is the probability that your vote will make a diference?', *Economic Inquiry*, 50 (2012), 321–326, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1465-7295.2010.00272.x; see also Pierre-Antoine Kremp and Andrew Gelman, 'What is the chance that your vote will decide the election?', https:// pkremp.github.io/pr\_decisive\_vote.html. Depending upon one's state of residence, one's vote will have a greater or lesser chance of deciding the election. For instance, if one votes in Colorado, Michigan, Connecticut or Wyoming, one's chance of deciding the election will be respectively one in 1 million, 3 million, 40 million or 30 billion. This, of course, assumes that voting patterns in the election between Kang and his opponent would follow those of other elections. One could, purely hypothetically, imagine this being so due to a distribution of propensities to be more concerned about getting the \$50 or more concerned about voting against Kang that are isomorphic to current partisan voting patterns.

be substantial, expected diferences in lives lost due to climate policy alone are likely to be enormous. For instance, as I will discuss more below, John Nolt estimates that the expected harm of an average US citizen's current lifetime GHG emissions is 1–2 human lives lost.13 Since Superior will zero-out the emissions of all 326 million US citizens, the expected beneft of voting for her due simply to her climate policy will be one's 1/60 million chance of deciding the election times the 326 to 652 million lives that can be expected to be saved by this policy, or 5.43 to 10.87 lives. Very clearly, the costs to oneself of voting are absolutely trivial in comparison to the moral importance of saving more than fve to ten lives!

Indeed, even if one lives in Wyoming and we take the more conservative estimate of Superior's saving only 326 million lives, the expected beneft of one's voting for her would still be (1/30 billion)×(326 million) = 0.0109 lives which (assuming a life expectancy of 80 years) is 317.31 days of life. Again, the cost to oneself of voting seems completely trivial in comparison to someone else's being deprived of 317.31 days of life. Even if Superior would, rather than eliminate US emissions, simply reduce them by 10% or just 1%, the expected benefts of a vote for Superior in Wyoming due simply to this policy would still be 31.73 or 3.17 days of life. Since the costs to oneself of voting are clearly less important than someone's not being deprived of a month or even three days of life, it would still clearly be worthwhile to vote for Superior, even in Wyoming.14

<sup>13</sup> John Nolt, 'How harmful are the average American's greenhouse gas emissions?', *Ethics, Policy and Environment*, 14 (2011), 3–10, https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.20 11.561584.

<sup>14</sup> Those who are inclined to fnd it too fanciful for an election to be decided by a single vote should consider the very real-world case of the 2017 election in Virginia's 94th House of Delegates district, where the vote was exactly tied, and control of the House depended upon a single seat. See e.g. Emily Tillett, 'Virginia election results 2017: Republican David Yancey wins Virginia House seat', *CBS News* (January 4, 2018), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virginia-election-results-lottery-drawinghouse-of-delegates-david-yancy-winner-virginia-house-seat/. Had one more voter voted for the Democrat, the seat would have been won, and instead of the Republicans winning a drawing by lot that led to them holding a 51 to 49 seat majority, control of the House would have been shared. There are records of at least 64 similar elections between 1822 and 2018, 21 of which were tied and would have been decided by a singe additional vote, and 43 of which were in fact decided by a single vote. See references to records compiled at 'List of close election results',

Voting is a paradigm example of what Shelly Kagan calls a *triggering case*, where if a certain threshold of individual contributions is crossed this triggers a morally important efect. In such cases, if one's act is part of a cohort that falls short of the triggering number or adds to the surplus above the triggering number, then it (as well as the other members of the cohort) makes no diference to the efect. But if one's act is part of a cohort that exactly crosses the threshold and triggers the efect, then it (as well as the other acts) makes all of the diference to it. To a frst approximation voting is a triggering case where one's act has a chance of crossing only a single triggering threshold.15 There are, however, many important cases in which one's act has a chance of being a part of several cohorts each of which exactly cross diferent thresholds that trigger morally important efects.

For instance, as Peter Singer, Gaverick Matheny, Alastair Norcross, and Kagan argue, purchasing animal products instead of plant-based alternatives is an instance of a triggering case where one's purchase has a small chance of crossing many thresholds, each of which would result in a great deal of harm to animals and the environment.16 Given the price mechanism in a market economy, there must be some number *N* (e.g. 10,000) of additional chicken purchases that causes *N* more chickens to be bred, tortured, and killed—at the expense of much more land, grain, and water inputs, polluting waste, and unsequestered GHG

*Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia* (October 9, 2020), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List\_of\_close\_election\_results.

<sup>15</sup> In reality, votes can matter beyond their efect on actually electing candidates by adding to or taking away from margins of victory or defeat, which can afect the extent to which politicians take themselves to have mandates, take certain policies to be favoured by likely voters, and take themselves to be likely to be elected or re-elected if they behave in the way the winning or losing candidate did. How individual votes afect perceptions of margins might not be straightforward, but one way this could work is for votes to have chances of creating totals that round to certain signifcant digits that stick in the minds of the relevant decision makers in ways they would not have had they been one vote short of this rounding threshold. Since there are presumably many diferent such totals that matter to many diferent such decisions makers, voting is to a more accurate approximation a triggering case with one triggering threshold of great signifcance and several other triggering thresholds of somewhat lesser signifcance.

<sup>16</sup> Singer (1980), pp. 335–336; Matheny (2002); Norcross (2004), pp. 232–234; and Kagan (2011), pp. 110–127.

emissions—than the consumption of plant-based alternatives.17 In *N*-1

17 On the torture of chickens in the meat industry and the much greater inputs and polluting outputs of animal agriculture, see e.g. Peter Singer and Jim Mason, *The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter* (New York: Rodale Press, 2006); Richard Oppenlander, *Food Choice and Sustainability: Why Buying Local, Eating Less Meat, and Taking Baby Steps Won't Work* (Minneapolis: Langdon Street Press, 2013); Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, *Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock: A Global Assessment of Emissions and Mitigation Opportunities* (Rome: FAO, 2013), http://www.fao.org/3/i3437e/i3437e00.htm; Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemcek, 'Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers', *Science* 360 (2018), 987–992, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaq0216; and Alon Shepon et al., 'The Opportunity Cost of Animal Based Diets Exceeds All Food Losses', *Proceedings of the National Academy of Science [PNAS]* 115(15) (2018), 3804–3809, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713820115.

If one is tempted to think that bringing chickens into existence and killing them is justifed on the grounds that it benefts the chickens on net, one should note that: (i) due to the much greater ecological use and damage of producing chickens instead of plant-based alternatives, far more wild animals who would likely live much better lives are caused to exist by the consumption of plant-based alternatives, and (ii) the view that it is OK to support the practice of bringing beings into existence and killing them on the grounds that this benefts them on net entails that one would be justifed in supporting similar practices of bringing into existence human children for the purpose of torturing or killing them on the grounds that this would beneft them on net. More plausibly, coming into existence is not a morally important beneft but a precondition for morally important beneft and harm, and bringing someone into this state gives one a special obligation to ensure that she will not come to harm such that if one cannot discharge this obligation one should not bring her into existence. For related ideas about the ethics of causing beings to exist and the genesis of special obligations, see Melinda Roberts, 'The asymmetry: A solution', *Theoria*, 77 (2011), 333–367, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755- 2567.2011.01117.x; and Seana Shifrin, 'Wrongful life, procreative responsibility, and the signifcance of harm', *Legal Theory*, 5 (1999), 117–148. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s1352325299052015.

Producers make production decisions on the basis of the anticipated future prices of products (as well of course as costs of production including the opportunity costs of inputs), a large input to which are present prices. One way in which one's purchases can afect the price of a product and thus the likelihood of greater amounts of it being produced is explained by the theory of marginal pairs pioneered by Eugen Böhm-Bawerk, *The Positive Theory of Capital*, trans. by William Smart (1889, reprinted in New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1930), pp. 198– 213; and developed by Murray Rothbard, *Man, Economy, and the State* (Princeton Van Nostrand, 1962; reprinted in Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2001), pp. 106–126. According to this theory a product's equilibrium price is determined to be somewhere in the range between, on the high end: (1) the lesser value of (a) the greatest amount that the *last buyer* (who is willing to pay the least for the product among those who actually buy it) is willing to pay for it, and (b) the lowest amount that the *frst excluded seller* (who is willing to accept the least for the product among those who are unwilling to sell it) would have been willing to accept for it; and, on the low end, (2) the greater of (c) the lowest amount that the *last seller* (who is least willing to accept less for the product among those who actually sell it) would have out of *N* cases, one's purchase will not make the crucial diference between being part of a cohort that does not as opposed to does cause another *N* chickens to be destructively tortured and killed, but in 1 out of *N* cases one's act will make this crucial diference. So the expected harm of one's act of purchasing a chicken is (1/*N*)×*N*×*h* = *h*, where *h* is the harm done to a chicken by being tortured and killed together with the environmental cost of doing this to her. The act thus has the same expected harm, and is as morally important to avoid, as directly torturing and killing one chicken and causing the attendant ecological damage for the mere taste pleasure of eating her.18

Animal products are responsible for at least 14.5% of GHG emissions—more than all transportation exhaust—and eliminating them from our diets is the easiest and most efective single thing that most of us can do to reduce our carbon footprints.19 John Broome, Avram

been willing to accept for it, and (d) the greatest amount that the *frst excluded buyer* (who is willing to pay the most for the product among those who are unwilling to buy it) would have been willing to pay for it. If one would have been the last buyer had one bought the product, then one's abstention may (i) decrease the upper limit of the equilibrium price by causing the former frst excluded buyer to become the new last buyer who is willing to pay the least for the product, and thus also (ii) decrease the lower limit of the equilibrium price by causing the former second excluded buyer to become the new frst excluded buyer who is only willing to pay less for the product.

<sup>18</sup> The expected benefts are at most taste pleasure, since plant-based diets are at least as healthy (and in practice often healthier—see e.g. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 'Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian diets', *Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics*, 116 (2016), 1970–1980, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025)—and equally nutritious plant-based substitutes like legumes and grains are actually less expensive (cf. e.g. Mary Flynn and Andrew Schif, 'Economical healthy diets (2012) including lean animal protein costs more than using extra virgin olive oil', *Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition*, 10 (2015), 467–482, https://doi.org/10.1080/19320248.2015.1045675).

<sup>19</sup> See e.g. FAO UN, *Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock*; and Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, 'Diet, energy, and global warming', *Earth Interactions*, 10 (2006), 1–17, http://doi.org/10.1175/ei167.1. Eshel and Martin fnd that on average going vegan reduces one's carbon footprint by about 1.5 tonnes CO2 equivalent, about 50% more than switching from a standard car to a hybrid, which reduces it on average by about 1 tonne. 14.5% is actually an extremely conservative estimate of the contribution of animal agriculture to anthropogenic climate change, since among other things it uses a low estimate of the efects of methane emissions from livestock and underestimates the destructive impacts of animal agriculture on carbon sinks; see e.g. Julie Wolf, Ghassem Asrar and Tristram West, 'Revised methane emissions factors and spatially distributed annual carbon fuxes for global livestock', *Carbon Balance and Management*, 12 (2017), 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1186/ s13021-017-0084-y; Robert Goodland and Jef Anhang, 'Livestock and climate

Hiller, Christopher Morgan-Knapp, and Charles Goodman have argued convincingly that other instances of emitting GHGs are also triggering cases with many chances of triggering harmful outcomes. As Broome observes:

Greenhouse gas harms people in multifarious ways. Each of them is chancy to some extent. A particular storm will be harmful only if the water rises above the food defenses. Each increase in the amount of greenhouse gas in the air slightly increases the quantity of rain, but it will be a matter of chance whether the particular quantity of gas you emit this year will be enough to cause a food on any particular occasion. Your emission increases the likelihood of a food, but it might not actually cause any particular food… But during the centuries they are in the air they will have the chance of causing harm on innumerable occasions. It is extraordinarily unlikely that they will do no harm at all.20

Broome is discussing our lifetime emissions rather than, say, the emissions from a particular drive. But even if the emissions from a particular drive are likely to do no harm at all, they do, as Morgan-Knapp and Goodman argue, have a small chance of causing a huge amount of damage through dramatic 'butterfy efects' that cascade into harmful events like storms, foods, droughts, and heat-waves. Moreover, because climate science dictates that acts which emit GHGs are more likely to have these butterfy-efect-caused harms and no more likely to have butterfy-efect-caused benefts than their omission, these small chances of great harm are not counterbalanced by equally sized butterfy-efect-caused benefts and do not 'drop out' of the decision theoretic evaluation.21

change: What if the key actors in climate change are… cows, pigs and chickens?', *WorldWatch*, November/December 2009, https://awellfedworld.org/ wp-content/uploads/Livestock-Climate-Change-Anhang-Goodland.pdf; and Timothy Searchinger et al., 'Assessing the Efciency of Changes in Land Use for Mitigating Climate Change', *Nature* 564 (2018), 249–253, https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41586-018-0757-z.

<sup>20</sup> Broome (2012), p. 76.

<sup>21</sup> Unlike the completely random and non-directional risks of butterfy-efect-caused harms from any act, which are counterbalanced by equal chances of butterfy-efectcaused benefts and can thus be ignored—at least so long as there are no constraints on harming (see Howard Nye, 'Chaos and Constraints', in Dimensions of Moral Agency, ed. by David Boersema (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014), https://www.cambridgescholars.com/resources/pdfs/978-1-4438-6692-7-sample. pdf; Morgan-Knapp and Goodman (2015), pp. 183–286).

As Hiller observes, because an emission's chance of crossing thresholds and triggering harmful efects is proportional to its size, and we know of nothing else that makes any given emission more or less likely to do this, we can determine an emission's expected harm by multiplying the total expected harm of our collective emissions by the ratio of the emission's size to that of the collective amount.22 John Nolt employs this method to estimate the expected harm of the 1,840 tonnes of CO2 equivalent emitted by an average US citizen over the course of her life to be the death and/or severe sufering of 1–2 humans.23 Using the more conservative estimate of one life lost per 1,840 tonnes CO2 equivalent, Hiller estimates the expected harm of a 40 km Sunday joyride in a car, which emits 14.1kg of CO2 equivalent, as that of ruining someone's afternoon (or depriving her of 5.37 hours of life). While weighty enough to decisively outweigh the benefts of joyrides, and to strongly favour walking, cycling, and taking public transit over commuting by car, these expected harms can plausibly be outweighed by such sufciently serious considerations as the need to rush someone to the hospital.

A fuller account of the expected harms of our GHG emissions would take into account their efects on non-human animals. Brian Tomasik argues that, on a conservative estimate, there are at least about 14 wild land vertebrates and 1,400 wild marine vertebrates for every human.24 These individuals are clearly sentient,25 and likely to be at least as vulnerable to the harms of climate change as humans. So a fuller but still conservative estimate of the expected harms of the emissions from a Sunday joyride might also include a proportionally great harm to 14 land vertebrates and 1,400 marine vertebrates. The fgure of depriving the human of 5.37 hours of life is based on a full human life expectancy

<sup>22</sup> Hiller (2011), 357–358.

<sup>23</sup> Nolt (2011).

<sup>24</sup> Brian Tomasik, 'How many wild animals are there?', 2018, http://reducingsufering.org/how-many-wild-animals-are-there/.

<sup>25</sup> See e.g. David Edelman and Anil Seth, 'Animal consciousness: A synthetic approach', *Trends in Neurosciences*, 32 (2009), 476–484, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. tins.2009.05.008; Jaak Panksepp, *Afective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Jonathan Balcombe, *Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good* (London: Macmillan, 2006); and Victoria Braithwaite, *Do Fish Feel Pain?* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1086/656881.

of 80 years. So if, for instance, each of the wild animals had a life expectancy absent climate harm of three years, a proportional expected harm to each of them from the emission of 14.1 kg of CO2 equivalent might be the deprivation of 3/80×5.37×60 = 12.08 minutes of life.

Hiller's method can also be used to estimate the moral importance of reducing our air travel, for instance by substituting online video econferences, e-colloquia, and e-symposia for traditional academic gatherings that require fying. It has been estimated that up to 1/3 of the GHG emissions of an institution like the University of California, Santa Barbara are due to air travel, and that a single round-trip continental fight can emit a full tonne of CO2 equivalent, consuming one's entire carbon budget needed to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C.26 The University of Alberta's Kule Institute for Advanced Study estimates that, for each year that it has held its Around the World econference in the place of a comparable traditional conference, it has eliminated the need for 200 fights and prevented the emissions of 300 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.27 The expected beneft of doing this is 300/1,840 of the beneft of saving the full lives of a human, 14 land vertebrates, and 1,400 marine vertebrates, or omitting to end the lives of an elderly human with a life expectancy of about 13 years and 14 land together with 1,400 marine vertebrates with life expectancies of about 6 months. According to the expected consequences approach, the moral reasons to transition to an econference are thus comparable in strength to those in favor of omitting to end the lives of a 69-year-old Canadian, the 14 elderly dogs for whom he cares at his animal sanctuary, and the 1,400 elderly fsh living in the lake next to the sanctuary. Since it would be morally imperative not to kill these individuals just to enable us to have a conference, it is at least as clearly imperative for us to bear the much lesser cost—which may actually be a net beneft when we account for the savings of money and time, and the greater accessibility to scholars of lesser means around the world—of substituting an econference like Around the World for a comparable in-person conference.

<sup>26</sup> Ken Hiltner, 'A nearly carbon-neutral conference model', https://hiltner.english. ucsb.edu/index.php/ncnc-guide/.

<sup>27</sup> Trevor Chow-Fraser, Chelsea Miya and Oliver Rossier, *Moving Ideas without Moving People: How to Econference at the University of Alberta* (2018), p. 7, https:// aroundtheworld.ualberta.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/E-Conferencing-Toolkit.pdf.

## 3. Gesang's and Nefsky's Challenges: Problems of Indeterminacy

Although he is sympathetic to a similar account of the moral case for reducing our emissions, Gesang has recently argued that the expected consequences approach's account as described above does not straightforwardly succeed. His main contention is that there is a reasonably likely climate scenario in which it is not only unlikely but genuinely impossible for small emissions to cause morally signifcant efects.28 To make this plausible, Gesang draws an analogy to the sorites paradox for vague properties like that of being a heap, which is that two very plausible views about the property lead to the very implausible conclusion that nothing has the property:

<sup>28</sup> Gesang (2017), pp. 14–19. Gesang sketches another scenario in which the expected consequences approach would not (at least in the straightforward way suggested by Hiller, Morgan-Knapp, and Goodman) support reducing our emissions, namely one in which there is exactly one triggering threshold and we know with certainty (or at least sufcient probability that the expected harm of our emissions is less than the expected harm of the large amount of emissions crossing the threshold times the ratio of our emissions to the large amount of emissions) that the threshold has been crossed and the continued existence of mammals will be impossible, regardless of whether or not we emit any given quantity of GHGs (pp. 8–9). While Gesang thinks this scenario is very unlikely and does not rest much weight on his discussion of it, it is worth noting that (i) even if we knew with certainty that a threshold had been crossed that would soon make life for mammals impossible, it does not follow that our emissions can have no further morally relevant efects (e.g. for the mammals and others before life becomes impossible, and for the sentient non-mammals after life becomes impossible for the mammals), and (ii) even if we thought it was extremely likely that the threshold would be crossed regardless of whether we emit, the tiniest probability of our emissions infuencing this catastrophic event could easily, in virtue of the enormous size of the harm, be enough to make our emissions' expected harms outweigh their expected benefts. Compare this to the case of voting for president in Wyoming discussed above.

As Gesang notes, most theorists view vagueness and the consequent Sorites paradox as resulting from the semantic or mental feature that there is no precise fact of the matter about what falls under the concepts signifed by vague predicates like 'is a heap' and 'is bald'. His problem is thus to explain how there could be a metaphysical sorites paradox in the case of GHG emissions, in which it seems plausible that small additional GHG emissions can never make the diference between the absence or presence of a morally important efect like a food taking place—even though small amounts of GHGs add up to large amounts, and large amounts do make such diferences.

To make plausible the metaphysical tolerance thesis about emissions and causation, Gesang invokes Nefsky's discussion of a voltmeter with a 1 kv margin of error. If after a series of single nanovolt increases the voltmeter registers '1 kv', Nefsky claims that we cannot say that the last nanovolt increase made the diference between its doing so and not doing so because its registering '1 kV' when it does is 'likely due to mechanical or environmental factors and not to the addition of some single nanovolt'.29

However, without saying anything more about the mechanics of the device, this case appears to do nothing to support the claim that it is *impossible* for a single nanovolt to make a diference to whether the voltmeter registers '1 kv'. The most natural way for it to be likely that the last nanovolt failed to make the diference is for it to be likely that the voltmeter would have registered '1 kv' even if one had not added this nanovolt, since the other factors would have made it register '1 kv' anyway. But this certainly does not rule out there being some chance—perhaps quite small—that the single nanovolt increase did make the diference because the other factors would not have made the voltmeter register '1 kv' if one had not added the nanovolt.30 The analogy to the climate case is thus simply what proponents of the expected consequences approach have been saying all along: for any climate harm, it is most likely that it will happen (or not) absent one's emission, but there is a small chance that one's emission will make the crucial diference and thus cause enormous harm.

<sup>29</sup> Nefsky (2012), p. 391.

<sup>30</sup> Nefsky actually acknowledges exactly this point on pp. 392–394 (ibid.).

But there could be a more interesting reason why we could not truly say that the last nanovolt made the diference to the voltmeter's registering '1 kv'. Suppose that the voltmeter operates in an objectively chancy or metaphysically indeterministic way, so that, given the entire history of the world at time *t*, the laws of nature fail to dictate that the voltmeter must be in some single state at *t*+1. Given this complete history, it is both possible for it to register '1 kv' and possible for it not to do so. As such, there will be no determinate fact of the matter about what would happen if one were to add or omit to add any given nanovolt. In some of the closest possible worlds in which one omits to add the nanovolt the voltmeter does not register '1 kv', but in others of these closest worlds the voltmeter does register '1 kv'. So for any single nanovolt increase followed by the voltmeter's registering '1 kv', it is not determinately true that this would not have happened had one not added the nanovolt—it might not have happened but it might still have happened.

Gesang's mention of quantum theory, the Copenhagen interpretation, and objective chances also support his being most charitably understood as proposing that the climate system may exhibit the foregoing sort of metaphysical indeterminacy.31 On this view, for small amounts of GHGs, there is simply no determinate fact of the matter about what would

<sup>31</sup> Gesang (2017), p. 18. It is admittedly confusing that Gesang additionally mentions 'emergence theory', the content and relevance of which is unclear, and 'chaos theory', which Morgan-Knapp and Goodman convincingly argue is a plausible way to understand how small GHG emissions can determinately cause morally important efects—since it involves the climate system exhibiting sensitive dependence on initial conditions which gives rise to the above discussed butterfy efects by which events like small emissions can cascade into dramatic efects like foods and serious harms. It is also confusing that Gesang describes the voltmeter and climate scenarios as ones where the nanovolts and small GHG emissions determinately do not make any diference, as opposed to their simply being such that they do not determinately make a diference, because it is indeterminate whether they make a diference. But it seems to me that (i) there is no way to interpret Gesang as getting at a distinct convincing argument by invoking 'emergence' or 'chaos theory', and (ii) my interpretation of Gesang as getting at the above described kind of indeterminacy is the only way to interpret his remarks about the voltmeter and climate system in a way that (a) has him avoid simply being confused about the possibility of overdetermination not precluding the possibility of determinate diference making and the case being precisely the sort that Morgan-Knapp and Goodman were discussing, and (b) makes sense of his invocation of quantum theory and objective chances, which make perfect sense on an indeterministic interpretation of his remarks.

happen if we emit them. In some of the closest possible worlds in which we emit them, climate harms that otherwise might not occur do occur, while in others they do not occur. Our inability to be certain about what would happen stems not only from our ignorance of the exact details of the extremely complex climate system, but also from some of these details being undetermined by the laws of nature.

Gesang's objection to the expected consequences approach's account of the moral case for reducing our emissions is thus most charitably understood as turning upon the possibility of its being metaphysically indeterminate whether our acts will have certain outcomes. Nefsky ofers a more general objection to the adequacy of the expected consequences approach that I think also turns upon a kind of indeterminacy, but indeterminacy in the value of the outcomes of our acts rather than whether our acts will cause them. Nefsky's criticism focuses on cases in which none of the possible outcomes of our acts seem to make a morally relevant diference. A classic example is Parft's case of

*The Harmless Torturers*. Each of 1,000 torturers presses a button that increases by a tiny amount the electric current being fed to 1,000 victims. When none of the buttons are pressed the victims feel fne, but after each torturer has pressed her button each victim is being shocked by a massive current that causes her excruciating pain. Yet none of the victims seem to notice the additional electrical current from any one torturer's pressing her button.32

Here, unlike in the cases discussed earlier, there do not seem to be any sharp thresholds that an additional button-pressing can cross to trigger a morally important outcome of pain or determinately worse pain to any victim. It thus seems that each torturer can be absolutely certain that because her pressing her button will not be noticed by any of the victims, it has no chance of making a morally relevant diference.

Kagan, Morgan-Knapp, and Goodman suggest that some cases of doing collective harm by polluting and causing climate change are *apparently imperceptible diference cases* of this kind.33 But even if the most important environmental collective action problems are clear triggering

<sup>32</sup> Parft (1984), p. 80.

<sup>33</sup> Kagan (2011), p. 129; Morgan-Knapp and Goodman (2015), p. 187.

cases, apparently imperceptible diference cases are still indirectly relevant to the expected consequences approach to explaining our moral reasons to reduce our ecological footprints. These cases challenge the general adequacy of the expected consequences approach, and it would seem problematic to accept this approach to our moral reasons in clear triggering cases but then to endorse a diferent explanation of our reasons in apparently imperceptible diference cases. Such a hybrid approach would among other things risk either (1) over-generating reasons in the clear triggering cases due to the reasons given by expected consequences combining with the other reasons operative in the apparently imperceptible diference cases, or (2) being implausibly ad hoc due to the lack of principled explanation as to why the nonexpected-consequence-based reasons are present in the apparently imperceptible diference cases but not the clear triggering cases.

Kagan and several other proponents of the expected consequences approach have ofered versions of the following 'reports-based argument' that apparently imperceptible diference cases are only apparent, and must actually involve sharp thresholds the crossing of which trigger determinately morally relevant diferences. Suppose that the torturers press their buttons one after the other, and you ask a victim if she feels worse after each button-pressing. Because at the beginning she feels fne and at the end she feels awful, there must be some buttonpressings after which she reports feeling worse. These button-pressings must have made a determinate diference to the badness of her pain.34

But as Nefsky observes, if *S*<sup>0</sup> ,…,*S*1,000 are the experiential states of a victim caused by 0 through 1,000 units of current afecting her, it seems entirely possible that she could report feeling worse in, say, *S*21 without *S*21 feeling determinately worse than *S*20. Perhaps there was no clear point at which she noticed her states feeling determinately worse than *S*0 , but this was somewhere around *S*15-*S*25, and it was somewhat random at which of these states she reported feeling worse to catch up to the fact that she seems to feel worse than she did in *S*<sup>0</sup> . Kagan actually concedes

<sup>34</sup> Frank Arntzenius and David McCarthy, 'Self-torture and group benefcence', *Erkenntnis*, 47 (1997), 129–144 (pp. 132–135) https://doi. org/10.1023/a:1005376607563; Alastair Norcross, 'Comparing harms: Headaches and human lives', *Philosophy and Public Afairs*, 26 (1997), 135–167 (pp. 141–144), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1997.tb00079.x; Kagan (2011), pp. 131–134; and Morgan-Knapp and Goodman (2015), pp. 186–190.

that our beliefs and reports about whether two very similar experiences were exactly the same are fallible indicators of whether they were.

Moreover, as Nefsky argues, proponents of the reports-based argument are too quick to dismiss the possibility of vague boundaries between which states in the series feel worse.35 It might well be that for each pair of adjacent states *Si* and *Si*+1, there is no determinate fact of the matter about whether *Si*+1 feels worse to the victim than *Si* . As Parft has argued in another context, it does not seem that the degrees of badness of diferent painful experiences are precisely comparable. Consider a comparison between an intense pain that lasts for an hour and a much less intense pain that lasts longer. For sufciently short durations like an hour and a minute, the less intense pain will be determinately less bad than the intense pain, and for sufciently long durations like three years the less intense pain will be determinately worse. But it seems very implausible that there is some magic number of seconds or milliseconds of the less intense pain that makes it precisely as bad as the intense pain, such that one second or millisecond less would make it determinately less bad than the intense pain, and one second or millisecond more would make it determinately worse than the intense pain.36

### 4. Indeterminacy and Supervaluationist Decision Principles

I have thus argued that Gesang's and Nefsky's challenges to the expected consequences approach hinge upon indeterminacy. Gesang has shown at most that there may be no determinate fact of the matter about whether our emissions will cause certain outcomes, while Nefsky has shown that there may be no determinate fact of the matter about whether certain of the outcomes caused by our acts are worse than their alternatives. But the expected consequences approach has been extended to these kinds of cases of indeterminacy. In this section I show how these extensions can be used to defend the approach against Gesang's and Nefsky's challenges.

<sup>35</sup> Nefsky (2012), pp. 380–387; Kagan (2011), p. 136.

<sup>36</sup> Derek Parft, *On What Matters*, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 132, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199572809.001.0001.

If Gesang is correct that there is no fact of the matter about what would happen if we were to emit small amounts of GHGs (and we know this), then proponents of the expected consequences approach like Morgan-Knapp and Goodman are mistaken in claiming that there is a small *epistemic probability*—or degree of expectation we should have given our evidence—that such emissions will determinately trigger signifcant climate harms. But other proponents of the expected consequences approach have discussed how to apply it to cases in which it is indeterminate what the consequences of our acts will be. As Bykvist observes, if indeterministic processes yield precise objective chances of the outcomes that might obtain if we act in various ways,37 we should follow

**The Indeterministic Consequences Extension**: apply the expected consequences approach using the objective chances as the probabilities of the outcomes to determine the (fact-relative) moral case for and against the diferent acts.38

The rationale here seems exactly the same as that in favour of applying the expected consequences approach to cases where one's acts will have determinate but epistemically uncertain efects using the epistemic probabilities of those efects. When one cannot know with certainty

<sup>37</sup> Where the objective chance of an outcome obtaining if an act is performed is something like the propensity of the act to lead to the outcome, or the proportion of the closest possible worlds in which the act is performed in which the outcome obtains. Such precise objective chances seem to be involved in the laws of nature according for instance to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics on which they determine such things as that a given electron has a 1/2 chance of being spin-up and a 1/2 chance of being spin-down.

<sup>38</sup> Bykvist (2003), p. 30, n. 7; see also Douglas Portmore, *Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Morality Meets Rationality* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 56, n. 1, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0953820812000490. The fact-relative moral case for and against one's alternative acts is the extent to which the facts of one's circumstances count in favour of and against performing them, regardless of one's evidence about these facts (cf. Parft (2011), pp. 150–162). The evidence-relative moral case is the moral case given one's evidence, which is typically at issue in discussions of the expected consequences approach. In a deterministic world the fact-relative moral case for and against an act is constituted by the benefts and harms it will actually bring about, regardless of one's evidence about this. But in an indeterministic world there are no determinate facts of the matter about what it will bring about: hence in such a world Bykvist suggests that we should use the expected consequences approach to determine what is the fact- and not simply the evidence-relative moral case for and against the act.

what would happen if one were to perform an act, in order to give appropriate weight to the ethical relevance of both

one should weigh against and in favour of the act i in proportion to ii. It does not matter to the plausibility of this idea whether the lack of certainty and probabilities are due to one's ignorance of facts or the indeterministic structure of the world.

Even if we assume that our emissions do have precise objective chances of causing various climate harms, we presumably do not know exactly what these chances are. Given our evidence, all we seem to know is that an emission's objective chances of causing harms are proportional to its size, and we know of nothing else that increases or decreases these objective chances. As such, it seems that we should still follow Hiller and determine a given emission's epistemically expected harm by multiplying the total expected harms of our collective emissions by the ratio of the given emission to the collective amount. All Gesang's point about metaphysical indeterminacy does is entail that the epistemic probabilities of harm are generated not only by our ignorance of facts but also by the chancy nature of the world.

What, however, if Gesang's scenario of a metaphysically indeterministic climate system is one in which there are no precise objective chances of various outcomes occurring if various acts are performed? In such a scenario, while it may be determinate that the objective chance of a climate harm given some complete world history is greater than 0.5 and less than 0.9, there may simply be no fact of the matter about whether it is, say, 0.6531, 0.6527, or many other values between 0.5 and 0.9. While this cannot be handled by the indeterministic consequences extension alone, it can be handled by a natural and conservative extension of the expected consequences approach to cases of imprecise probabilities.

As Rinard has argued, there is a compelling way to motivate such an extension to cases in which the epistemic probabilities of various outcomes are imprecise. According to the general *supervaluationist*  *approach* to vagueness, for a claim with a vague predicate (such as 'Singer is bald') to be determinately true is for it to be true under every *admissible precisifcation*—or way of making the vague predicate precise (e.g. 'someone with less than exactly 50% of typical hair-distribution is bald') consistent with what is otherwise determinately true and false about the predicate (e.g. 'someone with literally no hair is bald' and 'it is not the case that someone with a full typical hair-distribution is bald').39 If probabilities are imprecise, then claims about the probabilities of certain harms and benefts occurring if one performed certain acts seem to be clear instances of claims involving vague predicates. Thus, Rinard observes, the supervaluationist approach to vagueness supports

**The Supervaluationist Principle for Probabilities**: if probabilities are imprecise, but the expected harms of an act outweigh its expected benefts on every admissible precisifcation of the probabilities, then one determinately should not perform the act.

Suppose that, for every way of making precise the probabilities of the harms and benefts that might obtain if one were to perform an act, which is consistent with what one knows, the expected harms outweigh the expected benefts. Then the ethical signifcance of the act's possible harms and their range of admissible likelihoods of occurring seems to unequivocally outweigh that of its possible benefts and their range of admissible likelihoods of occurring.40 Note, moreover, that it does not matter to the plausibility of this rationale whether the imprecision of

<sup>39</sup> Brian Weatherson, 'The problem of the many', in *The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*, ed. by Edward Zalta (2014), §7.3, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2016/entries/problem-of-many/.

<sup>40</sup> Rinard (2015), pp. 2–5. See also James Joyce, 'A defense of imprecise credences in inference and decision making', *Philosophical Perspectives*, 24 (2010), 281–323 (p. 311), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00194.x. As Joyce observes, what I am calling the supervaluationist principle for probabilities is a point of agreement among all proposed decision principles for the context of imprecise probabilities. This point of agreement is all I am relying upon in my argument. Rinard is distinctive in arguing that the general supervaluationist rationale supports not only the supervaluationist principle for probabilities but the further conclusion that, if expected consequences are diferent under diferent admissible precisifcations of probabilities, then there is no determinate fact of the matter about what one should do. While I am sympathetic to this stronger view, my argument in no way depends upon it.

the probabilities is due simply to one's ignorance of facts that would justify having precise expectations, or to the world having an imprecise objectively chancy structure.

It seems, then, that if even if Gesang were right that a plausible climate scenario involves our emissions having objectively chancy efects without precise chances, we can use the supervaluationist principle for probabilities to apply the expected consequences approach. If we knew all there was to know about an act's objective chances of causing climate harms, we could apply the principle straightforwardly. For instance, if we knew that a given joyride had a propensity between one in one million and one in ten million of causing a food that will infict expected harm equal to the loss of 100 lives of 80 years, because the beneft to us is trivial in comparison to someone's losing anything between 70 and 7 days of life, the moral case against the joyride is determinately decisive.

Of course, if we assume any remotely realistic such scenario, we do not know all there is to know about our acts' imprecise objective chances of causing various climate harms. Given our evidence, all we seem to know is that an emission's admissible ranges of chances of causing harms are proportional to its size, and we know of nothing else that increases or decreases these ranges of objective chances. So it seems that, once again, we should use Hiller's method of determining an emission's epistemically expected harm by multiplying the total expected harms of our collective emissions by the ratio of the emission's size to that of the collective amount. The epistemic probabilities are generated not only by our ignorance of facts but by imprecise objective chances. But the epistemic probabilities of harm are exactly what they would be if they were, as Hiller, Morgan-Knapp, and Goodman suggest, due entirely to ignorance of facts.

Thus, even if Gesang is correct that our emissions may have imprecise objective chances of causing harm, modest extensions of the expected consequences approach entail that it is just as important to reduce our emissions as it would be if their efects were fully deterministic.

Rinard develops the supervaluationist approach to decision making in the context of indeterminate probabilities that certain outcomes will occur if we perform certain acts. But exactly parallel reasoning supports a similar approach to decision making in cases where the value of the outcomes of our acts is indeterminate. As Nefsky suggests, apparently imperceptible diference cases such as that of Parft's Harmless Torturers seem to be cases of this kind. Pressing a button that marginally increases the amount of current fowing to the 1,000 victims will, for at least some ways the other torturers might act, neither determinately worsen the pain of any victims nor determinately leave them no worse of than they otherwise would have been.

Just as the supervaluationist approach to vagueness supports the supervaluationist principle for probabilities, it also supports

**The Supervaluationist Principle for Values**: if the degrees of harm or beneft of some possible outcomes of our acts are imprecise, but the expected harms of an act outweigh its expected benefts on every admissible precisifcation of these degrees of harm or beneft, then one determinately should not perform the act.

Much as above, suppose that, for every way of making precise the degrees of harm or beneft of the possible outcomes of an act that are consistent with what we know, its expected harms outweigh its expected benefts. Then the ethical signifcance of the range of the act's admissible degrees of harm and their probabilities of occurring seems to unequivocally outweigh that of the range of the act's admissible degrees of beneft and their probabilities of occurring.

To apply this to the Harmless Torturers case, again let *S*<sup>0</sup> ,…,*S*1,000 be the experiential states of a victim caused by 0 through 1,000 units of current. For at least some *x*, it is not determinate whether *Sx*+1 is worse than *Sx* , but *S*1,000 is determinately much worse than *S*<sup>0</sup> . What we must do is consider the set of all admissible precisifcations or ways of assigning harm or disvalue to *S*<sup>1</sup> through *S*1,000 consistent with *S*1,000 being much worse than *S*<sup>0</sup> . Each such precisifcation distributes the diference in harm between *S*1,000 and *S*<sup>0</sup> , *H*(*S*1,000) – *H*(*S*<sup>0</sup> ), among the various states. So on each admissible precisifcation there will be *n* (≤ 1,000) states with amounts of additional harm *h*<sup>1</sup> ,….,*hn* of *H*(*S*1,000) – *H*(*S*<sup>0</sup> ), such that *h*<sup>1</sup> +…+ *hn* = *H*(*S*1,000) – *H*(*S*<sup>0</sup> ). By pressing one's button one has an equal chance of causing any of *S*<sup>1</sup> through *S*1,000, and the amount of additional harm of any state not assigned an amount of additional harm by an admissible precisifcation is zero. So on each admissible precisifcation, one's expected harm from pressing one's button will

#### *28 Right Research*

be (1/1,000)×*h*<sup>1</sup> +…+ (1/1,000)×*hn* = (*h*<sup>1</sup> +…+ *hn* )/1000 = (*H*(*S*1,000) – *H*(*S*<sup>0</sup> )) / 1,000, which is equivalent to that of a 1/1,000 chance of causing the full diference in harm between *S*1,000 and *S*<sup>0</sup> . Since one is doing this to 1,000 victims, the expected harm one is causing to all of them is equal to that of taking a single victim from *S*<sup>0</sup> to *S*1,000 with certainty.

But this is the exact same expected harm from pushing the button that we would get if we followed the advocates of the reports-based argument who insist that it cannot be vague whether certain states feel worse than others in apparently imperceptible diference cases. These authors simply insist that, for each victim there is some single actual distribution of the diference in harm between *S*1,000 and *S*<sup>0</sup> among the states *S*<sup>1</sup> through *S*1,000, *ĥ*<sup>1</sup> ,…., *ĥ<sup>n</sup>* , such that *ĥ*<sup>1</sup> +….+ *ĥ n* = *H*(*S*1,000) – *H*(*S*<sup>0</sup> ) (which they think corresponds in some way to what she would report if she were asked).

Thus, even if (as I suspect) Nefsky is correct that there are vague boundaries among the harms caused to the victims in states *S*<sup>1</sup> through *S*1,000, on every admissible precisifcation of the harms, the expected harms to the victims will be identical to what they would be if there were no such vague boundaries. So, given the supervaluationist principle for values, this means that the moral case against pressing the button will be decisive when the diferences in harm are vague just in case it would also be decisive if these diferences were not vague. So once again, even if there is indeterminacy where advocates of the expected consequences approach have thought that there is determinacy, our modest extension of the expected consequences approach enables it to yield the exact same results that it would if there was actually determinacy.

#### 5. Conclusion

The expected consequences approach provides a clear explanation of why we should take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints.  As Hiller, Broome, Morgan-Knapp, and Goodman have argued, emissions far less than the sum-total of all anthropogenic GHGs have small chances of crossing thresholds and causing the more likely butterfy efects of the chaotic climate system that result in great harm. Because an emission's chance of having these efects is proportional to its size, and we know of nothing else that makes any given emission more or less likely to have them, we can determine an emission's expected harms by multiplying the total expected harm of our collective emissions by the ratio of the emission's size to that of the collective amount.

Following Nolt, we can use this method to estimate the expected beneft of various political and private acts of reducing our destructive impacts on the environment. Doing so, we can see that policies like a Green New Deal in the US could reduce the emissions of CO2 equivalent by hundreds of billions of tonnes, which can be expected to save hundreds of millions of lives. As such, we must vote and campaign for policies like the Green New Deal because, although our votes and those of others we may convince are very likely to make no diference to the enactment of such policies, they have a small chance of winning the election and making all the diference. This makes the expected beneft of an average vote in such an election equivalent to that of saving between 5 and 10 full human lives, and that of even a vote in an extremely uncompetitive state equivalent to extending someone's life by almost a year, which decisively outweighs the costs to us of voting and canvassing.

This applies just as much to actions within our personal as our political lives. A single choice of purchasing plant-based alternatives rather than a chicken's corpse has a small chance of omitting to cause an enormous number of additional chickens to be tortured and killed in a way that would involve much greater ecological destruction than the production of plant-based alternatives. This makes the expected beneft of a single choice of purchasing plant-based alternatives rather than a chicken corpse equivalent to that of omitting to torture and kill one chicken and omitting the ecological damage of torturing and killing her, which decisively outweighs the relatively trivial cost of forgoing familiar taste e-pleasures from eating her corpse. By going vegan one can be expected each year to directly prevent the torture and killing of somewhere between at least 232 and 443 vertebrate animals, together with the benefts to wild animals and other humans of using up to 2.83 fewer acres or only 1/18 as much land, and emitting at least 1.5 fewer tonnes of CO2 equivalent.41 We can also prevent a great deal of

<sup>41</sup> Oppenlander (2013); Harish Sethu, 'How many animals does a vegetarian save?', *Counting Animals* (February 6, 2012), http://www.countinganimals.com/ how-many-animals-does-a-vegetarian-save/.

expected harm by reducing our fying and using video technology to hold our academic meetings online without the need to travel. A single econference like Around the World can be expected to save 300 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, which prevents an expected harm comparable to that of killing a 69-year-old Canadian, his 14 elderly dogs and the 1,400 elderly fsh in a nearby pond.

The adequacy of this account has been challenged by Gesang's contention that it may be not only unlikely but genuinely impossible for sufciently small emissions to make a morally relevant diference, and Nefsky's concern that the expected consequences approach cannot explain why we should avoid contributing to collective harm in cases like the Harmless Torturers where the possible outcomes of our acts do not seem determinately worse for anyone.

In response I have argued that Gesang has shown at most that, if the laws of nature are not deterministic, there may be no determinate fact of the matter about what would happen if we emit some quantity of GHGs. But, as I have explained, the expected consequences approach has already been extended to such cases of indeterminism. If indeterministic outcomes occur with precise objective chances, the general idea of the expected consequences approach supports using those objective chances—or our best estimates of them—in our calculations of expected consequences. If the objective chances are not precise, then we should follow the supervaluationist approach that has already been developed for imprecise epistemic probabilities, and conclude that, if on every admissible precisifcation of the probabilities the expected harm of emitting outweighs its expected benefts, then we should not emit. From our evidential perspective we do not actually know the precise or imprecise objective chances of any given emission making any given diference—all we seem to know is that the chance or range of chances of the emission causing harms is proportional to its size. So we should still determine an emission's epistemically expected harm by multiplying the expected harm of our collective emissions by the ratio of the emission's size to that of the collective amount. This means that even if Gesang is correct that our emissions may have imprecise objective chances of causing harm, the expected consequences approach entails that it is just as important to reduce them as it would be if their efects were fully deterministic.

Exactly similar reasoning can be used to respond to Nefsky's concern that the outcomes of our acts in cases like the Harmless Torturers may not be determinately worse for the victims. The supervaluationist approach here supports the conclusion that, if it is vague which mental states of the victims are worse for them than others, then we should not perform the act if its expected harms outweigh its expected benefts on every admissible precisifcation of the harms to the victims. But every admissible precisifcation must distribute the full diference between no one contributing to the victims' harm and everyone contributing to it among the various amounts of positive contribution, each of which our contribution has an equal chance of causing. So on every admissible precisifcation, the expected harm is equal to the total diference in harm divided by the number of states of positive contribution. But this is exactly what the expected harm would be if there were one actual precise distribution of the harm among the states of positive contribution. So, if there is indeterminacy in the value of the outcomes of our acts—just as if there is indeterminacy in the probabilities of certain outcomes of our acts occurring—the expected consequences approach entails that it is just as important to omit contributing to the victims' harm as it would be if there was no such indeterminacy.

I therefore conclude that the expected consequences approach can surmount the challenges of indeterminacy posed by Gesang and Nefsky, and that it provides a fully adequate account of our powerful moral reasons to take both political and personal action to reduce our ecological footprints.

#### Bibliography

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 'Position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics: Vegetarian diets', *Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics*, 116 (2016), 1970–1980, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2016.09.025

Arntzenius, Frank, and David McCarthy, 'Self-torture and group beneficence', *Erkenntnis*, 47 (1997), 129–144, https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1005376607563

Balcombe, Jonathan, *Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good* (London: Macmillan, 2006).

# 2. Sustainability in the Anthropocene:

From Forests to the Globe

*Petra Dolata*

Various meanings of sustainability emerged at specifc historical times shaped by diferent prevailing energy systems. Even though sustainability in the Anthropocene always included views that saw nature as resource and hence linked sustainable practices to proft-making (yield), there are qualitative diferences in the very meaning of sustainability and the ways it related to eighteenthcentury forestry practices, nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservation eforts and twentieth-century environmental activism and global development goals. Some of these meanings may have been building on each other, others developed in opposition to previous understandings of sustainability. There is no straightforward, linear evolution of the term and it may be misleading to relate past meanings teleologically to today's defnitions as this may overshadow diferent meanings that were prominent at diferent times in history. A comparison over time and throughout the Anthropocene shows that the concept needs to be understood within its specifc historical context.

The Anthropocene1 has become an accepted term to denote the multiple ways that humans have impacted the earth system on a scale that justifes

<sup>1</sup> Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, 'The Anthropocene', *IGBP Global Change Newsletter*, 41 (2000), 17–18; Paul J. Crutzen, 'Geology of mankind', *Nature*,

introducing a new geological epoch refecting this enormous human geophysical footprint. As climate change poses the most daunting challenge to today's high-energy, polluting and wasteful societies, sustainability is an important 'buzzword'2 that is discussed within the Anthropocene. Yet, sustainability has pervaded language in ways that rendered the concept almost meaningless. In corporate talk it is used to signal good business practice which somehow respects nature, while marketing strategies include the attribute 'sustainable' to advertise green products. Sustainability has turned into a normative label that indicates consideration of the environment and is used to 'greenwash'3 corporate approaches and products. Indeed, it has come a long way since its frst alleged appearance as a concept to guide forestry practices in the German publication of Hans Carl von Carlowitz in 1713.4 Situated at the very onset of the Anthropocene in the eighteenth century, this early modern publication addressed the sustainable use of forests in very localized circumstances of silver mining and metallurgical smelting, which relied on frewood. Over the next couple of centuries, these practices were refned and applied as sustainable forestry management plans creating 'engineered forests'.5 They informed North American debates on conservation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and even found their way into regulatory practices in the oil and gas industry in Texas and Oklahoma in the frst half of the twentieth century. Increasing pressure on eco and earth systems after 1945 due to accelerated economic growth, fossil fuel use and urbanization,6 led to a renewed discussion of sustainability in the late 1960s and 1970s, when various publications

<sup>415.6867 (2002), 23,</sup> https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a; Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'The climate of history: Four theses', *Critical Inquiry*, 35 (2009), 197–222, https://doi. org/10.1086/596640.

<sup>2</sup> Jeremy L. Caradonna, *Sustainability: A History* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 137.

<sup>3</sup> Ulrich Grober, *Sustainability: A Cultural History*, trans. by Ray Cunningham (Totnes: Green Books, 2012), p. 18.

<sup>4</sup> Hans Carl von Carlowitz, *Sylvicultura Oeconomica, oder Haußwirtschaftliche Nachricht und Naturgemäße Anweisung zur Wilden Baum-Zucht* (Leipzig: Braun, 1713).

<sup>5</sup> Paul Warde, *The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny, C. 1500–1870* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 314, https://doi.org/10.1017/<PHONE_NUMBER>767.

<sup>6</sup> J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, *The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945* (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674970731.

warned of the limits of global growth, overexploitation of resources and population increases.7 Following these decades, in which sustainability was used to address global ecological challenges and describe practices beyond forestry management, the 1980s saw the introduction of 'sustainable development', popularized through the 1987 Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, better known as the Brundtland Report.8 Originally pioneered as a scientifc concept to deal with a visible crisis (wood shortages in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), sustainability was now a term used to address the combined global challenges of environmental degradation, mainly resulting from exponential fossil fuel use, and poverty caused by lack of development in parts of the world. Sustainability bridges the early phase of the Anthropocene, in which fuels of the organic regime9 —wood—were foundational to life,10 with the current phase of accelerated use of fuels of the mineral regime—petroleum—which is equally foundational to today's societies, fttingly described by some observers as petrocultures.11

The meanings of sustainability emerged at specifc historical times shaped by diferent prevailing energy systems. As will be argued below, even though sustainability in the Anthropocene always included views that saw nature as resource and hence linked sustainable practices to

<sup>7</sup> Rachel Carson, *Silent Spring* (Boston: Houghton Mifin, 1962); Paul Ehrlich, *The Population Bomb* (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); Garrett Hardin, 'The tragedy of the commons', *Science*, 162 (1968): 1243–1248, https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.162.3859.1243; Dennis Meadows et al., *The Limits to Growth* (New York: Universe Books, 1972), https://doi.org/10.1349/ddlp.1; E. F. Schumacher, *Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered* (London: Blond & Briggs, 1973).

<sup>8</sup> United Nations, *Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development* (New York: United Nations, 1987), https://sustainabledevelopment. un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf.

<sup>9</sup> For the concept of organic and mineral energy regimes see E. A. Wrigley, *Energy and the English Industrial Revolution* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511779619.

<sup>10</sup> Ulrich Grober, 'Eternal forest, sustainable use: The making of the term 'Nachhaltig' in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century german forestry', in *Routledge Handbook of the History of Sustainability*, ed. by Jeremy L. Caradonna (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 96–105, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315543017-7.

<sup>11</sup> Petrocultures Research Group, *After Oil* (Edmonton: University of Alberta, Department of English and Film Studies, 2016); Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson and Imre Szeman, eds., *Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture* (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017); Imre Szeman, *On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy* (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019).

proft-making (yield), there are qualitative diferences in the very meaning of sustainability and the ways it related to eighteenth-century forestry practices, nineteenth- and twentieth-century conservation eforts and twentieth-century environmental activism and global development goals. Some of these meanings may have been building on each other, others developed in opposition to previous understandings of sustainability. There is no straightforward, linear evolution of the term and it may be misleading to relate past meanings teleologically to today's defnitions as this may overshadow diferent meanings that were prominent at diferent times in history. In addition to the diverse historical time periods in which they were coined, the various incarnations of sustainability (sustained yield, conservation, environmentalism, sustainable development) difer in the scales of the related economic activities (forests, oil felds, the global environment and economy) and the increasing complexity of the energy systems in which these occurred. Wood and oil are not interchangeable energy resources; the latter is a subterranean fuel not limited by the land space demands of the former.12 A comparison over time and throughout the Anthropocene shows that the concept needs to be understood within its specifc historical context. In light of current discussions on the Anthropocene and the 'Great Acceleration'13 after 1945, sustainability needs to be historicized even further in order to understand its historically contingent meaning which is closely related to scale and type of energy system.14 It is equally imperative to acknowledge the chronology of these conceptualizations, since once certain meanings have become accepted and ubiquitous, it is very difcult to go back to earlier, contrasting defnitions and consider them on their own terms. Sustainability is an idea, a discourse; it 'was invented, not discovered'.15 It tells us a lot more about how societies thought about the relationship between nature and humankind. At the same time, all these specifc historical meanings of sustainability in the Anthropocene, which are situated within stories of industrialization and increasing exploitation of resources, share a connection to a political economy that is characterized by treating nature as resource

<sup>12</sup> Vaclav Smil, *Energy Transitions: History, Requirements, Prospects* (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010).

<sup>13</sup> McNeill and Engelke (2014).

<sup>14</sup> For general histories of the term see Caradonna (2014); Grober (2012).

<sup>15</sup> Warde (2018), p. 334, see also pp. 356–357.

and proposing monetary exploitation. Throughout the duration of the Anthropocene, sustainability is often linked to ideas of growth, progress and proft reinforcing a market-driven capitalist economy. And even those conceptualizations that call for more ecological and anti-consumerist attitudes and propose alternative political economies do so to contest the dominant embedding of sustainability into capitalist systems and to resist prevailing growth paradigms and economic understandings of natural resources.

#### Sustained Use/Yield

In an attempt to establish a clear lineage to earlier concepts of sustainability, scholars point to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in particular to Hans Carl von Carlowitz, who is considered the father of the idea of sustainability.16 In his 1713 publication *Sylvicultura Oeconomica, oder Haußwirtschaftliche Nachricht und Naturgemäße Anweisung zur Wilden Baum-Zucht* (*Sylvicultura oeconomica or Economic Report and Instruction on the Cultivation of Wild Trees according to Nature*), von Carlowitz, a mining administrator and cameralist in Freiberg, Electorate of Saxony, addressed the unsustainable use of forest resources. He warned the Saxon ruler of a severe economic crisis in the region if deforestation were to continue. Originally proposed to ensure the supply of timber for silver mining and smelting purposes, his concept of sustainability relied on the idea to limit cutting timber in forests to a rate that allowed for the equal regrowth of this renewable resource. His proposal to manage the use of forests in order to sustain the commercial viability of silver mines in Saxony is seen as an early version of sustainable development as spelled out by the 1987 Brundtland Commission. Already in the seventeenth century, thinkers like Jean-Baptiste Colbert in France, John Evelyn in England and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands philosophized about the relationship between nature and economic activity to address overexploitation of forests.17

<sup>16</sup> Grober acknowledges the instrumental role of von Carlowitz but also dates the idea of sustainability back much earlier and calls it 'our primordial cultural heritage' (2012, p. 15).

<sup>17</sup> Ibid.; Roman Sandgruber, 'Korreferat zu Matthias Asche', in *Wirtschaft und Umwelt vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart Auf dem Weg zu Nachhaltigkeit?*, ed. by Günther Schulz and Reinhold Reith (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2015), pp. 77–87.

Like von Carlowitz they developed new ways to manage resources creating what has later become known as sustained yield forestry. The early discussions of unsustainable practices were in response to fear of severe regional wood supply shortages due to mining activities in Europe. Trees were foundational to life in early modern Europe, in fact they were as signifcant as today's fossil fuels are for industrialized societies and any crises in the provision of wood impacted the economic well-being of entire societies.18 When von Carlowitz criticized the use of the 'insatiable lumber ax' (unersättliche Holtz-Axt) and warned of deforestation due to human behaviour, he was describing a local crisis that was visible to everyone.19 The lack of infrastructure to transport timber long ways and the high local demand for this organic renewable energy resource in (silver) mining areas led to overexploitation and a wood crisis seemed imminent. Even though this scarcity afected all of Europe, it only did so on a local or narrow regional scale. Also, awareness often remained local, '"connected" thinking about the environment *avant le mot*' only emerged later.20 This is far removed from the global scale that its successor concept, sustainable development, claims to cover in the twentieth century.

Von Carlowitz criticized the way that human behaviour was devoted to making quick economic gains through exploiting wood for mining and producing silver. However, as Daniela Gottschlich and Beate Friedrich have convincingly argued, this does not readily translate into an economic understanding of the forest as material resource.21 While *Sylvicultura Oeconomica* emphasized the proft-making aspect of using the forest as an economic resource, von Carlowitz did not portray nature as an inanimate object that needed to be dominated but as exhibiting agency and beauty as 'mother earth'. Furthermore, his entire oeuvre shows a more complex and nuanced understanding of sustainable forest management practices which not only provided continuous yield but also qualitatively improved forests as animate spaces. Thus, the economization of sustainability did not come with von Carlowitz nor

<sup>18</sup> Caradonna (2014); Grober (2017); Warde (2018).

<sup>19</sup> Von Carlowitz (1713), p. 74.

<sup>20</sup> Warde (2018), p. 325.

<sup>21</sup> Daniela Gottschlich and Beate Friedrich, 'Das Erbe der Sylvicultura oeconomica: Eine kritische Refexion des Nachhaltigkeitsbegrifs', *GAIA*, 23.1 (2014), 23–29, https://doi.org/10.14512/gaia.23.1.8.

is there a clear link between von Carlowitz's use of the German word *nachhaltend* and twentieth-century discussions of sustainability.22 He did not use the term sustainability (or its German translation *Nachhaltigkeit*) in his publication. Etymology of the German term *Nachhaltigkeit* dates it back to von Carlowitz because he used the adjective 'nachhaltend' (later changed to 'nachhaltig') to talk about natural forest management practices in Freiberg, Saxony.

But as the earth's underground has through labor and expenses revealed its ores, we are confronted with a scarcity of wood and charcoal, that needs to be remedied, therefore the greatest technical skills, science, diligence and management of this country must address how such a conservation and cultivation of wood can be achieved so as to make possible a continual, steady and *sustainable use*, as this is an indispensable matter, without which the country cannot maintain its Being.23