Featured Writings and Talks

Environmentalism’s Racist History The New Yorker; What I Had Lost Was a Country Environment Forum at Harvard University’s Mahindra Center; Environmentalism Was Once a Social-Justice Movement The Atlantic, After Nature Duke Forward; A Communion of Subjects: Law, Environment, and Religion - Interview with Jedediah Purdy Yale University

Jedediah Purdy on...

The scale of the climate change problem:

“It’s a commons tragedy. I think it is the largest and most general that we've ever faced. It threatens to be the commons tragedy that ate the world, really."

Why the problem continues:

"Each generation can in a narrow, rational sense act in its own interest, while putting the cost of dealing with the consequences of what it's done on those who come after. So in that sense, the people making the decisions are always the ones who can least be counted on to do the right thing."

Species extinction:

"We're just beginning to understand it as it disappears. And it's not just a whole 'nother world, it's dozens of hundreds of worlds that are coexisting here in our world."

Environmental ethics:

"Our land use policy, our agriculture policy, our energy policy, they all have aesthetic and even moral dimensions. They shape the landscape and they shape the terms of experience where people will learn to relate to and value the landscape."

The consequences of our environmental actions:

We don't need whale oil anymore, but many of the whales are still substantially gone and depleted. ... So we don't just have preventative work to do, we have reparative work to do, as well."

The need for multidisciplinary action:

"Often in the tradition of law and philosophy, questions of justice among human beings and questions of environment have been thought of with separate vocabularies and separate silos. And I think in quite a deep way environmental questions can't be siloed going further."

The role of the individual:

"So many of the environmental problems we're talking about will not be solved by more virtuous personal and local action. Even if that action is a necessary prerequisite to the kinds of collective action that'll be required. And so our optimism is cruel and incomplete if it doesn't include saying that one of the things people need to do is see how hard the problem is, and what kinds of changes at the level of the architecture of economic rules and power we're working within have to happen."

Optimism:

"If we look at the people who were historically responsible for many of the kinds of progress that give us the greatest sense of historical possibility now, especially reform in social life and economic life, they didn't necessarily take heroic measures because they were optimistic. It was because they felt solidarity. It was because they were in it together with other people, and that gave them enough reason to act together toward the future."