Don Brown @ DotEarth

A few months ago we did a show with Don Brown (Asst. Professor of Science, Technology and Society and lead blogger at Climate Ethics) on the ethics of climate change. On that show, we talked about how and why climate change is a moral issue and what people can and ought to be doing about it.

Always a busy man, Don was recently interviewed by Andy Revkin over at Dot Earth about why an academic has started blogging:

My blog is a way of focusing on actual arguments about climate change policies as they unfold, teasing out these arguments the often hidden ethical questions, and inviting the world to see these questions not as “value neutral” scientific or economic questions but as ethical issues. A blog is the only way to do this that I know of that is relevant and timely to many of the climate change issues as they unfold. Most academic environmental ethics is neither relevant to actual public policy disputes nor timely. (It is often also far, far too abstract.) There is a huge need to do ‘applied’ climate change ethics as most ethical analysis in the academy on environmental issues has not engaged policy-makers or the general public. Yet climate change and several other global environmental issues are raising civilization challenging moral, justice and ethical questions that need to be teased out of policy debates.

I (Peter Buckland) have worked with Don on several occasions and have found this to be one of the most rewarding and refreshing aspects of working with him. His work is at the front what might be our largest collective problem - climate change - and it is confronting its hardest challenges. As he did on our show, Don focuses us on how our language controls our thinking about something and how in the case of economics and science our "value neutral" thinking and talking has actually landed us in some big problems.

Read on at DotEarth.