The Facing the Anthropocene: Interdisciplinary Approaches workshop presents:

Title: "Why Conservation is Failing - And What We Have Failed to Learn From Climate Change"

Dale Jamieson (NYU)

April 16th, 2024 | 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. (PST)

Boardroom, Stanford Humanities Center (424 Santa Teresa St, Stanford, CA 94305)

RSVP Today. 

Abstract: Conservation is failing—even optimistic papers on conservation talk about surviving dark times before emerging into a different, better future. Despite occasional victories, the patchwork of laws, regulations, and court decisions that can be thought of as the “conservation regime” in the United States is an incoherent mess.  The international regime suffers similar and also different infirmities, and each country will has its own particular story. In this talk, I will focus on the lack of clarity about conservation goals, and the dysfunctional logic of the conservation regime. I will go on to explore analogies with the climate change regime, and suggest that we are repeating many of the same mistakes. While there are no simple ways solutions, I suggest some ways of thinking about a more positive future.
 

Bio: Dale Jamieson is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies; Director, Center for Environmental and Animal Protection; Affiliated Professor of Law, Medical Ethics, and Bioethics; Founding Director of Environmental Studies Program; and former Chair of the Environmental Studies Department, and Professor of Philosophy.

His recent work concerns the complex relations between environmental and animal protection, especially in relation to food and conservation, with a special focus on China; the prospects for progressive consequentialism; and the nature and uses of love.  Underlying all of this work is his ongoing concern with how to live in the Anthropocene, both as an individual actor and political agent.

He led the creation of the Department of Environmental Studies and the graduate program in Animal Studies at New York University. He has held visiting appointments at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, Oregon, and Arizona State in the United States; Oxford University and Kings College London in the UK; Monash University and the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia; and LUISS University in Italy.  He is also a former member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  In 2017, he was Zurich Distinguished Visitor on Climate Change at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  In 2016, he was awarded the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences William R. Freudenburg Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jamieson is the author of Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed--and What It Means For Our Future (Oxford, 2014), Ethics and the Environment: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2008; second edition due out in 2023), Morality's Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature (Oxford, 2002), and most recently, Discerning Experts:  The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy (Chicago, 2019), co-authored with Michael Oppenheimer, Naomi Oreskes and others.  He is also the co-author of Love in the Anthropocene (OR, 2015), a collection of short stories and essays written with the novelist, Bonnie Nadzam, and the editor or co-editor of nine books.  Jamieson has published more than one hundred articles and book chapters, is on the editorial boards of several journals, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Environmental Protection Agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Office of Global Programs in the National Atmospheric and Aeronautics Administration, as well as private foundations.

This Workshop is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center and made possible by support from an anonymous donor, former Fellows, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.