'Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change' envisions the good life in a harsher world

PhysOrg: Think like a planet - and reorganize society to reflect it, says Case Western Reserve University's environmental ethicist Jeremy Bendik-Keymer. That's a new way of thinking about reversing the tide of climate change.

"Don't obsess over your individual actions: counting carbon emissions, changing light bulbs or even developing new technologies for personal use. The only international cure-all for climate change is societal, born of civic protest against the injustice we are visiting on future children," Bendik-Keymer says.

That's also the message from Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change: Human Virtues of the Future's editors Bendik-Keymer and Allen Thompson from Oregon State University.

..."The standard definition of adaptation is about coping to protect our business as usual model of development. We take that a step further and think adaptation requires ethics –a new frame for development. We should change our form of life to assume responsibility keyed to a planetary scale," said Bendik-Keymer, the Elmer G. Beimer-Hubert H. Schneider Professor in Ethics at Case Western Reserve.

The volume, aimed at both theorists and practitioners working on the emerging international architecture of climate regulation and climate philosophy, starts at the global level.

Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change (MIT Press) is a call for reorganizing both our conception of good character and our understanding of institutions to allow humans to flourish in the climate we have substantially affected for the next thousands of years....