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Speaker: Stephen M. Gardiner, professor of philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle

Gardiner maintains that the threat of intergenerational tyranny ought to be a core concern in environmental governance and policy. In this talk, he shares how the idea was motivated through an exploration of a key contemporary example, the threat of generationally-parochial geoengineering (‘GPG’). To do so, Gardiner and colleagues developed the concept of GPG, suggested some salient scenarios and identified early warning signs in the current scientific and policy literature.

Gardiner concludes with the offering that GPG ought to be a central issue in both the ethics of geoengineering and any serious scientific, political or policy discussion of such technologies.

This talk is offered both in person and online. Light refreshments will be served.

Stephen M. Gardiner is Professor of Philosophy and Ben Rabinowitz Professor of the Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he is also Director of the Program on Ethics. Steve is the author of A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change (2011), and co-author of Debating Climate Ethics (2016). His edited books include The Oxford Handbook of Intergenerational Ethics (in press), The Ethics of "Geoengineering" the Global Climate (2020), and The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics (2016). His latest book, Dialogues on Climate Justice (co-authored with Arthur Obst), is written both for general readers and college students. It tells the story of Hope, a fictional protagonist whose life is shaped by a series of conversations about ethics and justice in a climate-challenged world.