Which Is It? GMO or Organic?

The organic community has soundly rejected the use of genetically modified crops, and current organic standards do not permit genetically modified crops to be marketed as organic, even if they are grown without harmful pesticides or artificial fertilizers.

The reasons include the fact that genetic modification can come with unknown risks to the environment and that genetic modification alters plants in ways that many people feel are more extreme or unnatural than alterations that are brought about through selective breeding. I would put this in terms of "purity," a concept like "natural" or "disgusting" which seems to relate entirely to the eye of the beholder.

In addition, genetically modified crops are tied to patents and commercialization which threatens the economic well-being and independence of subsistence farmers.

However, genetic modification also opens up opportunities which can contribute to long-term sustainable agriculture, according to the authors of Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. For instance, if a variety of rice were genetically modified to make it flood tolerant, then instead of using herbicides that might have negative health consequences, farmers could flood fields to kill weeds. There might also be the possibility of genetically modifying crops so that they are tolerant of marginal growing conditions, permitting them to be grown without the use of high levels of artificial fertilizers.

My inclination is to be open-minded and even enthusiastic about the possibilities of genetic engineering, and I would argue that skepticism about the technology should be based in empirical arguments. If it provides a solution that solves a real problem, then I don't think the argument from purity is strong enough to give us reason to put on the brakes. Likewise, from a biological standpoint, genetic engineering seems to be different in kind but not degree from conventional breeding (even when genes from vastly different species are intermingled). Therefore, it extends problems that we already have without introducing new problems.

However, the gravity of those problems should not be underestimated, and neither should their nature as social and legal, rather than technical, problems. The problem is not how to physically grow enough nutrients for poor populations, but how to introduce stability and universal access into their food system. This is a problem that genetic engineering of crops will probably exacerbate rather than solve, as long as our patent system discourages creativity and as long as markets control the options of poor farmers.

Locavores are Everywhere

The LOCAVORE movement has become so popular that there is even an iPhone app to support locavores in their search for farmer's markets and in-season produce.

The reasons that people support growing and buying food locally include a desire to build strong communities, accountability, support for small and sustainable farming, reduction of dependence on fossil fuels for transportation, and aesthetic enjoyment. Some people feel that it is a way of putting down roots (so to speak) and finding what is special about the unique place where they live. It is a way of reclaiming regional flavors in a mass-market mass-media world.

It fits in well with my own life-style: my parents were some sort of urban homesteaders, with a significant-sized vegetable garden in the alley of our small-town backyard. We canned tomatoes, made dill pickles, put away plums and pears. Now, I belong to a CSA and complain about coming up with creative ways to fit a half dozen red peppers into every week's meals for months on end.

YUM!

But let's take a look at this again....
Is locavory elitist?
And are we pinning too much on a symbolic back-to-the-land movement?

The transportation of food accounts for 11% of food-related greenhouse-gas emissions. So, while all that transportation does add up, it's not the fastest route to cutting greenhouse gases.

What's faster? Cutting out meat, especially red meat. 18% of all greenhouse gases are produced by livestock, and 30% of the earth's land surface is devoted to raising livestock or the grain and grass they eat. If you replaced beef with beans one day a week, it would reduce your carbon footprint more than becoming a locavore.

Suburban Malaise

I've been teaching Bill McKibben's Deep Economy in my ethics class all year and have been collecting videos to go along with our discussions. My students love McKibben's chapter on eating local foods. To most of them, it's completely novel to think about where their food comes from. And they love to eat. So of course it's exciting that they can eat a meal and at the same time have it be an intellectual exercise.

But they get very defensive when it comes to talking about suburbs and the community (or lack of it) that is typical of American neighborhoods. For those that have grown up in suburbs (which is most of them), they know no other world. In fact, I not uncommonly hear that Rochester is a dangerous city and that their parents have counseled them never to go downtown and certainly never to go downtown alone. (I should mention that other than the public housing that is downtown, there is also the highly respectable Eastman School of Music, a lively bar scene, and a 5-screen independent cinema which specializes in foreign films.) What I would like to do is take them on a field trip.

Barring that, I'll take the confrontational approach and show this video of James Howard Kunstler pontificating on why suburbs are "not worth caring about" and on big box stores, that "when we have enough of them, we're going to have a nation that's not worth defending." Nothing like a radical to put a moderate position into perspective. Is the language too strong? I think anything is fair game these days.

Sexy Science

Isabella Rossellini lends her alluring beauty to the purpose of science education in these two green pornos, in which she examines the mating behavior of insects, spiders, whales, and barnacles. I love the straight-talking, anthropomorphizing, gender-bending sexiness of it all: 

If I were a male bee...I would have many brothers, and we would do nothing, just waiting to have sex. 

The question is: can I come up with a reason--and the courage--to show any of these in class?

Environmental Decisions: No Easy Answers

As sustainability and conservation become more prevalent concerns, there is no hiding the ways that some environmental values conflict with other environmental values. While such conflicts could be used to help us refine our sense of what matters and why, ethical reflection is likely to be swamped by politics.

Serenity, a student in my environmental philosophy class, passed along this article on the environmental value of the Mojave Desert. Senator Feinstein has proposed that 570,000 acres of federal land be set aside as a national monument to prevent the most pristine lands from being developed. Who would want to develop land in the desert? Companies who would like to capture solar energy.

The argument for preservation seems to hang on Feinstein's assertion that there are other, better places for siting solar power facilities:

“While I strongly support renewable energy, it is critical that these projects move forward on public and private lands well-suited for that purpose. Unfortunately, many of the sites now being considered for leases are completely inappropriate and will lead to the wholesale destruction of some of the most pristine areas in the desert.”

Certainly, there are multiple options for energy production and conservation, and only the one shot at preservation. But it can also be difficult for environmentalists to convince others that deserts, which seem to be wastelands, have ecological and aesthetic value.

Tips for Would-Be Philosophers

Here is a philosopher's letter to his Intro to Philosophy class, explaining what philosophy is and how to do it.

"Welcome to My Philosophy Class"

After sharing guidelines for how to read philosophy and write a paper for a philosophy class, Wayne Buck points to the value that can be found even in lower-level classes:

There are practical benefits to be gained from studying philosophy. First, it will improve your ability to reason, and to think originally. In reading and writing about abstract problems, you practice and develop analytical, critical and argumentative skills which are useful in many other endeavors. In turn, this will give you confidence in yourself and in your ability to think through problems and come to your own conclusions. It will make you less dependent on others and their thoughts, and put you in a better position to understand yourself and others.

Second, you will learn something about the philosophical tradition. Philosophy has been and still is a central force in Western culture and intellectual life. It is philosophers who have most clearly and thoroughly elaborated the values, ideals and theories which shape the way we live and think, even today. This is true not only for morals and religion, but also for the natural sciences, for political science, for economics and for literature.

Making Wise Choices About Environmental Goods

In my environmental philosophy class, this week we discussed preference utilitarianism, cost-benefit analysis, and whether we should trust people's stated preferences about how highly they value environmental goods.

I tend to be skeptical about economists' measurements of preference, though I don't know of a better and simpler tool that can be substituted.

Preferences can be discovered (only) by introspection, so it seems illogical to say that someone could be mistaken about what they prefer. The claim that someone can be mistaken rests on several observations:
1. Sometimes our actions do not follow our expressed beliefs. Which is the real preference: how we act or what we say?
2. People change their minds depending on how a choice is presented.
3. What we think will make us happy does not always, in fact, make us happy. Predictions of future happiness and unhappiness are wrong in systematic ways.

We talked about some of the mistakes that people make in estimating the value of their preferences and watched this video, from 6:00 to 12:54. I think Leroy's lottery ticket fallacy is particularly telling.

Socratic Showdown

A. O. Scott reviews a documentary film, Examined Life: Philosophy is in the Streets (trailer here), in which the filmmaker Astra Taylor interviews (and goads, as a gadfly should) seven prominent theorists: K. Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Cornel "I'm a jazz man in the world of ideas" West, Peter Singer, Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, and Avital Ronell.

Scott says

Part of the fun of “Examined Life” comes from watching these very intelligent people try to make themselves intelligible.

and

Cornel West, the Princeton professor whose back-seat ramblings punctuate the film (everyone else has a single, uninterrupted minicolloquium), clearly takes great pleasure in talking, and it is hard not to share it, at least in small doses. A man of great, one might say compulsive, erudition — not one to drop the name of a single great writer, composer or sage if five are available — he makes the case that thought can be a kind of performance art.

Showing at the Dryden Theater April 11 and 12.

A Philosophy of Science Course Blog

This past quarter, I experimented with my philosophy of science class by devoting a large percentage of class time (about 1/3) to student presentations on problems in the special sciences. 

What a success! I had a great time, the presentations were fascinating, and we all learned a lot.

Please visit our jointly produced blog--Planet Paradigm--to see the results! It's a treasure trove of links on interesting topics in philosophy of science. There's hardly a monster that we don't cover: zombies, two-headed dogs, bigfoot, and destructive microscopic black holes.

A footnote: my dependence on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy grows year by year!

Still Lifes on Life

Still life photographer Kevin van Aelst brings scientific images to life with everyday objects.

"Chromosomes"

© Kevin van Aelst

Global Warming and Realistic Expectations of Science

In my philosophy of science class last week I taught Wendy Parker's article on pluralism in climate science. (W.S. Parker. 2006. Understanding Pluralism in Climate Modeling. Foundations of Science 11:49-368) One of the topics that my class is spending a good deal of time on is the unity of science, methodological pluralism, and the more thorough forms of pluralism (metaphysical pluralism?) argued for by Nancy Cartwright, Phillip Kitcher, and John Dupré. This article fit well into that schedule because it examines a case in which the best contemporary science provides incompatible models which are nevertheless viewed as complementing each other, rather than competing with each other.

I expected that the class discussion which might develop out of this case would evaluate whether it is the levels of uncertainty involved in climate science which supports the current pluralism. In principle, at least, more certainty about climate processes and better datasets would be more likely to bring some of these models into actual competition with each other (even though such certainty is out of our reach for the foreseeable future).

But the discussion which actually developed came out of shock that our climate models are uncertain to this degree, that our data about past climate is not more complete, and an examination of whether, failing absolute certainty, the climate change skeptics have a correct assessment. I do not think that the students leaning this way started with any sympathy for the deniers. So, is this a case of a little knowledge being a bad thing?

In truth, I find this reaction to be an extension of the disillusioning about science which is a regular part of the philosophy of science class. The science students are comfortable with the revelations that there is not "a" scientific method, that science is not certain, and that when we want to explain why science is rational and progressive, the structure of its social institutions is one place to look for that explanation. My engineering students are less receptive.

I discovered that it's not wise to talk to smart, engaged, advanced undergraduates about the uncertainty in climate science because, unless they've taken an ecology class (which only 40 students a year at my institution enroll in), they may be completely unaware of the evidence in support of global warming. And if they're not aware of the evidence, they're certainly not able to evaluate it.

I don't think that only scientists can engage in issues surrounding global warming. But my students have taught me, again, how important science education is.

Here's my course blog, where an environmental science student reacts to the class discussion.

Is it getting hot in here?

Today is the National Global Warming Teach-In!

RIT is living up to its newly developed self-image as a leader in educating for a green economy. In just the last month, we revved up our program from 0 to this.

I'm participating in two ways:
1. in my philosophy of science class, we're discussing Wendy Parker's article "Understanding Pluralism in Climate Modeling" (Foundations of Science 2006, vol. 11, pp. 349-368).
2. a panel discussion with colleagues from the social sciences. Our comments will be directed by questions from our dean on the ways in which the liberal arts contributes to conceptualizing and addressing global warming.

Statistics on the Profession: A First Look at Race

I've been asked several times to extend the figures I collected on women in philosophy to include race. I've been reluctant to do so. The reason is purely practical. I use government figures and I analyze them at the most superficial level. To get the statistics, I just go to the table and divide a couple of numbers. But the figures on race are collected in a different way and so I think that calculating them does not provide an accurate picture of our discipline.

The figures on sex (from the Digest of Education Statistics) can be broken down to include only degrees in philosophy. However, the figures on race bundle philosophy with religious studies. Are there more or fewer racial minorities in philosophy than in religious studies? Are the profiles of the two fields the same? We can't assume they are. For example, at the undergraduate level, religious studies is evenly split between men and women, but philosophy graduates about twice as many men as women.

Here are the 2006 figures for bachelor's degrees in philosophy AND religious studies, bundled together:
White: 81.8%
Black: 5.7%
Hispanic: 5.4%
Asian and Pacific Islander: 5.2%
Native American: 0.5%
Non-resident alien: 1.3%

2006 figures for doctoral degrees in philosophy & religious studies, bundled together:
White: 70.9%
Black: 7.1%
Hispanic: 3.6%
Asian and Pacific Islander: 4.2%
Native American: 0.5%
Non-resident alien: 13.7%

These figures are additionally broken down by sex, and I thought it would be interesting to see whether the percentage of minorities is the same for men and women. But the numbers of individuals are so low that it's difficult to make comparisons.
% of male PhD's who are white: 70.7%
% of female PhD's who are white: 71.5%
% of male PhD's who are black: 6% (25 out of 420)
% of female PhD's who are black: 10% (16 out of 158)

But keep in mind: out of the 158 women in that last statistic, only 95 received philosophy degrees. I don't know of any way, using this published set of figures, to tease out the data on race for philosophy alone.

Women in Philosophy: Update

Just over a year ago I posted a series of statistics on women in philosophy. A new set of statistics has been released by the National Center for Education Statistics, to include graduation rates for 2006.

Bachelor's Degrees:
Since 1994, there has not been a significant change in the percentage of philosophy undergraduate degrees awarded to women. In 2002 it reached a high of 33.0%. Two years later it was at its lowest, at 29.2%. Last year the percentage of bachelor's degrees which went to women was 30.8%, right in line with past rates.

Master's Degrees:
26.6% of the master's degrees in philosophy went to women. I don't keep track of gender distribution among master's degrees, since not all graduate students pursue a terminal master's.

Doctorates:
The percentage of doctorates in philosophy earned by women has been about 27% since at least 1991. In 2006 (the most recent data), it is 27.1%.

Look at the bright side: women aren't falling out of the ranks of students.

Clean Air, Clean Water, Good Music

Here's a blog that discusses music and environmental concerns:
http://rockandecology.blogspot.com/. Check out the comparison of thrash metal bands' environmental awareness!

A post on Grist by Bill McKibben about environmental music.

A list of environmental songs

The Singing Climatologist

Captain Sea Level

Thanks to Richard Wallace, Ursinus College Environmental Studies program, for these links! A student in my Intro to Ethics course passes along this humorous video by Tim Minchin: