Most of what we think of as distinctively human has occurred in the last 10,000 years in the Holocene - a period in which the Earth was abnormally quiet.

Environmental philosophy just is philosophy full stop. It only sprung up as distinct subfield because mainstream philosophy was ignoring some of the most important philosophical challenges of our time.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

If we're interested in the continuation of the human experiment we need to focus on resilience and coping with change (whether natural or anthropogenic) rather than living as if God or nature has given us a nice, orderly, calm, Babbit-like existence.

Progressive Consequentialsm requires us to make the world better but we are under no obligation to bring about the best possible world.

I see a lot of individual action when it comes to environmental questions really as a form of politics as a way of communicating with political leaders, much in the same way that acts of civil disobedience during the civil rights' movement were really acts of political communication, trying to get laws changed rather than based on the thought that the individual action would really change the practices of segregation.

When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.