I remember considering myself up-to-date on the scientific specifics behind climate change before I attended a lecture on climate change ethics — a subject that should not be as novel as it is — here at UT a little while ago. It was a nice refresher on the theory of climate change, but it also emphasized the specific rate of future temperature trends and the time frames that could be expected — things I was blissfully unaware of. Things are going to start happening in the next 60 years.

However knowledgeable Dr. Allen Thompson, the man speaking on behalf of climate ethics, was about the science behind climate change, he was not a climate scientist; he was a philosophy professor. Unsurprisingly, climate ethics was a nice marriage between science and philosophy, empirical data and epistemology. Building off of the rather alarming data presented, Thompson made an argument about the virtue of adaptability. It built perfectly upon my own understanding of the world, that Earth has not always been the way we experience it. That around 200,000 years of human evolution have been lived in very favorable conditions for our specie’s progress; we owe every bit of our progress in technology, civilization, language — merely the complexity of our brains that has allowed us to begin comprehending and exploring existence — to the climate that has made up our physical reality ... consistent conditions we never knew had the weakness to be taken for granted. A reality of the balance of natural systems that, for economic, political and social motivations, people continue to resist.

We as a species adapted under very specific environmental conditions: Our climate had as much to do with our anatomy and physiology as the nature of the beasts and predators that hunted and competed with us. We may have set a new precedent for survival in a world that had thus far rewarded efficiency of form and the adaptation to very specific ecosystems. Migrating from Africa, we, a single species, adapted to every environment on the planet with the very furs and skins of the beasts that were bound to the land they adapted to, because our minds enabled us to overcome the barriers that restrict every other creature. But our success was still dependent on the rules of climate, the minimum and maximum temperatures that determined the plants, animals and natural resources that enabled us to thrive. The deadly irony is that the fragile, serendipitous conditions that have determined our very forms and existence are being subverted by technology that they enabled us to create.

Thompson’s argument is that it is a virtuous thing to, as a species, meet the supreme challenge of our time. Seeing, as many do, that human civilization experiences gradual moral evolution, climate change is our clarion call, our next big step. Adaptability, being our finest and most defining attribute, is the criteria for our specie’s moral evolution. What better way to judge the worth of our species than by how gracefully and effectively we overcome this inevitable, damning challenge?

He outlined what he identified as the two main perspectives of adaptability and progress, a weak and a strong. The weak perspective was, basically, our current status quo; notably, the idea that natural capital, natural resources as they are naturally on Earth, is largely interchangeable with artificial capital: currency, technology and every other kind of capital that cannot be translated back into natural resources. Natural capital, in all of its forms, is merely a commodity, and as long as our net sum of capital keeps growing every year, with the assumption that the natural and nonrenewable is indistinguishable from all other capital, we’re making progress as a nation, as a species. Moreover, total economic growth alone is the proper pace at which adaptation to challenges like climate change may occur; money will be spent on climate change as it starts affecting world economies. Remember in “Star Wars” how the planet of Coruscant was just one unending, smelly city? They probably had this perspective.

The strong perspective makes a distinction between natural capital and others types — progress, moral and otherwise — mandates the consistent preservation of a certain percentage of our planet’s natural resources along with thinking outside economic growth. It doesn’t speak well of our ability to adapt when we leave the planet in a continuously deteriorating state to subsequent generations. It’s selfish and immoral: We should act now.

— Wiley Robinson is a junior in ecology and evolutionary biology. He can be reached at rrobin23@utk.edu.