"Facing Climate Change with a Renewed Environmental Ethic," conference
November 21 - 23, 2008
in Honolulu, Hawai'i
We face unprecedented social, political and environmental challenges. Our linear take-make-waste models have led us to a point of planetary crisis. Worldwide, we see governments and international institutions struggle to address these pressing problems which cannot be solved by using outdated paradigms that place narrow human interests, such as economic wellbeing, above planetary life support processes.
Because ethics determines how we see the world, and what we believe is our place in it, we chose to look at the ethical underpinnings of our economic, political, and cultural systems in order to advocate for reforms at the deepest level. Are we here to dominate nature, as the current political and economic models would have us believe, or are we here as an intrinsic part of nature, for which we should behave with reverence, gratitude, and responsibility?
Against this background, the Toda Institute held an international conference, entitled Facing Climate Change with a Renewed Environmental Ethic, at the Ala Moana Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii, November 21-23, 2008. We brought together leading experts from academia, business, government and civil society to examine the deep ethical roots that guide our economic, political and civil institutions and how those ethics might be transformed to allow us to better address climate change.
Participant Photos
Back Row: Izaskun Petralanda, Laura Delgado, Dune Lankard, Alicia Villamizar, John Gutrich, Taha Balafrej, Peter Westra, Laurent Lepage, Tom Coffman, Christophe Dossarps, Dharm Bhawuk, Samuel Ndonwi Ayonghe, Othman bin Haji Ross, Tatsuki Toda, Satoko Takahashi, Laura Westra, Hiroshi Morita.
Front Row: Deva Temple, Katrina Rogers, Baird J. Callicott, David Abram, Marjorie Kelly, Bill Shireman, Ved Nanda, Sheila Collins, Olivier Urbain. (not pictured: Thomas Heyd)
Participant Abstracts
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