This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu.

Ryan Darr: I don't think the Christian moral life is simply about adding up the potential harms and benefits of your actions on a global scale. I think that The way in which we express our love for others and the way in which we seek to act justly in relation to others is crucial to the moral life. We need people willing to respond in the ways that they can, where they are.

I mean, in studies of big social change in the past, it's remarkable how small of a portion of active citizens you need to get large scale social change. I mean, something like five to 10 percent of citizens really pushing for a cause can be absolutely transformative. And so I think. Thinking about our role as one given to us by our place, maybe by a particular kind of calling, is the best way to think about this.

And the whole global problem is not in our hands, but that doesn't mean we don't have to respond in the way that we can. So what would it mean to be a consumer in a just society? And how can we make decisions about how we live as consumers that tries to push closer to that just society? Knowing that lives can continue to be lived well, and not well just in the sense of like, Pleasant and happy, but well in the sense of ethically meaningful that people find new and innovative and exciting ways to live amidst times of loss, I think, to me, like, keeps me going and gives me, if not hope, a sense of determination to do what can be done with the time that I have. 

Evan Rosa: Rhi

This is For the life of the world podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. I don't want to live on another planet. I want to live on this one. This one's good. And I'm consistently drawn to the idea that just being here is an unimaginable gift, even in the worst of times or social upheaval or natural disaster or personal pain and suffering.

But it's amazing how easy it is to take one step forward. all of this for granted. I turn on the faucet and water appears. I go to the grocery store, food's there. I walk outside and there's the perfect combination of gases to keep me breathing. So in many ways, I think of environmental ethics as a path away from taking our earthly home for granted.

And instead, moving toward a deep appreciation and careful thinking about this living natural world, this floating planet that we all emerged from, this place we share together with all the other living things around us. And this ground that we will all someday return to. That is, unless you plan to move to the Martian Riviera and start buying up some real estate there.

But I digress. This episode is a look into some contemporary issues in environmental or ecological ethics. How should we treat our one and only home, Earth? What obligations do we have to other living or non living things? How should we think about climate change and its denial? How does biodiversity and species extinction impact human life?

And how should we think about environmental justice, the rights of animals, and the ways that we consume the natural world? And with us today is Ryan Darr, assistant professor of religion, ethics, and environment at Yale. And author of The Best Effect, Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, he recently joined Ryan McAnnally-Linz for a discussion of some of the most pressing issues in environmental ethics, considering them through philosophical, ecological, and theological frameworks.

Together, they discuss what and who matters in environmental ethics, only humans, only sentient animals, every life form, the inorganic natural world too, the significance and difference between the global and individual scale of climate issues, the ethics of climate change denial, environmental justice, moral obligations to the environment, the question of what we owe to animals and the rest of the natural world, the importance of biodiversity and the impact of species loss and extinction.

The ethics of eating animals, the problems with human consumption, the natural world, and the impact of cultivating a wider moral imagination for our ecological future. Thanks for listening, friends. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Welcome to For the Life of the World. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I wanted to start by asking you how you got into The study of environmental ethics.

You're trained as an ethicist, so there's part of it, but why the focus on the environment? How come your work has taken that direction? 

Ryan Darr: That's a good question. It's been a bit of a twisting road for me to get here. I had interests in environmental topics. Even back before I had any interest in studying ethics, I was, after college, a high school teacher for some time, and I was teaching high school physics, actually, and discovered that climate change was nowhere in the high school curriculum, and because I had a section on the greenhouse effect in my textbook, which didn't really focus on climate, I decided I'm going to add a week on climate, and that yale.

edu, croasmun. yale. edu, croasmun. yale. edu, croasmun. yale. edu, yale. edu. It remains somewhat in the background for me. So actually one of my first big topics of interest was questions having to do with how individuals should think about their responsibility for complex global problems and complex social harms.

And that is a question that can be applied in all sorts of areas. But one of the most obvious is And so, Climate became something of a test case for me where I was thinking about this kind of theoretical ethical question, which I think is an important question and doing so with reference to climate.

And because again, I found myself thinking about climate somewhat incidentally, I thought From there, sort of went further and further into the literature, became more and more convinced that environmental questions are some of the most both intellectually interesting, theologically important, and practically 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: pressing.

Something you might call like environmental consciousness, just awareness that we're enmeshed in broader environmental systems has become a Much more common over the course of your and my lifetimes, for sure. And I feel myself that there's a kind of ethical edge to all of these relations all the time.

And that I'm a little bit kind of scrambling for frameworks or ways of getting some traction on those. So I wonder if you might. Kind of imagine yourself walking into a room of folks like me who have that sort of sense that there's something here, but don't have any real background in the literature and environmental ethics.

What would the crash course be like? What's where do you start to introduce folks to the kind of questions that we need to be wrestling with, uh, with respect to our relation to the environment. 

Ryan Darr: So there, I think there are different angles into this and different sets of questions. I mean, one of the things about environmental ethics as a topic is that it's both a particular applied topic and it's related to almost anything you can think about.

So there are no, in my mind, clear boundaries around what are environmental ethics topics and what are not. Usually the, some of the core questions, and I think Questions that are often worth starting with are questions about which entities we ought to be thinking about ethically. So it's standard in a lot of Western and Christian ethics to assume that human beings are the most important and potentially the only ethical subject, the only Not only the only ones who act ethically, but the only ones who matter ethically.

And one of the biggest questions, and I think that one of the original and most important questions of environmental ethics was what about animals? What about plants? What about other kinds of life? And not just, you know, as individuals, but what about these wider ecosystems? What about species? And the field developed a set of answers, or at least a way of a kind of arranging positions here, where some people defend anthropocentrism, where human beings are all that matters ethically.

Others will defend something often called sentientism, where anything sentient matters. Broadly animals, others will say biocentrism, every life form matters. Others will say, no, well, no, this whole way of approaching it is missing the point because it's focusing on only on individuals and the real lesson of environmental and ecological concern is that we need to think about larger holes, things like ecosystems, things like species, and more recently, even something like a global climate.

system. So, I mean, one of the first set of questions we really have to consider is what matters ethically. And in addition, how does it matter ethically? So do other entities matter in the sense that we should just consider their interests? Should we think that maybe they even have some rights against us such that if we act wrongly, we're committing some kind of injustice against them?

But while those are some of the, I think, central and core topics within environmental ethics, one of the dangers of focusing only there is that it leaves out the fact that environmental problems are so importantly human problems, and that human issues of justice and injustice are very tightly bound up with these questions of, you know, Not only what other entities matter, but how do we relate to these other entities and how do the way in which our actions affect other entities, how does that then affect other human beings?

Could you give me an example of that conjunction between those sets of questions? Yeah, well, so I mean, climate is climate change is probably the most obvious here. that in early framings of the climate problem, often something like the polar bear on melting ice was the figure of the victim of climate change.

I mean, you know, this is not a wrong idea. I mean, polar bears are in significant trouble with climate change and I think that matters. We should care about that. But I think that holding up the polar bear as if it's animals who are the primary victim here. is a mistake, both ethically and politically, because of course, the effects on human beings are massive and human life is at stake here.

Human ability to live in certain parts of the world is at stake. So I mean, all of us are affected and I think we need to keep front and center the justice issues among humans when we're talking about these non human issues. Does that 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: last remark mean that there are significantly differential impacts of something like climate change on different people so that it becomes a justice issue between people and not just a, hey, we're all like, we're all suffering and so we're all relevant?

Yes, 

Ryan Darr: that's right. It's certainly we're all vulnerable to climate change. I think anybody who thinks that they and their children are going to be free of the impacts of climate change is kidding themselves and need to think more carefully about this, but the impacts and the causes of this are differential in significant ways.

I think as relatively. It's straightforwardly obvious that in certain parts of the world, emissions, which are the primary cause of climate change, are much higher than in other parts of the world. These tend to be the more developed and the more wealthy parts of the world. You know, the U. S. is obviously very high on this list.

China is high on this list. But the effects of climate change are going to be stronger in the global south for all sorts of climate, ecological, earth related reasons. And countries in the global south are not only less. Responsible for causing this problem but are also less wealthy. Partly be again, because not having used as many carbon or, you know, not having as burned as much, uh, fossil fuel in the past.

And so this presents huge justice issues. And I mean, these are at the heart of climate negotiations that are going on now, which are the climate negotiations concern both who needs to lower their emissions and how, but also. How do we adapt because climate change, as we see in the news regularly now is it's here.

It's happening, it's accelerating, but it's happening already. And the effects are significant and we need to be adapting. And the countries that have caused the most harm are usually at least by ethicist thought to owe not just reducing their emissions, but payments and transfers of technology to countries that are less equipped to adapt and yet like more vulnerable to this.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So one of the things that was up for me a lot in thinking about these questions is a kind of. An alternation between a sort of massive overwhelm at the scope, a sense that this is that a lot of environmental problems are global and the scale is such that only really massive changes could make a real difference on the one hand.

And then flipping back to a kind of I have to change my life. What can I do? How should I be living? Very concrete, focused on, on kind of my everyday existence. And I wonder if you have wisdom or thoughts to offer about how to navigate the kind of the scale issue when it comes to something like climate or even some of the other kind of big ecological issues.

Ryan Darr: This is one of the most important questions. I mean, I feel the same overwhelm. I don't know. Many people who think about these issues who don't, I mean, the first thing I would say is not to let either of those, the two poles you pose, the big structural global problem poll or the individual action poll eclipse the other.

It's easy if you are focused on say climate as a global problem to think what I, what choices I make as an individual, they don't matter. My emissions are so small in comparison to the whole that I can set these aside. And. If all we're doing is kind of quantitative analysis, maybe that's true, but I don't think the moral life, I don't think the Christian moral life is simply about adding up the potential harms and benefits of your actions on a global scale.

I think that the way in which we express our love for others, the way in which we seek to act justly in relation to others is crucial to the moral life. And that involves, I think, thinking carefully about our individual choices in ways that are not just about limiting our missions, but are about demonstrating to others that other ways of living are possible.

You know, even kind of realizing in small scales, other ways of living that might be possible that, you know, demonstrate love and justice in new kinds of ways. But we also can't just focus on the individual because this is a global problem and any solution that really is going to address it is going to be.

global or at least very large scale in nature. And that means that I think political involvement in these issues is crucial. And again, you could think, well, any action I'm going to do as an individual is not going to matter. Um, but I mean, that that's taking into your hands, the whole global problem and imagining it as if Either you can solve it or you can't, and that's not what we need.

We need people willing to respond in the ways that they can, where they are. I mean, in studies of big social change in the past, it's remarkable how small of a portion of active citizens you need to get large scale social change. I don't remember the number off the top of my head, but I mean, something like five to 10 percent of citizens really pushing for a cause can be absolutely transformative.

And so I think Thinking about our role as one given to us by our place, maybe by a particular kind of calling is the best way to think about this. And the whole global problem is not in our hands, but that doesn't mean we don't have to respond in the way that we can. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: So our conversation so far has been presupposing, A, that climate change is happening, B, that humans have done things that are primary causal drivers behind climate change, and C, that climate change is going to have on the whole.

bad consequences for lots of ethically relevant creatures. How do you think about the ethics of climate change denial? 

Ryan Darr: Climate change denial, I think is a difficult problem. There's a well documented effort by fossil fuel interests and other interests to muddy the waters in this. And anybody who's been convinced by the obfuscations and the questioning of the science out there should explore the literature on this effort.

It's not that there can't be scientific questions raised about the overwhelming consensus about climate change. This is the nature of science. The questions have to be raised. I don't have any. problem with people posing these questions in good faith and doing their best to answer them. But I think it's safe to say that most of the people posing the questions are not doing so in good faith.

And that if you look behind the scenes, there's a lot of money flowing here because obviously the kinds of changes that climate change demands are tremendously expensive and shift the way money flows from certain industries to other industries. What I would say to those who feel uncertain about it is.

One, even if there's a chance, and I think you have to admit there's a meaningful chance here that this is really happening, then that should matter to you ethically. So if It's the case that millions of lives are at stake here, as the science tells us that they are. And you think, well, there's some doubt about it.

I don't see how some doubt can undermine the need for ethical action in the face of this possibility of significant harm. I think there are lots of motivations for individuals to want to deny Some of them are individual in terms of what it would demand of your life. Some of them are political because the changes demanded by climate are not attractive from all parts of the political spectrum.

And I mean, frankly, some of them are, shouldn't be attractive to anybody. It would be nice if climate change wasn't real. But all those reasons to be skeptical about it doesn't change reality. And I think we just have to face that fact and act on like the best certainty that we have.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Our conversation has been focusing a lot on, on climate. And I think understandably so given how immense an issue it is and how much it It matters for people's lives and how much attention it gets. But I know that's not everything that you think about. It's not the only issue of environmental ethics.

And so I was hoping you might pick another issue or a question that you find especially interesting and introduce it to us, dive in and see, explain to me why you find it interesting and what the ethical 

Ryan Darr: stakes are. Thanks for that. I mean, there are so many directions we could go with this. And one thing I think about right away is issues of environmental justice and injustice in which it's not just the impacts of climate change that are differential, but also the impacts of all sorts of toxicities that are released into the environment by and the way in which different communities, especially, you know, this is well documented to be based primarily on race are exposed to these and unjust and unfair ways.

So that, I mean, that that's one huge set of questions. I think what I'll focus on though, is what the one that I'm writing on right now, which is issues to do with. biodiversity, conservation and biodiversity loss. So the climate crisis is one and I think probably the most pressing environmental crisis we face at the moment, but looming right beside it, alongside it, and potentially in a scary sense, even overwhelming it in the future is the crisis of biodiversity loss.

So there are on earth estimated to be something like 8 million species The loss of species is a natural occurrence. Scientists talk about what's called the natural background rate at which species go extinct, and that background rate is elevated something like a hundred to a thousand times beyond what scientists believe was the natural background right before, just like, give me 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: a sense, you've got a million species.

How many are going extinct in the natural background rate 

Ryan Darr: before climate change? So the, I mean, the numbers are always estimates and off the top of my head, I'm probably going to get these estimates wrong, but my best memory of this is that we're talking about something, something like a handful per million per year, which then if there are 8 million species on earth, we're talking, I don't, I don't know, maybe 20 to 30 per year would be the natural background rate with speciation.

That is the emergence of new happening usually faster than the loss. Of older species. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's really interesting. So, so the kind of background state of things is that over time you get more species on earth. 

Ryan Darr: Generally, over time, you get more species on Earth with the occurrence of mass extinction events that drastically decrease the number of species.

These are often let change, by the way. And, uh, but, but yeah, after, after each mass extinction event, when the number of species drastically declined, usually 75 percent or more, the rise in biodiversity was higher than it was before the previous. And prior to the rise of human beings or the spread of human beings around the globe, Earth was at what's estimated to be the highest level of biodiversity that it's ever had.

But the background rate now has escalated significantly. So it's something like a hundred to a thousand times higher, meaning. How many hundreds or thousands of species are going extinct every year now, which would put it well beyond the pace of speciation, the emergence of new species. And, but again, I should say, I mean, these are estimates because we don't even, we haven't even named most of the species on earth.

We don't know most of the species on earth. exists and they're going extinct faster than they're being catalogued. So nobody knows exactly how fast they're going extinct. Among the ones that are being tracked, the rate is rising rapidly. And it's not just about the loss of species. A term that sometimes goes along with extinction is defamation.

which is just the decrease in the fauna on earth. So like the numbers of the species that are around are falling drastically as well, which puts many more species at potential risk of extinction. So any individual species is apt to have fewer 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: members than it had in the past. That's 

Ryan Darr: the same. Yeah. I mean, obviously that doesn't apply to every single species because there are some thrive on humans.

Society, right? Rats, uh, pigeons, et cetera. There, I'm sure are many more than there were before the rise of industrial civilization, but yeah, on a whole, the numbers of almost all species are decreasing. I mean, a way to capture this numerically is a study that estimated that of the biomass of mammals on earth, that is, if you just weigh up all the animals, the mammals on earth, something around 30 percent is human, something around.

Uh, 64, 65 percent is livestock. So chickens, pigs, cows that are domesticated by humans. And then somewhere around four or 5 percent is wild. Again, I'm probably going to get the exact numbers wrong, but that's roughly the right scale, which is absolutely stunning. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: I wonder, what do you think it has done to human life to biomass was.

on par, overwhelmingly larger than the human to the situation we're in now where almost all the animals are us or the things that we eat or 

Ryan Darr: have as pets. That's a really interesting question. I mean, I would, I think, prefer to first answer it by flipping it because I think what part of what we have to see is that changes in human life.

have been part of what's precipitated this problem. So this is not a natural outgrowth of the development of human technology or human numbers, even if those things are going to, to some degree, put pressure on other species. If we're talking about the American context, I mean, it's absolutely right that over the course of the 19th century, there were enormous losses in wildlife.

And I mean, some of this was very intentional. Some of the hunting of the buffalo. The bison in the West was used often as a tactic of warfare against indigenous people, cutting off their food supplies. And they were hunted nearly to extinction, fortunately, not entirely to extinction. And there are places where they're alive now.

So, I mean, we have to think about the way in which humans were changing their own relation to wildlife. First, before we think about how changes to wildlife are affecting us, I mean, likewise, with beaver, the beaver population went from, again, I can't get the estimates right, but, you know, hundreds of millions and fell very quickly.

And in this case, not as an intentional act of warfare, but because beaver hides became a wealth, a source of wealth in the global capitalist markets. And they were, you know, Everywhere. And so this kind of change in how humans thought about their relationship to wildlife, or you're hunting wildlife, not primarily in order to meet your own needs or the sustenance for your community, but for like global markets, you're shipping them around the world.

And, you know, People getting very wealthy off that. These kinds of changes are, I think, at the heart of where we find ourselves now. Changes linked to colonialism, changes linked to global capitalism. But then it is a very interesting question to think what now changes about human life in this era of the loss of other species.

And I mean, it's hard for me not to reach for language of impoverishment. Although It's also hard to know exactly how to, what to base claims like this on. It's, it's not like I've experienced a world rich with wildlife. I mean, I have seen changes that have felt notable to me over the course of my life around, for example, the presence of insects.

in Summers. But I do think our web of relationships is diminishing. And one way to think about this is to think about why God would have created the diverse creation that we find ourselves with. But one of my favorite answers to this comes from Thomas Aquinas, who writes that In creating the world, God wanted to make it as good as possible, which means as much like God as possible, because God is goodness.

And no single creature could mirror all of God's perfections. I mean, even a whole world can't mirror all of God's perfections, but God created a world full of biological diversity in part as a way to mirror different aspects of God's creation or perfections. throughout the world. And if we think that way, we see ourselves losing glimpses of God all over the world.

And I mean, that, that sounds like, uh, an instrumental way to think about it. So it's like we who are losing these glimpses of God, I think that is a real part of it, but it's also to say that, uh, genuine goodness, goodness that God wanted, that reflected God is being lost in the world. The world is literally showing forth 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: west of the glory of God.

Ryan Darr: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, now we know that it's not that God created a set of fixed forms like Aquinas thought, but rather a world that itself is constantly producing new diversity in ways that mirror God in new and interesting ways. And we're not only halting that process, but reversing it.

And I think, but how could that not make us worse off and make the world worse off? Painted at that level. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: That's really like compelling and beautiful. If I start to think that, well, some of those insects that you're seeing fewer of, hopefully in some places are malaria carrying mosquitoes. Then it starts to feel more questionable to me.

I start to wonder, well, the eradication of polio would be a great thing, but would also be the kind of intentional squelching of at least one of these species. 

Ryan Darr: How do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So There are different reasons to not want different kinds of living things around.

And in some cases, I'm pretty strongly inclined to push back. So for example, wolves were intentionally eradicated throughout a lot of America, partly because who wants a wolf in their neighborhood? And I very much understand that. I mean, they're being reintroduced and this is creating tensions. And I'm not unsympathetic to the human desires to rid their areas of wolves.

But in this case, I think we need to accept that what it means to be creatures among other creatures is to recognize that we don't own the world in a way that we can freely and should be able to freely walk safely in any part of the world. And that it is part of recognizing our creatureliness to see ourselves as vulnerable to other creatures, just like they're vulnerable to us.

It's hard to accept vulnerability as a good, but it is part of our created condition. And if it's not a good, it's at least something that I think we become deeply ethically questionable if we seek to entirely eliminate. But I don't think we have to be absolutists about this kind of reasoning. So here, I'm going to get a little bit into kind of ethical theory weeds on how I think about this.

But I think that there are some kinds of claims, uh, that we should be, that we should see as kind of claims of justice, things that we owe to one another by reason of justice. These are kind of moral obligations to one another. And then there are other kinds of things that are goods, but they're not necessarily sources of obligation.

They're not necessarily issues of justice. And I tend to think that those things that are sources of obligation or issues of justice have a kind of overriding force when it comes to the existence of species. I don't think. A species is a subject of justice so that we owe obligations to a species as such.

As I said, I think species are good. I think they're good in part for theological, the theological reasons I outlined, but I don't think that we owe them obligations. I do think that we owe obligations to individual human beings. And I think also to other animals, which we can talk about if you want to at some point, and that these are matters of justice.

And so I think it can be the case that, and especially with. diseases, and including, I think, with certain species of

Seek to eliminate them as far as possible in order to protect others as matters of justice, as matters of us as humans, recognizing what we owe to other humans in order to kind of protect the most vulnerable. But I think we should own that there is a certain loss there, that it's not, even if overall it's the right choice, something can be lost by the loss of these mosquitoes.

And that's, you know, a recognition of a certain kind of tragedy of our situation. You 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: mentioned obligations to animals. I'm curious, which ones and what kind of obligations?

Ryan Darr: Well, so, I mean, let's start with what I think is the most straightforward because in these conversations, there's, oh, there's never going to be fine and neat lines, but I mean, what, if somebody doubts that we can have an obligation to an animal, usually the example I'll give is.

Say I, there's a stray cat that like walks through my lawn as happens pretty regularly and say I don't like that. So I like chase and kick it to get it away. I think it's just straightforwardly obvious that I've done wrong to the cat. And I mean, One common response to this among people who don't think that we should have, we have obligations to animals is to say, it's not that you've done wrong to the cat.

It's that you've somehow worsened your character and therefore made yourself more likely to harm human beings. So Kant says something like this, Thomas Aquinas says something like this. So this is a somewhat common line of thought. I think that the only reason you would say something like that is because you've.

Made some theoretical commitments that forced you to. So my, my favorite response to this is what's often called in philosophy, the incredulous stare, which is just to say, I'm going to look at you with some serious doubt in my eyes and do so until you reconsider the action or the point. Because I just think it's straightforwardly obvious.

The, the, The problem with the action is that I've kicked the cat. It's because I've done wrong to the cat. If it harms my character, it's because it was already a bad action to start with. And if you're willing to admit that, as I think you should, and I'll keep staring at you until you maybe do, If you're willing to admit that, then we have an obligation not to kick the cat.

And that's, I mean, that's just like a wedge into it. So the question of which obligations we have to animals, we could go on for a long time thinking about this. And the question of like, which entities we want to like put in this category, uh, with Cats is also, I think, very complex. So that's my wedge end to trying to convince you that you do have obligations to animals.

And then it just becomes a matter of thinking, well, which animals are similar and what other kinds of things do I think would result in wronging an animal? 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Right. So, so a super radical sort of stance on these kinds of questions would be something like what I understand to be a typical Jane response with, you know, a very strict pursuit of ahimsa or non bi.

Where. Every animal species is included in, you know, including at least in some accounts of it, the mosquito that's like in your blood on the scale from like Thomas Aquinas to there, where do you tend to fall? Like, uh, how do you in your own actual life think about. The obligations you have to animals. And I mean, I know you have some cats, presumably you've got some obligations to them, but how far outside of your household does it extend?

I'm 

Ryan Darr: inclined to think that I have, I at least could have obligations to. Almost all animals. I mean, insects are one of the hardest cases. And I, I mean, in some sense, I think it's worth keeping some of these questions open. So, I mean, if I was going to draw a line, I would follow what is not an unusual position and say animals who are sentient.

Uh, so, so those who have an awareness of the world of themselves and of things as good or bad for them so that they can have. Desires they can experience, the frustration of those desires they can experience, pain are those for whom I can have an obligation. And I mean, just recognizing that the actual world is messy enough that we can't know exactly where that line falls.

And maybe that line in the end becomes artificial, but I think it's something it's somewhere to start. And then I certainly don't go the Jane route. So I think that to, to, um, fail to recognize that the world is such that Animals depend on other animals that, um, violence, predation, these are parts of the world.

They, they may be parts that we want to think of as aspects of fallenness. I am not confident of a view like that, but still they're parts of the world and they're parts that we can't escape means that we should recognize that there are going to be trade offs. But I mean, I think something very simple like harming an animal when there are relatively straightforward alternatives to achieving whatever good we're trying to achieve without harming an animal, those are probably wrongs against an animal.

And that's going to sound really minimal, but in fact, I think would make most industrial agriculture of animals ethically problematic. How

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: do you think about then 

Ryan Darr: the eating of meat? Well, so there's the one question in the abstract, which is just about, is it acceptable to eat meat in general? I'm not one who thinks that all eating of meat is ethically problematic, but then there's the reality of the world that we find ourselves in and the source that our meat comes from.

And I am very deeply skeptical of. Any kind of consumption of meat that is what's often called factory farmed. These are animals that are confined into tiny spaces. I mean, I think like effectively tormented for their short lives that grow rapidly due to, you know, both like medical things and genetic things that we've done to them.

And it's a way, I mean, I think what is, it's a kind of limit case in which. Animal life has become commodity. It's become reduced solely to its use for us with no regard for the well being of the animal. That to me is a deeply skewed and unjust way of us relating to other creatures. But that's not to say that I've cut all products from industrial agriculture.

So, I mean, it's just not that simple. to say, here's an absolute prohibition. I mean, there are people who, you know, don't have great access to alternative foods. There are all sorts of cultural traditions around meat that are not easily given up. And I'm not inclined to be the one to say you must give up all of these things.

But I, that, so that's why I put it in terms of, I'm deeply skeptical of this whole way of human beings relating to animals. And I think In a just world, this would be ended immediately. We don't find ourselves in a just world. And so we, as individuals have to kind of negotiate both how we relate to it as consumers, but also maybe how we relate to it politically.

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: And what difference does it make in what role we put ourselves as we're doing this kind of reflection? I'm thinking of say someone like Wendell Berry, who has the strong sense, I take it that We become way too much consumers. And part of the problem is precisely that we're relating as consumers rather than as members of some sort of land based ecological community.

And at the same time, I find myself a consumer and feel like I have to navigate things ethically within that way of being. How do you think about the kind of the stuckness that we might find in ways of being that we find unsatisfying that we find specifically ethically unsatisfying that we kind of wish we could get out of.

Ryan Darr: Yeah, these are big questions. So I both share some deep sympathies with Barry's point, but also with your reaction. And yet I am in relation to most of my goods, a consumer and not a producer of them. And so I think that this is a really important question. How do we. think about ourselves as acting within certain social roles within society.

I think that any questions about justice, which is to say questions about what we owe to others, the ways in which we're responsible to others, have to begin from concrete social positions. I think there's a way of thinking in issues like, say, the issue of factory farming and how individuals do or don't and the markets for meat, that Ask questions just about causation.

So what kind of harm do I or don't I cause, right? And there are those who wrestle with questions of, well, if I buy a hamburger, it's very likely or very unlikely that a single cow dies because of my buying of a hamburger. And I, I find this, I think, a fundamentally flawed way of thinking. Instead, I think we do have to recognize that we are.

acting in social roles, sometimes as consumer, sometimes as citizen, resident, you know, and also in all the sorts of civil institutions that we're involved with where we have social roles. And, and we need to be thinking about matters of justice in terms of what are the right ways to think about how these different social positions ought to relate to one another.

So what would it mean to be a consumer? in a just society? And how can we make decisions about how we live as consumers that tries to push closer to that just society? I don't think there's any getting around that given the world that we have, we're going to continue to be consumers. of many of our goods for a long time.

But that is, and I think Barry rightly raises the story that, I mean, that is just one of our roles and certainly to think of all of our kind of ecological or environmental activism as simply about consumer choices, that diminishes us. What we are like numbers of. societies in like multiple rich senses, we hope we hold multiple social roles.

And I think we, we should be thinking about what we owe to one another in complex ways that takes account of all of these social roles. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Brian, I'd like to ask you one more question before we close, going back to that risk of a sense of overwhelm and the ways that it can shut down action and creativity to, to feel like there's just, there's too much.

To be done, I want to ask you, what's one practice or stance that you would recommend to folks? What's one, one thing that's helped you as somebody who thinks about these really big questions a lot, act in ways that felt like you were aligning at least some portion of your life with your sense of how you ought to live.

Ryan Darr: Well, as I said before, the sense of overwhelm is real. I think it makes sense that many of us feel this. And I don't think that there's any like simple way out of it. So I certainly understand why listeners might find themselves in this position. And I don't have a silver bullet for getting out of it, but I mean, here's one thing that I do, and this has become an important part of the teaching I do at Yale Divinity School, which is I read fiction and stories, short stories, novels.

that tell stories of human beings in futures drastically affected by climate change, either in present, in the present, or in futures drastically affected by climate change as a way to kind of open up my imagination to what's possible. I think so often a certain kind of Like narrative is implicit in the way we think about these big environmental issues, especially climate change.

And for those who are most worried about this problem, and including a lot of my students, this narrative is one of, it's a dystopian narrative. It's one that we find everywhere in culture and it leads to a sense of futility and a sense of hopelessness because we think, well, we know where this is headed.

I don't think we know where anything is headed. I think. That even if we know that some drastic changes are coming to the climate in ways that are going to change our lives and change our lives, usually not for the better, probably ours, as in those of us in this room, less so than many people in other parts of the world.

But I mean, humans have lived through upheaval so many times. and have found ways. I mean, I had a student once that, uh, she tries to remind herself that people went on baking bread as the Roman empire fell. I think that's right. So there's a kind of historical way of thinking about this, but there's also the way I tend to do a more kind of future oriented, imaginative way of calling into question some of these narratives just by, you know, reading alternatives.

And so I have a class I teach called eco futures, where we read a whole series of These kinds of narratives, some of which are very hopeful about what might happen in global, uh, climate politics, others of which are not, but they portray like lives lived well in changing situations and sometimes like really painful situations.

So that knowing that lives can continue to be lived well, that they can, and not well, just in the sense of like, Pleasant and happy, but well in the sense of ethically meaningful that people find ways even to develop new and innovative and exciting ways to live amidst times of loss. I think to me, it keeps me going and gives me, if not hope, like a sense of determination to do.

What can be done with the time that I have? Which

book should we start with? If you want to think global climate politics, I would recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. It's a massive novel. He's in some ways deeply technocratic. He likes to think through finance and other kinds of very technical solutions. But, but also, I mean, it's a novel.

And so it has to tell the story of lives and it portrays how human beings as a whole might address and overcome the worst of climate dangers over the next 40 years. It's full of policy solutions, but also very kind of interesting, smaller scale narratives, but I tend to use in classes, at least mostly short fiction.

And there, I mean, one thing I'd recommend is, and you can find this online, Grist. The website Grist has an ongoing climate fiction contest called Imagine 2200 that draws all sorts of fascinating short stories. Again, often because they're short stories, they can't portray a whole world, but you see around these individuals and communities being depicted like a very different world.

And yet again, you like see the ways in which they are making good and just lives. possible in these contexts. There are other sources like this out of Arizona State University. There's a whole series of free online books called Everything Change, which is Margaret Atwood's way of talking about climate change to recognize that it doesn't just change weather, it changes everything and a whole series of short books.

fiction that they put out. So those are a couple of things I think about off the top of my head. 

Ryan McAnnally-Linz: Thank you so much for the recommendations and thank you for spending some time with us this afternoon. 

Ryan Darr: It's been a pleasure.

Evan Rosa: This is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Ryan Darr, production assistance by Alexa Rollow, Emily Brookfield, Zoë Halaban, Macie Bridge, and I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu or lifeworthliving.yale.edu. And on both of these online portals, you'll find a wealth of resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity. If you're a new listener, welcome, and remember to hit subscribe in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. And if you've been listening for a while and you enjoyed today's episode, I would strongly encourage you to share it.

If something connected here, passing it along to a friend is one of the best ways you can support the podcast. And as always, thanks for listening friends. We'll be back with more soon.

‍