Top researchers in biogeochemistry, oceanography, deep-sea biology, molecular genetics, and coral ecology are coming together on Oct. 2-3, 2012, for “Our Global Ocean,” the 48th annual Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College. They will meet to discuss the marine realm: what we know, what we don’t know, and how we humans rely upon healthy vibrant seas.
Here is an introduction to Nobel Conference 48 presenter Kathleen Moore, who will speak at this year’s Nobel Conference at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 3.
Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, Kathleen Dean Moore often waded with her biologist parents in the rivers and marshes near Lake Erie. Later, when she watched the Cuyahoga River burn, she thought about how to reconcile humans’ love of beautiful wet places and our abuse of them. In “Late at Night, Listening,” from her book The Pine Island Paradox, Professor Moore describes the incredible diversity of the unseen world at the border of the ocean and land.
As she and daughter Erin turn off their lights after perching on rock wrack at the edge, they are astounded by the sounds they hear: the soft inhale and gurgling exhale of the sea, the scratching sounds of tiny claws moving on rocks, the constant plop plop as saltwater drops off globules and tentacles—all evidence of life. When they turn on their lights to scan the water, they see hundreds of pairs of tiny yellow eyes staring back at them—bay shrimp. Moore goes on to explain how we often overlook the lives of things we can’t see clearly and distinctly, the unimagined other worlds watching us in the dark.
How do we protect this ocean of life? It is the urgency to answer this question that inspires her, or, as she puts it, “scares her out of bed in the morning.”
Moore is an essayist and activist who writes about cultural and spiritual connections to wet wild places. Her award-winning books include Riverwalking, Holdfast, The Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, her newest book, gathers calls from the world’s moral leaders to honor our obligations to future generations. Moore publishes in both environmental ethics and popular journals such as Audubon, Discover, and Orion, where she serves on the board of directors. She teaches writing workshops in beautiful places, from wilderness Alaska to the Apostle Islands.
Moore studied philosophy at the College of Wooster, and then went on to graduate work at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There, she studied philosophy and law, focusing on institutions of forgiveness as she explored how different world views may help us cope with our destructive tendencies. She teaches a variety of courses in philosophy of the environment, environmental ethics, and critical thinking at Oregon State University, where she is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy.
Professor Moore’s recent work focuses on finding solutions to the complex problems of the world by using an interdisciplinary approach. At Oregon State, Moore is co-author of a proposed graduate program in environmental leadership, which integrates science and humanities to provide leadership for complex times. She is also the founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. Its mission is to bring together the practical wisdom of the environmental sciences, the analytic clarity of philosophy, and the emotional power of the written word to re-imagine our relation to the natural world.
She is currently working on a new ocean ethic that brings our moral understandings of our obligations to the world into concordance with contemporary evolutionary and ecological understandings of an interconnected, interdependent, resilient, finite, and very beautiful planet. If we are full citizens of this planet, entirely dependent on the workings of its hydrological systems and ecological communities, how should we live?
Science alone can’t provide a solution to our problems, Moore says. We need also to affirm that it’s wrong to wreck the world. We need to recognize that climate change threatens to create the greatest human rights violation the world has ever seen—a global crisis of compassion and justice. We need to create a rising wave of affirmation of the basic moral principle that we have an obligation to the future to leave a world as rich in life and possibility as our own. Consequently, Moore is working to create a national conversation about the moral costs of climate change. Her goal is to match the scientific consensus that climate change is real, dangerous, and upon us, with a moral consensus that climate change is an unforgivable wrong.
When Kathleen Dean Moore is not in Oregon, she lives in a cabin where two streams and a bear trail meet a tidal cove on Chichagof Island in Alaska. There she enjoys kayaking in little boats, hiking, and wading to explore the tides of change.
For more information about this year’s Nobel Conference, go online to gustavus.edu/nobel.
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