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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.

Dale Jamieson

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Dale Jamieson
Age: 76
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Study
Understand
Difficult
Struck
Change
Studying
Back
Issue
Firsts
Climate
First
Started
People
Issues

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

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We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.
Dale Jamieson
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The very essence of civilized culture is that we deliberately institute, in advance of the happening of various contingencies and emergencies of life, devices for detecting their approach and registering their nature, for warding off what is unfavorable or at least for protecting ourselves from its full impact.
Dale Jamieson
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We live on a restless planet in a violent universe.
Dale Jamieson
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We're highly adaptable and have developed some powerful systems of representation.
Dale Jamieson
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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.
Dale Jamieson
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Sometimes I say philosophers should be at the table because they're the only people who know that they're not going to walk away with big money to support their research or to fund their crackpot solutions.
Dale Jamieson
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I take seriously the idea that we are African Apes who (at least for the moment) dominate the planet, but our psychology is pretty much what it was when we were living in small groups on the savanna.
Dale Jamieson
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Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale Jamieson
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The idea that Bentham and Mill were maximizers is the greatest stretch of all. They were progressivists, committed to improving the societies in which they lived, not utopian maximizers.
Dale Jamieson
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Most process philosophy is historicist (e.g., Hegel) and not concerned with deep time. Maybe Whitehead is an exception. He may be a really important philosopher for all I know. I've never been able to read him.
Dale Jamieson
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The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as reduce suffering) and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.
Dale Jamieson
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If we don't have historical consciousness we can't really understand problems in all their dimensions, and if we can't understand problems than we can't find solutions.
Dale Jamieson
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I played with English and Sociology in college but dropped out to work in the anti-war movement. I was going around denouncing the Viet Nam war as immoral but one day it dawned on me that I didn't know what that meant. I signed up for an ethics class at San Francisco State to find out the answer.
Dale Jamieson
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I think that by the middle of this century people will still be eating meat (though less), and their meat will mostly be produced in factories through synthetic processes, cell cultures, and so on.
Dale Jamieson
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If you're interested in doing something about climate change as we all should be, all of us who care about future people and creatures that will inhabit this world. Then buying a Prius is a good thing but an even better thing would be to be on the streets demanding urgent action from the United States' Congress.
Dale Jamieson
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Acts are right in virtue of the goodness of their consequences.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.
Dale Jamieson
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The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
Dale Jamieson