Donald A. Brown
Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law, Penn State
Donald A. Brown is Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law at Penn State University where he is currently teaching interdisciplinary courses on climate change and sustainable development and acting as Program Director of the Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change whose secretariat is the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. Mr. Brown is also director of the Pennsylvania Environmental Research Consortium, an organization comprised of 56 Pennsylvania universities and the Pennsylvania Departments of Environmental Protection and Conservation and Natural Resources. Before holding these positions he was an environmental lawyer for the states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Program Manager for United Nations Organizations at the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of International Environmental Policy. In this position he represented the United States Environmental Protection Agency on United States delegations to the United Nations negotiating climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development issues. Mr. Brown has written about and lectured extensively on climate change issues over the last 20 years. He has lectured on climate change issues at 30 universities in eight countries and lectured on sustainability issues in 23 countries. His interest has been the need to integrate environmental science, economic, and law in environmental policy making. His latest book is American Heat: Ethical Problems with the U.S. Response to Global Warming.
Turning Up the Volume on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change
The presentation will make the case that climate change raises several civilization challenging ethical issues that are also current barriers to progress in international climate change negotiations. Professor Brown will examine numerous ethical questions entailed by climate change and make the case that a better understanding of these ethical questions has a practical urgency. The lecture will explain why examination of such ethical questions as what is each nation’s fair share of safe global emissions is of critical importance in moving the world to a much needed global solution to climate change. The lecture will also explain how many of the solutions to climate change also raise ethical questions that need to be considered to overcome roadblocks to their deployment. Professor Brown will demonstrate that the analyses of climate ethical issues must be based upon a scientific understanding of the threat of climate change and for this reason those working on climate change ethical issues need to work closely with scientists, economists, and engineers working on climate change. For this reason, it will be shown that elaboration of climate change ethics is an inherently interdisciplinary activity.
This lecture is part of the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment’s Colloquium on the Environment, and is co-sponsored by the Rock Ethics Institute. For more information:
http://www.psiee.psu.edu/news/colloquium.asp
