Professor Melissa Lane, Class of 1943 Professor of Politics, Princeton University

Harald sends along details about an interesting talk being given at Agnes Scott College tomorrow night…

• Thursday, March 12 at 7:30 p.m.

• The Frannie Graves Auditorium (rm. 128), Campbell Hall

• Agnes Scott College, 141 East College Avenue

• Decatur, Georgia, 30030

The field of climate change communication (CCC) has recently emerged to address the gap between scientific knowledge of climate change and public motivation to respond. Psychologists in this field have offered helpful strategies for improving the effectiveness of CCC, but their empirical research tends to neglect the ethics of CCC. Philosophers have been more attentive to ethical communication, but they tend to focus on its cognitive dimensions and minimize the affective and social dimensions that contribute to effectiveness. As a result, studies that address ethics and effectiveness in tandem are lacking.

In this lecture, drawing on work with co-author Michael Lamb, I will fill this gap by recovering insights from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. By situating all communication within an ethical relationship between speaker and auditor, emphasizing the agency and judgment of auditors, and highlighting ways to build trust, Aristotle offers an art of rhetoric that can help climate scientists communicate both ethically and effectively.

Emily sends along this email from Agnes Scott College’s Michelle Hall announcing the return of “a pioneer of the campus sustainability movement”, David Orr.

According to a press release sent along with the email, Orr’s visit “is the inaugural event for Agnes Scott’s Environmental and Sustainability Studies program created in 2009. In addition to his lecture to the wider community on January 26th, Orr “will teach an introductory environment and sustainability studies class and have a roundtable discussion with faculty.”

After the jump, read Michelle’s full message, which includes the date and time of Orr’s lecture along with a brief bio.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blogger Bud Thomas Wheatley reports over on CL’s newly-redesigned Fresh Loaf…

Bill McKibben, author of End of Nature and Deep Economy, will speak at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 11, at the Holy Trinity Episcopal Parish in Decatur (map here). The event is co-sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book and Georgia Interfaith Power and Light. A collection of his essays, The Bill McKibben Reader, goes on sale tomorrow. One of his more recent works, Fight Global Warming Now – The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community, is worth a look, judging that the General Assembly this year isn’t taking any steps to address the phenomenon.

McKibben’s writings have been informing audiences about global warming long before An Inconvenient Truth made climate change a dinner table conversation topic. In fact, Al Gore attributes much of his passion to the cause to McKibben. According to this Wikipedia entry Gore wrote in 2007 “when I was serving in the Senate, Bill McKibben’s descriptions of the planetary impacts… made such an impression on me that it led, among other things, to my receiving the honorific title ‘Ozone Man’ from the first president Bush.”

McKibben writes for many big name pubs like The New York Times, The Atlantic and Harpers. Plus he’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, just down the street from where my mom now lives.