Environmental Ethics
and Public Policy
Ernest Partridge, Ph.D
www.igc.org/gadfly


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Lecture Topics

Conscience of a Progressive
    (A Book in Progress)

A Dim View of Libertarianism

Rawls and the Duty to Posterity
    (Doctoral Dissertation)

The Ecology Project

For Environmental Educators

The Russian Environment

NO MO PO MO
    (Critiques of Post Modernism)

Notes from the Brink
    (Peace Studies)

The Gadfly's Bio Sketch

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The Online Gadfly: Editorial Policy
 


The Gadfly's E-Mail: gadfly@igc.org


Classical Guitar:
"The Other Profession
"

 

 

 

The Quotation Bin

Environmental Ethics


The Environment

We are rapidly building a world in which the questions of health and peace and prosperity sooner or later will be moot because we will have crippled the very engine of life that makes it all possible...  The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.  All economic activity is dependent upon the environment with its underlying resource base.  When the environment is finally forced to file under Chapter 11 because its resource base has been polluted, drained, cut down, dissipated, and irretrievably compromised, the economy goes down to bankruptcy with it.  The economy, in reality, is just a subset of the ecological system.

Gaylord Nelson, "The Bankruptcy Files"
Wilderness, Summer, 1994.


The Energy Fix

We like energy, and our appetite for it keeps on growing.  Since we left our caves, we have increased our numbers roughly 1,000 times, and each of us consumes roughly 1,000 times more energy, meaning that our consumption has soared one millionfold.  An American uses six times as much energy, mostly fossil fuels, as the worldwide average, and 70 times more than a Bangladeshi.  That same American consumes twice as much energy as do  Western Europeans and three times as much as do Japanese.  But by increasing the efficiency with which the United States uses energy to Western European and Japanese levels, the country couls save $100-$200 billion per years.  As Amory Lovins points out, energy saving is not only a free lunch but one we are paid to eat.

Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent
Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars can Undercut
the Environment and the Economy.


Dr. Ernest Partridge is a consultant, writer and lecturer in the field of Environmental Ethics and Public Policy. He has taught Philosophy at the University of California, and in Utah, Colorado and Wisconsin. He publishes the website, "The Online Gadfly" (www.igc.org/gadfly) and co-edits the progressive website, "The Crisis Papers" (www.crisispapers.org).  Dr. Partridge can be contacted at: gadfly@igc.org .