The Occupy Wall Street movements and climate action movements stand on the same moral ground and affirm the same moral principles: It’s wrong to wreck the world. It’s wrong to wreck the health and hopes of others. An economic system that forces the people to bear the risks of the recklessness of a few powerful profiteers, to assume the burdens of others’ privilege, and to pay the real costs of destructive industries in the currency of their health and the hopes of their children -- that system is immoral. And when, to enrich a powerful few, that system threatens to disrupt forever the great planetary cycles that support all the lives on Earth?  This is moral monstrosity on a cosmic scale.

Last term, I taught a university class on “Ethics and Climate Change,” using MORAL GROUND as a reader.  It was the most moving teaching experience of my life.  My students were mostly graduate students, most from the science and natural resource fields. They didn’t know, or need to know, much about ethics, but they all cared deeply about the future of the Earth.

Like any diligent professor, I began with a clear list of the goals of the course: To examine the moral issues that we face as the climate changes; to learn how worldviews and values, together with science, can shape decisions about what we ought to do; to reason cogently about our obligations to honor intergenerational rights and the rich abundance of life on Earth; and so to acquire the skills and concepts to navigate in the choppy waters of a global moral discourse of literally world-changing importance. But, as I soon learned, the most important outcome of the course was not on my list.

Those scientists were so wrong back in 1980. When they climbed from the helicopters, holding handkerchiefs over their faces to filter ash from the Mount St. Helens eruption, they did not think they would live long enough to see life restored to the blast zone.