b) Unavoidably, human interests will conflict with ‘nature’s’. To feed ourselves, we must kill the natural world. How do we decide what to kill? What has more intrinsic value? (I think this way of thinking is unnecessary, but if we believe that everything has intrinsic value, then we must be ready to address these issues). Again, no satisfactory argument has been proposed to answer these questions. If there are two sources of food available (say, carrots and radish) to feed the masses, and everybody loves carrots (and carrots are less expensive than radish), is it fair for those poor carrots to forfeit their interests for our interests? Of course this example is ridiculous, but it shows the difficulty of living without some sort of value hierarchy (why should the radish live while the carrots die?). In place of a monetary value hierarchy we’ll get a hierarchy created by the leading philosophers of our time. They could easily, given a set of axioms, ‘prove’ that radish have more intrinsic value than carrots, and so it is morally acceptable for the masses to eat the less intrinsically valuable of the two vegetables.
I don’t think we should be so quick to replace a monetary valuing hierarchy with one determined by some prominent philosophers, who, with the right axioms, can ‘prove’ just about anything.

A further kind of capital he outlined was natural capital, though McLeman did not draw on this idea; someone at the end of the seminar asked why, and McLeman rationalized that natural capital is simply a different way of understanding economic capital, or is a means of viewing capitalism through a different lens. He essentially equated Bourdieu’s ideas of natural capital with environmental economics, and I think this is wrong; further, I think this misapplication is also one problem with makers of environmental policy. The environment cannot – or rather, in my opinion, should not – be measured in terms of market price fluctuations, but on its own terms. Indeed, parts of the environment can be exchanged for economic reward, but there is a real danger to seeing all natural capital as eventually replaceable with economic, or human capital. Stephen Harper, as evidenced most recently in Bali, does this regularly. As many ecological economists have suggested, however, economic capital must be viewed as a subset of natural capital, and not vice versa, in order for effective environmental policy to be implemented and enforced.

“Diamond first suggests that a society may fail to anticipate a problem” – We did fail to anticipate that industrialization would increase CO2 in the atmosphere and cause global temperatures to rise.

“Second, Diamond states that a society might fail to perceive a problem as it’s occurring” – Just as soil nutrients are invisible, so too are CO2 levels. Further, we have put the tag of “natural climatic fluctuation” on many changes that have been seen throughout the last century.

“Third, a society might fail to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived” – Many people have argued that the changes necessary to combat climate change are more of a threat to the economy (our top priority) than an opportunity to save our future.

“Fourth, perhaps a society has values that predispose it to disaster” – I would argue that this is true of North American society. Our values are more centred on self-gain and personal success than societal success. As long as I can make money, buy whatever I want, drive whatever car I want, and not have to make personal sacrifices I am happy. This attitude has led to many of the world’s ills and allows us to make excuses for not helping vulnerable regions adapt to potential disastrous outcomes inherent with climate change.

“Last, even after a problem is perceived and society is committed to solving it, solutions might be unsuccessful” – Here is where the story has not been written yet and this is where hope lies. We all know of the many possibilities that need to be put into action to get us on the right track of not only adapting to current and future climatic change, but to start reversing trends. Now it is just a matter of giving it our all to make the solutions work. I hope that Jared Diamond has not written the correct ending, but only time (and a real concerted effort) will tell.