Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., served as Distinguished Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University, where she wrote award-winning books about our cultural and moral relations to the wet, wild world and to one another. But her increasing concern about the climate and extinction crises led her to leave the university, so she could write and speak full-time about the moral urgency of climate action. Since then, she has spoken out across the country, publishing Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, a collection of short essays by the world’s moral leaders about our obligations to the future. That is followed by Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change (2016); Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World (February 2021); and Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change (April 2021). Her work on the extinction crisis includes a film, “The Extinction Variations,” a collaboration with a classical pianist. She writes from Corvallis, Oregon and from an off-the-grid cabin where two creeks and a bear trail meet a coastal inlet in Alaska.
Take Heart: Encouragement for Earth’s Weary Lovers — Excerpt
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Resilience.org
The times call for new sacrificial rituals. Let us kill the fatted calf of the fossil-fuel industries by taking away their social license to steal and destroy the sacred Earth.
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 27 Kathleen Dean Moore
By Vicki Robin, Kathleen Dean Moore, Resilience.org
Kathleen Dean Moore, Ph.D., is an Author, Moral Philosopher, Environmental Advocate. She served as Distinguished Professor of Environmental Philosophy at Oregon State University. Kathleen shares thoughts on What Could Possibly Go Right?
Why We Won’t Quit the Climate Fight
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth Island Journal
We are old climate veterans who have tried to do our part, in every way we know how, to keep our fossil-fuel addicted civilization from driving off a cliff. Are we tired? Sure. Discouraged? Absolutely. Pissed off? Yep. Sad? Call it broken-hearted. Quitting? Nah.
The Climate Defender’s Calendar: The Twelve-Year Plan
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking
Okay, folks, the people at the IPCC tell us that the world has twelve years to cut carbon emissions in half. Sounds like you and I need a plan. So, here’s a Climate Warrior’s Calendar.
Be the Hummingbird. Be the Bear
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth Island Journal
Protecting the children is a formidable responsibility. But it is our responsibility, and we bring to the task a formidable set of powers, honed, sharpened, and passed down mother-to-daughter over generations.
Medusa’s Curse: The Necessity of Art in the Climate Struggle
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Resilience.org
Because I am a literary writer, writing about climate justice, people often ask me, What is the importance of the arts in the climate struggle? I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” he wrote.
Barn’s Burnt Down: After the Paris Accords, Ten Things We Can See Clearly
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking
The morning after Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, this old climate warrior climbed out of bed feeling better about the chances of the sizzling, souring world than I have for months. Not just feeling better, feeling positively energized.