Climate Ethics, Leadership and Managemen

Often, our progress toward the remediation of persistently accumulating human damage to our collective home, the biosphere, is attributed to large-scale entities having a rather amorphous quality. Such are the industrial revolution, the global north, capitalism, colonialism, and countless preoccupied, habituated or denialist components of the human population. Yet, the dynamics of all types of leadership and management, whether in public, civic or private organizations, frequently push back on the progress desired, in more specific ways. These dynamics are so characteristic that climate ethics, an offshoot of environmental ethics, may seem to be cornered or futile. However, looking more closely at the essential functions of leadership and management, we may find the possibilities of change for the better: change that reverses climate change, or more widely, unsustainability. Conversely, we may find inadequate possibilities for such critical change.

In this course, leadership and management are explored to determine their dynamics are and how these afflict our biospheric home—including virtually all life.  The course is divided into 4 sections, the 1st is two weeks long, the 2nd and 3rd are each four weeks long, and the 4th is two weeks long.  The topic of the 1st section is climate ethics, their content and context:  how they work and how they are tripped by surrounding problematic discourses. The topic of the 2nd section is leadership: at its becomingly best, and how it demeans itself with incapability, irresponsibility and corruptibility. The topic of the 3rd section is management: at its operationally best, and how it degrades itself with dysfunctional hierarchy, captive systematization, and offensive behavior.  The topic of the 4th section reverts to climate ethics: the necessity of accruing and maintaining value—of the right kind, and the necessity of creating and applying guidance—of the right kind.  It is not only because the impacts of problematic ways of doing things are harmful to the biosphere but also because those impacts have others, which are increasingly desperate, rancorous and volatile.