Introduction: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Introducción:
Paths to Witnessing,
Ethics of Speaking Out

Nancy L. Rosenblum

W riting about the threat of nuclear catastrophe in The Fate of the Earth,

Jonathan Schell observed: “the act of thinking about it is always vol-
untary, and the choice of not thinking about it is always available.”1
The same can be said for most of us, most of the time, when it comes to the un-
thinkable of unchecked climate change. But the choice is not available to men and
women whose work is to comprehend the radical dangers of climate change, y
to act on what they know. For the authors in this issue of Dædalus–along with
many other scientists, doctors, public health experts, social scientists, lawyers,
journalists, business consultants, and military officers–climate change shapes
their professional identity and expands their sense of responsibility. They find
thinking about its many elements within strict disciplinary confines constraining,
and the codes of professional ethics that govern day-to-day practice inadequate.
The extraordinary challenges they confront require more. They push the bounds
of their fields and they push themselves to become witnessing professionals.

The term witnessing professionals is not part of common parlance. Yet we
need a name for those who speak out from the vantage point of their specialized
knowledge about the dangers posed by crises like climate change. In this volume,
the authors reflect on their paths into climate work and bearing witness to what
they know. Each focuses on a different aspect of climate change’s effects and re-
sponses to it, so that this constellation of essays helps us grasp that climate change
is not one single fearful thing. The familiar phrase obscures its many-sidedness.
We may, as Carolyn Kormann writes in her contribution to this collection, “try
to see the whole of the moon,” but we must also appreciate the innumerable, dy-
namic facets of climate change.2 Its devastation is pluralistic. It ravages the earth
as we know it: Arctic ice, rain forests, islands, and reefs; health and habitats; eco-
nomic systems and social arrangements; and for many people worldwide, it de-
ranges everyday life. Climate change is all encompassing, and so is the domain of
witnessing professionals.

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As I write (Julio 2020), professionals are speaking out about another global
amenaza: a pandemic of SARS-CoV-2, a highly communicable virus causing disease,
death, and massive social and economic dislocation. Epidemiologists and public
health authorities track the path of the COVID-19 contagion and recommend poli-
cies and practices in an attempt to contain its spread. They document the nation’s
ongoing unpreparedness: inadequate supplies of tests for the virus and store of
protective equipment, ventilators, and ICUs. They issue grim warnings about
misinformation coming from government officials in the United States, comenzar-
ning with the president, and they report the erratic, disorganized actions taken
by inexperienced political appointees who head the very federal agencies charged
with managing national emergencies. A trauma doctor spoke out in The New York
Times: “The sky is falling. I’m not afraid to say it.”3 They become witnesses.

The authors of “Witnessing Climate Change” address a global phenomenon
that is slower moving than viral contamination and has no foreseeable end. Nosotros
gather reflections from men and women immersed in the greatest problem of our
tiempo, perhaps of all time: the changing composition of the atmosphere that is al-
tering the earth on a planetary scale. There is no historical model. We see the au-
thors figuring out as they go along the meaning and value of their work, strug-
gling with the necessity and the limits of the authority of expertise, building in-
stitutions to draw others into their fields, and finding ways to educate, advise,
organize, advocate, and warn policy-makers and the public. Here are odysseys of
careers and activism growing from specialized knowledge, by men and women
contemplating what it means to respond ethically to this all-encompassing crisis.
They speak mainly of experiences in the United States, but their reflections have
universal application.

The authors range in age from their thirties to nineties, and they took up cli-
mate work and began to speak out at different points in their careers and at differ-
ent points in their professions’ commitment to understanding and action. Multi-
generational witnessing adds a special dimension of interest: these accounts add
up to a chronology of the evolution of knowledge about climate change from a
small circle of scientists into myriad professional spheres and public arenas.

Several themes unite these personal narratives: the path into climate-related
trabajar, the constraints imposed by standard codes of professional ethics and the
imperative to move beyond them, and the settings and institutions they build to
do what Elke Weber calls the “missionary work” of advancing our understanding
and communicating widely what they know. They share the moral imperative to
speak out, and they recount the challenges and especially the ethics of witnessing.
Climate change’s gathering effects occur slowly and vary from place to place;
in contrast to intense public preoccupation with the frightening invisibility, dis-
ease, and death of the COVID-19 pandemic, attention to climate is fragmented and
sporadic. Witnessing professionals to climate change have to arouse and then re-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

arouse public awareness. They have to continuously decry inertia and shortsight-
edness. They struggle against the malignant duo of political opposition and polit-
ical paralysis.

Sustaining hope in the face of accelerating destruction is the emotional burden
witnessing professionals assume. Despite advances in knowledge and organized
political activism, mitigation is anemic. Targets are missed, greenhouse gas emis-
sions are rising, y 2019 was the second-warmest year on record, in the warmest
decade on record.4 In 2020, there were wildfires in the Arctic. Research is under-
funded. International cooperation is brittle and intermittent. Entrenched obsta-
cles, including impenetrable layers of legal and political jurisdiction, stymie local
efforts at adaptation to protect against foreseeable climate-related disasters. Todavía
hope is elemental to witnessing. Despair is not just psychologically harmful but
would be a “mistake.”5 And by continuing to expose and act upon painful truths
witnesses can communicate a sense of hope.

I n April 2018, The New York Times published a story, “Climate Change Deni-

alists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back.” Turning “the
charismatic bears to their own uses,” deniers challenged scientific evidence
of the physical decline of the polar bear population linked to the loss of Arctic sea
ice. Rejection of the science of climate change and its effects was nothing new;
what made headlines was that fourteen researchers resolved to expose this dis-
information campaign. The deniers renewed their attempts to discredit them,
calling the scientists’ response a hit piece by “climate bullies,” “smack talk,” and,
ramping up their assault, an act of “academic rape.” They demanded a retraction.
They filed Freedom of Information Act requests for three of the scientists’ corre-
spondence and agitated for another, Jeffrey Harvey, to be reprimanded for “con-
duct unworthy of serious scientists.”

The decision to speak out, Harvey explained, was precipitated by the

increasing frustration scientists felt about the spread of false information, the disre-
gard of established evidence, and the harassment of researchers. . . . Every time these
deniers make some outlandish claim on the media and we don’t respond to it, it’s like
a soccer match and we’ve given them an open goal.6

In publicly defending their calculations of the status of Arctic ice and polar
bear populations, the scientists were making a larger point. Polar bears need sea
ice; it’s a question of habitat loss, “there’s nothing more complicated than that.”7
They connected their research to the endangered habitats of virtually all life
formas, including our own.

These scientists defended the integrity and validity of their research and insist-
ed on its significance. They pushed back against those who challenged not only
their legitimate claim to specialized knowledge, but also its meaning and value for

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

decision-makers and the public. As Jessica Green puts it, “If we don’t clearly voice
our views . . . to counteract misinformation . . . our knowledge will be irrelevant.”8
Witnessing professionals are drawn into battle against climate rejecters and
deniers and, at the same time, against the wider, wholesale delegitimation of
knowledge-producing institutions and expertise. Assaults on the value and au-
thority of specialized knowledge have become a familiar, degrading part of pub-
lic life, and delegitimation of climate work is particularly ferocious in the United
States and at the highest levels of government.

It has multiple sources: fossil fuel industry disinformation campaigns to ob-
struct regulation of emissions, entrenched economic interests such as real estate
developers hungry to build, and bad-faith accusations of partisan bias. Delegit-
imation also takes the form of wild conspiracy claims: the head of the Environ-
agencia de protección mental (EPA) casts public health researchers as a cabal produc-
ing “secret science,” and advocates for regulation of greenhouse gas emissions are
accused of plotting to impose despotic measures that extinguish personal free-
dom.9 As one advisor to President Trump charged, “They want to take your pick-
up truck, they want to rebuild your home, they want to take away your hamburg-
ers. This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved.”10

Speaking out as scientists of the Arctic did is the oppositional face of witness-
En g. There is also a constructive side: witnessing as education, advocacy, and insti-
tution-building. From their professional vantage points, the authors call attention
to aspects of climate change that are less prominent than, decir, sea level rise. Ellos
do not confine themselves to expert circles. They lecture, publish, post on the In-
ternet, and talk to the media. They join and counsel NGOs and international bod-
es. They bring lawsuits and file amicus briefs. They build and participate in ad-
vocacy groups and transnational organizations. They form alliances across fields
and across national boundaries. Witnessing professionals sit on commissions and
scientific advisory boards and testify before congressional committees. They pro-
vide vital information to government agencies; Patrick Kinney describes his sat-
isfaction when the EPA used his findings on fine particle pollution to successfully
argue that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse pollutants had adverse health ef-
fects and were therefore within the agency’s authority to regulate.

Writing in 2019 from the Korean peninsula during a record heat wave and
amidst threats of nuclear missile attack, Scott Knowles observes: “The reality is
that the slow disaster of climate change . . . is every bit as ominous as the threat of
guerra, it’s just unfolding at a pace that makes it harder for us to keep in the front of
our minds.”11 Yet witnessing professionals do just that.

W itnessing climate change adds a dimension to our moral lexicon.

The classic moral witness is a survivor of atrocity so horrifying that
it evokes evil. Genocide is the grim touchstone. Survivors look back-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

ward. They tell what they endured and speak for those who died. They name and
blame the people at whose hands they suffered dehumanization, and demand that
the perpetrators be identified and punished. They hope to make their unspeakable
experience meaningful. By testifying to the identity of perpetrators and the char-
acter of events, they can enhance collective memory.12

Sometimes professionals are witnesses of this kind even though they do not
personally suffer the ghastly violations they report. Anthropologists studying
bones to identify victims of mass killing and journalists and photojournalists doc-
umenting organized ethnic rape and murder know that the facts they present pro-
vide proof of what has happened here. Their work has moral and historical impor-
tance. People must be made aware and condemn the evil that made it necessary to
identify bones and report atrocity.

But when it comes to the effects of climate change, we are all victims, and cer-
tainly in advanced industrial countries, we are all perpetrators. The harm is ongo-
En g, not safely relegated to the past. Witnesses to physical devastation and mass-
es of climate refugees, the extinction of ecosystems and the species that inhabit
a ellos, tell stories of suffering and the human cause of suffering. They are not, o
not always, acts of willful cruelty, yet the ultimate impact is wanton destruction.

Until thirty years ago, only a small company of scientists recognized climate
change and its causes. The turning point was the 1988 congressional testimony by
James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He deliv-
ered the critical warning: global warming is not a natural variation in climate but
can be ascribed with a high degree of confidence to the buildup of carbon dioxide
and other gases in the atmosphere. From then on, climate change could not be
seen as the unintended consequence of measures to improve human well-being
by means of energy produced from fossil fuels. Por décadas, we have known that
none of the basic activities of ordinary life that rely on energy from carbon-based
sources are harmless. Robert Jay Lifton calls the condition under which we con-
tinue to worsen climate change just by doing what we ordinarily do “malignant
normality.” “We are born into it,” he writes, “and nothing in our lives is outside
of it.”13

Climate change and extreme weather events–wildfires, floods, calor, y
drought–require us to exercise the extraordinary human capacity for adaptation,
which takes its place alongside mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions as a prac-
tical and moral imperative. Adaptation demands more than triage and rebuilding
ruined homes after an earthquake. It calls for massive rearrangements: alterations
in agriculture, Por ejemplo, and relocation of entire communities vulnerable to
sea level rise, and measures to deal humanely with the displacement of many mil-
lions of refugees from parts of the earth made uninhabitable by heat. Miguel
Gerrard outlines the legal tools available for local adaptation: flood maps, zoning
codes, building codes, infrastructure specifications, insurance requirements, y

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

más. Yet speaking out about the need for adaptation is an underappreciated as-
pect of witnessing; Gerrard observes that legal practice in this area is “less glamor-
ous than suing oil companies, and it tends to promise no more than local benefits,
but it will be an important part of coping with the hot world to come.”14 Adapta-
tion also presents a confounding dilemma, and in our conversation for Dædalus,
Rafe Pomerance delivers a cold truth: “What are you adapting to? What climate
system are you adapting to? One or two degrees warmer or five degrees warmer?
The climate is now transient. . . . There is no equilibrium state anymore.”15

“A cademic writing typically does not happen in the first person singular,"

Elke Weber notes. These essays are an exception: the authors reflect on
their paths to witnessing. Becoming a witnessing professional entails
two deeply transformative processes. The first is a commitment to a professional
identity, and as these essays show, it takes a second transformation to propel pro-
fessionals into the public square.16 Witnessing is not how the authors understood
their role at the start of their careers. They began doing work they were trained to
hacer, in familiar settings, and in accord with “bread and butter” professional ethics,
cual, they learned from experience, are an inadequate guide for confronting the
practical and moral challenges their work exposes. Their idea of social responsi-
bility expands.

This sense of purpose occurs against the background of powerful, often con-
servative forces of professional education and of professional associations that
define and police practice. They set requirements for training and qualifications
for certification, adelanto, and tenure. They deliver the privileges that come
with professional positions and status. They judge and discipline. Professional as-
sociations work to preserve their authority over members and their autonomy vis-
à- vis government.

George Bernard Shaw once declared these institutions “conspiracies against
the laity.”17 That is an overstatement. But broadly speaking, professionals enjoy
independence and discretion; many work in settings that do not subject them to
direct supervision and accountability. They can do great harm. Dennis Thomp-
son had a leading role in establishing ethics requirements in professional schools
around the world, and notes that it took a wave of scandals to prompt programs
to begin to teach “role morality.” “Applied ethics journals sprang up,” Thompson
recalls. “The ethics movement gained momentum not only among lawyers and
doctors but also in the training of police officers, veterinarians, accountants, incluso
economists.”18

Sociologist Émile Durkheim’s concept of “moral particularism” captures the
nature of codified professional ethics. “It has been observed since Aristotle,"
he wrote, “that . . . morals vary according to the agents who practice them” and

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

“a system of morals is always the affair of a group and can operate only if this
group protects them by its authority.”19

Codes of professional ethics typically contain a mission statement idealizing
selfless service and benefits to others.20 Their chief purpose, sin embargo, is to set the
parameters of standard practice: the terms governing research on human sub-
jects, Por ejemplo, responsibilities toward patients and clients, requirements of
data access and transparency, and avoiding conflicts of interest. They constrain
what practitioners should and should not do with their specialized knowledge,
and the step into witnessing stands out against the background of these con-
tensiones. The American Political Science Association, Por ejemplo, of which I am a
member, allows that academics in the field have the rights and obligations of any
citizen, but says nothing about obligations to public life arising from their work.
En efecto, some professional norms mandate silence with regard to the affairs of
clients or to protect proprietary information about climate change’s impact on
negocio. They also censor experts in order to avoid political conflict. For this rea-
son, David Titley shows, the military controls publicizing its strategic focus on
climate effects on military bases, supply chains, and regional conflicts inflamed
by drought and food scarcity.

Además, because professional schools and associations shape education, de-
fer funding, and sponsor prestigious publications, they define and entrench what
questions are important to address and methods for addressing them. At business
escuelas, Rebecca Henderson explains, climate change was considered an “ex-
ternality” costly to society but not to the firm, and until very recently, it was not
part of any curriculum. Jessica Green observes that when it comes to conferences,
peer-reviewed publications, and hiring and promotion decisions in political sci-
ence, narrow disciplinary criteria apply and both climate research and activism
are devalued: “I had politics trained out of me.”21

Por supuesto, professional associations can facilitate speaking out. Mark Mitch-
ell discusses the National Medical Association (NMA), founded in 1895 to repre-
sent African American physicians, who were excluded from the American Medi-
cal Association. The NMA focuses on communities “ignored by the larger climate
organizations and health organizations whose members did not face the same
threats.”22 It gave its members a collective voice and credibility to their warnings
about the effects of toxic environmental exposures in their patients.

Writing about the natural and political disaster of Hurricane Katrina, mitchell
observes that effective disaster policy requires an understanding of local commu-
niidades: “The ‘experts’ don’t know that many people will not get on an evacuation
bus without their pets and without knowing where it is going.”23 Rebecca Hender-
son and Carolyn Kormann describe their experiences with professional schools
that hire faculty and design curriculum to enlarge the terrain of what counts as
relevant knowledge.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

Professional associations and education are the background from which wit-
nessing professionals emerge, and standard professional ethics rarely entail an
obligation to bear witness. Mental health practitioners’ “duty to warn,” for exam-
por ejemplo, is a specific requirement to report dangerous patients to potential victims or
the police. Witnessing professionals transform the “duty to warn” into an obliga-
tion to the wider society.

“Is it enough to do good science and publish it in reputable peer-reviewed
journals?” Naomi Oreskes asks.24 The authors question the adequacy of ethics
designed for standard practice when we require what essayist Elaine Scarry called
“thinking in an emergency.”25 The authors’ paths to witnessing confirm the title
of Patrick Kinney’s essay: “Leaving the Comfort Zone.”

T hese essays give paths into witnessing a face and a story. For some, an ear-

ly experience propelled them years later into climate work and speaking
afuera; we can think of their commitment as a calling. David Titley opens his
essay with a memory from when he was six years old: “All I ever wanted to do was
to forecast the weather.”26 The pain of being a target of racial slurs in school, Marca
Mitchell recounts, led to his career combating environmental injustice in minori-
ty communities long before the concept of environmental justice was recognized
by public health officials. Michael Gerrard traces the roots of his dedication to en-
vironmental law to his youth in Charleston, West Virginia, a polluted coal-mining
area and hub of the petrochemical industry. He entered the arena when laws spe-
cific to climate change were undeveloped and “there was little law to practice.”
Carolyn Kormann was in third grade when she read about Biosphere 2 in a weekly
children’s magazine. “The idea of a monumental, glass, sun-drenched structure,
in a faraway desert landscape, containing miniature versions of seven biomes–
rain forest, ocean with a coral reef, desert, savannah, mangroves, intensive agri-
cultura, and human habitat–was thrilling.”27

For others, serendipity propelled them down the path to speaking out. Antonio
Oposa describes his youth on a small remote island in Central Philippines. Cuando
the most powerful typhoon to make landfall struck his region, he was driven to
use the law–indeed to make new law–to protect the people of drowning island
naciones.

Rafe Pomerance’s career was propelled by sheer chance. He describes “run-
ning across” an EPA report on the environmental impact of coal and saying to
él mismo: “This can’t happen!”28 In 1972, as the facts and causes of climate change
were just beginning to circulate within a small group of scientists, he took on the
self-appointed mission to expand the circle and move climate change into the po-
litical arena. Más tarde, he seized an opportunity to set an agenda for climate action. En
el 1988 Toronto conference “Our Changing Atmosphere,” he recalls, “I decided
somebody had to start talking about making carbon dioxide reductions. I actually

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

made that decision. Nobody was talking about it, somebody had to talk about it,
so I decided I’ll talk about it.”29

Elke Weber’s early work as a psychologist focused on financial risk when, en
her first faculty position, she was thrown together with agricultural economists
studying farmers’ awareness of climate change. She recognized the unanticipated
opportunity to address “the intellectual puzzle of our time: what lies at the root
of pervasive inaction, wishful thinking, and denial.”30 Before the public health
community began to think about climate change, an unexpected invitation to
join a newly created team assessing climate’s impact on the New York City region
launched Patrick Kinney into his study of heat effects on health.

Robert Jay Lifton, at the age of ninety-one, coined the phrase “witnessing pro-
fessionals” in his book The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival,
published in 2017. His plunge into the subject followed more than sixty years
studying extreme situations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and lead-
ership in the doctor’s movement in opposition to nuclear arms. He calls nuclear
and climate threats “the apocalyptic twins.”

Witnessing is associated with testifying, advocating, and warning, but the au-
thors remind us that expanding knowledge and the authority to speak out require
institutions dedicated to these purposes, institutions that provide “research eco-
systems” of colleagues, reliable funding, and career ladders to sustain the next
generation of climate-oriented lawyers, científicos, y otros, and to encourage
public engagement. The authors are institution builders, and a sample of their
initiatives provides another window into the many-sidedness of climate change
sí mismo.

Michael Gerrard founded the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. rebeca
Henderson taught the first required course at Harvard Business School on the
bearing of climate on business decisions. Elke Weber led the creation of the Cen-
ter for Decision Sciences to advance social science collaborations among behav-
ioral economists, psychologists, and anthropologists. David Titley led the first
A NOSOTROS. Navy Task Force on Climate Change, which acted as a “forcing function” to
include climate impacts in strategic reviews for the Pentagon and the General Ac-
countability Office. Patrick Kinney was among the founders of the first academic
program dedicated to climate change and health. Mark Mitchell built the Con-
necticut Coalition for Environmental Justice and is associated with the recently
created Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

Novel legal strategies belong to this category of institutional innovation.
“Lawyers are scrambling for legal theories that might be available,” Michael Ger-
rard writes; avenues to creating a legal status for climate refugees, for example.31
Antonio Oposa, a legal advocate for the principle of intergenerational responsibil-
idad, describes his decision to bring the first (and successful) class-action suit with
children as plaintiffs to oppose government deforestation.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

A s witnessing professionals move outside the company of colleagues, cli-

ents, and patients, they face a distinct set of practical and ethical chal-
lentes. How do they assess opportunities and select arenas for speaking
afuera? Judge which powerful interests are susceptible to education and pressure?
Expand the short time-horizons of policy-makers and the public? Facilitate in-
volvement of people on the sidelines? Consider what activities are effective,
dónde, and whether we even have a measure of efficacy?

Witnessing calls up qualities that are not part of any professional training,
among them a fighting spirit and political judgment in the widest sense. It is in-
fused with moral fervor, but urgency demands sensitivity to temper and tone.
Rebecca Henderson describes coming to the insight that “there are some things
one can say in public as an economist and as a businessperson, y . . .‘the planet
is burning and we must fix it at any cost’ is not one of them.”32 These essays make
the challenges vivid.

The process of “translation” is the most familiar challenge experts face on en-
tering the public square. Citizens carrying posters of polar bears and marching
with 350.org, a leading activist group, are free to be personally expressive; they can
speak the language of civic responsibility or religious conscience, green virtues or
sanity. Professionals have the responsibilities of citizens but also the distinct ob-
ligations that come with expert knowledge, influencia, and privilege. They strug-
gle to communicate technical knowledge so that it is intelligible, its significance
clear, and its tone modulated for specific groups of policy-makers and segments
of the public.

For the same information can have opposite import depending on the audi-
ence. Robert Socolow observes that scientists outside of climate work are skep-
tical that 97 percent of climate scientists believe in human-induced warming; él
goes against engrained assumptions that no finding is “incontrovertible," y
that confirmation bias is always a problem. Al mismo tiempo, lay audiences are
vulnerable to those who sow doubt about climate science by falsely claiming that
experts disagree about whether carbon emissions are a principal cause of climate
cambiar; for the general public the accurate fact of 97 percent consensus is an ef-
fective corrective.

Because climate work does not respect disciplinary bounds, “learning how
to talk,” as Patrick Kinney puts it, is also a requisite for working with colleagues
across disciplines.33 From “learning to talk” comes the creation of new fields, y
Elke Weber describes the birth of “environmental decision-making.”34

The challenge of translation is really the challenge of translations in the plural.

Witnessing professionals must be multilingual.

Antonio Oposa poses the difficulty of getting a hearing differently. His ap-
proach to litigation to force government protection of old-growth forests is a form
of storytelling. He explains: “If I went to the media and attended hearings in Con-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

ingreso, who would listen to a young lawyer who represented trees? . . . But in a court
of law, the story can be told better.”35 Carolyn Kormann expands the principle
of storytelling to journalism: “Reporting on climate change should require not
just understanding and conveying the science, but understanding the culture of
a place, the stories that a culture tells itself about itself. . . .These stories would al-
ways be tied to a landscape, and a place, they would always, in a sense, be local.”36
There is no single rule for translating specialized knowledge; explicación
must fit the audience and the purpose. Nor is there one best way of warning and
propelling action. In The Uninhabitable Earth, journalist David Wallace-Wells in-
sists that no approach is too dangerous to try. As he reads it, el 2018 report from
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered “a new form of permis-
sión, of sanction, to the world’s scientists” emboldening them to “scream as they
wish to.”37 Should they?

T he authors reflect on the ethical challenges of speaking out. Many of these

considerations are intrinsic to expert witnessing and center on the imper-
ative to protect the authority of specialized knowledge. Canvassing the
potential risks of witnessing, Dennis Thompson emphasizes the “obligation to re-
spect the knowledge that is the basis of their authority to witness.”38 Every con-
tributor to this volume is sensitive to the demands of truth and honesty. They ac-
knowledge the pitfalls of over- and undersimplification. They are aware of the risk
that some forms of activism may undermine their standing as experts by raising
questions about their objectivity. For many, that is the very definition of irrespon-
sible advocacy.

Professionals can endanger their authority by overreaching or “fearmonger-
ing.” Robert Socolow advises climate scientists to build “a political middle” that
diminishes polarization between apocalyptic assertions on one hand and lack of
urgency on the other. Advocating for research funding to better understand the
sensitivity of the earth to human activity and to assess the risks of worst outcomes
associated with new technologies fall into this middle ground. But professionals
can also fail as witnesses by excessive caution and reticence. Jessica Green warns
against the propensity to avoid activism and to validate only modest incremental
políticas: “We are in a fight for our collective survival. This takes precedence over
our precious credibility. . . . We need to plant a flag: we must be explicit about what
our findings indicate we should do.”39

“What we should do” is itself double-edged. On one side, witnessing profes-
sionals have been accused of abandoning objectivity just by advocating for specif-
ic policy solutions. They are liable to be cast as biased, as partisans. Los autores
do not accept this argument for constraint, and their witnessing often takes the
form of pressing for and against specific actions. It is a different matter, sin embargo,
if they prescribe policies that fall outside their own area of expertise. Naomi Ore-

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

skes insists that beyond the bounds of their own work, reticence is appropriate,
not least because professionals model respect for specialized knowledge by defer-
ring to colleagues in other fields.

Yet ethical considerations extend beyond the responsibility to protect the val-
ue and authority of specialized knowledge. A second set of moral considerations
is not unique to professionals and the authors take on these daunting challenges
también.

They join moral philosophers in attention to injustice. Responding to climate
change requires dismantling the structures of energy use that poison the earth and
inventing both clean energy resources and new social and institutional resources.
In all this, there is the imperative to assess kinds and degrees of suffering and in-
equalities in burdens and resources. Rafe Pomerance, Jessica Green, Michael Ger-
rard, Mark Mitchell, and Antonio Oposa speak to the profound and vexing ques-
tion of distributive justice within and among nations and across generations.

Witnessing professionals grapple with another aspect of justice. When pub-
lic officials and others in a position to effectively address climate change and re-
duce its danger and suffering fail to take responsibility, they are active agents of
injustice, and calling them to task is part of witnessing. Citizens who sit on the
sidelines, perpetuating “malignant normality” and its differential effects, can be
seen as passively unjust. The challenge for witnessing professionals is to appreci-
ate both faces of injustice. Al mismo tiempo, they must take care that demoniza-
tion and castigation do not eclipse the constructive content of education, advice,
and warning.

The perennial ethical question of means and ends presents its own set of chal-
lentes. What means are justified in pursuit of climate awareness and action?
What forms of persuasion or manipulation should be ruled out? Elke Weber is a
leading contributor to research on the cognitive mechanisms that obstruct think-
ing about the long term and make, in her words, “believing is seeing” as true as
“seeing is believing.” She presses us to question how professionals should employ
psychological knowledge in advising, warning, and prescribing action.

Political theorists (and politicians!) know that fear can be salutary. Considerar-
ing whether professionals should induce or exploit fear, Weber argues that arous-
ing dread is only temporarily effective; después de todo, people are loathe to suffer that
emotional state for long. In order to motivate attention to climate change over
tiempo, fear must be paired with positive messaging.

There are many such challenges. “Framing” refers to how an issue is defined;
in some settings, por ejemplo, the terms “climate change” and “green” are in-
terpreted as partisan and policy advocates substitute “energy-saving” or “good
for health.” What is gained or lost by this shift in language? “Soft paternalism,"
“nudging,” or “choice architecture” alters how information and incentives are
presented in order to subtly redirect people’s actions; when is it warranted? Y-

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

certainty is endemic to many areas of climate research; how much transparency is
necessary to avoid being misleading? Should the uncertainty of projections into
the future be communicated to policy-makers? To lay audiences? Returning to
an earlier example, acknowledging unknowns about the time frame of disappear-
ing Arctic ice can be exploited to perpetuate popular doubt about the devastating
demographic trends of polar bears.

The authors take on these ethical challenges. For many professionals, howev-
es, they are daunting and dampen willingness to step into the public arena. Naomi
Oreskes observes that scientists in particular are reluctant to speak out, and she
offers an additional explanation for their reticence. Scientists’ sense of social re-
sponsibility is more limited today than in the past because of specialization, she
observes. It orients them almost exclusively to their discipline and its community
norms so that the prospect of collegial censure discourages witnessing. Against
this insularity, Oreskes posits “the obligation to be witnesses, testifying to mat-
ters that they as the relevant experts are uniquely positioned to observe, bajo-
stand, and explain to the rest of us.”40 She calls this robust demand “sentinel
obligation.”

W itnesses for climate change also confront fundamental political chal-

lentes. One is the uneasy relation between democracy and expertise.
“Science isn’t about . . . voting,” Robert Socolow observes.41 True, pero
political decision-making is. Witnessing is imperative precisely because profes-
sionals share civic responsibility for responding to the climate crisis with other
los ciudadanos.

Reconciling the authority of specialized knowledge with respect for democrat-
ic political agency is a perennial problem. Citizens and their political representa-
tives have to judge when deference to the authority of expertise is warranted. Ex-
perts can be wrong. Experience provides good reasons to be wary of technological
hubris and averse to paternalism. There are grounds for reasonable skepticism.
Beyond that, unreasonable rejection of expertise, which is widespread today, es
intensified in the case of climate change by the inherent radicalism of necessary
responses and fierce partisan conflict.42

A dimension of witnessing, entonces, is sensitivity to public wariness of expert au-
autoridad. It underscores the responsibility to explain just why, in each particular
caso, specialized knowledge is vital to democratic decisions and, at the same time,
calls on professionals to demonstrate humility with regard to what they don’t
saber. They publicly demonstrate tolerance for uncertainty and exhibit the capac-
ity for learning and self-correction.

“We can raise our voices . . . and hope to move some minds. But neither the
UN nor the pope can force action,” Michael Gerrard acknowledges.43 Witness-
ing aims at moving minds and propelling action. As Jessica Green points out, “We

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

must remember that policy is not a substitute for politics.”44 The authors’ com-
mitments to a certain course of education, warning, and advocacy reflect their
judgments of how to best contribute to effective climate action. These judgments
are rooted, sometimes implicitly, in their thinking about the political dynamic of
cambiar.

Does effective climate policy come, or will it come, from above? From an alli-
ance of political and professional authorities? From executive emergency powers
operating outside regular institutional or constitutional constraints? From deci-
sions by national judicial branches? Or from international negotiations or legal
structures created by international courts? And who will enforce these decisions?
Alternativamente, does the dynamic of constructive political action operate from
abajo? Is the critical mover mass popular mobilization, including protest move-
ments by young people who affirm with John James Audubon that “the world is
not given by our ancestors, but borrowed from our children”?45 Or does the im-
petus to political action come from community-level organizing and coalitions of
advocacy groups?

Or is the path more complex, running from a combination of popular mobili-
zation and social organization to the creation of stable electoral majorities capa-
ble of holding political representatives accountable?

Witnessing professionals differ, as well they might. These essays suggest that
no political dynamic can be ruled out. No effort is lost. Every effort enhances our
moral self-esteem. One thing witnessing does not countenance is disparaging
democratic political agency. Representing humans as a “psychopathic colony . . .
of suicidally productive drones in a carbon-addicted hive” expresses frustration,
even despair, but it is self-indulgent.46 Witnessing is directed at awakening and
life affirmation, at harnessing the human capacity for adaptation and innovation,
and at actions consistent with democracy.

Y et hope and despair thread through these narratives. Witnessing imposes

personal costs. The scientists who rallied and pushed back against deniers
of the decline of the Arctic polar bear population were not fired from their
jobs, but David Titley bluntly acknowledges the peril: “We now have an adminis-
tration in which it is hazardous to your career’s health to bring up climate risks in
any form.”47 Climate witnesses suffer insults, attacks on their reputation, hound-
En g, harassment, and loss of funding. Naomi Oreskes endured violent threats and
Antonio Oposa was the victim of a devastating violent assault.

Witnessing professionals also bear the emotional and psychological cost
of having their advice and warnings ignored while evidence mounts of how far
things have gone wrong. As one researcher whose career is dedicated to studying
frogs put it, “We are losing all these amphibians before we even know that they
exist.”48

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

Still, the Dædalus authors persevere. They exhibit stamina. Scott Knowles con-
fesses, “I’m a disaster researcher, worry is my business”; but worry is not resig-
nation.49 Michael Gerrard’s essay is titled “An Environmental Lawyer’s Fraught
Quest for Legal Tools to Hold Back the Seas”–a frustrating quest, not a futile
one–and Carolyn Kormann’s is “The Coral Is Not All Dead Yet.” Elke Weber
practices what she calls “applied hope.” Antonio Oposa leads the Normandy
Chair for Peace, which he describes as a search for “the good, the right, y el
bright.”50 David Titley’s essay on selling climate change inside the halls of the
Pentagon–“A Patron Saint of Lost Causes, or Just Ahead of Its Time?”–sits on
the knife-edge of despair and hope. The final note Rafe Pomerance strikes in our
conversation is pitch perfect: “Shouldn’t I be totally depressed? Yet I’m not. . . .
We started at zero. Well, look at us now. Everybody in the world knows about cli-
mate change. So is that progress? Let’s hope.”51 As Robert Jay Lifton concludes,
“With climate issues, it is always late in the game and yet, in mitigating potential
catastrophe, never too late.”52

Inaction is massive carelessness. It is also a violation of what is right. Antonio

Oposa takes stock of the absurdity:

We cut down trees that took all of time to grow, sell them off as lumber, and count
them as revenue. We scoop out the Seas to eat fish by the millions of tons, fish that
were here long before us. In a matter of hours, we dig out carbon that formed over one
hundred million years, and burn it as coal, oil, and gas. In a matter of minutes, we burn
a ellos . . . belching out poisonous gases into the very Air we breathe. We take out so
much from Earth, use it for a while, and then throw it away as “waste.”53

For most of us, climate change as a whole and the fearful future it portends
are beyond imagination. These essays give us grounding. They help us grasp the
muchos- sidedness of climate change and its effects, the next steps, the laws, el
business decisions, the regulations and policies and political actions that are with-
in reach. Witnessing professionals show us how to think about and beyond the
unthinkable.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

nota del autor

This project began under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council’s
(SSRC) “Anxieties of Democracy” program. With Robert Keohane, I cochaired the
climate change working group with the goal of stimulating empirical research on
the politics of climate change and normative questions raised by climate politics.
Inspired by Robert Jay Lifton’s concept of witnessing professionals, I organized a
conference at Princeton University in 2018 on speaking out about climate change.
This volume is an outgrowth of the conference and several of the original present-
ers are authors. I am grateful to all the participants for exploring the significance
of witnessing, and to colleagues and graduate students in attendance who took ac-
tive part in the discussion. I am also grateful for financial and administrative sup-
port from the SSRC; to program coordinators Ron Kassimir, Kris-Stella Trump,
and Cole Edick; to Melissa Lane and the University Center for Human Values at
Princeton University for advice and funding; and to Michael Oppenheimer and the
Princeton Environmental Institute, the Program in Science, Tecnología, and Envi-
ronmental Policy, and the Climate Futures Initiative.

Dædalus stepped onto the field of climate change in 1996 with “The Liberation of
the Environment.” “Religion and Ecology” followed in 2001, and two volumes on
“The Alternative Energy Future” in 2012 y 2013 focused on solutions. En 2015,
“The Future of Food, Salud & the Environment of a Full Earth” and “On Water”
were published. I am grateful to the American Academy for adding this volume on
the experiences of those who do climate work and bring what they know into the
public square. Peter Walton and Heather Struntz did expert and speedy work copy-
editing these pieces. Phyllis Bendell, Director of Publications and Managing Editor
of Dædalus, brought her experience as guide and editor, her supreme good sense,
and her enthusiasm to this effort; she made this publication possible.

Sobre el Autor

Nancy L. Rosenblum, miembro de la Academia Americana desde 2004, is Senator
Joseph Clark Research Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government and Professor
Emerita in the Government Department at Harvard University, where she served
as chairperson. She is coeditor of the Annual Review of Political Science and has been
a member of the advisory board of the SSRC “Anxieties of Democracy” program
desde 2013. She is the author and editor of eleven books, among them A Lot of People
Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (with Russell Muirhead,
2019), Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America (2016), On the Side of the
Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship (2010), Membership and Morals: The Per-
sonal Uses of Pluralism in America (1998), and Thoreau: Political Writings (1996).

notas finales

1 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition (Palo Alto, California: Stanford Univer-

sity Press, 2000), 89.

2 Carolyn Kormann, “The Coral Is Not All Dead Yet,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

3 Cornelia Griggs, “A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky is Falling,” The
New York Times, Marzo 19, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/
coronavirus-doctor-new-york.html; and Rob Davidson, “Most Doctors Don’t Want
to Be Political Activists, but Coronavirus Forces Us to Act,” The Guardian, Abril 22, 2020,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/22/doctors-coronavirus
-political-activists.

4 Bob Berwyn, “Earth’s Hottest Decade on Record Marked by Extreme Storms, Deadly
Wildfires,” Inside Climate News, December 19, 2019, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/
18122019/decade-climate-heat-drought-extreme-storms-arctic-sea-ice-antarctica-greenland.
5 Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Destruction (Cambridge, Masa.: Har-

vard University Press, 2006).

6 Erica Goode, “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing
Back,"El New York Times, Abril 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/climate
/polar-bears-climate-deniers.html.

7 Ibídem.

8 Jessica F. Verde, “Less Talk, More Walk: Why Climate Change Demands Activism in the

Academia,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

9 Zoë Carpenter, “Trump’s EPA Is Promoting a Conspiracy Theory Created by Big Tobac-
co,” The Nation, Noviembre 22, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/
environmental-protection-agency-secret-science-big-tobacco/.

10 Cited in Naomi Klein, “Care and Repair: Left Politics in the Age of Climate Change,"

Dissent magazine, Invierno 2020, 97.

11 Scott Gabriel Knowles, “Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: A Historian Witnesses Cli-

mate Change on the Korean Peninsula,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

12 See Avishai Margalit, “A Moral Witness,” The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, Masa.: Har-

vard University Press, 2000), 147–182.

13 Robert Jay Lifton, “On Becoming Witnessing Professionals,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).
14 Michael B. Gerrard, “An Environmental Lawyer’s Fraught Quest for Legal Tools to Hold

Back the Seas,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

15 Quoted in Nancy L. Rosenblum and Rafe Pomerance, “A Conversation,Dédalo 149 (4)

(Caer 2020).

16 This standard characterization of bureaucrats without discretion is contradicted by Ber-
nardo Zacka, When the State Meets the Street: Public Service and Moral Agency (Cambridge,
Masa.: Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 2017).

17 jorge b.. Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma (Nueva York: Brentano’s, 1911), 32.
18 Dennis F. Thompson, “The Professional Ethics of Witnessing Professionals,Dédalo

149 (4) (Caer 2020).

19 Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, trans. Cornelia Brookfield (Glencoe,

Ill.: The Free Press, 1958), 3, 6–7.

20 Echoing a statement by the president of the American Bar Association in 1894, "El
True Professional Ideal,” in Bruce A. Kimball, America: Una historia (Cambridge: Blackwell,
1992), 1.

21 Verde, “Less Talk, More Walk.”

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out

22 Mark A. mitchell, “Racism as a Motivator for Climate Justice,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer

2020).

23 Ibídem.
24 Naomi Oreskes, “What Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?Dédalo 149

(4) (Caer 2020).

25 Elaine Scarry, Thinking in an Emergency (Nueva York: W.. W.. norton & Compañía, 2011).
26 David W. Titley, “Task Force Climate Change: A Patron Saint of Lost Causes, or Just

Ahead of Its Time?Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

27 Kormann, “The Coral Is Not All Dead Yet.”
28 Rosenblum and Pomerance, “A Conversation.”
29 Ibídem.
30 Elke U. Weber, “Seeing Is Believing: Understanding and Aiding Human Responses to

Global Climate Change,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

31 Gerrard, “An Environmental Lawyer’s Fraught Quest for Legal Tools to Hold Back the

Seas.”

32 Rebecca Henderson makes this point in an earlier version of her essay, on file with the

author.

33 Patrick L. Kinney, “From Air Pollution to the Climate Crisis: Leaving the Comfort Zone,"

Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).
34 Weber, “Seeing Is Believing.”
35 Antonio Oposa Jr., “Let Me Tell You a Story,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).
36 Kormann, “The Coral Is Not All Dead Yet.”
37 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Nueva York: Aleatorio

House, 2019), 157.

38 Thompson, “The Professional Ethics of Witnessing Professionals.”
39 Verde, “Less Talk, More Walk.”
40 Oreskes, “What Is the Social Responsibility of Climate Scientists?"
41 Robert H. Socolow, “Witnessing for the Middle to Depolarize the Climate Change Con-

versation,Dédalo 149 (4) (Caer 2020).

42 Harold T. Shapiro, opening statement in “Climate Change Assessments: Review of the
Processes and Procedures of the IPCC InterAcademy Council,” UN Press Conference,
Agosto 30, 2010, http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/OpeningStatement.html.
43 Gerrard, “An Environmental Lawyer’s Fraught Quest for Legal Tools to Hold Back the

Seas.”

44 Verde, “Less Talk, More Walk.”
45 The precise wording of the quotation varies and has been attributed to various authors.
For a brief history, see “We Do Not Inherit the Earth from Our Ancestors; We Borrow It
from Our Children,” Quote Investigator, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/22/
borrow-earth/.

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149 (4) Fall 2020Nancy L. Rosenblum

46 Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (san

Francisco: City Lights Open Media, 2015), 86.

47 Titley, “Task Force Climate Change.”
48 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Nueva York: Picador, 2015), 10.
49 Knowles, “Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene.”
50 Oposa, “Let Me Tell You a Story.”
51 Rosenblum and Pomerance, “A Conversation.”
52 Lifton, “On Becoming Witnessing Professionals.”
53 Oposa, “Let Me Tell You a Story.”

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesPaths to Witnessing, Ethics of Speaking Out
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