I recently had a wonderful visit at Lafayette College.

Lafayette is a highly regarded institution located in Easton, PA. It has a twin-fold emphasis on the liberal arts, as well as engineering and the applied sciences. This creative mix of the arts and sciences is sorely needed in a society like ours that risks loosing sight of larger values amongst technical details. While technology is never a ‘neutral tool’ as some would like to think, our choices to use technologies for good or ill are the more important issue. Bringing the value-relevance of the liberal arts into creative dialogue with the applied sciences seems like a great idea to me.

I was visitng as a keynote speaker for Earth Week. Unlike other speaking engagements, this was not a one-off presentation, but an extended opportunity to engage with the campus community about ethics and sustainability. So alongside my presentation, I had the pleasure of meeting with a wide variety of the college’s faculty and students.

My talk was on ‘Avatars of Sustainability’. I interpreted the movie Avatar as a cultural text, the meanings of which have something important to say about our approach to ethics and sustainability. It was fun to do, and the discussion session afterwards was quite lively. I was peppered with insightful questions about the movie itself, and its implications for the troubled relationship between people, animals and nature. These questions touched on capitalism, militarism, colonialism, patriarchy, race, anthropocentrism, speciesism, power, animal domestication, practical versus analytic ethics, ethics in environmental policy, and the ethical norms of sustainability.

The next day I met with LEAP or Lafayette Environmental Awareness and Protection. Organized by a core group of environmentally minded students, LEAP is particularly active in the local food movement and the introduction of sustainable practice at Lafayette. Following that I was a guest in Humans and Other Animals in Contemporary Culture, a course instructed by Carrie Rohman of the English department. Students in this class had a wide range of ethics-related thoughts on Avatar, offering many distinctive insights on the movie. Following this, I met with faculty for a wide-ranging and productive discussion about the state of environmental studies programs and curricula.

So a big thank you to all the faculty and students who made my visit such an enjoyable one.

Cheers!