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Hydraulic Fracturing: The Project
As I have been hinting, I’m currently caught up in a collaborative project on engineering, ethics and policy related to hydraulic fracturing. The idea for the project began to take shape in conversations I was having with my colleague, Chloé Arson, who is over in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech.… Continue reading
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Some Notes on the Side
I’ll be attending the 2015 International Conference of the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, next month, in California. My presentation for the conference is a progress report on an collaborative project on hydraulic fracturing, about which I really will post some things this week. In the mean time, I’ve got something of an experiment… Continue reading
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From the Archive: Oil Liberation!
As an over-the-weekend teaser for a couple of posts I’m planning for next week, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek entry from my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, from April 7, 2014. _________ Oil Liberation! A longtime friend posted a link on Facebook to an article bearing the headline: Vast oil trove trapped in Monterey Shale… Continue reading
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From the Archive: A Phenomenology of Driving, and Other Matters
Continuing along the thread of music and the experience of systems and of movement, here is a post that appeared on my other blog, The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, on November 11, 2011. In it, I draw from half-remembered conversations from grad school to inform an elucidation of the fluidity of movement and the transparency… Continue reading
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The Music of Movement
Thinking about the convergence of ethics and music, I was reminded of a passage in Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On. The book recounts Sacks’s own experience as a patient, recovering from a severe injury to his left leg. He describes experiencing his leg as an alien thing, little more than a pillar of… Continue reading
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The Music of Systems
As I continue to mull over possible connection between ethical experience and music, I came across a passage suggesting that systems have a kind of music to them. I provided students in my environmental ethics class with a few excerpts from Donella M. Meadows’ very useful book, Thinking in Systems: A Primer. The last chapter,… Continue reading
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What a Field Guide Is For
Thinking about my maybe-project of writing A Field Guide to Basic Values, it occurs to me I should be ready to say something about the very idea of a field guide. When I first took up birding, at the age of 12, I leaned very heavily on the battered old field guide I had available… Continue reading
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Reading Old Books with Engineers
In yesterday’s post I described an approach I developed for encouraging and helping students to read old books and, more to the point, to derive understanding from them. In a political theory course, last semester, I tried something different. In the first half of the course, I set students to work together on understanding three… Continue reading
