Philosophers for Sustainability, an international group of over 200 philosophers “that aims to encourage our profession to take leadership on climate change and environmental sustainability,” has launched a campaign to urge the American Philosophical Association (APA) to move one or two of its annual divisional meetings entirely online.

The organizers of the “APA 2+1 Campaign,” call their effort “an achievable step towards mitigating North American philosophers’ climate impacts.” They write:

Philosophers increasingly recognize the grave challenges posed by the climate crisis. North American philosophers can take a significant step in facing these challenges if all three divisions (Eastern, Central, and Pacific) of the American Philosophical Association collective shift to a 2+1 model for APA annual meetings. This would mean that either one or two divisional meetings each year takes place entirely online, with the in-person meeting(s) rotating between divisions… [T]his shift… would significantly reduce the APA’s climate impact while recognizing that different conference formats work best for different philosophers…

The APA’s conferencing practices should be consistent with its own stated values as an organization. The APA’s own Good Practices Guide makes explicit that “many current practices in philosophy are unsustainable, contributing to irreversible environmental harms that are expected to greatly increase global temperatures.” Conference travel is the most unsustainable of these practices. 

A round-trip flight from New York to Chicago incurs around half a ton of CO2 per passenger in economy class, equal to the average Ghanian or Bangladeshi’s annual footprint. This means that a conventional week-long conference produces as much greenhouse gas as a settlement of similar size generates in a year in most of the global South. A similarly sized virtual event, by contrast, incurs probably less than 1% of those emissions.

You can learn more about the campaign, and sign a petition supporting it, here.

(via Helen De Cruz)

Related: “Open, Live, Online Philosophy Events“, “Results of the Philosophy of Science Association’s Climate Change Survey“, “New Group: Philosophers for Sustainability“, “Online Conferences: The New Default“, “Will Conferences Recover? Should They?“, “Planning an Environmentally Friendly In-Person Conference”