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Available fossil energy sources are dubiously compatible with the goal of arresting climate change. Carbon capture and sequestration technologies currently do not work on an industrial scale, and even if they could be made to work, they will reduce the energy returned on energy invested (EROI) of fossil fuels to below acceptable levels. The EROI of nuclear fission is disputed, but most peer-reviewed work places it in the 5–14 range, making it of questionable utility. Nuclear fusion, if it works, will not be available in time. Some renewable sources—notably, various biofuels—have unacceptably low EROIs. The remaining forms of renewable energy—solar, wind, hydropower, and wave power—sport EROIs that are, at best, on the cusp of viability. There is reasonable hope for improvement in these technologies because they are, at present, immature. In the meantime, it would be ideal if we could find a way to give them an edge.

Societies need energy in order to sustain themselves and their members. This energy comes in two forms: fuel and food. These are continuous: they are both means of energy acquisition consumed for the same purpose, the maintenance of a complex society. The energy sources that sustain a society—whether fuel or food—must have a sufficiently high aggregate energy returned on energy invested (EROI). The EROI of a source is the energy acquired from a source divided by the energy that the society had to invest in acquiring it. Once the EROI of a society’s energy sources drops below a certain threshold, societal collapse often results: the breakup of that society and the emergence of new, simpler societies. Calculations suggest that maintenance of a society recognizably similar to our own vis-à-vis socioeconomic parameters requires energy sources with EROIs in the 11–14 range. Maintenance of certain markers of liberal democracies may require higher EROIs, in the 20–30 range.

Underlying human-caused extinctions, past and present, is a vast biomass reallocation program. Before our Neolithic forebears began changing the world, biomass was distributed quite evenly among species of animals and plants. The tenure of humans has seen a marked change in this, as biomass became progressively concentrated into a small number of species—us and animals we eat. Today, 96% of all mammalian biomass consists in humans and the mammals that humans farm. An additional 70% of all avian biomass consists in domestic fowl. This biomass reallocation is the most significant driver of species extinction. The number-one driver of species extinction today is change in land use. The most significant driver of change in land use is agricultural expansion. By far the most prominent form of agricultural expansion is pastoral farming and the growing of animal feed crops. Eating animals is, therefore, the most important driver of species extinction.

The other climate benefit of no longer eating meat is that it will make available huge swathes of new land for afforestation—the return of forests to land that has not recently been forested. One consequence of the inverted energy returned on energy invested (EROI) of meat is that we use far more land for farming than we would need if our diet were to be exclusively plant based. In the United States alone, somewhere in the region of 834 million acres could be made available through this strategy, much of it suitable for afforestation. Even the afforestation of land not currently used for farming has the potential to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly one-third. Adding in land currently dedicated to animal grazing and feed crops is a potentially game-changing development in the fight against climate change.

This chapter describes the problems facing a particular coastal metropolis—Miami, Florida—in the face of sea-level rise induced by climate change. The science underlying sea-level rise is outlined, and important concepts such as marine ice cliff instability are introduced. Sea-level rises of between 1 and 7 feet can be expected by 2100, although where in this range such rises fall is a matter of significant uncertainty. Sinking beneath the waves—which would, barring significant architectural interventions, occur when sea-level rise reaches 5 to 7 feet—is the least of Miami’s problems. It will cease to exist as a viable city long before this, due to problems with water supply and disposal of wastewater, and the resulting financial crises engendered by this. Sea-level rise is far from the worst problem engendered by climate change. We focus on it only because it is easily quantified.

This chapter introduces the central themes, and outlines the central argument, of the book. Three dominant environmental threats are identified: climate change, mass extinction, and pestilence. The warming of the planet is accelerating. At the same time, species are becoming extinct at a startling rate. Newly emerging infectious diseases—COVID-19 being the latest off the production line—are becoming more pronounced and problematic. It is argued that our habit of eating animals—and the massive reallocation of biomass that it involves—lies at the heart of all of all three problems, and if we abandon this habit, we can make substantial progress in tackling them. This proposal should be taken seriously on the grounds that it is easier to implement, more effective once implemented, and ultimately more palatable than other options.

The three grave environmental threats that we face today are those of climate change, mass extinction, and pestilence. To mitigate these threats, the most important things we can do are (1) stop eating animals and their products and (2) afforest wherever and whenever we can. The first course of action makes possible the second. By no longer eating animals, we make available large areas of land suitable for afforestation. These twin policies will go a long way toward solving our three environmental threats. Afforested land will sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide, arrest the changes in land use that are the most important cause of extinction, and provide a suitably undisturbed home for animal reservoirs of disease. In afforesting the land, we must let the past be our guide: restore the land to what it was before humans arrived and ruined the neighborhood.

This chapter examines the reasons for thinking that anthropogenic climate change—planetary-level warming caused by human activity—is real. The science underlying the idea of anthropogenic global warming is explained. Several different forms of skepticism about climate change are explained and ultimately found to be lacking. The idea of a tipping cascade, and the consequent possibility of runaway warming, is explained. The ability to predict the ultimate severity of global warming relies on knowledge that we do not yet possess. Nevertheless, it is argued that, even if we adopt relatively conservative assumptions, it is very likely that global warming is going to have grave consequences, both for humans and for the rest of the natural world.

We face three epoch-defining environmental problems: climate, extinction, and pestilence. Our climate is changing in ways that will have serious consequences for humans, and it may even profoundly affect the ability of the planet to support life. All around us, other species are disappearing at a rate between several hundred and several thousand times the normal background rate of extinction. The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has wreaked social and economic havoc, is merely the latest model off a blossoming production line of newly emerging infectious diseases, many of which have the potential to be far worse. At the heart of these problems lies an ancient habit: eating animals. This habit is the most significant driver of species extinction and of newly emerging infectious diseases, and one of the most important drivers of climate change. This is a habit we can no longer afford to indulge. Breaking it will substantially reduce climate emissions. It will stem our insatiable hunger for land that is at the heart of both the problems of extinction and pestilence. Most importantly, breaking this habit will make available vast areas of land suitable for afforestation: the return of forests to where they once grew. Afforestation will significantly mitigate all three problems. But only if we stop eating animals will we have enough land for this strategy to work.

The benefits of no longer eating animals extend beyond climate mitigation. It will also mitigate current species extinction trajectories. This chapter looks at the history of human-caused extinctions. A great extinction occurs when a percentage of a species dies out (e.g., 75%). A mass extinction occurs when the actual rate of extinction exceeds the normal background rate by a certain margin (e.g., 1000×). There are good reasons for thinking that a mass extinction of species is currently occurring. Humans are the cause of this, as they have been the cause of all major extinction pulses since the Quaternary period. This chapter examines one of the Quaternary extinction pulses of 8000–11,500 years ago and defends the hominin paleobiogeography hypothesis, that is, that humans were substantially responsible for this pulse of extinctions. An undue focus on extinction, however, can mask the harm we are currently doing to species.

The edge required by renewable technologies is provided by a simplification of the energy supply train. This simplification consists in no longer eating animals. Animals have upside-down energy returned on energy invested values (EROIs), with up to 30 times as much energy having to be put into raising them as we get out of them through eating them or their products. At one time, when our fossil fuels sported extraordinarily high EROIs—100:1 in some cases—we could afford to take this sort of hit on our food-based energy supply. Now, however, we can no longer afford to do so. Moreover, the results of this grossly inefficient energy exchange are rising greenhouse gas emissions. By no longer eating meat, we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 14%. Importantly, much of this reduction will be in methane and nitrous dioxide, which have very high global warming potential relative to carbon dioxide.

The third benefit of no longer eating animals is a reduction in the prevalence of zoonotic diseases: diseases acquired from a nonhuman, vertebrate host. The majority of temperate diseases, almost all tropical diseases, and probably all newly emerging infectious diseases are zoonoses or they have zoonotic origins. A zoonotic pathogen can go through five stages, in which it transforms from one that afflicts only nonhuman species to one that is exclusively human. There are several factors that determine the likelihood of such a transformation. The most important of these, since it is most under our control, is the frequency of encounters between us and the animal reservoir. Eating animals and disturbing their environment are the two forms of human behavior most likely to increase frequency of encounters. Moreover, most disturbance of the environment is caused by expansion in animal agriculture. Eating animals, therefore, is the most important cause of zoonotic diseases.

Most animal pathogens that infect humans employ an intermediate host. The original hosts of most coronaviruses are various species of bat. The original host of all flu viruses is the duck. But we tend to catch coronaviruses from animals that have been infected by bats. Influenza is more likely to be passed on by chickens or pigs. By eating animals, we engineer many opportunities for species, and their pathogens, to mix and mingle. We turn animals into intermediate hosts of harmful pathogens by inserting them into a particular point on a food chain that leads, ultimately, to us. These ideas are explained via SARS-CoV-1&2, the Spanish flu, the H5N1 influenza virus, and Nipah virus, among others. The role played by animal agriculture in virus mutation and reassortment is explained. By no longer eating animals, we would largely eliminate the threat of zoonotic diseases.

The question of whether consciousness is embodied has been vitiated by a failure to ask a more basic, and possibly obvious, question: what is the body? This chapter argues that the body you see in the mirror, the hands that you hold up in front of you, are instances of the body as object. But the body is more than the body as object. There is also the body as subject; the body as lived. You cannot see the lived body by looking in the mirror. The body as lived is that in virtue of which you see the body as object (and many other things also, of course). There is no question concerning whether consciousness is embodied in the lived body. Consciousness is the lived body; they are one and the same thing; the body as object has no trace of consciousness in it.

The idea of moral enhancement has no clear meaning. This is because the idea of being moral has no clear meaning. There are numerous ways in which one might go astray, morally speaking, and each of these ways, in turn, fragments on further analysis. The concept of moral enhancement is as broad, messy, and mottled as the reasons why people behave badly. This mottled character of moral failure calls into question the feasibility of (non-traditional) programmes of moral enhancement.

According to the standard conception of persons, an individual qualifies as a person if it satisfies four conditions, broadly construed. First, the individual is conscious, in the sense that there is something it is like to be it. Second, it is rational, in the sense that it can execute at least some rational inferences and possesses the required materials for such inferences, such as beliefs and desires. Third, the individual must be self-aware, aware of itself as an individual persisting through time. Finally, it must be other-aware, aware of the mindedness of others. This book argues that many animals can satisfy all of these conditions and so qualify as persons. Unlike recent debates that concern whether we should extend personhood as far as the great apes, it is argued that personhood extends quite widely through the animal kingdom.

The idea of pre-intentional self-awareness is extended to incorporate awareness of one’s mental states or acts and of the “lived” body. The temporal parameters of pre-intentional self-awareness are also extended by way of a detailed consideration of episodic memory in animals. Whether animals are capable of such memory is controversial, due to our inability to determine whether they represent past episodes in the right way. Even if animals cannot episodically remember, they still have pre-intentional awareness of themselves through time. This pre-intentional awareness of the self through time consists in a sense of familiarity, which is explained in parallel with perception: in terms of a generated series of anticipations in which the person who remembers is implicated.

There are no good reasons for denying that animals are rational, and many good reasons for thinking that they are. Many animals have displayed impressive capacities for causal reasoning. And some animals have displayed the ability to engage in logical reasoning operations such as modus tollendo ponens. The common reasons that have been used to deny logical reasoning capacities to animals rest on a series of clear confusions concerning the nature of logical inference and what it is to engage in such inference. It is likely that many animals execute logical inferences in the way humans would if they had not developed external formal structures to scaffold the reasoning processes.

Problems in attributing beliefs to animals stem from the fact that the contents (of beliefs and desires) used in such attribution are anchored to humans. This chapter spells out a de-anchoring strategy. The result of this is that it can be appropriate to explain the behavior of an animal using contents that only humans can entertain as long as our contents track theirs. That is: (a) the truth of a belief with our content guarantees the truth of their belief, and (b) our belief and theirs share narrow content. This is important not just in the case of animals. There are good reasons for thinking that tracking begins at home. There are no stable belief contents shared by different humans or even attaching to a single human through time. Content must be de-anchored in order to make sense of ourselves as well as other animals.

According to the problem of other animal minds, claims to know anything about the minds of animals suffer from serious problems of justification. These problems parallel the problem of other human minds. Inferentialist approaches argue that the justification lies in the appropriate form of inference. These approaches are inadequate for a variety of reasons. Direct perception approaches claim our access to the minds of animals is, in some cases, perceptual. A novel form of the direct perception account is defended. This is based on three ideas: (a) a distinction between seeing and seeing that, (b) a distinction between formal and functional descriptions of behavior, and (c) the idea that functional descriptions of behavior are (often) disguised psychological descriptions. If we wish to have any useful descriptions of animal behavior, we must accept that we can often see their mental states.

An animal is phenomenally conscious if there is something it is like to be that animal. There are excellent scientific reasons for thinking that many animals are phenomenally conscious. In humans, consciousness is strongly correlated with widespread, relatively fast, low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical region of the brain. When the brains of many animals are examined, precisely this sort of activity in these areas is found. The primary philosophical objection to the idea that animals are phenomenally conscious is based on the higher-order thought (HOT) model of consciousness, according to which mental state is conscious when, and only when, the individual who has it is conscious of it. The HOT account suffers from a number of fatal difficulties.

Far from being contrary to common sense, the idea that some nonhuman animals can be persons conforms to a certain prominent strand in common sense. Three conceptions of personhood are distinguished: legal, moral, and metaphysical. The subject of this book is the metaphysical sense of person. Four essential conditions of metaphysical personhood are identified: consciousness, cognition, self-awareness, and other-awareness. These conditions are advanced as individually necessary and collectively sufficient for an individual to qualify as a person. A person is an individual that is conscious, in the sense that there is something it is like to be that individual; it is a cognitive agent capable of engaging in reasoning; it is aware of itself; and it is aware of others precisely as other persons.

This book has been a protracted case in worst-case scenario philosophy. Assume the absolute worst about animals, and the most stringent conception of a person imaginable, and then argue that animals still qualify as persons. Some of the limitations of this strategy are identified. If animals are persons, it changes the way we think about our obligations to them. The principal change is from a treatment paradigm to a listening paradigm. In a treatment paradigm, the primary question is how we should treat them. This is an inadequate way of understanding our obligations to persons. For persons, prior to the question of how we should treat them is the necessity of listening to them: of learning to ask them the right questions and make ourselves capable of understanding their response.

In pre-intentional self-awareness, a person is self-aware without making herself into an object of any intentional act. The idea of pre-intentional self-awareness is examined through a historical lens provided by Kant and Sartre. The idea is further developed analytically. A perceived object is always perceived as something. This occurs because a series of anticipations are generated in the perceiver. The perceiver is implicated in many of these anticipations. In perceiving an object, therefore, the perceiver is pre-intentionally self-aware. A de-intellectualized way of understanding pre-intentional self-awareness is identified and defended. Pre-intentional self-awareness attaches to the possession of conscious experiences. To the extent animals have conscious experiences, therefore, they will, thereby, be pre-intentionally self-aware. Pre-intentional self-awareness is likely to be widely distributed through the animal kingdom.

Other-awareness is the ability to recognize another as minded. This sort of ability is usually identified with mindreading: the ability to attribute mental states to another and use this attribution to predict and/or explain his or her behavior. It is unclear whether animals have mindreading abilities. However, even if they do not, there is another way of being aware of the mindedness of another. Just as there is a pre-intentional form of self-awareness, so too is there a pre-intentional form of other-awareness. In pre-intentional self-awareness, one is aware of oneself in virtue of being aware of something else in a certain way. In pre-intentional other-awareness, one is aware of the other in virtue of being aware of oneself in a certain way. Arguments are presented for the claim that many animals can be pre-intentionally other-aware.

Standard ways of thinking about self-awareness in animals—the mirror test and the debate over metacognition—assume self-awareness must take an intentional form, where a bodily or psychological facet of an individual is taken as an intentional object of a mental act of that same individual. There are several reasons for supposing that this intentional model of self-awareness is inadequate. These include Wittgenstein’s analysis of the idea of knowing one is in pain, Shoemaker’s arguments that much self-awareness is immune to error through misidentification, and Perry’s argument for the non-eliminability of an indexical component of self-awareness. These cases show that, in self-awareness, what one is aware of is often not independent of the act of awareness, and this is something that cannot be accommodated by the intentional model.

Since there are two forms of self-awareness, there is question concerning which is relevant, or most relevant, in the formation of the person. The relevance of self-awareness in the formation of the person consists in the role it plays in underwriting the unity of a mental life. Intentional self-awareness is incapable of doing this. Appeal to the apparatus of intentional act and object presupposes the unity of a mental life and, therefore, cannot explain it. Pre-intentional self-awareness is much more promising as a candidate for underwriting the unity of a mental life. The identity of the person is imprinted on the content of each mental act of which he is pre-intentionally aware. Thus, to whom the act belongs is part of the content of the mental act. This can explain the unity of a mental life.

This chapter defends a general picture of intentionality. Intentional directedness toward the world consists in revealing or disclosing activity: activity in virtue of which an object is revealed as falling under a given mode of presentation. This revealing activity often straddles processes occurring in the brain, in the body more generally, and the environment in which this body is situated. The result is that mental processes are often—not always, not necessarily, but often—embodied, enacted, and extended. There is no principled reason for thinking that the revealing activity that occurs outside the brain and/or body is not mental activity.

Through the examination of the lives (or afterlives) of several immortal beings, this paper defends a version of Moritz Schlick’s claim that the meaning of life is play. More precisely: a person’s life has meaning to the extent it there are things in it that the person values (1) intrinsically rather than merely instrumentally and (2) above a certain threshold of intensity. This is a subjectivist account of meaning in life. I defend subjectivism about meaning in life from common objections by understanding statements about life’s meaning in quasi-realist terms.

The question of whether cognition requires representations has engendered heated discussion during the last two decades. I shall argue that the question is, in all likelihood, a spurious one. There may or may not be a fact of the matter concerning whether a given item qualifies as a representation. However, even if there is, attempts to establish whether cognition requires representation have neither practical nor theoretical utility.

The role of visualization and model-based reasoning has become increasingly significant in science education across a range of contexts. It is generally recognized that supporting learning in developing causal explanations for observed astronomical events presents considerable pedagogic challenge. Understanding the Sun's apparent movement across the sky requires a sophisticated interpretation of visuospatial relations. This study explores how preservice teachers employ models in reasoning about this phenomenon. It adopts a research methodology that attempts to capture the fine detail of learning using a range of strategies to determine student teachers’ use of models in visuospatial reasoning. This included individual learners documenting their responses during taught sessions as part of the process of capturing their personal perceptions. Student reflections on their own learning were subsequently discussed during follow-up audiotaped interviews. The findings revealed four different models of visuospatial reasoning used by the student teachers and highlighted subtle differences between individuals. The ways participants used these to make sense of the phenomenon and how this contributes to our understanding of model-based reasoning in basic astronomy are discussed.