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CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore will speak about the moral challenges of ecological emergencies at 4 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 18, in the Journey Room of the Memorial Union at Oregon State University. 

The talk, sponsored by the OSU Bookstore, is called "Climate Ethics: What Do We Owe the Future?" It is free and open to the public.

Scientists are doing a heroic job of documenting climate change and predicting its effects, Moore said.  But to draw conclusions about what we ought to do in response requires a rational discourse about ethics. 

"Climate disruption and environmental degradation are fundamentally moral issues requiring more than a scientific and technological response," Moore said.

Moore's appearance at OSU is part of a national town-hall tour in conjunction with "Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril," published by Trinity University Press. Moore is co-editor of the new book along with Michael Nelson of Michigan State University. More than 80 global leaders writing on the moral obligation to act to mitigate climate change have contributed to the book, which features a foreword by Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu.

Contributors to "Moral Ground" are politicians, including President Barack Obama and Iran's first female vice president Massoumeh Ebtekar; writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry and Daniel Quinn; and religious leaders, including Pope John Paul II and the Dalai Lama. "Moral Ground" also features essays from journalists, including Thomas Friedman and Alan Weisman.

Drawing on essays from "Moral Ground," Moore will talk about what she learned when she asked one hundred of the world's moral leaders the urgent question, "What do we owe the future?

"We are called to do far more than change out our light bulbs," Moore said. "Taking what we need for our comfortable lives, and leaving a degraded and dangerously destabilized world for our children, is not worthy of us as moral beings. We owe it to the future to live our lives in ways that embody our deepest values."