Environmental Ethics in Dialogue

Patrick Byrne

Patrick H. Byrne is Professor emeritus of Philosophy and Former Director of the Lonergan Institute at Boston College. His research/publication interests include the relationships between science, evolution and religion; ethics and environmental ethics; philosophy of service learning and social justice; the thought of Bernard Lonergan, Albert Einstein, and Aristotle. His book publications include Toward Environmental Wholeness: Method in Environmental Ethics and Science (2024), The Ethics of Discernment: Lonergan’s Foundations for Ethics (2016) and Analysis and Science in Aristotle (1997). He is also author of “Bernard Lonergan,” Oxford Bibliographies (2019) and “The Integral Visions of Teilhard and Lonergan: Science, the Universe, Humanity and God,” From Teilhard to Omega: Co-creating an Unfinished Universe (2014). He is editor of The Dialogue Between Science and Religion: What We Have Learned from Each Other. (2005). He is the founder and long-time teacher in the Boston College PULSE Program for Service Learning.

Marion Hourdequin

Marion Hourdequin is a Professor of Philosophy at Colorado College.  She specializes in environmental philosophy, with interests in climate ethics, intergenerational ethics, relational approaches to ethics, and comparative philosophy.  She is the author of Environmental Ethics: From Theory to Practice (Bloomsbury, second edition 2024), What Should Individuals Do About Climate Change? A Debate (Routledge 2025, with Dan Shahar), and editor, with David Havlick, of Restoring Layered Landscapes (Oxford, 2016). Professor Hourdequin served as President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics from 2022-2024.

Matthias Fritsch

Matthias Fritsch is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal. In addition to many articles and chapters, he has published: The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida (SUNY Press, 2005); Taking Turns with the Earth: Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Intergenerational Justice (Stanford UP, 2018); Intercultural Philosophy and Environmental Justice between Generations (Cambridge UP, 2024, co-editor); Phenomenology and Future Generations (SUNY Press, 2024, co-editor); Environmental Philosophy and East Asia (Routledge 2022, co-editor); Eco-Deconstruction (Fordham UP, 2018, co-editor); Reason and Emancipation (Humanity Press, 2007, co-editor). He has been a Humboldt Fellow in Frankfurt and Berlin and Visiting Research Professor at Kyoto University and Western Sydney University.

Melissa Lane

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University, where she is also Associated Faculty in Classics and in Philosophy, and has received the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Stanley J. Kelley Teaching Award of the Department of Politics, and the Faculty Community Engagement Award of the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. She currently also holds a three-year appointment dedicated to delivering periodic public lectures in London as the fiftieth Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College.  She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Classics, as well as fellowships and visiting professorships at a number of institutions including the ANU, Auckland, Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, the American Academy in Rome, and the École Normale Supérieure.

Lane was educated in Californian public schools, then at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, where she received an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy and then taught for fifteen years before moving to Princeton in 2009. Her most recent monograph, titled Of Rule and Office: Plato's Ideas of the Political and published in 2023 by Princeton University Press, was awarded the 2024 Book Prize of the Journal of the History of Philosophy; her 2012 book Eco-Republic continues to be widely discussed. Lane has appeared multiple times on ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio Four, and been published in periodicals in the US, UK, Italy and Germany. authored over 20 major policy reports.

Andrew Light

Andrew Light is Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy, Philosophy, and Atmospheric Sciences at George Mason University, and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth at The University of Chicago. He has served in a variety of senior positions in government and NGOs, most recently as U.S.Assistant Secretary of Energy for International Affairs in the Biden-Harris administration from 2021-2025, leading a mission of putting the U.S. back in a leadership position on the global clean energy transition while ensuring energy security. From 2013-2016, he served as Senior Adviser and India Counselor to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change in the Department of State, and Staff Climate Advisor in the Secretary of State’s Office of Policy Planning, working on the U.S. team that negotiated the Paris Agreement, and an array of other climate compacts.

In the NGO community, Andrew has been Distinguished Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute and Senior Fellow and Director of International Climate Policy at the Center for American Progress. In his academic work Andrew is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters on climate change, restoration ecology, and urban sustainability, has authored and edited 19 books, and co-authored over 20 major policy reports.

Yi Ming

Yi Ming is the Institute Professor of Climate Science and Society and Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College. Dr. Ming uses climate models, observations and theories to elucidate the physical mechanisms governing Earth’s climate system and applies the fundamental understanding to practical issues of societal and policy importance. He has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed papers, and mentored a number of Ph.D. students and postdocs.

His honors include the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Norbert Gerbier-Mumm International Award, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Henry G. Houghton Award and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Ascent Award. Previously, Dr. Ming was a Senior Scientist and Divisional Leader at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). He was also a faculty member of the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS) at Princeton University. 

Dr. Ming holds a B.E. in Chemical Engineering (with a second B.E. in Environmental Engineering) from Tsinghua University (1998) and a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University (2003). 

Johanna Oksala

Dr. Johanna Oksala is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. Her areas of expertise are political philosophy, feminist philosophy, environmental philosophy, Foucault, Marxist theory, and phenomenology. Her books include Foucault on Freedom (2005), How to Read Foucault (2007), Foucault Politics, and Violence (2012), Political Philosophy: All That Matters (2013), Feminist Experiences (2016), and Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology (2023).

Romy Opperman

Romy Opperman (she/her) is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School, NYC. Romy’s research is at the intersection of environmental philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, Feminist Africana, Indigenous, Decolonial philosophy, Black Studies, Environmental Justice, critical theory, and Continental philosophy. Romy is presently working on a book manuscript focused on practices and theorizations of freedom grounded in Black ecologies and the ways that they trouble theories of environmental racism and climate ethics inherited from liberal political philosophy. Recent publications include: “Protocols for a Grounding Philosophy,” in As for Protocols, “Charles Mills’s ‘Black Trash’: Reproducing Race, Pig Waste, and Ecological Resistance,” in Critical Philosophy of Race, and “Sylvia Wynter’s Caribbean Critical Theory,” in Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy.

Ronald Sandler

Ronald Sandler is a professor of philosophy and Director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University. His areas of research are environmental ethics, ethics of emerging technologies, ethical theory, and Spinoza. He is author of Character and Environment; The Ethics of Species; Environmental Ethics: Theory in Practice; and Food Ethics. He is editor or co-editor of Environmental Virtue Ethics; Environmental Justice and Environmentalism; and Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Sandler’s research has been supported by NSF, NEH, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, among others.