Laurie Zoloth
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 273
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"When I first wrote an essay about the environment, it was late in the game, 1996. I wrote it for an interfaith group of scholars of religion, gathered to consider the relationship between consumption, reproduction, and the environment. We did not discuss global warming, nor did we mention climate change and most of us did not know about the data about which scientists were already alarmed. We were concerned about pollution, food scarcity, the destruction of habitats, and the irreparable damage to a fragile ecosystem-- ecological issues. I had just finished my graduate school training and had completed a book about health care ethics. My training in bioethics had focused on the dilemmas of the clinical encounter: one doctor, one patient, the dramas of death, life and intimate choices, raising important ethical conflicts, questions and competing moral appeals in medicine and then suggests the best reasons for choosing amidst them. National debates in bioethics were emerging about end of life care, and reproductive technology, but also, increasingly about theoretical questions, like "what would happen if a technology that doesn't exist (human cloning) would become globally popular and fundamentally change the nature of our species?" or "what if brain scans could be done from afar and governments use fMRIs to know your thoughts?" Bioethicists in later decades would come to worry about the most arcane of issues, or the rarest of human conditions"--
