Predictions about global climate change have produced both stark scenarios of environmental catastrophe and purportedly pragmatic ideas about adaptation. This book takes a different perspective, exploring the idea that the challenge of adapting to global climate change is fundamentally an ethical one, that it is not simply a matter of adapting our infrastructures and economies to mitigate damage but rather of adapting ourselves to realities of a new global climate. The challenge is to restore our conception of humanity--to understand human flourishing in new ways--in an age in which humanity shapes the basic conditions of the global environment. In the face of what we have unintentionally done to Earth's ecology, who shall we become? The contributors examine ways that new realities will require us to revisit and adjust the practice of ecological restoration; the place of ecology in our conception of justice; the form and substance of traditional virtues and vices; and the organizations, scale, and underlying metaphors of important institutions. Topics discussed include historical fidelity in ecological restoration; the application of capability theory to ecology; the questionable ethics of geoengineering; and the cognitive transformation required if we are to "think like a planet."

• Acknowledgment
• Introduction: Adapting Humanity
• Adapting Restoration to Climate Change
  • Nature Restoration as a Paradigm for the Human Relationship with Nature
  • Environmental Virtues and the Aims of Restoration
  • Global Warming and Virtues of Ecological Restoration
  • History, Novelty, and Virtue in Ecological Restoration
• Integrating Ecology into the Virtue of Justice
  • The Death of Restoration?
  • Animal Flourishing and Capabilities in an Era of Global Change
  • Environment as Meta-Capability: Why a Dignified Human Life Requires a Stable Climate System
  • Justice, Ecological Integrity, and Climate Change
• Adjusting the Character to a Climate Environment
  • Ethics, Public Policy and Global Warming
  • The Virtue of Responsibility for the Global Climate
  • Rethinking Greed
  • Are We the Scum of the Earth? Climate Change, Geoengineering, and Humanity's Challenge
• Reorganizing Institutions to Enable Human Virtue
  • The Sixth Mass Extinction Is Caused by Us
  • Human Values and Institutional Responses to Climate Change
  • Alienation and the Commons
  • Thinking like a Planet
• About the Contributors
• Index