Ecological Humility and Geoengineering the Earth

The prospect of geoengineering the Earth—the deliberate, large-scale intervention in Earth’s climate system to help mitigate the negative impacts associated with climate change—forces us to confront more than just scientific and technological questions. It challenges us to examine questions about our character. While some scholars have argued that geoengineering the Earth would be an act of arrogance, we develop a new account of ecological humility that is grounded in evidence from environmental psychology and argue that, under some conditions, this virtue is consistent with geoengineering the Earth.