On Wednesday, Oct. 28 Elizabethtown College welcomed Professor of Sustainability Ethics and Law from Widener University Law School Dr. Donald A. Brown to speak as the College’s 2020 Peace Fellow. Each year, the Elizabethtown College Alumni Peace Fellowship selects its annual Peace Fellow with assistance from the Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking (CGUP.) 

The Peace Fellow is an expert scholar or activist whose work is related to peace-building and social justice. While on campus the Fellow will speak in different classes and be available for conversation. The fellow’s stay on campus then culminates in the annual Peace Fellowship Lecture. While Brown may not have been on campus this year, he engaged with various classes via Zoom and was able to give his presentation in a webinar format. 

President of the Peace Fellowship John Hayden emphasized the importance of bringing experts to campus, “The kinds of people that we would tend to bring to campus are not necessarily what you would see or hear everyday,” he said. 

Giving voice to nuanced perspectives that may not be typically highlighted in a classroom setting is one of the many benefits of bringing the fellow to campus, giving them the time to engage with students and faculty. Brown is an expert scholar and advocate for environmental justice, emphasizing the importance of applying ethics to conversations surrounding climate change. While on campus, he spoke in various classes across multiple disciplines, including political science, religious studies and biology.

Brown’s lecture was focused on the importance of changing the ways in which climate change is conceptualized and discussed both by policy makers and within popular culture. The main way that Brown hopes to change the conversation is to shift the focus from science and economic to ethics and community responsibility. 

“For 35 years, the public debate [has] call[ed] upon people trained in science and economics to respond…that’s a big mistake,” Brown said, emphasizing the importance of applying ethics to concerns of science and public policy. “The ethics applied to science [are] indispensable.”

The discourse present in the United States, according to Brown, fails to take that ethical perspective into account.

“Most of the conversations in the United States are about harms and benefits to us alone,” he said.  “Not only do we have a duty to understand what [climate change] will do to other countries, what happens in other countries will hurt us too.”