This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Climate change is one of the main challenges of our time,

so ancient philosophy might not be the obvious place to look for a solution.

But Melissa Lane of

Princeton University believes that Plato has some profound insights into our

21st century problems. Melissa Lane, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Nigel, great to talk to you again.

The topic we're focusing on this time is Plato and sustainability.

Could you just start by saying what you mean by sustainability?

Well, in a narrow sense, sustainability is concerned with maintaining the ecosystem services and

functioning that human society depends on and maintaining that in a way that will be sustainable over time and that it won't be self undermining.

But at the same time, that means that what we want to sustain are those relationships and

functioning that we think are valuable.

We don't want to sustain those elements of the way that we currently do things that actually

are there are creating damage to the environment or damage to

human society or that aren't actually stable over time.

And so I think that sustainability has to have ethics as much as science and it's hard.

It has to have an account of what's valuable and it actually may then be about moving gradually

towards a fuller realization of value rather than simply in a conservative way sort of maintaining everything

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