Inaugural Professorial Lecture – Professor Lisa Ellis

Rational Environmental Optimism...

To make progress on problems like climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental injustice, people need to coordinate their actions. Lisa is a political theorist who investigates the conditions of possible human coordination in challenging contexts.

She began this work as a PhD student at UC-Berkeley, focusing on philosopher Immanuel Kant’s ideas about interaction among limited rational beings. Now Lisa applies Kantian insights to problems like the collective ethics of flying (with Otago colleagues James Higham and James Maclaurin), the human value of biodiversity, the principled distribution of the risks of sea-level rise, and the challenge of protecting New Zealand’s endemic species.

Lisa has been a member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), and her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities among other funders, including most recently the Deep South National Science Challenge.