Whether to Teach Climate or Not?
In my first two years of the English doctoral program at the Graduate Center, my research and writing centered almost exclusively around the climate crisis—its rhetoric in US mainstream media, narratives of extraction, narratives of ecological repair, the violence doled out unevenly across lines of gender, class, race, and sexuality—but I’d never once ushered these topics into my classroom. I’d taught a first-year writing course in one form or another at four different colleges for twelve semesters with themes around visual culture, photography, systemic racism, and fashion, at times combining the themes where I saw overlap. At some level, I knew that turning toward a theme of climate could easily unite these themes: media (mis)representation of Hurricane Katrina; the photographs of Ruby LaToya Frazier (whose work is the featured photograph of this blog post) expertly document crises of petrochemicals and extraction; the Movement for Black Lives’s emphasis that racial capitalism drives climate chaos and tends to hit Black and Latino communities hardest; and the fast fashion industry’s carbon emissions, second only to the oil and gas industry, not to mention the several thousand gallons of water consumed in the production of a single pair of blue jeans.
But I worried that climate destruction was too grim for a first-year nuts-and-bolts writing course. Not that systemic racism isn’t incredibly grim. The difference, I think, is that climate can seem, at first, only abstractly grim. If you’re not careful, the destruction can appear to be always “over there,” and, if so unreachable, unable to be addressed. I also worried the topic was too big—it’s quite literally planetary—too scientific, even too polarizing.
During the Fall 2019 semester, the rift between my own work and the texts I was teaching widened. In addition to my graduate work, I was also writing a book on the environmental impact of air conditioning and the American idea of comfort. I knew I needed to better align my doctoral work with my pedagogy. The realization that many students could move through four years of college without taking a single class specifically focused on the disproportionate violence of climate change haunted me. With encouragement from the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center and some first-year writing faculty at Queens College, I decided to re-haul my first-year writing syllabus and organize it entirely around climate change.
My students had signed up for “College Writing I”—a required course—not “Writing in the Anthropocene,” which is what I decided to theme it. In other words, I forced the theme on them—a risky venture. As I planned the new theme, I dreaded the thought of a room full of climate deniers or—perhaps worse—students who took no interest in the topic, an acutely place-specific anxiety (and, I would later find, an unfounded one) about city students, who sometimes think that “the environment” has nothing to do with Kew Gardens or Flushing but is a two-hour-long train ride away on the Metro North. I also worried about the term “Anthropocene” (which I’m fiercely critical of anyway). Would putting the word on the syllabus immediately alienate students?
In the end, my anxiety proved useful on several fronts. For one, I made sure to frame the climate crisis as a human rights issue, not as an “environmental issue”—something I should have done regardless. I also made an effort to present the topic in terms of urban ecology, and in a way that might appeal to my students who, I knew, would come from an incredible array of racial, ethnic, national, and socio-economic backgrounds. I approached the syllabus with the assumption that most of my students, while likely not climate deniers, wouldn’t have much experience reading, writing, or talking about climate change beyond the obvious. And, above all, I made sure to approach the design from the perspective of language. How is the climate problem a narrative problem? How do our language categories sustain the crisis? How might we language our way out of this mess?
I chose only one text from the hard sciences: Paul Crutzen’s 2002 one-page article describing the term “Anthropocene.” The rest I chose not for their explanation of climate but because they were either exemplary rhetorical models (Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit) or else introduced useful, provocative concepts (Cara New Dagget’s essay on “petro-masculinity” or William Cronon’s deconstruction of the concept of “wilderness”). Since I worried about sending my students into nihilistic sulks, I also made sure to include testimonies from activists and community leaders like Van Jones and Majora Carter, who were working to make real change, some in the very boroughs in which my students were born. A few days before our first meeting, I sent the syllabus to students and hoped for the best.
A Semester of Writing on Climate
On the first day, after we introduced ourselves, I asked the students whether anyone knew what the word “Anthropocene” meant. To my surprise, a few hands shot up. Several students gave an impressive and thorough gloss of the term. As it turned out, before my email, none of them had ever heard the word. But this unknown—and my promise that we would explore it on the first day—sparked curiosity in several students who began researching and reading about it even before the course began. Once they understood the general concept of “Anthropocene,” they recognized it. I’ll have a hard time forgetting the way one student put it, her shoulders slumping at both the relief of new understanding and the resignation of old familiarity. “I didn’t know there was a word for that,” she said. “But, yeah, I know it’s happening.” Given that some of our major goals were to think about the production of knowledge, to build college-level research skills, and to engage critically with scholarly ideas, we were off to an auspicious start.
I’ve never had a more enthusiastic class filled with students itching to debate, unpack, and learn from their peers—almost none of whom cited environmental concerns as an interest on the first day. Quickly, the students understood the totality of the concept: that if we’re going to talk about climate violence, we need to closely examine our words, which, in our Western, over-developed culture, tend toward ideas of false universality and dominance—dominance not just over the environment but over each other. Students began to question Crutzen’s framing of climate damage as “the effects of humans.” Is all of humanity responsible when only a very small percentage of mostly white Euro-American politicians and corporate leaders—Crutzen himself acknowledged “these effects have largely been caused by only 25% of the world population”— continue to lead us further into destruction through denial and continued investment in fossil fuels? As a class, we asked how the popular ways we frame the climate crisis seem to acknowledge the problem of climate damage while simultaneously allowing those in power off the hook. We asked: What is our culture telling us about climate change and who is responsible? We asked: How do we know what we know?
One particularly effective unit used environmental theories (the essays by Cronon and Daggett mentioned earlier) to think through our assumptions about “nature” and “environment,” and how advertising taps into these assumptions to appeal to our identities in order to sell us things. We watched a tourism video for the state of Wyoming and unpacked the implicit gender and racial bias in the ad—as well as the explicit intertwining of “wilderness” (which is always falsely empty) with patriotism. I showed them a car commercial, and the students had a field day drawing connections between fossil fuels and our constructions of masculinity (“Built Ford Tough!”) and our assumptions about labor. Afterward, the students found their own popular media to analyze, and they wrote an essay using one of the environmental theories to deconstruct a commercial and consider how it sustains tropes about the environment that, ultimately, perpetuate climate violence.
As the COVID-19 pandemic hit the continent, Queens College, like every other college in the US, moved to “distanced learning.” I started substituting some of the planned activities with articles that connected the pandemic to increased deforestation. By this point, the students were comfortable with the idea that climate change was touching each of our lives in one way or another—and this moment became an important way for students to process the pandemic and their own work in the course at the same time.
Given everything that was happening, I worried that we were veering too far into the apocalypse. I regret giving them a section from David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, which only led to near-hopeless comments for the few who were willing to speak.
At this point, I re-designed the last assignment, which was supposed to have been a full research essay, and in its place challenged the students to find a local environmental action group, browse some of the issues and problems they were working to address, and form a research question around a solution to a local environmental problem. The final project became an annotated bibliography organized around a research question that addressed some palpable solution to a local environmental crisis. I gave them Majora Carter’s TED Talk on “Greening the ghetto” in the Bronx. I sent them videos of local environmental justice organizations with campaigns about fighting the pollution that exacerbates asthma in children. The research projects I received astounded me: water quality in Long Island; a cost-benefit analysis of painting rooftops white in all five boroughs to mitigate the urban heat-island effect; growth of public education as a tool for climate mitigation; theories of managed coastal retreat in the face of slow but steady sea-level rise.
Advice for Teaching Climate
Despite the horrors of the viral pandemic and economic plunge, the semester’s focus on climate rhetoric provided a necessary space for students to think about planetary atrocity. For Fall 2020, I’m once again teaching this theme, though with slightly different readings and assignments.
Regardless of discipline and background, I would encourage all higher-education instructors to bring relevant questions and issues around climate change into their classrooms, whether it’s for a single class, a single unit, or the entire semester. I would also recommend three things, which would have helped me at the start.
The first is that I recommend instructors arm themselves with some well-chosen, perhaps surprising facts and statistics relevant to their disciplines to share with students. The current IPCC reports are great sources for this, but there are many others out there. (I’ve found the Princeton Primers in Climate particularly helpful.) The International Energy Agency’s charts on each nation’s average energy-per-capita grounded a rigorous debate on resource disparity. While we should always be wary of national averages—they obscure the fact that many of the working poor in the US are hit hardest by climate-related disasters despite the fact that they contribute to it the least—they also highlight the fact that a great deal of middle-class Americans consume four times as much energy as the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. In a moment of increased austerity, and at a time when environmental activists are focused on renewable energy solutions, this provided another perspective: the structural inequities that allow or coerce us into consuming four times the amount of energy as our neighbors. A firm grasp of numbers will not only allow students to understand various climate-related injustices on the statistical level, but it will also empower instructors who aren’t in the hard sciences to speak about climate injustice with authority.
Second, intersectionality and interdisciplinarity are key to planning a successful course on climate. Environmental injustice touches just about every discipline, and the tension that arises from pairing an economic with an ethical critique of fossil fuels can produce space for productive debate, the strengthening of critical thinking skills, and the harnessing of students’ disparate interests and backgrounds. Likewise, beware the universalizing and abstracting view of climate seen from the “human race.” As Ajay Singh Chaudhary has written, “We’re not in this together.” More challenging, more embodied, and more engaging for students are perspectives that attempt to see the problems of climate from multiscalar, multi-identity views. How might disability studies and Western medicine’s obsession with “cure” help us think about restoring—or not restoring—ecosystems? What do housing for Black trans women and anti-gentrification campaigns have to do with urban ecology? How might Traditional Indigenous Knowledge help us see local environmental problems more clearly while also challenging the traditional epistemological assumptions of the university? If we claim to want to think ecologically, we must do so in terms of both discipline and embodied experience.
Lastly, I recommend instructors become vigilant to the number of apocalyptic, doom-and-gloom texts that students encounter. While I’m continually astounded by the hope, ingenuity, and resilience of undergraduates, I’m also worried that too much focus on imminent destruction can send students who may have a lot of struggles already weighing them into a tailspin. This is not to say that instructors should tout a false optimism in techno-utopic solutions or shy away from the violence of everyday climate emergencies. But it is to say that many of the tough problems around climate can be approached just as easily through the lens of creation (what kind of planet do we want?) rather than critique (what’s killing us?).
I would love to see issues around environmental justice and climate resilience become commonplace for teachers in numerous disciplines. I hope this encourages those of you who’ve wanted to teach something in the environmental humanities to go for it. With each semester, my conviction grows stronger that we can’t afford not to teach it.
