13 Climate Change and Climate Justice: Activity Seeds
- Collectively act as a small group. There are actions individuals can take, and there are actions that large entities can take (states, multinational corporations). But what about a group of, say, fifteen to twenty students plus their valiant tutor? Divide students into groups and have them brainstorm ideas for an action that feels achievable within six weeks. Each group presents its proposal, and then the class collectively votes which action to pursue. They could use texts or themes from the module for additional inspiration. (If there are no obvious links, support students to come up with creative links). You could frame the exercise as an experiment in agency and affect — not trying to solve everything at once, but exploring what we can change, and how the attempt makes us feel.
- Attempt to influence a much more powerful actor. For example, try to get an institution to bring forward its net zero date by one year. In a situation where every year counts, isn’t it odd that organisations are still thinking in five-year increments?
- Learn about specific ongoing environmental justice struggles. The Environmental Justice Atlas is one good starting point. Explore ways of creating connections, raising awareness, offering resources, and building solidarity.
- Explore how violence relates to climate change. Rob Nixon writes in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: “Maintaining a media focus on slow violence poses acute challenges, not only because it is spectacle deficient, but also because the fallout’s impact may range from the cellular to the transnational and (depending on the specific character of the chemical or radiological hazard) may stretch beyond the horizon of imaginable time” (Nixon 2011, 47). Nixon’s term “slow violence” can be usefully explored in relation to concepts such as systemic violence, structural violence, techno-racism, and disciplinarity.
Malm et al. write: “Whiteness and its surrounding negations were fixed in place during this particular century of violence from the core. Modern racism, in other words, is unthinkable without techno-racism […] And no technological complex was as pivotal as this one: the steamboats, the railroad cars and all the other steam-powered machines of white Europe” (Malm 2021b).
Cara Daggett draws on Kate Manne’s understanding of misogyny as the demarcation and punishment of deviance in order to reinforce patriarchal power, to argue that defence of fossil fuels is a violent compensatory practice. “Those regions that have emitted the most carbon dioxide are positioning themselves to profit from a warming earth by advancing a militarised and corporatised version of climate security. Petro-masculinity, like fossil fuel systems, arguably has global dimensions. However, like other masculinities, petro-masculinity should be understood as manifesting in multiple, and locally specific, ways. This article focuses upon its most prominent recent appearance: in new authoritarian movements in the US” (Daggett 2018).
Then there is violence as resistance or intervention. Andreas Malm: “But if destroying fences was an act of violence, it was violence of the sweetest kind. I was high for weeks afterwards. All the despair that climate breakdown generates on a daily basis was out of my system, if only temporarily; I had had an injection of collective empowerment. There is a famous line in The Wretched of the Earth where Frantz Fanon writes of violence as a ‘cleansing force’. It frees the native ‘from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’. Few processes produce as much despair as global heating. Imagine that, someday, the reservoirs of that emotion built up around the world – in the global South in particular – find their outlets. There has been a time for a Gandhian climate movement; perhaps there might come a time for a Fanonian one. The breaking of fences may one day be seen as a very minor misdemeanour indeed” (Malm 2021a).
- Explore theories of change. How do things happen? How do big things happen? Because media, arts and humanities scholars have a special interest in culture, and because the reductive instrumentalisation of culture is a real and pervasive danger, we can sometimes slip into the habit of undertheorising how change occurs. Sometimes we might narrowly emphasise the cultural and psychological features of big political and social shifts — “We need a fundamental transformation of our worldview,” “This text challenges such-and-such an entrenched power system and articulates such-and-such an alternative ontology,” etc. Perhaps the urgency and complexity of climate change asks us to create more space in our teaching for a plurality of theories of change. For example, Donella Meadows’s ‘Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System’, the system’s mindset or paradigm is only one of twelve points where intervention is possible.
- Foster critical literacy of scientific claims. This could be a sidelong way to come at sustainability, climate science, and climate justice themes. Find STEM / social sciences articles related to themes you are teaching, and support students to develop collaborative, reflexive and critical understandings. Often it’s possible to make useful evaluations even based on a fragmentary understanding.
- Focusing on experiment design and methodology is sometimes a good way in: what did the researchers actually do? What could such an activity demonstrate in principle, and how well does this correlate with the article’s main claims (including what a casual reader might garner at a glance?)?
- Psychology and social sciences may have relatively easy learning curves and help to build confidence in reading STEM texts.
- And/or, have students comparatively close-read media reports and the scientific studies they are based on: are qualifications lost (or maybe introduced)? How does tone and register shift? How do connotations shift when language is simplified?
- Deepen the collaboration by exploring collaborations with STEM colleagues or other relevant experts.
- It could also be interesting to apply theory around reparative reading vs. paranoid reading (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) when reading texts well outside our comfort zones.
- Activities from the Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators. Invite students to make a mind map or spectrum of ecological emotions; to practice mindfulness exercises; to roleplay a future descendent; or to write a letter to a future self. See www.existentialtoolkit.com.
