"This imaginative and empowering book explores the ways that our emotions entangle us with climate change and offers strategies for engaging with climate anxiety that can contribute to social ...transformation. Climate educator Blanche Verlie draws on feminist, more-than-human and affect theories to argue that people in high-carbon societies need to learn to ‘live-with’ climate change: to appreciate that human lives are interconnected with the climate, and to cultivate the emotional capacities needed to respond to the climate crisis. Learning to Live with Climate Change explores the cultural, interpersonal and sociological dimensions of ecological distress. The book engages with Australia’s 2019/2020 ‘Black Summer’ of bushfires and smoke, undergraduate students’ experiences of climate change, and contemporary activist movements such as the youth strikes for climate. Verlie outlines how we can collectively attune to, live with, and respond to the unsettling realities of climate collapse while counteracting domineering ideals of ‘climate control.’ This impressive and timely work is both deeply philosophical and immediately practical. Its accessible style and real-world relevance ensure it will be valued by those researching, studying and working in diverse fields such as sustainability education, climate communication, human geography, cultural studies, environmental sociology and eco-psychology, as well as the broader public."
Engaging with new materialist/posthuman approaches to agency, in this paper I explore what might happen to the goal of cultivating climate action if we decentre the human from our climate pedagogies. ...Specifically, I engage with Karen Barad's concept of intra-action which argues that agency is not possessed by individual things or beings, but emerges through relationships. I work with experiences and occurrences from Climate Change Responses, an undergraduate social science course that I tutored in 2015 (CCR15). I explore how in CCR15, while trying to learn to better mitigate climate change, we became climate killjoys, resisting, challenging and disrupting pleasurable carbon intensive practices. Through these empirical examples, I show that 'climate intra-action' can enable us to attend to how human and more-than-human identities change through engagement with climate change; how our human capacities to affect climate emerge through acting-with more-than-human entanglements; and thus how unanticipated, different actions can emerge in climate change education. I therefore suggest that an intra-active approach to climate change education research and practice might enable less anthropocentric and more relationally attuned climate change 'response-abilities', for both teachers and students.
Research is increasingly identifying the issues of ecological distress, eco-anxiety and climate grief. These painful experiences arise from heightened ecological knowledge and concern, which are ...commonly considered to be de facto aims of environmental education. Yet little research investigates the issues of climate change anxiety in educational spaces, nor how educators seek to respond to or prevent such emotional experiences. This study surveyed environmental educators in eastern Australia about their experiences and strategies for responding to their learners' ecological distress. Educators reported that their students commonly experienced feeling overwhelmed, hopeless, anxious, angry, sad and frustrated when engaging with ecological crises. Educators' strategies for responding to their learners' needs included encouraging students to engage with their emotions, validating those emotions, supporting students to navigate and respond to those emotions and empowering them to take climate action. Educators felt that supporting their students to face and respond to ecological crises was an extremely challenging task, one which was hindered by time limitations, their own emotional distress, professional expectations, society-wide climate denial and a lack of guidance on what works. Author abstract
This paper explores the emotional experiences of some undergraduate sustainability students in a semester long course on climate change. Specifically, it attends to experiences of anxiety, ...frustration, overwhelm, guilt, grief and hope. I suggest these experiences are characteristic of a process I term learning to live-with climate change. Learning to live-with climate change involves attuning to the relational composition of the world and thus the self; mourning desirable relationships that are lost as the planet warms; and responding to these conditions in ways that may foster more liveable worlds. Collectively, these processes enrol people in practices of bearing worlds: enduring the pain of the end of the world they have known, and labouring to generate promising alternatives. As such, these processes reconfigure the self and its relations, and attunement to how climate change composes, recomposes and decomposes particular subjectivities is important. The paper argues that affective adaptation is therefore a crucial element of climate change education.
Theories of climate justice retain a persistent tension between transcorporeal entanglement and coherent individuality. The ontology of bodily separation required for accountability for polluters and ...reparation for the vulnerable enacts a worldview potentially inconsistent with the more-than-human relationality of climate change. Yet theories of material agency and posthuman becoming are criticised for offering limited guidance for political practice. Engaging with the bushfire smoke that blanketed eastern Australia throughout 2019/2020, I seek to revitalise climate justice by engaging with theories of more-than-human transcorporeality. To do so, I articulate an aspirational climate justice, where aspiration is understood as a yearning arising from inhibited breath. Aspirational climate justice considers the relationally composed human and non-human bodies that breathe, as well as the relationship - respiration - itself, as subjects, and offers a politics through which we might keep breathing together towards a more liveable world.
This paper engages with the concept of affective atmospheres which has gained prominence in affect studies and suggests that in this era of global climate change, we need to ‘acclimatise’ this term. ...Working with a range of empirical examples, I argue that we can understand the climatic and affective to be entangled processes that co-produce each other. Working with the conceptual affordances of affective atmospheres offers much potential for research investigating the emotional and affective dimensions of climate change, enabling considerations that go beyond the individualism and anthropocentrism of more conventional approaches. Additionally, attuning to the climatic dimensions of affective atmospheres lessens the representational baggage of this term by moving beyond a metaphorical use of ‘atmosphere’. The refined concept I propose, climatic-affective atmospheres, offers promising opportunities for contributing to more effective and ethical social responses to climate change, for example, by enabling attention to how climate change reconfigures, disrupts, shapes and directs humans, and how everyday human affective practices contribute to changing or stabilising climate.
•Climatic-affective atmospheres ‘acclimatises’ affective atmospheres.•Offers opportunities for research into climate change mitigation and adaptation.•Affords consideration of planetary and epochal affective forces.•Emphasizes the entanglement of affect and climate.
This paper explores the process of feeling climate injustice. It aims to situate climate distress as an issue of justice, in order to generate more politically accountable and empowering responses. ...It firstly situates climate anxiety, solastalgia and climate disaster trauma as symptoms of affective climate violence, where harm that could have been prevented was instead consciously and systematically exacerbated by fossil fuelled political regimes. It articulates witnessing as a practice of affective climate justice, an approach that would recognise climate distress as violence, and offer support, apology and redress for this violence, including through seeking to prevent future climate change. However, the second section outlines how, in perverse efforts to maintain fossil fuel interests, climate distress is often further amplified through practices of greenhouse gaslighting – denying, deriding and dismissing people's experiences of harm. Greenhouse gaslighting is outlined as a patriarchal practice of emotional abuse that is enabled by and seeks to perpetuate white-colonial-extractivism. Thirdly, the paper argues that even within progressive circles, current efforts to witness climate distress potentially fail to enact affective climate justice due to discourses that centre whiteness and privilege, rather than recognising and responding to the different and unequal forms of affective climate violence experienced by diverse peoples.
In this article, we collectively explore the significance of engaging with theory in environmental education research. Inspired by Jackson and Mazzei's (2011) postqualitative research methodology, ...each researcher provides a short sample of engaging with his/her chosen theoretical concept for one shared data source. Through our three individual theoretical engagements with a short video, we collectively demonstrate that the data may be enacted in different ways, based on the theoretical concept that is engaged. This may potentially actualise multiple different and partial realities of the researched, and by decentring the researcher, this can also rework humanist epistemologies. We suggest that non-researcher-centred and/or non-anthropocentric actualising may contribute to more sustainable relationships in environmental education and its research, not only between the researcher and the researched, but also among the researchers. Author abstract
In terms of building resilience to the mental health impacts of climate change, rural communities•Prioritised community action that was community-led.•Perceived that collective and democratic action ...contributes to a community's resilience.•Saw collective and democratic action as a means to foster connection, hope and optimism.
Climate anxiety, and the mental health and wellbeing impacts of extreme weather-related events, are of growing concern globally. In Australia, where the current authors are based, rural communities in particular are dealing with unprecedented drought, fires and/or floods every few weeks. The mental health and wellbeing impacts of such climate change induced events are numerous and varied and operate within complex systems. However, little is known about what promotes the resilience of rural communities to these impacts.
This study engaged participants from three highly impacted communities in rural New South Wales in workshops designed to explore the mental health and wellbeing impacts of climate change and ways to address it.
This study shows that, from the perspective of community members, community-led collective action and planning which strengthens social and relational capital engenders feelings of belonging and increases informal social connectedness, while simultaneously supporting communities to prepare for the impacts of climate change.
The design of strategies to mitigate the mental health and wellbeing risks from climate change may benefit from a move beyond an individual health focus to community-led and implemented collective actions that build community networks.
In this article framing the special issue on the global school strikes for climate, we ask: what if education is not the solution, but part of the system young people want to change? In conversation ...with school strikers and reflecting on the contributions to this issue, we argue that the strikes pose a reckoning for education. Five key themes emerge from this special issue: (1) students are striking because of the affective weight of climate injustice; (2) students learn through their participation in striking, in contrast to the often insufficient climate change education taught in schools; (3) young people are becoming climate change educators through their roles as strikers; (4) strikers are patronised through paternalistic structures (including schooling) that ostensibly exist to protect them; and therefore (5) we need to reimagine education. We then advance four propositions for education in response to young people’s modest demands for a liveable future: (1) young people are in and of the collapsing climate; (2) youth voices need to be taken seriously, without excusing adult and collective responsibilities; (3) multigenerational, more-than-human, intercultural collaborations must be practiced in education for climate justice; and (4) we must learn to navigate ontological uncertainty and attend to ethical complexity.
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