ABSTRACT
The recent May 24, 2015 encyclical by Pope Francis on climate change provides an opportune moment to consider what climate pedagogy might look like for those of us who teach in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. The most significant contribution of the encyclical, as we see it, is that it provides a pathway for thought, a means for us to cross scales to be able to implicate individual lives and actions within a phenomenon that has been largely perceived as a scientific construction, distant, abstract, and far in the future. The pathway that Pope Francis proposes not surprisingly is grounded in spirituality and takes the words of God as spurs to relate individual lives to human suffering. We are urged to anticipate the large scale of suffering already underway, now much intensified because of climate change, through the means of our personal capacity for suffering. Pope Francis terms this mode of anticipation ‘ecological conversion.’We might understand this in the following way: we can imagine how hunger, thirst, weariness must feel like for the wider community through the fact that our bodies know these experiences. We have to renew these experiences, further intensify them, to be able to grasp the dimension that climate change introduces to them. Climate change is nothing new. It is already in our experiences. We have to learn to be attuned to it to produce change in ourselves. Dale Jamieson, in his 2014 book, Reason in a Dark Time, provides another path-
way for thought, comparable in some ways to that of Pope Francis. Showing how the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change-sponsored conversation on climate change has by and large failed to arrive at any meaningful global plan, he urges us to avoid the threat of nihilism that this critical insight might bring. To succumb to nihilism is to assume that a single global model was the only way forward. Rather he suggests that evolving an individual climate ethics is as necessary to produce urgency in one’s actions as learning to continue living in a flagging global process. The virtues he foregrounds towards this ethics are those of humility, temperance, mindfulness, simplicity, and so on. He writes: “The virtues do not provide an algorithm for solving the problems of the Anthropocene, but they can provide guidance for living gracefully while helping to restore in us a sense of agency” (Jamieson 8).
