ABSTRACT
Several years ago, before there was much engaging literature on climate change available, I included Mark Lynas’s 2004 non-fiction travel narrative, High Tide: The Truth about Our Climate Crisis in a few undergraduate environmental literature and film courses. In the prologue Lynas explains that while he understood the science behind climate change, he found it all “a bit too abstract” and “difficult to connect to [his] everyday reality” (xxix). So he embarks upon a three year journey across five contents, “searching for the fingerprints of global warming,” interviewing “Mongolian herders, Alaskan Eskimos, Tuvaluan fishermen, American hurricane chasers and a whole Army of scientists” (Lynas xxxiii). While students found much within High Tide to be thought-provoking, as well as disturbing, one section in particular stood out. Explaining that there are “serious practical reasons why natural ecosystems can’t simply move with a shifting climate,” Lynas gives this example: “The great crested newt couldn’t move north even if it wanted to-it can’t cross the M4 motorway.” Somehow it was this sentence-the predicament of one English newt-that had the strongest impact on students in this particular environmental literature course in north Texas. Indeed, it could be said that the newt switched off the classroom lights for the rest of the semester (see Figure 3.1). The plight of the newt who couldn’t cross the road provoked the students to
insist that we conduct class in such a way as to minimize our impact on the climate, which suddenly seemed to be the newt’s climate. We turned off the lights when we entered the room, pulling up the long, dusty shades and letting the daylight, or the cloudy ambiance, in. Admittedly, this may seem a ridiculously minute incident, a pedagogical moment that would be better served as an anecdote for the pub rather than as an essay. But consider that many of the pedagogical, epistemological, and political challenges of climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene are, precisely, about scale and the human inability to shift between, connect, and make sense of multiple, interconnected dimensions. Ursula Heise, in her influential book, Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, argues for an “eco-cosmopolitanism,” which envisions “individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds” (61). Instead of fostering an “ethic of proximity,” eco-cosmopolitanism investigates “by what means individuals and groups in specific cultural contexts have succeeded in envisioning themselves in a similarly concrete fashion as part of the global biosphere”
(Heise 62). Lynas’s tale of the newt was one such means of inciting a stance of ecocosmopolitanism for one group of students. This infinitesimal yet impassioned action of turning off the lights in the classroom suggests that climate change entails a reconsideration of the ethical and political, as even the smallest actions take place within multiple, scrambled, and interconnected scales. Was the focus on one newt and one light switch a way to gain a conceptual grasp on complex, nearly unfathomable forces and systems? Or was it merely a way to contain the uncontainable, domesticate the devastatingly unthinkable results of climate change and extinction? How can instructors encourage everyday modes of activism, and, at the same time, help students understand the epistemological and political problems posed by interacting, emergent forces that cannot be captured by the plight of say, just one species of newt? And how can climate change pedagogies foster an eco-cosmopolitanism that makes sense of the relations between small, simple practices and the larger domains of politics, policy, and global environmental processes? In the same chapter that the newt appears, Lynas discusses how everyone who
drives a car is complicit in climate change, adding that even worse, the flights he took for this book alone “produced over fifteen tonnes of carbon dioxide” (27). In the sprawling urban, suburban, exurban, and somewhat rural landscapes of north Texas, driving across rather long distances, usually in massive trucks or SUVs, is the norm. Within that wider geography, across which most of us had driven to campus, was the space of our classroom, a fleeting utopian space where business would not go on as usual. Our “enlightened” class often took place in a noticeably dark room.
Figure 3.1 Great crested newt
