ABSTRACT
I prepare courses recalling what John McNeill’s study of twentieth-century environments reveals, a globalizing industrialism’s damage to planetary life. Even if climate change were not reality, we would still need to address issues of pollutionof air, soil, water and organisms, issues of human population and food and water provision, the sixth extinction spasm, etc.—issues ecological and social that climate change amplifies and augments. Doing so would require acknowledging how different regions of the world, in the North and South, attempt to benefit from modernity’s promise while, from different historical positions, they try to disentangle from legacies left by European expansion and colonialism, with their accompanying dispossessions, enslavements, exploitation. Needing acknowledgment, too, would be how current attitudes toward living-toward self and other, toward nature-emerged in this long past of twinned promise and nightmare. This past, after all, looks to continue, in different guises, into the foreseeable future. So, the problem: how to help students navigate between modernity’s promise
and its nightmare in the presence of climate change? First, I offer a few words on my teaching situation. I work with undergraduates
in Kentucky, contributing English courses to a multidisciplinary environmental studies minor, courses that supply, as well, general education credit. Few of the students are English majors. Some have gone on to environmental work in government, in the corporate sector, or in law. Most have not. My assumption is that I work with future citizens more than with future scholars or environmental professionals. Climate change becomes a topic in these courses, which, since the 1980s, have explored representations of the nature-human relation in US environmentalist writing, mostly. The courses circle about a haunting question: What role can literature and film play in edging a hi-tech industrial society, capital-driven and requiring high levels of commodity consumption, toward a more ecologically sound relation among people and planet? Of course, I do not expect undergraduates to give an answer-or to know much
about “global modernity” and its colonial pasts (Dirlik). I maintain minimum course requirements and then what happens semester-to-semester depends, largely, on those I work with. Each term, though, my goal is to help students grasp that when thinking of nature, both language/discourse and social inequities matter.
