ABSTRACT
Environmental educators recognize that teaching climate change involves helping students process difficult emotions and resist both naïve hope and debilitating despair. Ray argues that mindfulness and emotional intelligence are as important for climate justice work as scientific literacy. Students readily grasp how mindfulness practice might help them process climate anxiety. But they need to understand that the meditation component is not just a therapeutic add-on; rather, it’s an integral part of the embodied learning process the course aims to foster. Ray explains how mindfulness can help us question unsustainable cultural narratives and cultivate resilience and emotional intelligence for climate justice work. By adding a contemplative dimension to Butler’s action-oriented novel, the earth-seed verses similarly suggest that climate adaptation and climate justice require both practical skills and contemplative practices for working with uncertainty, impermanence, and interdependence. Mindfulness pedagogy is valuable in part because it challenges us to suspend “business as usual” judgments about what counts as scholarly, productive, and important.
