ABSTRACT
Responding effectively and justly to the climate crisis demands that we “change everything” (Klein 2015). This includes our forms of political, economic, and social organization, the technologies we use to interact with the world and each other, and perhaps most centrally, the cultures and subjectivities that naturalize “business as usual” and make other ways of living seem impossible or unimaginable. Anthropology has truly unique potential to contribute to this counter-hegemonic just transition. As a field long dedicated to holistic understandings of diverse ways of being, and to studying how “everything” has changed in the face of the mega-disruptions of colonialism, capitalist domination, globalization, and the like, we have a rich theoretical toolkit for understanding how the climate crisis and alternative futures are produced through complex and reverberating interactions among politics, economy, culture, society, language, bodies, and emotions. In this chapter, one professor and two former students at Appalachian State University detail the tactics they have used to make student-faculty-community organizing successful in terms of both reducing university carbon emissions and generating a new common sense for a climate-just counter-hegemony.
