ABSTRACT
A handmade rag rug, stuffed in the middle to produce a perch for writing, and an accompanying handmade journal call forth a sense of community around creating and sharing climate change stories (Margaret Kearney). A series of landscape prints, produced by inking found aluminum cans and running them through a French etching press, underscores consumption and energy use (Jessica Biletch). A digital drawing of the Statue of Liberty bound by a gasoline pump hose and wreathed with ribbons of oil critiques the entrenchment of U.S. petro-capitalism (Cara Lowe). An artist’s book, loaded with charcoal that dirties the fingers of the reader, uses the topic of smog in Beijing to explore links between privilege, manufacture, consumption, and pollution (Cathy Lee). An “apocalypse pack,” underwritten by satire and filled with items that coddle the user and quickly lose all value, mocks inaction on preparedness for climate disasters (Paige Silverman). These examples mark the range of objects students have created for my undergraduate course, “Representing ‘Unrepresentable’ Environments: Climate Change.” My course is designed to help students at the Rhode Island School of Design
(RISD) negotiate written, visual, and material climate change cultures by introducing them to a variety of Anglo-American climate change texts, topics, and genres; helping them become more sophisticated and attentive readers with respect to the formal, rhetorical, and affective strategies that shape climate change texts; and, whether or not their art and design work ultimately engages explicitly with climate change, aiding them in situating their professional practice within the context of a climate-changed planet. Three primary assumptions anchor “Representing ‘Unrepresentable’ Environments.” First, as many environmental humanities scholars argue, climate change confronts us with both material and representational challenges.1 Second, as a descriptor of planetary circumstances, climate change names not only future socioecological milieux, but also many socioecological presents. In other words, as Bill McKibben notes, we already live in uncanny circumstances, on an “earthlike” planet we should think of not as the Earth, but rather as the “Eaarth” (McKibben 2-3). Third, as Rob Nixon avers, writer-activists, and, by extension, artist-activists, are uniquely positioned to intervene in how we conceptualize and respond to the multidimensional socioecological disasters that constitute slow violence, climate change among them. Taken together, these three assumptions add urgency to a mode of teaching climate
change cultures attentive to students’ intellectual and emotional trajectories. In my classes, the phrase climate change cultures means both works of literature, visual art, and performance art that engage with causes, effects, discourses, and affects of climate change and the process of creating community through discussion of climate change. In an attempt to help students “navigate between hope and horror”, my course
moves from texts that foreground forms of climate change disavowal, for instance skepticism or denialism, to those that present forms of climate change affectresilience, fortitude, apathy, resignation, melancholy, anxiety, fear, sadness, anger-tempered by what Clive Hamilton calls “the new reality” (Lioi 14).2 In sketching this arc, both here and in class, I purposefully avoid the overly simplistic pessimism/optimism binary that marks much climate change discourse.3 This binary conceals three important things I foreground and work through with students. First, as Stephanie LeMenager reminds us, “feeling ecological need not be pleasant” (LeManager 105). Second, unpleasant ecological feelings are myriad. Third, to different varieties of ecological feeling accrue different stakes and forms of agency. To track how different climate change discourses and affects show up in contemporary culture, we consider topics such as Arctic ecologies, biodiversity and extinction, climate denialism, climate change-induced migration, energy systems, environmental toxicity, industrial agriculture, resource scarcity, and visual and performance art responses to climate change. Our discussions of climate change genres, forms, and modes include short stories, poems, novels, films, and nonfiction texts that employ the conventions of apocalypse, comedy, documentary, ecothriller, elegy, jeremiad, irony, melodrama, satire, speculative fiction, and tragedy.4
