ABSTRACT
As the slow-rolling disasters of climate change continue to unfold, the question is no longer if anthropogenic climate change will come to be the defining issue of our time, but rather how anthropogenic climate change defines our present, and how it will shape our individual and collective futures. Today, the ubiquity of climate change, its causes and effects, entangles virtually every human endeavor and action with ecological and geophysical processes. Every mote of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emitted through the vast web of the global economy contributes to climate disruption, as does every carbon sink filled, destroyed, or diminished. The social effects of climate change are just as widespread and convoluted, from childhood malnutrition in Arctic Canada, where changes in seasonal migratory patterns radically affect the hunting economy, to debates about whether official “refugee” status can be given to migrants fleeing sinking Pacific island states. Even real estate values in coastal California and Florida, havens of global wealth, respond to sea level rise, as the insurance industry well knows. The ubiquity of climate change implicates all of us in the wealthy world as both perpetrators and victims, while its most negative impacts continue to be distributed unevenly and unjustly. The omnipresent yet uneven imbrication of ourselves and our students in
climate change leads us to consider perhaps the first provocation of climate education in the humanities. We summarize this first provocation as the ecological, planetary provocation. Likewise offered as a foundational maxim of environmental education, it is eloquently voiced by famed naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” (248). Climate change is “hitched” to so many aspects of our lives as human animals,
just as our lives have always been deeply interwoven into the vagaries of climate. As Richard C. Foltz notes, one of the first tenets of teaching environmental history
is that “we should remind ourselves that humans interact not only with each other, but in all times, places and contexts with the non-human world as well” (10). Integrative approaches developed over almost two decades through teaching environmental history, philosophy, and literary and cultural studies are well-suited to climate change education. Yet humanists have lagged behind their colleagues in the natural and social sciences in developing curricula around climate change. This is due largely to the understandable tendency in higher education for teaching to follow research. Technical and scientific reports for decades have emphasized the tremendous challenges of unmitigated climate change-rising sea levels, extreme weather events, crop failure, and social unrest, among others-and thus there has been more focus on teaching the technical and scientific dimensions of these issues. Climate science is taught to graduate and undergraduate students in courses, integrated into a host of internships and extracurricular opportunities, and even acknowledged by the White House as crucial for developing nation-wide climate literacy.3 Although educators have pointed to the necessity of including the humanities in climate change curricula, far more scholarship has attended to teaching climate change in science and policy disciplines.4
