The Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club for Sustainability in Higher Education
Climate Change as a Third Thing
This summer I’m hosting The Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club for the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Over the next six months, faculty and sustainability practitioners from colleges across the U.S. will be discussing ways to integrate fiction into courses in disciplines where climate change and its entourage of impacts is a central subject: Geography, Biology, Economics. And also the courses where it isn’t, but could be: Art, Psychology, Education, Math.
I’ve been motivated in this work by David Orr, one of the great champions of curricular transformation in higher education. Orr recently published an essay called “The Pedagogy of Transition: Educating for the Future We Want,” in which he maligns (again) problems in our institutions. I love professor Orr because he says things like this:
Too often, colleges and universities have become hives of “busy-work on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale.”
and this:
The planetary crisis cannot be attributed to the uneducated, but rather to the highly degreed, i.e., “itinerant professional vandals.”
And yet, he says, and this is where I always return as well — how could we possibly solve our planetary predicament WITHOUT our universities? I pull my hair out some days trying to figure how to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I agree with Orr that despite their incontrovertible bureaucracies, intractable racism, and flawed epistemological paradigms,
“It is difficult to envision a transformation to a more decent, inclusive, and durable world without universities and educational institutions at all levels stepping up to meet the largest challenges of our time.” (1)
Most people by now have heard the buzz about “cli-fi”, an emergent genre that is part science fiction, part literature, a bit of speculative fiction, a touch of nature writing. In The Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club we look at this fiction as a way to open and hold conversations about the uncertain human future. The book club includes librarians and counselors and professors and sustainability coordinators. We take up the offerings of writers who are increasingly engaging with climate change as plot, as setting, or even as a character.
From Quaker pedagogy, which I discovered through the work of Parker Palmer, I learned the idea of a ‘third thing’.
‘True community in any context’, Palmer states, ‘requires a transcendent third thing that holds both me and thee accountable to something beyond ourselves. The presence of the ‘third thing’ in a subject-centred place is ‘so real, so vivid, so vocal, that it can hold teachers and students alike accountable for what they say and do’. (2)
The third thing lets us have a common focus that is not each other. (I have the best conversations with my teenaged daughter in the car — both looking through the windshield, we can sometimes touch difficult topics more easily.) We are learning to use climate fiction as a third thing — like a windshield that we look through in order to talk about the future.
- Literature can penetrate the mind’s defenses against climate change. Our brains literally do not like what is happening with the climate. There is a whole cognitive field about bias and affirmation and debunking and resistance and how we come to hold what we know. I recently read a piece in the Seattle Times that was titled: Humans Do not Have the Mental Bandwidth to Confront Climate Change. Yep.
- Literature slows us down. With climate change, we have to slow down to act fast, and we have to look backwards to see forwards, in order to avoid wicked problems and the potential to make things worse (I hate being a killjoy about renewable energy, but I have read a LOT of naive first-year research papers about solar panels and electric cars, and I appreciate bold films like Bright Green Lies.) Literature helps to suspend and transcend time, activating a more expansive form of attention in our minds.
3. Lastly, literature engages the sensory world and the emotional world, allowing us to feel difficult feelings such as fear, anger, sadness, and shame. These were some of the key emotions in the student focus group study I conducted in 2018 and 2019 (Hiser and Lynch, 2021, “Worry & Hope: What Students Know, Think, Feel, and Do about Climate Change”). I am currently engaged in a follow-up study called Teaching Climate Change, interviewing faculty who teach climate change in different disciplines. (I also keep a field notes blog of the 33 interviews conducted so far, here.)
One interesting thing I’ve noticed in the interviews is that faculty bring to their teaching multiple layers of academic training. Each is like a layer cake, complete with frosting and sprinkles.
For example: a professor of Art who also as a Ph.D. in Psychology; a professor of Anthropology with a Master’s in Geography; a philosopher with an undergrad in Biology. One professor of environmental history who taught core courses in an Environmental Studies program moved and got a position in a History department, where nobody really even knows he’s there. My point is that despite the pervasive and much maligned “silos” of higher education, faculty manage to be multi-disciplinary, even if they sometimes have to “stay in their lane” to publish or get promotion.
My own sixteen-year academic layer-cake consists of an undergrad English degree, followed by a Master’s in Composition & Rhetoric, and Ph.D. in Educational Administration, with some frosting in Educational Psychology and sprinkles of a graduate certificate in Reading Theory — which is how I know that undergraduate writing problems are actually most often reading problems!
Let’s think about reading in college. Faculty assign readings, and then bemoan the fact that students don’t do the reading (or can’t do the reading, because they never actually purchased the textbook…which is a whole other topic). A recent article in the Chronicle revisited the research on digital vs. print textbooks and reading comprehension (also a whole other thing).
Most colleges by now have implemented accelerated writing and math pathways — doubling up college-level writing courses with a supplemental “lab” for students needing remedial support. Along the way, we eliminated our courses in Reading. We may have saved a few students from a quagmire of pre-college courses that they didn’t need, but we also closed the doors of an open access institution just a little bit more, and shuffled along students who really cannot read complex texts.
In my focus groups with college students from many different majors, I asked them how they know what they know about climate change. Here are their responses:
#1. Lived experience
#2. Social media
#3. K-12 teachers
#4. Films and documentaries
#5. Social sources (including peers, workplace, and “at the bar”)
#6. College courses
That’s right. College faculty were the least frequently mentioned source of information about climate change (unless maybe they are hanging out at bars). We are simply not engaging deeply enough on this topic, despite our environmental studies and science colleagues who have been teaching this stuff for decades.
Every opportunity I get, I advocate that everybody on campus needs to carry a piece of the puzzle on climate change. This way students can put together their own coherent picture as we reinforce and view this complex situation from different angles. I have interviewed teachers in religion, art, economics, psychology, microbiology, chemistry, business — every discipline is affected and must update its disciplinary knowledge. If you are paying attention, then climate affects your discipline. If you are paying attention, then climate change affects you.
Postapocalyptic Literature
Back in 2009 I started teaching a postapocalyptic literature unit in ENG 100. It was around the time of the Hunger Games which, along with Harry Potter, were the only books many of my students had ever read of their own volition. I got interested in apocalypse because of the ending of the Mayan calendar and the leftfield scholarship of the late Jose Arguelles. Have you noticed lately that many people are pointing out that the Greek root of the word apocalypse really means ‘to uncover’, or ‘to reveal’?
Back then, I published an essay called “Pedagogy of the Apocalypse” (along the lines of Orr’s “Pedagogy of Transition” piece). The essay was a media review of texts including Atwood’s Oryx & Crake, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, both of which had just come out, and released films during this time as well. People thought I was crazy, but I loved teaching The Road, and found that it resonated well with students. I love this scene where the father discovers a can of Coke and gives it to the son:
He put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said. The boy took the can. It’s bubbly, he said. Go ahead. He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It’s really good, he said. Yes, it is. You have some. Papa. I want you to drink it. You have some. He took the can and sipped it and handed it back.You drink it, he said. Let’s just sit here. It’s because I wont ever get to drink another one, isnt it? Ever’s a long time. Okay, the boy said. (23–24)
I love Cormac McCarthy’s writing, and the way this novel showed us how to defamiliarize the present. How to see what we have with new eyes.
The way the boy was with the can of Coke, I’m like that with coffee these days.
Every morning, I make coffee and I think on the first sip about how fantastic it is, and then on the second sip how terrible it is, about the carbon impact of labor and shipping, the disruption to ecosystems and animals. Coffee is one way I feel culpable for climate change. I drink through my guilt to the third sip where I think about how much I will miss it. (I’ll even confess to some stockpiling of Costco bags of coffee, which I think will make good barter in case of social collapse.)
I remember, back in 2012, talking with students about how “no, no, the world isn’t really ending, but why do writers like to imagine it?” And now 11 years later I’ve finally caught up with things and I find that the world, at least this civilization as we know it, actually IS in an apocalypse. It really is being revealed — one way or another, that this civilization is not sustainable. Or as Daniel Schmachtenberger said, “Unsustainable means self-terminating.”
Maybe you saw the Scholars’ Warning letter about near term social collapse, although it was easy enough to ignore just like Scientists’ Warning. In the letter, 500 faculty members argue that maybe institutions of higher education should be more open about the possibilities of near-term collapse. Climate communication expert Susanne Moser, a signatory to the letter, recently published a wonderful essay that begins with a third thing, a poem:
Future, Earth, Life –
You, promise of our days.
You, ground of our existence.
You, source of our being.
We come to you, broken.
Maybe not broken, merely unfinished.
And yet, with broken hearts:
We nearly broke you.
That is the opening of the essay: “If It’s Life We Want: A Prayer for the Future (of the) University.” (3) I dare you to bring that up at your next faculty senate meeting!
Which brings me back to the Ultimate Cli-fi Book Club. Literature is safe ground to open up some difficult conversations with students, or with our faculty peers, or even with administrators. It’s just a book club.
It’s just a third thing.
I told a story recently in an interview with Citizens Climate Radio, about a student crying during office hours. He was reading Wu Ming-yi’s amazing novel, Man With the Compound Eyes for my class, and he was reading it in Chinese since he was from Hong Kong. I thought that was pretty cool, and we were meeting during office hours to talk about translation issues. The student started to cry and he said “why isn’t anyone talking about this?”
Does everybody have a story like that? (Of course, this was pre-Greta Thunberg, but not all college students are as climate-woke as we think.)
The purpose of the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club (and this blog) is to gain a big picture of the genre of cli-fi. There are lots of books to choose from now that the genre has been exploding for several years. Of course, some of them are terrible, and some are un-teachable for different reasons (like mysogyny, trigger alerts, too long, not accessible, not literary enough)but the idea is to inspire sustainability professionals or faculty who aren’t English teachers to take a deeper dive and maybe design a course or assignment, learn about teaching reading and guiding conversations. Or host their own book club!
The term Cli Fi is credited to Dan Bloom, who writes a great blog called The cli-fi Report. He first used it in 2013, around the same time Barbara Kingsolver published Flight Behavior, which is pretty much the epitome of literary climate fiction and meets all my personal criteria (even if it’s a little long, and a bit slow for most students). In 2016, Amitav Ghosh wrote The Great Derangement, asking what it was about American Literature that had failed to engage with climate change. I am also very appreciative of Adeline Johns-Putra’s thorough scholarship on the genre (4).
The Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club criteria for Teachable Climate Fiction:
1. No aliens, no zombies.
2. No silver bullet technology.
3. An identifiable time and place.
4. Direct description of some aspect of climate change science, impact, or solutions: sea level rise, soil depletion, warming, drought, migration, pandemic.
5. Fine Sentences — this is what it boils down to for me, but I have a whole paper assignment about “what is literature” and “how does climate change change what counts as literature?” (Cli fi and sci fi are considered genre literature vs. literary literature) That can be a side conversation for later.
6. Climate change can be analyzed as the setting, the plot, or a character. This is a key idea for thinking about climate fiction!
Note: this blog post was edited from my opening comments to the Ultimate Cli-Fi Book Club. Future posts will follow the club’s discussion of teaching climate fiction in higher education including the novels Ministry for the Future, Grapes of Wrath, A Rain of Night Birds, and Station 11. Leave your email in a comment if you would like information about The Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club with the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
Works Cited
- Orr, D. (2021). “The Pedagogy of Transition: Educating for the Future We Want.” Resilience. 25 May, 2021.https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-05-25/the-pedagogy-of-transition-educating-for-the-future-we-want/. Retrieved June 24, 2021.
- Smith, M. K. (2005). “Parker J. Palmer: community, knowing and spirituality in education.” The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education.https://infed.org/mobi/parker-j-palmer-community-knowing-and-spirituality-in-education/. Retrieved: June 24, 2021.
3. Moser SC and Fazey I (2021). “If It Is Life We Want: A Prayer for the Future(of the) University.” Sustain. doi: 10.3389/frsus.2021.662657 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351268977_If_It_Is_Life_We_Want_A_Prayer_for_the_Future_of_the_University. Retrieved: June 24, 2021.
4. Johns-Putra, A. (2016). Climate change in literature and literary studies: From cli-fi, climate change theater and ecopoetry to ecocriticism and climate change criticism. WIREs Clim Change doi: 10.1002/wcc.385. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/wcc.385. Retrieved: June 24, 2021.
