Having lived through the hottest summer on record, students and teachers are back in school for the start of the new academic year. And there, increasingly, the changing climate is a factor in course curricula, classroom pedagogy, and campus operations.
Yale Climate Connections has featured books and reports for educators several times in the past. (See these bookshelves from 2023, 2022, and 2019.) This month’s bookshelf updates those efforts and highlights, in particular, how climate change is reshaping the arts and humanities.
The list starts with the Higher Ed Climate Action Plan released last month by a special task force of the Aspen Institute. Three very different takes on the challenge of teaching climate change follow.
That challenge is then reframed in more general terms by the next two books. The senior director of programs for the National Academy of Engineering addresses climate change as one of several “wicked problems” we must engage if we are to “engineer a better world.” But tackling wicked problems, those deeply entangled with the systems on which we depend, requires abilities that must taught and practiced. And for that challenge, a 2018 title I first learned about just as this just as this list was being assembled offers a provocative response: “Creating wicked students” should be a goal of higher education.
Equally important, educational institutions must study, test, and teach ways to support the emotional well-being of young people as they struggle with the wicked problems that have been left for them to solve. The edited volume that fills the seventh spot on this list offers a status report on these efforts.
Rounding out this year’s back-to-school bookshelf are five titles that address climate change through rhetoric, literature, art history, architecture – and fashion. Courses on sustainable fashion are gaining popularity on college campuses. Climate is now part of the calculus for deciding “what to wear.”
As always, the descriptions of the titles are adapted from copy provided by their publishers.
Higher Ed Climate Action Plan by Mildred Garcia and Kim Hunter Reed et al (This Is Planet Ed 2024, 69 pages, free download)
Our society is in a moment of transition. The effects of climate change are harming people and communities across our country and the globe. These effects will only worsen in the decades to come. The Higher Ed Climate Action Plan provides a roadmap to support comprehensive action across higher education and outlines recommendations for different stakeholders to catalyze and scale these efforts across the country. The Higher Ed Task Force heard from experts and leaders across the country and have identified recommendations, bright spots, and insights towards building a sustainable future through collaboration and innovation. In this action plan, we identify the opportunity for the higher education sector to advance climate solutions, adapt to our changing climate, and prepare students for success in a sustainable, resilient, and just society.
Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse by Ahmed Afzaal (Wipf & Stock Publishers 2023, 244, $31.00 paperback)
Humanity finds itself on the cusp of a long period of disruption, the likes of which no previous generation has experienced. Large-scale behavioral changes are imperative, not necessarily to “save the planet” but to reduce unnecessary pain and suffering. Yet, the vast majority of educators are still functioning in the “normal” mode, teaching the same subjects and skills, year after year, even as the nature of the challenges our students will face is undergoing dramatic changes. This mismatch is causing a moral and spiritual crisis. Teaching at Twilight invites all educators to take an unflinching look at the deteriorating state of the earth’s life-support system, become aware of its implications for human civilization, and rethink their responsibility in light of that awareness.
The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World edited Jennifer Atkinson & Sarah Jaquette Ray (University of California Press 2024, 344 pages, $29.95 paperback)
As feelings of eco-grief and climate anxiety grow, educators are grappling with how to help students learn about the systems causing climate change while simultaneously navigating the emotions this knowledge elicits. This book provides resources for developing emotional and existential tenacity in college classrooms so that students can stay engaged. Featuring insights from educators, activists, artists, and others who are integrating emotional wisdom into climate justice education, this user-friendly guide offers a robust menu of interdisciplinary, plug-and-play teaching strategies, lesson plans, and activities to support student transformation and build resilience. Galvanizing and practical, The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators will equip both educators and their students with tools for advancing climate justice.
Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice by Vandana Singh (Earthscan/Routledge 2024, 246 pages, $42.95 paperback)
The book sets out a radical vision for climate pedagogy, introducing an innovative framework in which the scientific essentials of climate change are scaffolded via three transdisciplinary meta-concepts: Balance/Imbalance, Critical Thresholds and Complex Interconnections. Vandana Singh draws on her own classroom practices to provide implementable ideas for educators, and to demonstrate how climate change can be taught from any disciplinary perspective in a transdisciplinary way. She identifies four key dimensions for an effective, justice-centered climate pedagogy: scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary, the epistemological and the psychosocial. Bridging the social and natural sciences, this book will be a resource for all climate change educators, in whatever settings, as well as for community climate activists.
See also Teaching Climate Change: Fostering Understanding, Resilience, and a Commitment to Justice by Mark Windschitl (Harvard Education Press 2024, $38.00 paperback)
Wicked Problems: How to Engineer a Better World by Guru Madhavan (W.W. Norton 2024, 384 pages, 29.99)
Challenges that tangle personal, public, and planetary aspects—often occurring in health care, infrastructure, business, and policy—are known as wicked problems. In linked chapters on key facets of systems engineering, Guru Madhavan reveals how wicked problems have emerged throughout history and how best to address them in the future. Braided throughout is the uplifting tale of Edwin Link, an unsung hero who revolutionized aviation with his flight trainer. In Link’s story, Madhavan finds a model mindset to engage with wickedness. An homage to society’s innovators and maintainers, Wicked Problems portrays engineering as a cultural choice—one that requires us to restlessly find ways to transform society, but perhaps more critically, to care for the creations that already exist.
Creating Wicked Students: Designing Courses for a Complex World by Paul Hanstedt (Routledge 2018, 200 pages, $27.95 paperback)
In Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt argues that courses can and should be designed to present students with what are known as “wicked problems” because the skills of dealing with such knotty problems are what will best prepare them for life after college. To prepare students for wicked problems, they need to have wicked competencies, the ability to respond easily and on the fly to complex challenges. Unfortunately, a traditional education that focuses on content and skills often fails to achieve this sense of wickedness. This course design book assumes that the goal in the college classroom is to develop students who are not just loaded with content, but capable of using that content in thoughtful, deliberate ways to make the world a better place. Creating Wicked Students takes instructors through each step in the process of reconstruction.
Climate Change & Youth Mental Health: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Elizabeth Hasase and Kelsey Hudson (Cambridge University Press 2024, 456 pages, $34.99 paperback)
Climate change is the biggest threat of our century, one that will impact every aspect of children’s lives: their physical, emotional, moral, financial, and social health and well-being. The relationship between the climate crisis and mental health in young people is therefore by definition multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural, requiring multiple perspectives on how to understand and guide younger generations. This book provides a unique synthesis of those perspectives – the science, psychology, and social forces that can be brought to bear on supporting young people’s psychological well-being. No matter the setting in which an adult may interact with younger people, this book provides the intellectual rigor and tools to ensure those interactions are as helpful and supportive as they can be.
Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing by Ira J. Allen (University of Tennessee Press 2024, 280 pages, $24.95 paperback)
In Panic Now? Tools for Humanizing, Ira J. Allen takes the reader on a journey through difficult feelings about the various crises facing humanity, and from there, to new ways of facing impending dread with a sense of empowerment. The interrelated threats of climate collapse, an artificial intelligence revolution, a novel chemical crisis, and more are all brought to us by what Allen describes as “CaCaCo,” the carbon-capitalism-colonialism assemblage. After suggesting that it is absolutely time to panic, he asks: how do we manage to panic productively? This book is a master class in how to create better, more humanizing outcomes by confronting the panic that comes with the realization that the world as we know it is ending. Allen invites us to an action-oriented mode of panic, which can incite our imaginations to move from panic to empowerment.
Unseasonable: Climate Changes in Global Literatures by Sarah Dimick (Columbia University Press 2024, 328 pages, $35.00 paperback)
As climate change alters seasons around the globe, literature registers and responds to shifting environmental time. An essayist in the northeastern United States observes that maple sap flows earlier now, prompting him to reflect on gender and seasons of transition. Poets affiliated with small island nations arrive in Paris for the United Nations climate summit, revamping the occasional poem to attest to intensifying storm seasons across the Pacific. In Unseasonable, Sarah Dimick traces how knowledge of climate change is constructed, conveyed, and amplified via literature. She documents how “the unseasonable” reverberates. She contends that climate injustice is an increasingly temporal issue, unfolding not only along the axes of who and where but also in relation to when, shaped by the shared but disparate experiences of the unseasonable.
See also Writing Romantic Climate Change: Gendered Poetics and Critical Legacies in the Anthropocene by Anya Heise-von der Lippe (Transcript Publishing 2024, 274 pages, $35.00 paperback).
Van Gogh and the End of Nature by Michael Lobel (Yale University Press 2024, 200 pages, $45.00)
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is most often portrayed as the consummate painter of nature whose work gained its strength from his direct encounters with the unspoiled landscape. Michael Lobel upends this commonplace view by showing how Van Gogh’s pictures are inseparable from the modern industrial era in which the artist lived—from its factories and polluted skies to its coal mines and gasworks—and how his art drew upon waste and pollution for its subjects and even for the very materials out of which it was made. Merging a timely sense of environmental urgency with bold new readings of the work of one of the world’s most acclaimed artists, Van Gogh and the End of Nature weaves detailed historical research and perceptive analysis into an illuminating portrait of an artist and his changing world.
See also Entropy by Diane Tuft (Monacelli-Phaidon 2024, 136 pages, $80), “a photographic exploration … of nature amidst the tragedy of climate change.”
The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy by Vishaan Chakrabarti (Princeton University Press 2024, 284 pages, $45.00)
The world is facing unprecedented challenges, from climate change and population growth, to technological dislocation and a fraying cultural fabric. With most of the planet’s population now living in urban environments, cities are the spaces where we have the greatest potential to confront and address these problems. In this visionary book, Vishaan Chakrabarti argues for an “architecture of urbanity,” showing how the design of our communities can create a more equitable, sustainable, and joyous future for us all. Lavishly illustrated with a wealth of original graphics, data visualizations, photographs, and drawings, The Architecture of Urbanity eloquently explains why cities are the last, best hope for humanity, and why designers must, alongside political, business, community, and cultural leaders, steward the healing of our planet.
What to Wear and Why: Your Guilt-Free Guide to Sustainable Fashion by Tiffanie Darke (Broadleaf Books 2024, 262 pages, $27.99)
Reportedly, the clothing industry produces 80 billion garments a year, employs 15 percent of the world’s population, exploits labor, and seriously pollutes the environment. In What to Wear and Why, top fashion writer turned sustainability activist Tiffanie Darke sheds light on these unsustainable practices and immense environmental impacts of the fashion industry and presents a compelling argument for transformative change. And drawing on her extensive fashion experience and expertise, Darke offers practical guidance on how we as consumers can make a difference. Whether you’re a fashionista who cares passionately about sustainability, an environmental advocate seeking to learn more about the impact of fashion, or simply someone who wants to be a part of the change, What to Wear and Why is your go-to guide to a more sustainable future.
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