Climate Change as Threat (& Opportunity) Multiplier

By Leave a Comment

My year at Princeton University is coming to a close, although the second half of the spring semester was disrupted, as everything has been, by the COVID-19 pandemic. But I still wanted to share the syllabus for the class, which includes the adaptations I made given the shifting situation. After spring break in March, we all transitioned to Zoom, and our planned trip to a local farm to learn about carbon farming had to be cancelled, but the class remained a great series of discussions, inquiries, tough questions, thoughtful answers, exciting possible solutions, and more.

Here’s the description for ENV 381, which was cross-listed in journalism and urban studies:

The US Department of Defense has called climate change a “threat multiplier,” referencing military bases inundated by sea level rise and increased global political instability from extreme weather events, especially in vulnerable countries already struggling with poor governance and impoverished populations. Likewise, among conservation biologists and urban designers, farmers and social justice activists, there is acknowledgement that perennial challenges are all exacerbated because of a rapidly warming planet for these same reasons. Every aspect of life on earth, for humans and other living creatures, is changing. This class will explore everything from the state of songbirds to the national security concerns of war hawks to agriculture to urban design to storytelling to social justice. The aim is to understand how, while climate change aggravates existing struggles, innovative climate action solutions might also help ease them.

As always, feel free to reach out to me with your suggestions or to let me know if you’ve adapted it for your own class. Here’s the full syllabus:

ENV381_SYLLABUS_ClimateChangeAsThreatMultiplier

Crossing the Climate Change Divide syllabus

By Leave a Comment

I’m just wrapping up a semester of teaching a class I called Crossing the Climate Change Divide, an undergraduate seminar I led at Princeton University.

The effects of climate change are here, now. Yet Americans are divided on this singular issue. Or are they? While media often portray climate change debates as binary—fact-averse conservative denialists vs. Green-New-Deal leftists—the reality is that all Americans are experiencing changes in their own backyards. For some it is the impact of devastating extreme events such as wildfires or storm flooding; for others, it is noticing quieter shifts such as when spring blooms and birds arrive. How they process and understand these changes was the focus of our semester.

Our readings included:

  • Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
  • Andrew J.  Hoffman, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate
  • Michael Mann and Tom Toles, Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
  • Naomi Oreskes and Erik. M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt
  • Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
  • Earl Swift, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island
  • Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
  • Candis Callison, How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts
  • Mitch Hescox and Paul Douglas, Caring for Creation: The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and A Healthy Environment
  • Pope Francis, Encyclical on Climate Change & Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home

But for educators curious about the whole class, here’s the syllabus:

ENV375_SYLLABUS_CrossingClimateChangeDivide

And I’d love to hear from others out there about the readings that you are using in your classrooms, too. Write me!

Crossing the Climate Change Divide

By Leave a Comment

ENV 375 class. Photo by Denise Applewhite

This fall, I’ve been leading Princeton undergraduates as we take a deep dive into the climate debate in the seminar “Crossing the Climate Change Divide.” Tom Garlinghouse from Princeton’s Office of Communications joined us to share what we’re doing. To see the full syllabus, click here. And here’s his piece:

The course is taught by award-winning journalist Meera Subramanian, who is asking students to examine what people think about climate change — whether they accept the current climate science, reject it or are simply confused by it — and why they think the way they do.

“I’d love the students to engage in the conversation around climate change with a slightly more wide-open lens about how people are thinking about this and why people are thinking about it in the ways that they do,” said Subramanian, the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities in the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). She is participating in a panel titled “Breaking the Logjam” at the Princeton Environmental Forum on Oct. 25.

Subramanian wants the students to use what anthropologists call an “emic,” or “insider’s,” approach — that is, taking into account a person’s words, perceptions and beliefs as main sources of information rather than adopting a potentially more objective or “outsider’s” approach. This demands that the students consider factors such as how an individual’s ideology, religion, economic level and politics impinge on a particular topic — in this case, the climate debate.

“Humans are messy creatures,” Subramanian said. “It’s not like we’re just economic creatures or just religious creatures. We are all of those things, all at once.”

Read the rest here.

Announcing: visiting professorship at Princeton University

By Leave a Comment

I’m pretty sure I have been well behind the curve when it comes to the field of environmental humanities. What I didn’t realize as I criss-crossed India working on A River Runs Again was that my method of reporting and research was just that: taking a systems approach and thinking about the interconnected, interdisciplinary aspects to the complicated realm of environmental stories I was exploring. It led me to understand, for example, that designing a clean cookstove was a gender issue as much as (or more than) a technological one and that the disappearance of vultures could have religious as well as ecological implications. I had stepped, without realizing it, into the world of environmental humanities.

So — to bury the lede — it’s with great delight that I announce that for the 2019-2020 academic year, I’ll be the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University. I’ll be rooted within the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI). In their words: [Read more…]