Making difficult subjects accessible is a hallmark of Allegheny College faculty. Finding that relatable entry point for students to begin learning can take many forms. In the ESS department, that often means getting outdoors, and sometimes getting out of intellectual comfort zones, too.
From literature and movies to graphic novels and photography — it can all help us to reflect and reimagine our relationships to the more-than-human world. The Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says that, “The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination,” and Assistant Professor Delia Byrnes agrees. She teaches her environmental science and sustainability students that cultivating our critical imaginations through art and storytelling is a vital part of building climate resilience and shared understanding.
Students often voice excitement at learning about the broader systems that have contributed to planetary degradation–systems such as capitalism, colonialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy, to name a few. A side-effect of the burden of climate change — what’s often referred to as eco-anxiety, climate anxiety, or climate despair — can affect ESS students. Students sometimes think it’s a depressing major and can feel hopeless, overwhelmed, and despairing. These are completely logical emotional responses to the world they’ve inherited. But “doom-spiraling” forestalls action: why bother working for change if it seems hopeless?
To combat this, Byrnes created a project called “Another World is Possible: An Ecotopian Podcast” in which students worked in small groups to develop and research their own “ecotopian” (eco-utopian) word or concept that can help us conceptualize justice-based solutions to an environmental problem. This project culminated in student-produced podcasts to communicate their research and storytelling to a broad audience. Students invented words like “dichotomyth” (dichotomy + myth) that theorizes the problematic dichotomy between humans and the nonhuman world, and “traumaship” (trauma + friendship) to develop an understanding of how Gen Z’s shared grief around climate change can be mobilized toward community resilience.
