CLIMATE CRISIS 101
(A.K.A. ENGLISH 23)
Course Format
Page Contents
Why is English 23 also called Climate Crisis 101?
This is a discussion-based course with 1000 students
Attend, read, or watch. The choice is yours.
Does posting this material online make the class redundant?
A note on the syllabus for people not taking the UCSB course
Is this a book, a course, or a website?
Seriously, why does this page look the way that it does?
Some reflections on the first time that the course was taught
This course is creating a lasting archive
What exactly is Climate Crisis 101?
Climate Crisis 101 is a number of things.
First, it is an actual college course offered at UCSB.
Second, it’s the course content, such as the Climate Crisis 101 YouTube channel, audio podcast series, and this webpage, which are entirely free of charge and open to the public.
In the case of YouTube, this takes the form of short video lectures that not only explain the nuts and bolts of various aspects of the climate crisis, but focus on what we can do about it, both as individuals and through collective action.
Unlike a traditional lecture series, each of the primary lectures is short and to the point. These YouTube videos are usually less than 20 minutes in length (though the “deep dive” videos, which comment on the online class discussions, are longer.) For the most part, you can view them in any order that you like, though, as they are clustered in short playlists around certain themes, some videos reference others in their particular playlist. Still, feel free to poke around and watch anything that catches your eye in any order that you want, as no video here is a prerequisite for any other. This strikes me as a more interesting – and potentially far more effective – way of experiencing material than sitting through a prescribed sequence of hour-long lectures.
The focused discussions of the climate crisis that take place in the YouTube comments are central to the course, as literally hundreds of people constructively discuss particular issues there.
The audio podcast series adds another element to the discussion through interviews with a range of individuals, from climate scientists to journalists to teen activists, who are intervening in the crisis.
This is a discussion-based course with 1000 students
Traditionally, much of academia has taken place behind closed doors. Even though we are now in a connected age, this is still the case at many universities. At UCSB, for example, most online class discussions take place behind a password-protected wall in a Moodle-based online area known as “GauchoSpace.”
As far as I am concerned, this is problematic. There is no reason to keep this material from the public – especially given the urgency and severity of the climate crisis. Consequently, anyone who is interested can follow along with our class discussions – even years from now, as I have no intentions of taking down the course archive. Feel free to invite friends or family to check out our online discussions.
Given the size of the class (860 students) and the fact that every student will be making three groups of ten (30 total) comments, literally millions of words of commentary and discussion will be created by this course and archived.
How does this work in practice? Traditional lectures can be seen as a kind of broadcasting. As only the lecturer talks and everyone else listens, knowledge travels in just one direction, not unlike a radio broadcast. In contrast, during a lively discussion ideas are transferred back and forth as many people can take an active part.
Admittedly unusual – and certainly experimental – we will be using the comments in this class in order to facilitate a discussion involving the 1000 students in the class. In order to do so, we will be taking a decidedly different approach to flipping our classroom. (Incidentally, I have long been intrigued by this general approach: I flipped my first classroom back in 2012-13 at Princeton University.)
Unlike a lecture, in a traditional discussion-based class the instructor generally both transmits information and helps students make sense of it during the class period by way of a class discussion. In other words, part of the time the instructor delivers information by lecturing and part of the time there is a class discussion over what has been said by the instructor and others.
In contrast, in a flipped classroom, students first encounter the information prior to class, usually through an online source. Class time is then given to working through this material, often by way of discussion. This allows for more time to discuss the material and work through it in other ways.
See the next section on the deep dive lectures for more on this discussion-based approach.
This course employs an admittedly experimental variation on the now traditional approach to flipping a classroom outlined immediately above.
Prior to class, students will have already watched (or read) the day’s material and commented on it, as well as – and this is important – commented on what their classmates had to say. All commenting will be done on YouTube and hence will be completely public. During the class session, Ken will jump into this discussion by reflecting on particularly helpful comments, which he will be projecting onscreen.
Ken’s responses to these comments will be recorded as individual sessions. After the course ends, they will be uploaded to YouTube as “deep dives” into the material with the comments onscreen and Ken’s reflections as a voiceover. For example, if you would like to consider the climate crisis as a generational issue (which a cluster of five of the primary lectures take up) in greater detail, as well as see what informed students think about this important issue, the five accompanying deep-dive videos will provide additional food for thought.
Ken will similarly reflect on student reaction to the assigned readings and course films. These deep dives on the course readings and films will also be uploaded to YouTube after the course ends.
In this way, everyone in the room will take part in the discussion, which is a dramatic increase from a traditional discussion section. In such a section, assuming that it is particularly lively, perhaps just 30-40% of students participate regularly. An excellent discussion leader can push it to perhaps 50%. This, of course, means that half of the students are not participating in section. In our approach, however, everyone will be taking part in the discussion – which, in this case, will be 1000 people.
Moreover, as a student will have time to consider his or her written comments, they may well be more thoughtful. Consider the dialogue that one encounters in really good fiction. One of the joys of reading such a conversation comes from the fact that it is often just too good, with phrases and retorts chosen just too perfectly, to have been spoken in real-time. And it wasn’t, as the author had the benefit of time in writing and revising it into a polished form.
In transitioning from the spoken to written word, students have the same luxury with their comments in this class. When we put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) we have time, even if just a few moments, to reflect – as well as to revise the thought once written down, if desired. Consequently, while they may read like the transcript of a spoken conversation (as does the dialogue in a novel), our online discussions are potentially more thoughtful and precise.
Finally, because online comments are a form of social networking, the format is familiar and quickly embraced by students.
By using this admittedly unusual approach, not only will the primary lecture material be preserved online, but all of the considered and thoughtful class discussion surrounding it will be archived as well.
Attend, read, or watch. The choice is yours.
A note to my UCSB students: even though you are encouraged (and in some cases required) to encounter this material in additional ways, attendance at lecture is absolutely mandatory!
There are three ways to encounter the material for this course.
1) Attend the course lectures. This is the ideal approach, as students not only systematically encounter all the course material, which they are tested on, but I also respond to their thoughts and questions during lecture. Unfortunately, this option is not available for the Winter of 2021 due to COVID.
2) Read what is on this page. Below you will find complete text of all the primary lectures for the course. Hence, this page is not only book-length, it is in fact a book.
3) Watch the videos of the lectures on YouTube, which are accurately closed captioned in English for greater accessibility. The goal is to also closed caption them in Spanish and Chinese.
This multi-pronged approach (which is further explored immediately below on the section on “Accessibility”) is designed to blur and challenge the distinctions between a book, a classroom experience, and an online experience.
Why take the above four approaches to disseminating essentially the same material? While everyone potentially benefits, this multi-pronged approach also makes the course material more accessible to a range of individuals with varied abilities.
For example, with this approach you need neither hearing nor sight to fully access all the course materials, as it can alternately be read or heard. During the “deep dive” videos (which will also be available as audio podcasts), Ken will narrate what is onscreen in order to make the material accessible in audio form.
Nearly all of the text on this page is more than twice standard size (30pt) in a font recommended as an option for print disabilities. For the highest contrast possible, all letters are black and appear against a solid white background, which is also helpful for individuals with color vision deficiency. All text is clustered together in large blocks separated by, rather than embedded with, images for added clarity.
If the text is a little large for your liking, just use your browser’s “zoom in” function to drop it down a size or two.
Since there are just six of these large text blocks, it would be a relatively simple matter to cut and paste them into a text editor in order to convert them into a specialized font, such as Open Dyslexic. Apologies for not building this functionality directly into this site, but, given that this is a living document and is being continually updated (see below), it presents a somewhat daunting challenge. Nonetheless, I am working on it.
In addition, using a varied approach to presentation gives everyone potentially useful options, such as the ability to easily listen on the go to a number of short lectures on the same theme collected together into a single audio podcast.
If you are an educator using this material, the large font on this page is a particularly good size for projecting it onscreen for a class.
Does posting this material online make the class redundant?
It is useful to pause and to reflect on why we give university credit for coursework. Credit is not given for simply showing up for class. Instead, students are graded on how well they have understood and mastered the material. Even if someone were to explore all of this online lecture material, the instructor would be in no position to evaluate what they had learned. Such evaluation is essential for accreditation.
This is not to say that someone studying this online material could not master it well enough to receive an “A” in the actual class. Indeed, the goal of posting everything online is to offer such a person everything necessary to attain that level of proficiency.
It is also the case that the course subject matters here. If this were a course on something like a computer language, having university accreditation would likely be of significant value in seeking a job. However, understanding the climate crisis is different. True, having accrued four credits for this course could play a role in obtaining an undergraduate degree, but the reason that someone would take this particular course is presumably because they want to learn more about what will likely be the most significant issue of this century – and one that will have a profound impact on his or her life.
In this sense, whether you receive credit for taking this course is – as far as I am concerned, given the urgency and severity of the climate crisis – far less important than learning about this issue.
This is also a moral issue for me. Anyone who is interested should have access to this material. Again, it might be different if the subject at hand were something like Renaissance poetry, but it seems to me that there is a moral imperative in making this material open to the public. Given that fossil fuel interests are working hard at spreading disinformation about the climate crisis, everyone needs to have unrestricted access to reliable information on this crisis.
Although it might be possible to convert the approach explored here into some sort of graded MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), it is by no means the objective – and certainly not at all necessary in implementing the approach. Moreover, making it into some sort of a paid course, and in the process restricting access to this material, strongly goes against the spirit of this approach. At the risk of repeating myself, as everyone on the planet is experiencing the climate crisis, everyone should have complete access to credible materials relating to it.
Unlike a print book, this page is regularly being updated and expanded. Why? Because the climate crisis is unfolding at a bewildering rate. Consequently, this page and its content will change along with the crisis. Moreover, students often come to me with questions that suggest new material that I should add to this page.
As a living document, this page is somewhat like an academic preprint; however, with the understanding that a print version will not be forthcoming. I welcome input from my students and colleagues, as well as the public, in improving it.
If you would like to cite from this page, you should note the date of the reference. Alternately, you could archive and reference a copy of this page from the day that you are citing it by way of the Internet Archive (a.k.a. “The Wayback Machine”) and reference that URL.
The document that you are reading is for the 2020-21 course. Here is the archived version from the 2019-20 course. As you can see, the course changed quite a bit in just one year.
The material on this website may be of particular interest to educators, as the course videos and podcasts may be useful in flipping a classroom. In fact, as noted above regarding this being a discussion-based approach, this course is designed around a flipped classroom.
A note on the syllabus for people not taking the UCSB course
If you are not enrolled in the course, you still might find the below syllabus of interest, as it structures what may otherwise be a confusing array of online material. Although it is possible to randomly watch the course YouTube videos, this syllabus not only provides a systematic way of approaching them, it also offers links to additional course material (such as the primary readings, which are all available free of cost online). In addition, it should be possible to watch all of the course’s YouTube lectures directly from this page – even if YouTube is not available in your country
Is this a book, a course, or a website?
This is, in fact, all three.
In one sense, this is a book. As such, you can sit down and read it from beginning to end as you would any other book. If you view this on a tablet, it should look pretty similar to an e-book on a Kindle or similar app, assuming that it is set to scroll.
True, the underlined text is different here than in a print book, as clicking on it can do things like scroll through the document to a new section or play a video, but, if you just want to read this book, there is no need to click anything. Just keep reading and scrolling.
Incidentally, depending on how you look at it, this is either a very old or very new way for a book to appear, as it is based on the scroll. Long before the Romans invented our modern book with facing pages, also known as the codex, parchment scrolls had already been in use for thousands of years in Egypt and elsewhere.
Although the codex largely supplanted the scroll two thousand years ago, it came roaring back with computers, as it has become the preferred user interface for websites.
While e-book readers and apps originally used the codex metaphor, both the Kindle and Apple Books app for tablets and smartphones now offer the scroll as an option. Their reason for doing so was likely because the long or “infinite scroll” has become a common interface element for smartphones and other handheld devices. Scrolling through material (often with just one hand) is arguably the easiest way to navigate it.
But this is an unusual book. Not just because it has website functionality, but because it places unusual demands on the reader. At the risk of stating the obvious, all that most books require of their readers is that you read them. True, they may reference other works, like books or films, but generally you are not required to read or watch additional works as part of the reading experience.
However, this book requires that you read and watch a range of works, which it comments upon. It is possible to read this book without reading and watching these other works. However, as it is designed to frame and explicate this material, the reader will not be able to fully experience (perhaps even understand) this book without encountering these additional works while reading.
While this is an unusual thing for a book to do, it is the way that university courses generally function, as the instructor assigns and gives context for a range of works, such as textbooks. Not surprisingly, these works are often central to the course. In the humanities, a course that did not reference other works would be unusual.
But university courses go further, as they not only encourage the reading and viewing of material, but public discussion of it in the classroom. Certainly in a traditional sense, a book is not a classroom experience.
However, as this book is also a university course, it contains a classroom experience. Indeed, if you are enrolled in this course, you are required to take part in this experience by way of commenting on dozens of parts of this book, which have been posted as video lectures on YouTube.
These comments then become part of this book. Not only because the goal is to incorporate them directly into this book by publishing them on this website, but also because the “deep dive” lectures, an important part of this course, are built upon them.
All this would, of course, not be possible if this were not, in addition to being a book and a university course, a website. A dedicated e-reader, like a Kindle, is not able to offer this sort of functionality.
As this is a website, it is obviously possible to hyperlink directly to other online material, which is far faster than the way that footnotes and other references work in print books. In addition, it is possible to watch (stream) the lectures as videos right on this page. In order to keep videos from interrupting the reading experience, they are only displayed as needed. Consequently, all that is displayed on this page is text.
Curious what one of these lectures is like? Take a look. (To view the comments and the public discussion, open in a new tab, in YouTube.)
As a website, it was authored, as much as possible, with just HTML and CSS in order to ensure complete cross platform and browser compatibility, as well as interactivity. In other words, you should be able to read it on any desktop or mobile device, even one from a decade ago. Incidentally, if you would like to highlight passages, there are apps for some browsers, such as Liner, that allow you to do just that.
Here’s a tip for viewing on mobile devices: if you are reading it on a smartphone, hold your phone horizontally (i.e. in landscape mode). If you are reading on a tablet, do just the opposite: hold the device vertically (i.e. portrait mode). Doing so should result in the most rewarding experience, as the page will be about as wide as many print books.
This book/course/ website is an interpretation of how a book can look and act as we enter the third quarter of the 21st century. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way claiming to be a web innovator, as there is hardly anything new here. Nonetheless, as I have brought six books into the world as printed objects, the online approach being employed here strikes me as an interesting alternative.
I also like that it is free of charge. Did you know that most scholars make very little money off of the books that they publish? This may come as a surprise, as university libraries often pay more than $100 for each of the books on their shelves. Nonetheless, many professors make only a few hundred dollars in total royalties per book, as academic publishing is an expensive process. Hence, I like the idea of eliminating it all together and directly offering this material to everyone without cost.
Seriously, why does this page look the way that it does?
See the above section on accessibility. It’s also time for a confession.
I love getting lost in a good book. Lost in a sea of words, just words on a blank page. As I am a scholar of the written word, this probably comes as little surprise. Of course, there is nothing wrong with feeling the same way about a page rich in images, like a graphic novel, but I personally find the look of words alone against a stark backdrop familiar and inviting.
In her Thinking With Type, Ellen Lupton wonderfully observed that “Typography is what language looks like.” In addition to considering what written language is doing, which is what I do for a living, I am fascinated (“mesmerized” might be a better word) by how it looks. The fact that I am dyslexic may play a role here.
While this fascination began decades ago when I was a child who read far too many books, and continued into adulthood as I collected far too many of them, I have grown to enjoy the look and nuance of digital text even more. Perhaps not surprisingly then, I find long scrolls of crisp Helvetica text pleasing.
Apologies in advance if you don’t like this look, as I realize that it flies in the face of a good deal of contemporary web design and the fact that pictures can indeed add interest to a page. Hence, you may find it just plain boring. Still, since I have no desire to monetize this site with ads or to promote anything here, I hope that you enjoy the luxury of this minimalist approach.
Some reflections on the first time that the course was taught
As noted above, my goal with the comments was to create a “discussion-based course with 1000 students.”
Many people are of the decided opinion that the best size for a discussion class is just the opposite of this approach: classes that are as small as possible. Indeed, around one hundredth the size of this course, as the ideal for many is a seminar with 8 to 12 students. Indeed, this is pretty conventional wisdom.
Having taught at both Harvard and Princeton, I am very familiar with discussion classes of this size, having led quite a few of them, which are the norm at both of those schools, as well as a broad range of private (read expensive and sometimes elitist) colleges.
However, looking back on the first time with this course was taught, I can say with complete confidence that these online UCSB discussions surpassed, by orders of magnitude, any discussion that I ever led at Harvard or Princeton.
By that I am not talking about the sheer number of comments or words written. In terms of metrics like these, few courses on the planet could compete with what happens with English 23, as the students in the class together literally wrote millions of words of commentary and discussion.
No, I am talking about the quality of these discussions.
First, the comments and questions posed by students were generally far longer and more thoughtful than what one might say off the cuff, in realtime, during a conventional discussion. This is one of the great advantages of switching to discussion using the written, rather than the spoken, word.
In addition to being a cultural historian, I am also a literature professor. Hence, as the written word is my stock and trade, I know that it can in many ways surpass spoken speech. While Oscar Wilde may have been as clever as some of his characters when he spoke, few conversations are as witty as those that he penned.
When we put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), we have the advantage of time. Time to reflect on what we are going to express. Time to craft our individual sentences and phrases. Time to go back and revise what we have written. Even if we take just a little time, a minute or two, this still gives us time for thought.
Written comments have additional advantages. Even if there are just 10 people in the room, speaking up in class can be a little daunting. For some people, more daunting than others. In fact, for some, so daunting that they never express what they are thinking to everyone else. I remember my first seminar in college, I didn’t say a single word the entire term. I didn’t say anything in my second seminar either.
As a professor, I have led plenty of small seminars where some people never talked. And others, where more than half the room had little to say.
But by making commenting a requirement of the course and removing any face-to-face social pressure, it means that everyone gets to be heard. And we all benefit by that.
With public comments like these, we also have the opportunity to read what others have written prior to putting in our own two cents. This is where comments turn into discussions, as people get to respond not only to the course material, but to each other.
And what interesting comments and discussion we had!
To be honest, they greatly exceeded my expectations. People said more – and said more interesting things – than I ever imagined.
I’m sure some of this had to do with the subject matter, the climate crisis. Many of my students (and people of their generation) are rightly very concerned about this crisis, which is no longer a hypothetical, as it once was for my generation, but is a reality of their lives.
The great diversity of the class was also a factor here, as we had students from around the world and from a range of different backgrounds sharing often unique perspectives on the course material. I will always remember one of the comments toward the end of the first course that began “When I was reading “Being The Change” I couldn’t help but think of my parents. They were recently deported to Mexico…”
All this drew more than just my attention, as people responded, often in droves, to comments by their classmates that particularly resonated with them. The above comment received over seventy responses.
As you can probably tell, I am more than a little psyched about the comments in this course.
Because I found the comments so interesting and compelling, I completely structured the in-class lectures around them.
The idea was to have a discussion not unlike what would have happened in a traditional seminar involving just a dozen or fewer students.
In a traditional seminar of the sort, everyone comes to class having read or watched the course materials. I would then usually begin by making an opening statement, which, depending on the material, would take a few minutes. After which, people in the class would offer their own thoughts on the material and questions that I had raised. These comments would then often elicit responses from other people in the room.
During this time, incidentally, I usually try to hang back until everyone has had a chance to respond to their classmate. Once they had, I then would weigh in myself, delivering new information in the process. This procedure would repeat itself through the session.
I have to admit that I very much like this seminar model, as it allows the students in the room to structure how I present my thoughts and material on the subject at hand. In other words, if people are interested in a particular issue, I can then teach them more about that issue. In a lecture, by contrast, I am solely deciding what is important and the order in which it appears, leaving students out of the process altogether.
Even though both traditional seminars and lectures introduce students to a range of new material and ideas, the seminar approach has the potential to be more effective and ultimately more personally meaningful, as it tailors instruction to students in the class. This has long been a selling point of colleges (often expensive ones) that promise small classes, which is central to this pedagogical approach.
Although I was inspired by this seminar model, my suspicion was that it could work even better if far more than a handful of people were involved.
So, in this course I posted my short opening statement to YouTube and then invited comments on it, as well as responses to these comments. As with a small face-to-face seminar, I then replied to some of the most interesting of these comments and responses, one by one. This was done during the class period, as I projected select comments and replies onscreen for the class to read before I weighed in.
What quickly became apparent was that students were essentially “voting” on what they found interesting by replying to comments that focused in on particular issues. This often made it easy for me to decide which comments to discuss in class, as those receiving dozens of responses were clearly resonating with people. Although something similar can happen in a small lecture when people latch onto a comment, in this case such enthusiasm was made especially clear.
This is not to say that the only interesting comments were those that received dozens of responses. In fact, one of the real challenges of preparing for the class period was choosing just which comments and responses to project onscreen, as there were often a hundred or more really interesting ones!
This course is creating a lasting archive
The first iteration of this course began as a new decade opened, on January 6, 2020.
One of the objectives of this course, which is tied to when it is being taught, has little to do with pedagogy. From the start, one of the goals was to use the opportunity of this course to create an archive that is expected to contain tens of millions of words of commentary on, and discussion of, the climate crisis. It will be written by thousands of college students at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) throughout the 2020s. In order to have the greatest chance of enduring over time, this material will reside on the Internet Archive.
Before exploring the nature of this unusual course and archive further, allow me to underscore the importance of this particular ten-year period, as it is not just any decade.
As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a Representative from New York, famously declared the January before this decade opened, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Unless you had your head buried in the sand at the time, you know that she opened herself up to an enormous amount of criticism here. Consequently, regarding this statement, she later made clear that “you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.”
Still, AOC was right to draw attention to the profound importance of this decade, even if she could have done so more carefully. Which is, incidentally, exactly what Bernie Sanders, a Senator from Vermont, later did when he noted that “[t]he scientific community is telling us in no uncertain terms that we have less than 11 years left to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and sustainable energy, if we are going to leave this planet healthy and habitable for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and future generations.”
The reference to the “scientific community” by Sanders was very likely to an October 2018 report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which noted that, if we are to limit “global warming to 1.5°C…[g]lobal net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030.” These IPCC findings were also likely what AOC was referencing.
So, while the world will not (literally) end in 2030, we will really need to have decisively acted by then if we hope, in the words of Sanders, “to leave this planet healthy and habitable” for future generations.
Consequently, with respect to keeping our planet habitable and welcoming for our species, the decade of the 2020s may be the most important of the century.
But what, exactly, do people – and young people especially – make of all this?
Why focus on a younger generation in particular? Their lives, along with the lives of future generations, will be defined by what we do, and fail to do, in this decade.
For the most part, students in the first class taking part in this project in 2020 were born around the year 2000 (47% were Freshman, 33% Sophomores, 11% Juniors, 6% Seniors, and 3% others). Most of them will likely witness the majority of the 21st century unfolding. As will the nine classes following them each year through the 2020s. Consequently, the climate crisis will be a far bigger issue for this generation than it was for mine, as I have only been minimally impacted by the crisis during my six decades on the planet.
So, what do these young people, with the weight of the world on their shoulders, make of all this?
The title of this course, “The Climate Crisis: What It Is and What Each of Us Can Do About It,” was meant to signal (as best I could in a few words) what is covered in class. Roughly the first third of the course is taken up with explaining exactly what the climate crisis is and what we can expect in future decades. The second two thirds is devoted to exploring a range of ways that each of us can make interventions, including personal action, collective activism, becoming politically active, communicating the issue to friends and family, and so forth.
As lecturer, my job was to inform my students of the situation and suggest ways that each of us can help to mitigate it. In this sense, our respective tasks were clear: I taught, they learned.
But in another sense, the more than 800 people in the room taught me a great deal – for which I owe them an enormously debt of thanks.
Normally, this would not have been possible with a lecture this large, as traditionally I would have been just broadcasting to the lecture hall with no feedback. However, as I note here, this course employed an unusual variation on a flipped classroom, as students watched and commented on my prerecorded lectures online. They not only commented on my primary lectures, but also short lectures in which I introduced and framed the course readings and films. All told, they each commented on over thirty short lectures.
In addition, and importantly, students were required to spend half their time responding to comments made by their classmates. The idea was to get them talking to each about specific aspects of the climate crisis and what we can do about it.
Some people may see this form of “talking” as inferior to face-to-face communication; however, having spent a number of years working on facilitating online conference discussions as a more environmentally sound alternative to fly-in events, it has been my experience that meaningful interaction can and does happen online in written form. Moreover, because we have more time to consider our words and be more precise when writing, this form of interaction is in some ways potentially superior to spoken conversations. Of course, as a literary historian, I have a certain fondness for the written word.
In any event, the primary goal of the course was, 1) as the title suggests, to familiarize students with the climate crisis and what actions that we can take to mitigate it, as well as to 2) get them talking about it with each other. All the material was selected and presented with this two-part goal in mind.
However, as with many class discussions, I also learned a great deal. In fact, I learned more than in any other class that I have ever taught – by a long shot.
Some of what I learned was pretty pragmatic, as these online conversations taught me, for example, new ways of intervening in the climate crisis, such as specific and novel ways of leveraging and communicating through social media. (As you might imagine, my students are far more up on this than I am.)
But I am also learning a great deal about how my students think and feel about this crisis.
This was not the primary objective in setting up this unusual pedagogical approach, as I did not structure lectures with this outcome in mind. For example, our first reading (by David Wallace-Wells) explores what would happen if we do not limit global temperature rise to 1.5-2 degrees Celsius, the goal of the Paris Agreement. Instead, Wallace-Wells outlines the consequences if it creeps to 2-4 degrees or beyond.
My goal was not to gauge how my students responded to the rather dire consequences that Wallace-Wells lays out. If that had been the objective, I might have provided them with a questionnaire containing a series of specific questions, perhaps asking them, on a scale of 1-10, how anxious they were made by the specific discussion of “Heat Death” in the article. But I’m not a sociologist and that sort of assessment wasn’t my goal.
Nonetheless, the online discussion for the article by Wallace-Wells (and for all of the readings, films, and lectures for the course) proved utterly fascinating.
My students are wonderfully diverse, coming from all over the planet and all sorts of backgrounds. However, they are a largely homogenous group with respect to age, as they are (as noted above), for the most part, all in their late teens or early twenties. They are a particularly bright bunch, as the average UCSB undergrad had over a 4.0 GPA in high school. It is also worth noting that they are a largely self-selected group, as only students with a least some interest in the climate crisis would likely take this particular course.
Consequently, if you are interested in what bright young people with an interest in the topic thought about the climate crisis in the 2020s, there is much to be learned from the archive created by the course.
As the plan is to add a new installment each year for a decade, presumably what they think will change over the years. For example, the first interaction of the course took place as the COVID-19 crisis was initially unfolding, but before social distancing was required (over 800 students were packing in one lecture hall, shoulder to shoulder). Will the next class see the climate crisis differently in light of COVID-19? Perhaps. We will have to wait and see.
Similarly, California’s Democratic primary took place during the first class, with Bernie Sanders, whose platform centered on a sweeping Green New Deal, taking an enormous initial lead. In contrast, the next time course is taught, either the sitting President (Donald Trump) or a new one will be sworn in four years. Hence, this political backdrop will be significantly different from the first class. It should be interesting to see how attitudes change.
I hope that you find this archive useful. The students in this class have already taught me much. And I am more than little optimistic that I will learn more during the following nine years. In posting these student reflections and discussions online, my fondest hope is that you will learn from them as well.
Climate and Generation
How the climate crisis was brought about in a single lifetime
Why the generation that caused the climate crisis is not acting
What a new generation can do to mitigate the climate
Can one generation do what previous generations failed to do?
What the Boomer generation knew about the climate crisis – and when we knew it
What each of us can do about the climate crisis
Why the climate crisis is a cultural problem (and why electric cars are more trouble than good)
Pulling it all together: 20 things that each of us can do to save the planet
The Climate Crisis: What It Was and What Each of Us Did About It (A Message From the Future)
Personal action, climate activism, or becoming politically active. Which matters more?
Do we need a climate vanguard? (Food, today and tomorrow)
Flying, the absolute worst thing that you can do environmentally
Films
Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel
A Climate of Doubt and Merchants Of Doubt
Are we destroying the planet in a misguided pursuit of happiness?
Readings
The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth
Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming
Social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and the injustice of it all
Communicating the Climate Crisis: vegans and freegans, vegetarians and climatarians
Copyright 2020-21 by Ken Hiltner