Santa Barbara during the 2017 Thomas Fire
CLIMATE CRISIS 101
The Climate Crisis
What It Is and What Each of Us Can Do About It
by
Ken Hiltner
Copyright 2019–21
Contents
So, what, exactly, is Climate Crisis 101?
Accessibility 2.0
The real reason that I chose to make Climate Crisis 101 such an unusual course.
In each of its forms, Climate Crisis 101 is unusual.
Why take this approach?
Climate Crisis 101 as a NCN (nearly carbon-neutral) course
FAQs
Some reflections on the first time that Climate Crisis 101 was taught
This course is creating a lasting archive
Scholar Activism
(In the lower right of the screen, note the faint box with a small chevron in it. Click the chevron at any point and the page will quickly scroll up to the top.)
Introduction
Scroll down to read this section, or
download as a PDF / watch as a video / listen to as a podcast
Prior to becoming a professor, for more than two decades I made my living as an artisan, a furniture maker. During that time, I was a voracious reader. I spent my days working wood. My nights and weekends were given to reading pretty much anything that I could get my hands on. My principal interest was (as it still is now) the environment.
The challenge was getting access to useful books.
While my local library had some things of interest, what I really needed was a good academic library. I was seemingly in luck, as I lived a little south of Princeton University and little east of the University of Pennsylvania, also an Ivy League school. Both have amazing, world-class libraries: Firestone at Princeton and Van Pelt at Penn.
The problem was that neither library would let me in the door, literally. On more than one occasion, I was turned away by guards posted at the entrances. And, mind you, I had absolutely no hope of securing borrowing privileges. I just wanted to come in and read the books.
Some universities at the time – and we’re not talking all that long ago – were not only ivory towers, but walled-off ivory towers, that had little interest in sharing their riches with members of the public (like me).
And, of course, being able to attend a lecture was altogether out of the question. In my early 20s, which was during the early 1980s, I actually went to Princeton to ask them if they had night classes or if I could sit in on lectures. I wasn’t seeking university credits or a degree, I just wanted to learn.
They literally laughed at me. Apparently, Princeton wasn’t that sort of school. It was as frustrating as it was humiliating.
If knowledge is power, doesn’t it just seem wrong that only some people have access to it and, in some ways even worse, that universities went way out of their way – by actually posting guards at the doors – to make sure that others were denied access? We are not talking about a totalitarian government seeking to control access to knowledge here, but rather higher education the US in the closing quarter of the 20th century.
In terms of a subject like the climate crisis, why in the world would anyone want to restrict access to such knowledge? Standing outside of these extraordinary libraries, as well as classrooms where amazing courses were being taught, it just didn’t make sense me.
Of course, I wasn’t alone out there. In fact, the rest of the world was largely there with me.
Nearly everyone in low- and middle-income countries have long been quietly excluded from international educations. This is a huge social justice issue, which is, as far as I am concerned, still being ignored today. As with most social justice issues, this hurts us all.
So, I began dreaming of a time when the walls would come down and universities would make their riches (books, courses, discussions – everything) available to nearly anyone. To me, it was all about access.
A dyslexic furniture maker in New Jersey, a deaf teacher in Nigeria, a blind young woman on a farm in Mexico, nearly anyone, anywhere could learn as much as they wanted, whenever they wanted, about anything they wanted. And, ideally, learn it from any professor in any school on the planet.
It was quite a dream.
However, as I was a furniture maker and the Internet was still in a pretty nascent form back then, I had absolutely no idea how to bring it about.
But, then, years later, after I became a professor, I began to explore ways of realizing my outlandish dream. After more than a decade experimenting, Climate Crisis 101 brings together much of what I have learned through quite a bit of trial and (mostly) error. Although it falls short of the dream in some ways, it is, nonetheless, designed to be free and accessible to anyone, anywhere.
It is also a course that could be put together by pretty much anyone. No fancy cameras or studios were involved. Everything is filmed at my desk in a tiny little office, no bigger than a closet, that I built in my backyard and where I do most of my work.
This introductory chapter takes up in detail my quest to make a truly accessible university lecture course. In order to do so, we will first consider the various forms that the Climate Crisis 101 material takes, which is key to its accessibility.
If you are primarily interested in the climate crisis and what we can do about it, feel free to skip the rest of this chapter, which deals with the unusual format(s) of Climate Crisis 101 and educational reform (my dream from decades ago), and instead jump ahead to the next chapter.
So, what, exactly, is Climate Crisis 101?
Scroll down to read this section, or
download as a PDF / watch as a video / listen to as a podcast
Climate Crisis 101 is a number of things.
First, it is an actual course offered at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where it is designated as English 23. Climate Crisis 101 not only explains the nuts and bolts of various aspects of the climate crisis, but also focuses on what we can do about it, both as individuals and through collective and political action.
However, Climate Crisis 101 is also 1) a book, 2) a YouTube channel, 3) an audio podcast series, and 4) a website, in addition to being 5) a university course.
Let me be clear here, it is at root all five of these things. For example, the YouTube channel does not simply support the book, nor does the course emerge out of the book. Rather, Climate Crisis 101 was, from the start, imagined as a grand experiment: a way to encounter the exact same material in a variety of ways.
In this chapter, I am going to talk about why Climate Crisis 101 takes these many forms.
Given that the climate crisis is an extraordinarily urgent and important issue, the reason for offering all these forms was not just to drag the traditional lecture into the 21st century (something that, as far as I’m concerned, desperately needs to be done), but also to make this material as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
The central issue here is accessibility.
In this, the third decade of the 21st, people are learning all sorts of things by accessing material in different ways. Some prefer to do so through traditional means, such as by reading a book or taking a course, some by watching instructive YouTube videos, and some by listening to audio podcasts. Each of these ways in turn has its own options. For example, some people like to read whole books in order to get a unified overview of a topic, while others like to read shorter pieces.
Since I am an educator, and I hope to inform as many people as possible about what the climate crisis is and what we can do about it, it just makes sense to offer this material in a variety of forms that work for various types of learners.
As to why people prefer different ways of learning, it is important to note that human beings are various abled, although sometimes only subtly so.
Some people learn best by reading, some by watching, some by listening, and some by a combination of these, such as reading the closed captioning of what is being said while they’re watching a video. For these folks, it might be best to forgo the video all together and just read a book while simultaneously listening to it being narrated it (i.e. “Immersion Reading”).
Conversely, for some people, just watching a video may be best, as attempting to read captions of what they are simultaneously hearing may be annoying or downright confusing. None of these is, obviously, the right way to learn. However, one or more may be right for you.
For certain people, some of these options may not be options at all. Not everyone can see or hear, either well or at all. This makes offering material in a variety of forms especially important, indeed crucial.
Finally, as I did not want to privilege any particular group of learners, I tried to make this material equally accessible to everyone. In other words, Climate Crisis 101 is not first and foremost a book, a course, or any of the other forms. For example, as I will explain directly, rather than relying on visuals, I make a point of carefully narrating everything in my talks, so that someone just listening to the material won’t miss anything.
Although doing so is crucial for individuals who are not able to see (or see well) what is on a page or screen, we all stand to benefit here, as this gives everyone the option of listening to this material as an audio podcast when we were on the go, such as while out for a walk.
Regarding which approach is best for you, since this is a personal issue, think of Climate Crisis 101 as, among other things, an invitation to reflect on how you learn best. Feel free to experiment with the different forms on offer here.
So, how does all this work in practice?
1) Let’s start with why I chose to write this as a book. It is simple enough, as books are a time-honored and wonderful way of consolidating and organizing a great deal of material in a single place. And most people are, of course, familiar with how to use books. Some people, myself included, love books.
However, not everyone does, making books of somewhat limited use in disseminating material in the third decade of the 21st. Indeed, “[r]oughly a quarter of US. adults (27%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.” There is also the matter that written material can present learning challenges for some people.
Consequently, if presented just as a book, this material would reach a rather limited audience that has certain preferences and abilities. It is also the case that books usually cost money to buy and are generally protected by copyright, meaning that the material in them cannot be freely shared. These are significant issues, as my goal is that all this material should be free for everyone to use and reuse as they like.
So, I wrote this as a book (mainly for people like me who like books, even though I am, in fact, dyslexic), but I also pursued other options.
2) Enter social media, arguably the preferred way of disseminating information in the 21st.
But which social media platform is the most used (and hence likely to reach the most people)? If you ask Americans who are the age of my students (18-24), it is not Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram.
Instead, YouTube is now used by 94% of these young adults. Indeed, three quarters of all American adults, regardless of age, use it. Teens now watch YouTube more than TV, and, according to Nielsen data, this may soon become true for the rest of Americans.
The Climate Crisis 101 material is broken into a number of chapters, just like any other book. These chapters are in turn each broken into a number of sections, which, of course, books sometimes do.
However, each of these chapter sections is also designed to be a YouTube video. In order for this to work, the tone here is a little unusual for a book (it is certainly different from the scholarly books that I am used to writing), as it is meant to be relaxed and conversational. On a personal note, I really like writing this way.
In practice, this simply means that I film myself reading (from a Teleprompter) one of the Climate Crisis 101 sections, which are meant to be 10 or 20 minutes (i.e. 1500-3000 words) in length or so. This is pretty standard for YouTube videos, though some, like this one, are a little longer. Because just watching me speak could quickly become a little boring, a small team of undergraduate student editors “punch up” these videos. One of the ways that they do this is to intersperse video clips while I am talking.
For example, if I am talking about the importance of bicycle culture in the future of sustainable transportation, clips of people on bikes might alternate with me talking. Substantively, this doesn’t really add anything to the talk, but it does breaks things up.
By the way, in case you somehow didn’t know, YouTube is an incredibly effective social media platform. Consequently, students enrolled in Climate Crisis 101 often share course videos with their friends, family, and even former teachers. In this way, the material is broadly disseminated online. The last time that Climate Crisis 101 was taught, there were more than 150,000 total visitors to the course YouTube channel and website.
You may be wondering why I don’t add images and clips that are more instructional, such as graphs, charts, quotes, or something of the sort.
The issue here centers on accessibility.
3) Which brings us to audio podcasts, a third form in which this material is available.
As I have already noted, one of my goals in putting this material together was that it should be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. The idea is that anyone should be able to access this material, regardless of their vision, hearing, or motor and cognitive skills.
Specifically, Climate Crisis 101 was designed to be compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, especially regarding the four major categories that apply: Visual, Auditory, Motor, and Cognitive.
It is noteworthy that many traditional in-person classes, as well as many Zoom classes, are often not at all compliant with these standards. As far as I’m concerned, this is deeply problematic, both morally and legally.
In order to make this material accessible to people who are blind or with low vision or vision impairment, it is entirely text-based. In other words, while I could show a chart, I instead explain (often in some detail) what such a chart would show. Without exception, all of the material is narrated, rather than shown onscreen.
Of course, it would be possible to provide a separate audio track that describes what is on screen, such as a chart. However, aside from being awkward and not necessarily effective, I dislike the idea of creating material that is essentially privileges vision over other senses (i.e. ocularcentric material). In other words, as much as possible, everyone should encounter the same material. It shouldn’t matter, for example, whether they see or hear. No one group should be privileged.
In short, sight and hearing are entirely optional for Climate Crisis 101.
Having all of the talks consolidated in one place as a channel on a podcast app also means that it is not necessary for people who are blind to bother with screen readers to access the material. This also significantly reduces the need for fine motor control, as it is possible to sequentially advance from talk to talk in the podcast series without making a single selection (most podcast apps will go from one podcast to the next automatically).
Regarding cognitive concerns, the material can be easily slowed down, repeated, or, for that matter, sped up. In general, the idea here is to offer as much flexibility as possible. As I already noted, some people benefit by being able to read closed captioning while watching a talk. Others find it a distraction. The goal of Climate Crisis 101 is to provide a range of options. In order to avoid fatigue, the book sections are short, resulting in videos or podcasts that are generally under 20 minutes, or even half that length.
Incidentally, this also pays significant environmental dividends, as excellent quality audio requires as little as 4% of the bandwidth of video. As “20% of the world’s total electricity consumption may be used by the Internet by 2025” and the overwhelming majority of the available bandwidth on the Internet is used by streaming video, this is not an insignificant issue. It is also the case that podcasts are frequently streamed from mobile devices, like smartphones, which operate on about 2 wats of electricity – far less than a desktop computer or even the 50 watts or so needed to power a laptop computer.
Incidentally, I do realize that some material benefits from visuals. Imagine working through a formula, either on a board or projected on a screen. However, if this was not narrated as well, I am not exactly sure how a blind person would be able to follow what is going on in class. Consequently, I try to communicate first and foremost through words, both written and spoken. (The fact that I am an English professor probably comes into play here, as words are my stock-in-trade.)
4) As most people no longer go to brick-and-mortar libraries to access reading material and various media, it makes sense to present this material by way of a website. In order to make it available to as many people as possible, the course website was carefully authored to be accessible and convenient.
All of the text on the course website is 2.5 times standard size in font recommended as an option for print disabilities. In order to ensure high contrast, all fonts are black and appear against a solid white background to be helpful for individuals with so-called color vision deficiency. Even link text is black, rather than a separate color (in order to distinguish links, they are underlined, which, in order to avoid any confusion, is a text stye not otherwise used in Climate Crisis 101).
The course website is also designed to work well with modern browser extensions (such as developed for Chrome), like Font Changer, which allow users to view the site text in different sizes and in specialized fonts, such as Open Dyslexic.
At the risk of using a little jargon, by using best HTML backend practices, the course website is optimized to work with screen readers, like NVDA, JAWS, Apple’s VoiceOver, and Android Talkback, which can read it aloud.
The website it is also designed to lead people to this material. If you happen to be curious about the climate crisis and type “Climate Crisis 101” into your browser, you should quickly be led to the course website, ClimateCrisis101.com.
Because this material is also a book, the website is designed to mimic an e-book reader, whether held horizontally on a smartphone or vertically on a tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. Doing so replicates the width and line length, and hence in some ways the general feel of a print book.
The goal was to have the website function like an e-reader app set to scroll. In other words, if you are used to reading Kindle or other e-books on your smartphone or tablet, the course website should provide a pretty similar experience (this is explained in detail in another section of this chapter/playlist).
In addition, as a website, Climate Crisis 101 is able to offer more functionality than the e-reader apps that it emulates. For example, without ever leaving the Climate Crisis 101 website, it is possible to have the YouTube video of the section pop up and play.
At the same time, Climate Crisis 101 also offers features provided by some advanced e-reader apps, such as ability to hear an e-book narrated as you are reading it at the same time (i.e. like Kindle/Audible e-books via their Whispersync technology). For some people, this can really help concentration and learning. (As this is an important point, I take up this issue of “Immersion Reading” in detail in an upcoming section of this chapter.)
At the beginning of every section, users are given the option to “Download as a PDF,” “Watch as a Video,” “Listen to as a Podcast,” or to simply scroll down to read the material as a browser-based e-book. If you choose to listen, you can just scroll down and read along with the narration. Students in the lecture hall can do something similar by reading along with the lecture on their smartphones, tablets, laptops, or go old school by reading the lecture on paper (i.e. a printout of the lecture PDF).
Making Climate Crisis 101 available as an online book also provides an easy way to reference the material, even if you did not initially encounter it by reading. For example, if you would like to revisit something that you heard on Climate Crisis 101 as a podcast, you might have to listen to hours and hours of material in order to find the proper section. However, a computer could quickly search the text of the Climate Crisis 101 online book. In addition, the text also provides the links to material cited in Climate Crisis 101.
Finally, as a website, Climate Crisis 101 brings together all of its forms. While it feels and functions like an e-book, the videos and audio podcasts are embedded directly (and conveniently) into the relevant text on the website, which also contains the course syllabus.
5) So, why is Climate Crisis 101 a university course?
The advantage of experiencing this material as a course is that it requires individuals (i.e. students) to encounter the material in 1) a carefully chosen order, 2) in its entirety, and 3) at a digestible rate.
While the book format presents the material in the same order, there is no way of ensuring that someone will read the whole book, let alone read it carefully. However, when taken for university credit, a course requires students to carefully study all of the material, as they will obviously be tested on it. Spreading it out piecemeal over an academic term helps ensure that people will not become overwhelmed.
A course also allows for supplemental materials to be introduced. This important point will be taking up in detail in another section of this chapter.
It is worth noting that all of this material in all of its forms is completely open access. Hence, anyone anywhere with an Internet connection can read this book, watch this YouTube channel (assuming that YouTube is available in your country), listen to the audio podcast series, visit the website, or take this course – though you can only receive university credit if taken at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Because all of the material is open access, educators are free to incorporate all or part of it into their own classes. Moreover, since there are so many components available (i.e. so many individual chapters, videos, and podcast episodes), educators can and do use this material in flipped university and even high school classrooms. In other words, instructors have students read, watch, or listen to one or more of these components at home, then discuss it in class.
It is also worth noting that there is often a synergy between these five formats.
For example, YouTube automatically creates closed captioning for its videos using voice recognition technology. However, as you may have noticed, this often leaves much to be desired in terms of accuracy. In this case, however, the talks are all being given directly from a script (i.e. the section of the book chapter that I am reading by way of a teleprompter). Hence, the script replaces YouTube’s automatic closed captioning, ensuring that the captioning is completely accurate, including proper punctuation and capitalization.
Having accurate closed captioning means that when users employee YouTube’s translation feature to read it in a language other than English, the result will be likely be more accurate. Since 14% of UCSB’s student body are international students, this is, as far as I am concerned, especially important.
I realize that this may raise some eyebrows, as I am giving students the option to encounter course material in a range of languages, even though this is an English course. However, as far as I am concerned, students that have been accepted into UCSB (which means that their high school GPA was, on average, 4.25) who are non-native speakers, not only deserve praise and respect, but should be given support whenever possible. Moreover, being able to listen to a lecture in English while reading it in familiar language strikes me as a potentially useful way of improving one’s English – which is, after all, one of the things that English courses should do.
And, moreover, this potentially makes Climate Crisis 101 available across the planet in more than 100 languages. Which is no small thing.
An accurate script also means that I am able to make PDFs of the actual talks given (rather than just bullet points) available on the website. This can be an advantage for students watching the talks, as it allows them to take careful notes without going to the trouble of writing down what is being said. In order to help with this, the PDFs have been formatted with a good deal of white space on the page so that notes can be added, either to hardcopies or through PDF notetaking software.
Consequently, the PDFs present Climate Crisis 101 in yet another format. For some people, it might be preferable to download and read Climate Crisis 101 by way of these PDFs, rather than reading it directly online as an e-book. This is because, as I just noted, doing so allows notes to be added directly to the text. Actively annotating a text while reading (or while both reading and listening) is yet another effective learning strategy. Who knows, it might be especially good for you.
Incidentally, I realize that making PDFs of the entire lecture series available, word-for-word, may also raise some eyebrows, as some educators are of the mind that students learn best when they actively taking notes during a lecture. If that happens to be you and you are practiced in the art of notetaking, by all means take this approach if it helps you learn. In no way does Climate Crisis 101 prevent you from doing so.
However, this only works for a section of learners. Not everyone can take effective notes while keeping up with someone speaking between 150-200 words per minute (which is what I average). As far as I am concerned, assuming that everyone in the room is capable of executing this skill at this speed is a problematic and potentially unfair. Hence, Climate Crisis 101 provides additional options.
So, if the course material exists in all these forms, what exactly is the classroom experience like?
This is an important question. As UCSB is still a brick-and-mortar school, students are all required to show up for class in the lecture hall.
Let me repeat this for the benefit of my UCSB students: coming to class is absolutely, positively a requirement of this course!
During the class period, the YouTube videos of the talks are projected onscreen. Because they are shorter than the period, they are sequentially (i.e. in the order that they appear in the book and on the course YouTube channel) shown in the allotted class time.
This, raises a question, which may have already occurred to you: what exactly am I doing during lecture if I’m not…well…lecturing?
When my large lectures increased in enrollment to where there were more than 800 students in the room, it generally became impossible for me to take questions during class. As you might imagine, I found this frustrating. While we did have an “open mic” at the front of the room, almost no one, understandably, felt comfortable speaking in a room that large.
Now, while my talk is being projected in the front of the room, it is also simulcast as a webinar. I am seated in the lecture hall with my laptop officiating over a real-time Q&A session (which is similar to the Zoom chat function that many of us came to appreciate during the pandemic).
In a sense, this allows me be in two places at once: 1) up on screen giving the talk while also 2) spending the entire class session fielding questions and clarifying points. In traditional classes, I often spend half the time lecturing and half the time fielding comments and questions. Since the same thing is happening here, it is like having a two-and-a half-hour class taking place in 75 minutes.
I’m not sure just what you would call this, but I think of it as a flipped classroom that is synchronous. In other words, in the now traditional flipped classroom, students watch lecture material at home and come to class with questions and comments. The instructor then elaborates on the material by way of these questions. The same thing is happening here, but all at once, rather than at two separate times and places (at home and in class).
As with a flipped classroom, the obvious advantage here is that it makes the lecture interactive. It also gives every student in the room, including those who may be a little reticent, the opportunity to ask questions and make comments.
The lectures are, incidentally, interactive in a second way, as I ask students, at a time of their choosing, to comment on some of the talks by way of the YouTube forum. I also require them to comment on the comments of their classmates half of the time. The idea here is, of course, to get students talking with one other. (I take up Climate Crisis 101’s interactive discussions in detail in another section.)
So, there do you have it. Climate Crisis 101 is 1) book, 2) a YouTube channel, 3) an audio podcast series, 4) a website, and 5) a university course, all in one. And there is often synergy between these five formats.
Why did I take this unusual (and time-consuming) multifaceted approach?
To sum up this section, people learn in all sorts of ways. Some do well with the written word, others like to watch, some to listen, and so forth. And others do well with a combination. Moreover, unlike a traditional lecture where students only have access to lecture material two or three hours a week during class time, with the approaches outlined here, they can revisit the material by going back to read, watch, or listen to it at any time.
I should also confess that, because I think of myself principally as a scholar activist, I additionally wanted to speak to as many people as possible about the climate crisis and what we can do about it. The fact is that, as a university professor, I believe that I have a moral obligation to do so. Hence, I offered the material in a variety of forms to appeal to a variety of different individuals.
In the following section, I take up an entirely different kind of accessibility: digital.
Accessibility 2.0
In the previous section of this chapter, I took up the issue of how Climate Crisis 101 was designed to be as accessible as possible for as many people as possible, which is why you can either read, watch, or listen to this material, either as part of a classroom experience or not.
However, accessibility doesn’t end there.
Although this section further explains how Climate Crisis 101 works, it also grapples with digital accessibility.
In choosing to put course material online, we need to confront the fact that not everyone will have equal access to it. Not by a long shot. Consequently, in committing to disseminate information online, educators take on an enormous responsibility, as we need to ensure that this material gets out to everyone as equally as possible.
I have been thinking about this issue for number of years now. As I shall explain directly, Climate Crisis 101 is an effort to actually do something about the problem. In the first section of this chapter, I explain why this is personally important to me. Suffice it to say that I have long had a dream of truly opening up the traditional university to everyone, everywhere. Climate Crisis 101 brings together much of what I have learned over the years.
This is an important social justice issue. Allow me to explain.
In July 2020, when COVID-19 was accelerating its spread across the US, The New Yorker published a article on “How Harvard’s Star Computer-Science Professor Built a Distance-Learning Empire.” I have to admit to being utterly fascinated, as I learned that the Harvard course detailed in the article, CS50, is shot in super high-resolution 4k video with five separate cameras, some of them robotic, in order to make the video of the course lecture “on par with what you would expect from Netflix.” Actually, it’s more than you would expect from Netflix, as some of those cameras are $20,000+ virtual reality units capable of delivering a 3-D experience.
Now, let me be clear, I absolutely applaud these sorts of experiments. As far as I am concerned, exploring the cutting-edge of distance learning is definitely something that computer-science professors should be doing.
However, as I have repeatedly noted regarding virtual conferences, I am less interested in tomorrow’s technologies than yesterdays.
Why? Harvard’s dorms may be outfitted with enough bandwidth to simultaneously stream 4K video to all the students living there, perhaps even in 3-D. However, many students across the US. do not have the sort of Internet access needed for 4K.
This is an important social justice issue, as race, family income, and even the educational level of parents can impact what sort of Internet access a student has, as well as the devices are likely in their possession. As we shall see, some of our students are only half as likely as others to have access to broadband Internet at home, let alone the devices that can actually benefit by it. Sure, some undergraduates own a laptop, a smartphone, and a tablet, but fewer than a third are this fortunate.
Have ever wondered why some students take part in Zoom classes with their webcams off or even just by phone? It may be by choice, or it may be the case that they had no choice, as they simply may not have 1) adequate Internet access or 2) access to a laptop or desktop computer. Does it seem unlikely that many students would be in this predicament? As we shall see, it may be far more likely than you imagine.
We have been talking about the “digital divide” for over two decades now. This “refers to the gap between those able to benefit from the digital age and those who are not.”
Unfortunately, the divide hasn’t closed in that time – and perhaps never will. While more people have access to the Internet now than two decades ago, access varies greatly.
Even if, at some point in the future, all of our students have access to the bandwidth required to stream that 4K Harvard course, there is an emerging standard, 8K (some YouTube videos are already available at this resolution), that requires four times the bandwidth of 4K. Regardless of whether we are considering 4K or 8K, 3-D, which is what that Harvard course is experimenting with, has even greater demands: on the order of sixteen times more bandwidth. Very few consumers have access to this sort of Internet.
The simple fact is that once the digital divide begins to close, marketers release new technology that keeps opening it up again, such as 4K, 8K, 3-D, or whatever.
As long as we keep designing for tomorrow’s technology, we risk leaving quite a few of today’s students behind, who may only have access to yesterday’s technology. While the digital divide has been a social justice concern for many of us for some time now, it didn’t involve immediate action on our part.
However, now that we educators are generating and disseminating information online, we need to address this issue directly – lest we to become part of the problem.
Regarding the specifics of this issue from a social justice perspective, let’s start by looking at the numbers, which are from a 2019 Pew study.
Race: Nearly four out of five white Americans (79%) have home broadband. However, if you happen to be Black, it drops to just two thirds (66%). And just three out of five (61%) of Hispanic Americans have broadband at home.
Income: 92% of Americans who make more than $75,000 per year have broadband at home. Conversely, just 56% of Americans in the lowest income bracket (less than $30,000 per year) have access to it.
Education: 93% of Americans with a college degree have broadband at home. Only half that many (46%) have it if they do not possess a high school degree.
Since some Americans opt not to have broadband at home, it’s safe to say that if you are white, college educated, and with an income of $75,000 or more per year, you very likely have broadband, if you want it. One the other hand, for Black and Hispanic households with lower income and parents with less education, half may not have access to broadband.
For educators like me, it is also important to take into account international students who may not be on campus. As 14% of UCSB’s students are international, and most were not on campus during COVID, this was a significant issue for me at the time. In some places, like China,
bandwidth “can be as much as 50 times more expensive than in western countries.”
What does all this mean for us, as educators attempting to deliver video lectures via the Internet? As certain of our students are only half as likely as others to have access to broadband Internet at home, it would be simply unconscionable for us to design courses that require high-speed access.
What, then, do we do?
The good news is that smartphones often provide Internet access for those people who do not otherwise have it. The bad news is that race, income, and education also impacts smartphone dependance. Here are the numbers:
Race: Only 12% of white Americans depend on their phones for access to the Internet. However, that number doubles if you are Black (23%) or Hispanic (25%). Allow me to repeat that, if you are Black or Latinx, it is twice as likely than if you are white that you will need to rely on your smartphone for Internet access instead of a computer. One quarter of our Black or Hispanic students may well find themselves in this situation.
Income: Just 6% of Americans who make more than $75,000 per year need to rely on their phones for Internet access. That number more than quadruples to 26% if you make less than $30,000 per year.
Education: only 4% of college-educated Americans depend on their phones for Internet access. However, that number increases eightfold (32%) for Americans who do not have a high school degree.
As dismal as these numbers are, the good news is that 96% of Americans age 18-29 have smartphones. Unfortunately, certain students have no choice but to depend solely on their smartphones for Internet access. Whether they do so by choice, or because they have no choice, a 2017 ECAR study found that 25% of undergraduates “used a smartphone for all of their courses.”
The environmental implications here are also more than a little noteworthy, as smartphones, operate on about 2 wats of electricity, compared to the 50 watts or so needed to power a laptop computer or 1000 or more watts for some gaming desktops.
Given that we came to rely on it during COVID, you may be wondering how Zoom compares here. Unfortunately, not well. Everything else being equal, Zoom can more than double required bandwidth. Let’s take as an example a video meeting taking place at 1080p, also known as “full high definition,” which is quickly becoming the streaming standard online, now used by Netflix, YouTube, and a range of other services.
Zoom’s recommended bandwidth for meetings using 1080p video meetings is 2.5mbps, which is comparable to streaming 1080p content elsewhere online (i.e. Netflix or YouTube). However, Zoom requires even more bandwidth (3.0mbps) to send out 1080p from a participant’s computer – thereby more than doubling the required bandwidth. It doesn’t matter whether we are using a lower resolution (720p) or higher (4K), Zoom more than doubles the required bandwidth, as we are simultaneously receiving and sending video out.
Hence, during COVID, some students had no choice but to either turn their cameras off, or resort to calling into meetings.
What’s the answer here? It is simple enough: we need to design our courses around the lower end of the installed base of technology. Yesterday’s technology. Not doing so risks a broad swath of our students missing out. Moreover, we need to consider if having a two-way video connection is really necessary for the course at hand.
For some large lectures, like Climate Crisis 101, I would argue that it simply isn’t.
I know what you’re thinking: that this eliminates having a back-and-forth conversation, either between students and the instructor, or students and each other. However, this need not be the case if we shift to text-based interaction. What would this be like?
During COVID, we experienced this at work by way of Zoom’s chat feature. For many educators, this was a bit of a revelation. It created an entirely separate discussion space, which often rivaled (and indeed sometimes surpassed) what was being said in class. Incidentally, as I’ve experimented extensively with text-based interaction for our Nearly Carbon-Neutral (NCN) conferences, it is clear that it can be remarkably effective and often in a great deal more depth than a real-time, spoken interaction.
And the environmental gain in shifting to text-based discussion is extraordinary, as transferring text requires remarkably little bandwidth compared to video. Using the same amount of bandwidth, you could either watch one second of that 4K Harvard course or download the whole of War and Peace as an e-book.
As I explained in an earlier section, this also means that we can effectively double class time, as students can watch an uninterrupted, full-length lecture while also taking part in a Q&A that extends over the same period.
In practical terms, at this particular moment in time, I would argue that we need to make sure that our courses run on no more than one quarter of the bandwidth used by that aforementioned Harvard course (4K), which is 1080p resolution. However, given that some of our students do not have consistent access to high-bandwidth Internet, courses should ideally be designed to provide a rewarding experience at a resolution that is a quarter of that (i.e. 480p).
In addition, all of our content should be designed to run on smartphones, as this is not only the preferred way that many of our students access the Internet: for some, it is the only access point that they have (I will also explain more about this directly). Smartphones also provide access to an entirely separate network, cellular, for times when broadband is not available.
These recommendations may seem unreasonable, especially regarding 480p, which many people regard as an antiquated standard. However, I recall when this standard first came on the scene in the 1990s, as this is the resolution of DVDs. (Hence, 480p is also called “standard DVD,” or more accurately “DVD NTSC.”) Like most people, I was wowed by the incredible – and, initially incredibly expensive – DVD experience, which remained the most common video delivery standard in the US. well into the 2000s, and which is still alive and well today for certain users.
Keep in mind that most people initially experienced DVDs on home televisions, some of them quite large, and still found the experience rewarding and often exciting. When viewed on the five- or six-inch screens of a smartphone, I would argue that the experience is still completely satisfactory. Conversely, 4k and above is entirely unnecessary and even 1080p is questionable for smartphones, as Apple’s flagship smartphone (at the time I am writing this), the iPhone 12 Pro, has a resolution that is not all that much more than 1080p – and is far less than 4k.
And let’s not forget the environmental implications of all of us. As I noted in a previous section, “20% of the world’s total electricity consumption may be used by the Internet by 2025” and the overwhelming majority of the available bandwidth on the Internet is used by streaming video. 4K requires twenty-seven times the bandwidth of 480p. This translates into quite a bit of unnecessary carbon emissions.
If you read, watched, or listened to the opening section in this chapter, you know that, in its current iteration, students are required to come to class to watch the Climate Crisis 101 YouTube lectures. It may seem that this resolves the Internet access and device problem. However, I believe that it is important that each and every student has access to the course materials outside of class, allowing them to revisit and study the material as much and as often as they like. Only giving this access to certain students is, as far as I am concerned, unconscionable. Hence, even in a course like Climate Crisis 101, the digital divide can still present an impasse.
What does this mean for us educators?
We need to design our course for presentation on smartphones, not laptops or tablets (though these should, obviously, also be supported). This means, among other things, that we should ideally design our course presentations for screens that are about the size of a 3” x 5” card.
They should also be designed to look appealing at this size. This means little or no text on the screen during the primary lectures (which, as I explore in detail in another section, presents its own set of problems for individuals who are blind or with low vision or vision impairment).
It also means that all of the course material should also be designed to be read on a smartphone, which is one of the reasons that Climate Crisis 101 appears like an e-book on a mobile device.
Given that some students only have intermittent access to the Internet, all of the course material, including the videoed talks and audio podcast, should be downloadable. Because it is not generally not possible to do so with YouTube, Climate Crisis 101 uses a second video archive: Vimeo, which also allows the videos to be download in resolutions down to 240p, which is one fourth of the size of 480p.
Since bandwidth is such an important issue, videos should be designed to exploit data compression algorithms. For example, in the videos for Climate Crisis 101, I am filmed speaking against a solid black backdrop. Consequently, in terms of pixels on the screen, well over half of them are a single color. Because data compression algorithms are design to exploit statistical redundancy (like having a lot of the same-colored pixels on the screen), this means that, everything else being equal, when compressed these videos are half the size that they would otherwise be.
The stark black backdrop also provides for a simplified visual field, which may help individuals with low vision or vision impairment.
Ensuring that the material can be streamed and downloaded as audio, greatly reduces the demand for bandwidth. As I previously noted, excellent quality audio requires as little as 4% of the bandwidth of video. Of course, this means that the material needs to be designed for audio presentation.
And, of course, providing the course material as downloadable text requires the least bandwidth of all. Using the same amount of bandwidth, you could either download one or two seconds of Climate Crisis 101 as a video, or the entire book in text form.
What does all this mean for our students?
First, whether you can see the course material or not, or see it well, or hear it, or hear it well, it, ideally, shouldn’t really matter much. Moreover, being able to attend a lecture and access course material anywhere at any time with just your phone opens up a world of possibilities. Simply grab your phone and go in search of a nice quiet place and pop in your earbuds. Perhaps on some comfrey grass under a nice quiet tree. What better place to read, listen to, or watch a lecture on the climate and environment?
The real reason that I chose to make Climate Crisis 101 such an unusual course.
As I noted the previous sections of this chapter, unlike a traditional lecture series, each of the Climate Crisis 101 sections is design to be short and to the point, usually less than 20 minutes in spoken length. You can either read these lectures, watch them as YouTube videos, listen to them as audio podcasts, or experience them in the lecture hall if you are enrolled in the UCSB course.
So, why did I design such an unusual course and make its material available in these different forms?
As I noted in the previous two sections of this chapter, Climate Crisis 101 was, first and foremost, designed for accessibility.
In this section, I want to further talk about the format of Climate Crisis 101 and why it is so unusual. For me, this is a deeply personal issue.
For most of my life, I made my living as an artisan, a furniture maker, the trade that I learned from my father. It was not until my early 40s that I returned to school to pursue a Ph.D. Hence, I was a furniture maker for a longer than I’ve been a professor.
As I noted in my introduction to this chapter, back when I was a furniture maker I tried (and failed) to get access to the libraries at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
When the Internet began to come on the scene in a big way the 1990s, my mind kept returning to an outrageous idea: What if universities, their libraries, and their courses were completely open to anyone, anywhere? Presumably, as the Internet could disseminate of variety of media types, it could not only make this possible, but make these courses accessible to anyone, regardless of whether they could, for example, see or hear.
But, as an outsider, there was little that I could do to help realize this dream.
However, in my early forties I entered a Ph.D. program at Harvard. How I got there is a long story. I won’t bother to bore you with details. If you happen to be interested (though I’m not sure why you would be), in the Introduction to my most recent book, which is available for free on my personal website and which is on writing a new environmental era and moving forward to nature, I tell the tale in some detail.
In any event, flash forward a decade, when I was (as I still am) a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In a perhaps someone surprising twist of fate, Princeton University invited me to teach there for a year, where I held a Chair as the Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI).
Partly because of my earlier experiences outside of Princeton when I was a furniture maker, as a professor I felt strongly that education should be open. So, I took the unusual step of uploading videos of my entire Princeton lecture series online, which were completely free and open to the public. As far as I was concerned, there was a certain gratifying and poetic justice in doing this at the school that had turned me away decades before.
However, it began to dawn on me that, although available to the public, this material would not likely reach many people.
The problem is that most people, even if interested in a topic, just don’t have the time to sit through twenty or thirty hour-long lecture series.
I know that it sounds a little corny, but a university education really is something precious, wonderful, and quite a privilege, especially when you have the freedom to set aside four years of your life just to learn. Having earned my undergraduate and first master’s degree by attending night classes over two decades, the fact that a four-year education is a privilege is definitely not lost on me. It is a wonderful space and time, just for learning.
The traditional university lecture series emerged out of this space. Without the demands of a full-time job (at least I hope that fulltime students are not also working fulltime jobs), students have the luxury to take deep dives into subjects by attending lecture courses that last an entire term.
Outside of a university setting, few people have anywhere near that sort of time, even if the material is available to them. Consequently, publishing an entire lecture series online (like I did at Princeton) will not likely reach that many people.
How, then, do we reach a broad range of individuals? An obvious thought would be through the traditional genres of academia: books and articles. Another idea would be a newer form adopted by some scholars, the blog.
However, in the age of digital media, information is more often more disseminated by way of social media, which is now more popular than any of these genres – by a long shot. And, by many metrics, YouTube is now by far the most popular social media service of all.
The popularity of YouTube raised a question for me:
What if we took a lecture series and presented it in the form of a series of relatively short YouTube videos? The idea was to present the material in digestible little bites, rather than as one huge monolithic lecture series. Hence, anyone with 10 or 20 minutes to spare and an interest in a particular topic could learn about it from a credible, university source. If they found it interesting, they could go on to watch other short talks in the lecture series.
But the real question remained: Would students and the public really want to watch YouTube videos on the sort of material that we present in university lectures?
Natalie Wynn, who was for a time a PhD candidate in philosophy at Northwestern University, has a remarkably successful YouTube channel entitled “ContraPoints,” where she posts videos on such topics as “What’s Wrong with Capitalism.” Astonishingly, this video (which, incidentally, I heartily recommend) has been viewed millions of times. This is all the more striking given that it is essentially a 40-minute lecture broken into two YouTube videos of roughly equal length.
As far as I’m concerned, Natalie Wynn and others have proven that people by the millions are electing to watch meaningful content on YouTube – some of it quite like what we teach in university lectures.
This strikes me as a potentially important way for professors to speak to the public.
It is also worth noting that this approach potentially allows the lecturer to build a better relationship with the audience. In a traditional lecture, the speaker appears as a tiny person at the front of the room. It may be hard to hear them or even see their face. However, on YouTube, speakers often appear just about as large as someone sitting across a small table, speak directly to you, seemingly looking right at you.
Since we human beings are hardwired to pick up on a range of subtle facial cues, this rather nicely replicates a face-to-face talk. And a good one, as the speaker is hardly disinterested, but rather is intently focusing on you, telling you something that they obviously think is important.
If you look at the comments that YouTube personas like Natalie Wynn receive, it is clear that the regulars to her channel often think of her as a friend. They almost always refer to her by her first names. When I began to look through comments like these, it became clear to me that many YouTube speakers were, somewhat surprisingly (at least I was initially surprised), connecting with their audiences in a personal way.
Consequently, with respect to educators like me, although it may sound counterintuitive on first hearing, showing a pre-recorded lecture may well help build a better relationship with students in the class.
While I am of the opinion that virtually all university material should be freely disseminated, the climate crisis is an especially timely and important issue. As far as I am concerned, it is absolutely imperative that universities provide a comprehensive overview of the climate crisis, not only for our students, but the public as well.
There are, obviously, a range of reasons why this is important, but, as we’ll see in another section of Climate Crisis 101, it is especially urgent given that fossil fuel affiliates are spreading an enormous amount of this disinformation about the climate crisis in order to encourage denial of the science and delay of much needed action.
Consequently, as far as I’m concerned, it is crucial that each and every university offers a comprehensive course on the climate crisis. Ideally, it should be a campus-wide requirement. However, this raises two important questions:
1) To whom should we be teaching it? 2) How should we be teaching it?
The first of these questions has an obvious answer: To our students, of course. But should we also, given the urgency of the issue, be directing ourselves to the public as well? Since (as we shall see) fossil fuel affiliates are targeting the public and specific groups, like K-12 teachers and policy makers, shouldn’t we also be taking on the role of directly educating these individuals as well?
In many respects, this job has largely fallen to various media outlets, who sometimes report on our university research. The problem is that this sort of coverage is very different from a comprehensive overview of the topic that can provided by a course like Climate Crisis 101. Hence, my goal is to create an exceptionally accessible university course on this crucial topic that is available to the public.
This raises our second question: how should we be teaching it? In other words, how should material be structured to be informative, thought-provoking, and appealing to both students and the public?
For over a decade now, efforts have been made to make university lectures available to the public online. These range from simply uploading videos of an entire lecture series online (like I did at Princeton) to full-fledged courses offered for university credit at places like Stanford and UC Irvine via the Cursera platform.
The problem with this approach, as I have already noted, is that it seems unlikely that most members of the public would be willing to sit through many hours of lectures over ten or more weeks. Hence, this approach, while potentially offering a comprehensive overview of the climate crisis, risks largely failing when it comes to delivering it to the public at large.
Enter YouTube.
Posting a lecture as a series of short YouTube videos is definitely an unusual step for a professor. To be completely honest, many (I suspect most) of my colleagues don’t take YouTube very seriously – and may well look down on me for this. But, to be equally honest, I am of the mind that YouTube is so much better than the mediums than what we’ve had available to us in the past.
And we need not stop with YouTube, as there are other mediums available to us, like the audio podcast. Consequently, Climate Crisis 101 is also available in this format as well.
In short, Climate Crisis 101 is my most ambitious attempt to date of realizing the dream that I had decades ago while still a furniture maker: to make higher education free and accessible to anyone, anywhere. My first attempt at doing this, uploading my Princeton lecture series, made clear to me that just making material available online was not enough.
Instead, teachers like me need to make it accessible in range of different ways. Because the climate crisis is such a timely and important issue, it is, as far as I am concerned, absolutely crucial that we do so.
So, that’s the real reason that I chose to make Climate Crisis 101 such an unusual course.
In each of its forms, Climate Crisis 101 is unusual.
In the opening section of this chapter, I noted how Climate Crisis 101 is at once a book, a YouTube channel, an audio podcast series, a website, and a university course. In this section, I would like to draw attention to the fact that while Climate Crisis 101 is a lecture course and book, it does things that are very unusual for either lectures or books.
Let’s begin by focusing on Climate Crisis 101 as a lecture.
For hundreds of years, lectures have remained pretty much the same. For lecturers, this means standing at a podium and talking to a room full of people, usually from notes, which are now often bullet points projected on screen.
From a student’s perspective, it means a breakneck hour or so of feverishly trying to write down whatever seems important. With any luck, you can see and hear the lecturer OK, as this may well be the only time that you have access to the primary course material. Though, now that we are in the 21st-century, if you’re lucky, you might just get a digital copy of those bullet points.
It is also imperative that you are a fast and good notetaker. As you may have noticed, some lecturers never tired of repeating the importance of this particular skill. This emphasis on notetaking starts early, as studies have shown that “[m]iddle-school teachers use lectures with note-taking about one-third to one-half of the time in their content-area classes.” Unfortunately, for students with certain learning challenges, this could potentially set the stage for disaster.
As far as I am concerned, there has to be a more inclusive way that is better for everyone.
One of the overarching themes of Climate Crisis 101 is that, if we are to successfully mitigate the climate crisis, we need to make significant changes to our day-to-do practices. Technology is certainly important and instrumental here, but the simple fact is that technology alone is not enough. Not by a long shot. We also need to change the way that we live and do things.
This also applies to lectures. In this case, there are a range of technologies, such as streaming video and audio, that can be of great benefit if we are willing to accept the challenge of fundamentally rethinking the nature of a lecture and how we experience it.
In taking up this gauntlet, I first considered a variety of ways of disseminating information, like books, YouTube channels, and audio podcast series. It soon became clear to me that each of these could succeed at the job of teaching new material, though each in different ways that might work especially well for certain people. On thinking about it, it occurred to me that a mashup of these approaches might make for an interesting and effective lecture series.
Hence, Climate Crisis 101 it’s not your grandparents’ lecture, as it was designed, from the very beginning for both online presentation and to simultaneously exist in a variety of other forms, including as an e-book.
As a book, Climate Crisis 101 is, admittedly, also pretty odd. 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. Ideally, through to the end. 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, to be fully experienced, this book requires that you read and watch a range of works, which it elucidates and 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, it will not be possible to completely experience (perhaps even completely understand) Climate Crisis 101 without encountering these additional works.
Climate Crisis 101 is also an unusual book by virtue of the fact that you can hear it narrated as as you read. Currently (as far as I know), this feature is only available on Kindle/Audible e-books via their Whispersync technology.
Hearing the book that you are reading can have real advantages for some learners, as it can help keep you focused. As was noted in Inside Higher Education, “[a]nyone who has ever tried Whispersync knows how compelling the syncing of e-book and audiobook can be. Switching back and forth between your eyes and your ears brings momentum to your reading. A synced e-book / audiobook creates a virtuous circle of reading. You want to read more because you are encouraged by how quickly you can read, a desire which causes you to read more still.” There are, incidentally, studies that back up the effectiveness of such so-called “Immersion Reading.”
However, this can be an expensive option, as you are in essence paying for a book twice: once as an e-book and then as a recorded book. The Kindle edition of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything costs $15. The Audible version $30, for a total of $45. If you buy the two together, the combined total is discounted to $28. Still, this is a lot of money. In all of its various forms, Climate Crisis 101 is completely free of charge.
Although the text is not highlighted as it is spoken (as it is with Whispersync), I personally prefer this approach. Without Whispersync’s (somewhat annoying) animation, the page just feels more like a book. At least it does to me.
For certain people, Immersion Reading may be especially helpful. If English is not your first language, this might be a good opportunity to improve your English. In addition, for people like me, who are dyslexic, hearing what we see on the page can often be useful.
However, as we all learn in our own ways, Immersion Reading could be a good option for anyone. So, feel free to give it a try.
On a personal note, I very much like listening to books narrated. When I made my living as a furniture maker, I used to listen to books all the time while working. However, when I sit down to read a book, I often imagined that the author is speaking directly to me. It’s just one of the ways that I enjoy getting into a book. The problem with most of the audible books that you buy is that the author is not the one who does the narrating, which can be a little disappointing.
However, with the Climate Crisis 101, you get to hear me speaking the words that I put on the page. Apologies in advance if you 1) don’t like what I am saying (i.e. what I have written), and 2) if you don’t like hearing me say it out loud!
While requiring the reader to watch and read a range of supporting works is an unusual thing for a book to do, it is indeed the way that university courses generally function, as the instructor assigns and gives context for additional works. Not surprisingly, these works are often central to the course. In the humanities, a course that did not reference additional works would be more than a little unusual.
Just to be clear for the UCSB students who are enrolled in this class, reading and watching these additional works is an absolute requirement of the course. To put it bluntly, you will be tested on them!
But university courses go further, as they not only encourage the reading and viewing of material, but a discussion of it in the classroom. Certainly, in a traditional sense, a book is not a classroom experience. Moreover, a book does not contain an archive of various discussions initiated by the book itself.
However, as this book is also a university course, it contains a classroom experience. Indeed, if you are enrolled in the UCSB course, you are required to take part in this experience by commenting on portions of this book, which, like everything else in Climate Crisis 101, have been posted as video lectures on YouTube. These comments then become part of this book.
In other words, in addition to the required outside readings, Climate Crisis 101 is designed to encourage discussion of this material.
This is, in fact, really a four-part process for students in the class. First, you read, see, and/or hear my framing of the documentary or reading. Second, you then read or watch the work at hand. Third, you read what other people thought about the work in the YouTube comments to my framing videos. Fourth and finally, students share their own thoughts. Although the YouTube comments are not on the same webpage with the primary course material, this archive should also be considered part of Climate Crisis 101.
All of this is, importantly, public.
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.
Given the size of the class (over 800 students) and the fact that every student will be making multiple online comments, literally millions of words of commentary and discussion will be created by this course and archived.
Why take this approach?
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 freely transferred back and forth between students and the instructor, as well as between students and each other.
Admittedly unusual, Climate Crisis 101 uses YouTube’s comment feature to facilitate a discussion involving hundreds of people. In order to do so, Climate Crisis 101 takes a decidedly different approach to flipping a 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 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.
Climate Crisis 101 employs an admittedly experimental variation on the now traditional approach to flipping a classroom.
Here’s how it worked the first two years that Climate Crisis 101 was taught.
Prior to class, students would have already watched (or read) the day’s material and commented on it on YouTube. During the class session, I jumped into this discussion by reflecting on particularly helpful comments, which were projecting onscreen.
There were, however, shortcomings to this approach.
During the first two years that Climate Crisis 101 was taught, I waited until the end of the week when all the comments were posted. I then scrambled to go through hundreds of comments looking for particularly interesting ones. After which, I quickly put together a video, which was a “deep dive” into the subject. Students were then required to watch each of these deep dives.
While this approach worked well enough, it soon became clear to me that it had significant shortcomings.
First, this gave me a single day to sort through hundreds of comments and then make my own comment on the most interesting. As you might imagine, this felt really rushed.
Moreover, as we did not have time to edit the closed captioning for accuracy, I was 1) uncomfortable that we did not have an accurate written script for people who really needed it, and 2) frustrated that we were not able to include these talks as part of the Climate Crisis 101 book. Similarly, this meant that we we’re not quickly able to upload this material as an audio podcast.
As I noted in the previous sections of this chapter, accessibility is one of my central aims. Consequently, having some of the Climate Crisis 101 material unavailable in certain forms, such as a book and as audio podcasts, was of concern to me.
Finally, in the anonymous evaluation of Climate Crisis 101 at the end of the term, quite a few students noted that spending an entire class going over student comments did not seem like the best use of time. To be clear, most students seemed to like hearing the comments and my reflections on them. However, some felt that it ran for a little long.
So, I set about to take a different approach the third time that I taught Climate Crisis 101.
Because I had already taught the class twice (with enrollments of 860 and 1000 students, respectively), I had a terrific archive of thoughtful responses to the course readings and films. Consequently, instead of using the comments from the current class, I was able to create deep dives from this archive.
This allowed me to create the videos well in advance of the class, which also meant that we had an accurate script from which to work, which 1) allowed it to become part of the Climate Crisis 101 book and 2) also meant that we had accurate closed captioning for the videos. The additional time also allowed this material to be uploaded as audio podcasts.
Although I did like the fact that I was reflecting on comments that had not been made by students in the room, I decided to go with this new approach, as it was more accessible in a variety of ways.
This approach also promised to better prepare students for discussion. During the first two years that Climate Crisis 101 was taught, students were asked to comment on brief video introductions that I made framing the week’s documentary or course reading. Now, however, students watch this introduction along with a series of comments made by earlier students. In other words, they do not just get to hear my thoughts on the work, but what some especially thoughtful Climate Crisis 101 students (albeit, from a year or two before) thought about it.
In short, students are given more food for thought with this approach.
It is also worth noting that in the new approach I reduced the number of student comments included in the deep dive by half, which feels adequate, but not overwhelming.
In any event, informed by my framing of the material, as well as some particular thoughtful student comments, everyone in the class is then required to comment on the week’s documentary and course reading.
In this way, everyone in the room takes 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 takes part in the discussion.
Moreover, as a student will have time to consider their 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.
By using this admittedly unusual approach, not only is the primary lecture material preserved online, but all of the considered and thoughtful class discussion surrounding it is archived as well.
Actually, the current iteration of this course encourages student involvement in two ways. First, by way of the YouTube comments that I have outlined here. Second, as the primary lectures are giving as webinar, students are encouraged to comment and ask questions in real-time during the lectures.
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 device, 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.
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.
Climate Crisis 101 is an interpretation of what a book can be in 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 with respect to website design. 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.
Climate Crisis 101 as a NCN (nearly carbon-neutral) course
Up until this point, this chapter has been focused on the various forms that Climate Crisis 101 takes. As the first two sections made clear, one of the central reasons for making the material available on all of these different forms was to make it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
However, from the very beginning, Climate Crisis 101 was imagined as being a climate friendly, environmentally sustainable course. In other words, this course was designed to have a small climate footprint. In fact, making the footprint as small as possible has become a bit of an obsession for me.
So, what prompted this obsession? Please allow me to again relate a personal story – apologies in advance for doing so…
In 2015, I learned that a third of the carbon footprint for the campus where I teach, the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), came from air travel. This principally comes from flying staff and faculty to all sorts of conferences. All this air travel annually releases over 55,000,000 pounds of CO2 or equivalent gasses directly into the upper atmosphere, where it contributes most to the climate crisis. Once I got over the shock, I became a little obsessed with the climate impact of academic conferences – and how they might be improved.
Within a year, in May of 2016, we staged our first NCN (nearly carbon-neutral) conference at UCSB. Once it was over, we ran the numbers and realized that the carbon footprint for the event was less than 1% of its traditional, fly-in counterpart.
It was not, as you might imagine, a Zoom conference, but rather an unusual asynchronous event. Here is how it worked: 1) Speakers recorded their own talks and upload them online. 2) The conference was open for three weeks, during which time conference goers could watch any of the talks that they wanted at any time they want it. 3) While the conference was open, participants contribute to an online Q&A session by posing and responding to written questions and comments.
Why did I decide to experiment with such an unusual format?
As I have noted in the past, “being an admitted silver lining kind of guy, I try to think of the climate crisis as something of an opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, doing so isn’t always easy, especially as I realize that countless beings (some human, most not) will suffer because of our rapidly and profoundly changing climate. I certainly wish that it wasn’t happening.”
In that sense, I can actually sympathize with climate change deniers. Because this is such a horrific situation, it would be easy to slip into a state of denial and pretend that it wasn’t happening – and vehemently defend that position. Seriously, I would sleep so much better if I could somehow convince myself that humanity was not at a crisis point.
But, as the climate crisis is real, happening, and indeed is at a crisis level, it requires us to radically reconsider a range of cultural practices. It would be wonderful if there were technological fixes in the wings that would successfully mitigate the crisis without us having to raise a finger or make changes to our lives.
However, as far as I’m concerned, this is seductively wishful thinking.
In short, if we hope to get through this, we need to change the way that we live and do things. However, the required changes need not necessarily be for the worse or even painful. Moreover, what if, in addition to climate change, we also addressed a range of social injustices and cultural problems desperately in need of change?
Returning to conferences, as I note in my introduction/practical guide to NCN conferences, “the traditional conference has more than just environmental shortcomings. The cost of airfare from many low- and middle-income countries to anywhere in North America or Europe is often greater than the per capita annual income in these countries. Consequently, scholars from most of the world’s countries, and nearly the entire Global South, have long been quietly, summarily excluded from international conferences. Even in wealthy countries like the US, conference participation is, owing to vagaries in funding, a privilege unequally shared.”
And this is just the tip of the iceberg, as the traditional academic conference has additional, glaring shortcomings. Consequently, our NCN conferences are design to 1) be generally more accessible for variously abled individuals than their traditional counterparts, 2) provide free and lasting access to all the cutting-edge material introduced at the event, which is similar to open-access journals, and 3) allow participants from across the globe to equally take part, as comments can be made at any time in any time zone. The list doesn’t stop here, but you get the idea.
In short, the idea was to stand back and take a look at the traditional academic conference in order to brainstorm ways of addressing its shortcomings, both environmental and cultural.
However, as I have noted in previous sections of this chapter, decades before I began thinking about how the academic conference might be reimagined, I was giving a great deal of thought to the classroom and how it’s shortcomings might be addressed. Climate Crisis 101 is my most recent attempt at doing so.
Consequently, I not only think of Climate Crisis 101 as akin to our NCN conferences, I think of it as a NCN (Nearly Carbon-Neutral) course.
In rethinking both academic conferences and courses, my goal was the same: to make them a more accessible and just, as well as more environmentally sound.
This may seem a little counterintuitive with respect to courses. After all, why use all of the technology needed for Climate Crisis 101 (YouTube channel, audio podcast series, e-book, and website) when students could, alternately, just walk over to a lecture hall and hear me speak. Surely, the traditional lecture course must have a very tiny climate footprint.
The problem here is getting students to campus in the first place, as international students make up 14% of UCSB’s campus body. When I ask students to assess their individual climate footprints using an online calculator, many international students are surprised to learn that flying home four or more times per year is not only doubling their climate footprint, but in some cases tripling it or even more.
This is frustrating for more than our international students, as their presence on campus benefits everyone.
I have long noted that, if you took me to an unfamiliar college campus but kept my eyes covered, I would likely still be able tell if I am in a truly great university. How? By listening for the different languages being spoken there. Truly great universities are international universities by virtue of the fact that they draw students from all over the world. This is, as far as I’m concerned, absolutely terrific.
Until we think about the climate footprint of flying these students back-and-forth from campus and home. Not only is all this air travel environmentally largely disastrous, but we are back to the same issue that I noted regarding traveling to academic conferences. Please allow me to repeat what I said regarding international conferences, but instead slightly revise it to reference international courses:
“The cost of airfare from many low- and middle-income countries to anywhere in North America or Europe is often greater than the per capita annual income in these countries. Consequently, scholars [students] from most of the world’s countries, and nearly the entire Global South, have long been quietly, summarily excluded from international conferences [educations].”
This is a huge social justice issue, which is, as far as I am concerned, largely being ignored today. And, as with most social justice issues, this hurts us all.
True, students who cannot afford the airfare are obviously harmed. But, in addition, we all lose out, as universities like UCSB are not being enriched by having these international students in our classes. Simply put, we are missing out on the opportunity to have a great deal of additional brain power in our classes. Moreover, having a range of international perspectives on an issue like the climate crisis would deeply enrich Climate Crisis 101.
Consequently, Climate Crisis 101, as a NCN course, is designed to provide an equal experience to students (and anyone) across the globe.
Although I have repeatedly returned to the particular way that I am currently teaching Climate Crisis 101 at UCSB, this is hardly the only classroom experience possible.
For example, not every student watching the lectures need to be in the classroom. In this hybrid scenario, students in the lecture hall would watch the pre-recorded lecture projected on the screen in the room. At the same time, remote students would be able to watch the lecture (and take part in the Q&A) as a live webinar coming out of the computer playing the pre-recorded lecture. Hence, this would not be an asynchronous class, as all students will be watching the same lecture at the same time, regardless of their location.
The difficulty here is that time zones present a problem here. Simply put, regardless of when a lecture is scheduled, it will be the middle of the night in some time zones. However, when we experimented with live “NCN Salons” to complement our asynchronous NCN conferences, it became clear that some presentation times can work for a broad swathe of the planet.
Hence, as a UCSB class, Climate Crisis 101 is scheduled for 9:30-10:45am PST. This translates to starting times of 12:30 in NYC, 1:30pm in Salvador, Brazil, 6:30pm for London, 8:30pm in Nairobi, 10:30pm in New Delhi, and 12:30am in Beijing. I have, incidentally, geared this toward students, who (in my experience) tend to get up and go to bed a little later than I do. Thus, for some audiences, the timing could be moved up a little. For example, a start time of 7:30am PST start translates into 10:30pm in Beijing.
In any event, even though careful timing can include most people on the globe, some people will inevitably be left out. A 9:30am PST start time is 3:30am in Melbourne.
In order to be truly inclusive and not privilege any one time zone, we need to shift to an asynchronous course. This is the approach taken by both our NCN conferences and by Climate Crisis 101 when it was taught during COVID.
Since all of the lectures are prerecorded (and exist in a variety of forms) and students interact via the YouTube comments, Climate Crisis 101 was easily adapted to asynchronous presentation during COVID. The one downside was that this precluded a live Q&A while the lecture were being shown. However, it was easy enough to open an online forum where students could post questions and comments (and where I could respond) at a time of their choosing.
Why take this unusual approach? It creates a course that has ultimate flexibility, as it can be done in person, as a hybrid, remotely, and if remotely, internationally, as well as asynchronous presentation.
FAQs
In the course of this chapter, I somewhat sidestepped a number of issues. So, in order not to miss anything, in this chapter I would like to address a number of outstanding points regarding Climate Crisis 101.
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.
Is this a MOOC?
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.
This is a living document
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.
A note for teachers
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 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
Why does this page look the way that it does?
First, see the above sections 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 Climate Crisis 101 was taught
As I noted previously in this chapter, 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 quite familiar with discussion classes of this size, having led quite a few of them. This is, incidentally, 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 can 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 real-time, 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 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 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.
Here is the archive from the first time that the course was taught in the Winter of 2020, which has been saved to the Internet Archive:
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
Drawing down greenhouse gas emissions by being the change
Scholar Activism
Climate Crisis 101 emerged out of another class that I annually teach: UCSB’s English 22, “Introduction to Literature and the Environment.” English 22 explores nearly 5000 years of Western literature with the goal of better understanding contemporary environmental attitudes. While this proved to be a popular course over the years, it became clear that students really wanted to focus on the cultural implications of the climate crisis. So, after thinking it over for a few years, I introduced Climate Crisis 101 in order to do just that.
I mention this because English 22
In order to expose students to a broad range of British and American Literature, all UCSB English majors are required to take a four-course lecture sequence (English 101-104) that covers literature from its earliest Anglo-Saxon beginnings to the present. For many years, I taught the first installment, English 101, which includes texts from the early Medieval period through 1650, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and early Milton.
The problem is that many students dread this course. When I taught the course during the summer, I learned that more than half of the students in the room had just walked at graduation, even though they hadn’t taken English 101. (If students have just one or two courses to go, UCSB will allow them to take part in the graduation ceremony, but will not confer the degree until they finish the courses.)
When I asked students why they dreaded English 101, I kept hearing the same story: they repeatedly put off the course because Medieval and Renaissance literature did not seem very interesting (with the possible exception of Shakespeare, whom they often encountered in high school) and because they found the prospect of reading Chaucer in the original Middle English daunting. Thoughtful students also noted that this early English literature often lacks diversity, as most of the writers that have been traditionally taught are wealthy white men.
Ironically, it has been my experience that once students take English 101, they tend to like it, or at least see the merit of having encountered its literature. Consequently, having taught English 101 many times over the years, I have seen the central challenge as presenting the material in ways that interests students. For example, I work at making the readings more diverse by including portions of the first autobiography in English by a woman and poems by England’s first professional woman writer.
However, given the current situation in the humanities, I have come to see that the more urgent challenge is getting students interested in the material before (rather than during) the course.
If we fail to do this, courses like this are nonstarters, as students will not even sign up for them. If English 101 were not required for the major, I imagine enrollment would plummet. Keep in mind that we are focusing on English majors here. If we stand back to consider the humanities in general and students that have not yet declared a major, the situation is far more grim – and at the center of our current situation in the humanities.
Students want to know why they should take our courses and majors. This is a fair question. Answering that English majors will encounter 1400 years of literature, which is held up as a sufficiently worthwhile goal in itself, is no longer a compelling answer for a broad swath of students.
In response to the challenges with English 101, I developed a different sort of course. It is similar to English 101 in so far as we read one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (in Middle English), one of Shakespeare’s plays (in Elizabethan English), and the opening books of Milton’s Paradise Lost (in its original 1667 iambic pentameters). In addition to these three canonical writers, we read over a dozen more English and American texts.
We also read a range of classical literature, including a significant chunk of the 5000-year-old Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the first great work of Western literature, as well as Greek and Latin classics, including Hesiod, Theocritus, Ovid, Virgil, Cato, Varro, and Horace in Loeb editions (which have the original Greek or Latin text on the left and English translations on the facing page).
Finally, we looked at philosophical and theological texts (like portions of Plato’s Republic, the opening of the Bible, and one of Martin Heidegger’s essays). In each case, we explored the challenge of translating specific Greek, Hebrew, and German philosophical terms and concepts into English.
Unlike English 101, which students are often reluctant to take, this course – even though it is not a required English Department course like English 101 – fills the 860 seats of the largest lecture on campus with the significant waitlist every year. Not only is it the largest lecture course offered by the English Department (the average large lecture has 200 students), it is the most popular elective on campus.
So, what is this course and how does it differ from English 101? It is Ecocriticism 101, “Introduction to Literature and Environment.” The course asks a simple question: “Why do we feel the way we do about the environment?” In addressing this question, we explore our culture’s relationship to the natural world and its long history. Literary responses to environmental concerns are as old as the issues themselves. Deforestation, air pollution, endangered species, wetland loss, animal rights, and rampant consumerism have all been appearing as controversial issues in Western literature for hundreds – and in some cases thousands – of years.
Not surprisingly, our students are curious to learn why we feel the way we do about the environment. They see this as relevant and important, especially given the current state of the world. Reading Medieval and Renaissance is not the purpose of the class (as it is in English 101), but rather a means to what students see as a worthwhile end.
Yes, it would be terrific if we could get students to line up by the hundreds for the opportunity to just read Medieval and Renaissance texts, but this is just not going to happen. Perhaps back in the 20th century they did, but times have changed.
The solution is not to water down the material. As noted above, Ecocriticism 101is a challenging course with readings easily as demanding as those in English 101 (arguably more demanding, given all its Greek and Latin texts). It is certainly not a humanities version of popular science courses like “Rocks for Jocks.” Nonetheless, the course has confirmed for me that undergraduates are willing to put in the work for what they see as a worthy goal. And once in class, we can introduce them to the joys and merits of literature.
In short, if enrollment numbers are any indication, in recent years students are showing less interest in learning literature for the sake of learning literature. The lackluster interest in English 101 suggests that this is true even among English majors. However, if they believe it is for a worthwhile reason, students are lining up to take the class. If we were to reduce this to a concise maxim, it could be “If you give them a reason that they find relevant, they will enroll.”
Note that the high enrollment is not for vocational or immediately practical reasons. Some Environmental Studies majors are enrolled in the class, but they are a small minority. Most students take the class simply because they find it interesting. While it is perfectly fine to argue that humanities majors get jobs once they graduate, it is not necessary to do so to get students to enroll in our classes. Of course, once we have them in class we can (and should) let them know the many vocational opportunities open to humanities majors. However, job #1 is first getting them into our classes.
There is nothing particularly special about Ecocriticism 101 in this regard. Yes, undergraduates are interested in environmental issues, but other topics interest them as well. Many of our students, often from before they even enter college, are deeply concerned about a range of social justice issues, such as Black Lives Matter, LGBTIQ rights and identity, climate and environmental justice, wealth inequity, the rise of nationalism, and so forth.
I further believe that we have a moral obligation to introduce students to these important and timely issues. In the past few decades, the study of English has in many ways shifted from the study of literature to the study of culture. Hence, I think of myself as more of a cultural historian than literary critic (though I am both). Because we are scholars of important cultural issues (like climate change, race, queer studies, etc.), why not teach English around these issues? Yes, I am aware that professors often bring these issues into English 101-104 lectures. But why not build the courses around them? Since a recent study has revealed that a third of high school teachers are teaching climate change skepticism, it is crucial that we remedy this at the college level. Debates around race, LGBTQ+ rights, and a range of issues have similarly erupted on the public stage in recent years. We have a unique opportunity to make a difference in the world by helping our students sift through all this by way of courses built around these crucial issues.