Staying with the Climate Trouble

Abstract

In teaching about climate, when it comes to the troubling question of “what can we do?” I’ve argued that we try to help students stay with, rather than prematurely and inadequately, resolve that trouble and that we do this by inviting them into our own state of not knowing. How to stay with the pedagogical trouble of doing that, including the trouble of trying to contain the despair that an honest account of the climate crisis may provoke? This essay suggests that one approach to that question in the literature classroom is to teach texts in which characters themselves grapple with the question of “what can we do?” Ultimately, the pedagogical challenge is to help shape these textual encounters into an awareness that, especially as it is shared, despair might be something other than a terminal condition—indeed, might be a necessary passage through to whatever comes next.