Bethany Wiggin
Environmental and Public Humanist, Germanist and Comparative Literature Scholar
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An Opening for Climate Civics? The WE in WEdnesday (Weekend edition)
I needed the weekend for this WE in WEdnesday dispatch hitting on a Monday. Whoosh! Early on Election Day Tuesday, I voted at my polling place in Philadelphia with my favorite new-ish voter–and then resolved not to look at the news for 24 hours. In hindsight, I wished I had gone to a watch party instead! Has the blue tsunami swept away blockages for climate civics? What might WE build in its wake? Permit me an attempt to exorcise some demons, as we hear we’re at the end of an era. Along the way…
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Building a “We” for My Climate Story: GLocal Edition
Come through for a meeting designed to connect climate-culture workers and build community for a campaign to create, collect, and deliver 1000 stories of climate change to state lawmakers. And read on to learn more about important voices in the effort to center culture and imaginative work in climate policy–from UNESCO’s Office for Climate Education to Philadelphia’s Germantown to a fantastic new report by the British Council laying out the case for Culture-Based Climate Action.
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“Come Grow with Us”
Climate literacy is where it’s at, and partnerships are the key. This week new partnerships are falling in place and this week’s WEdnesday dispatch is devoted to new partners at Philadelphia Lankenau Environmental Science Magnet High School. Their motto? “Come Grow with Us.” I love it. So will you. And Ellen Hu’s stunning climate memoir too.
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Hustling toward a Big WEdnesday Meeting: Teacher Gratitude Edition!
Tick tock! It’s the first of five semesters on the road toward a new climate story. This week’s WEdnesday dispatch is teacher gratitide edition, and I make a small road trip to the Academy at Palumbo in South Philadelphia to swap stories (and more) with teacher Joni Woods. And save the date: WEdnesday, November 18th!
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Sweat + SWOT for this WEdnesday’s dispatch
It’s WEdnesday and back in Philadelphia, the My Climate Story team continues to put in the “WE.” In this week’s dispatch, we first meet the City School District’s Greenworks team; Zey and I ooh and aah for real, and we make some plans for collabotayive storytelling. Then, inspired by Dr. Constance Clayton, I muse a little about what it might mean for climate storytelling and the climate justice university when “the children come first.” Utopian? Maybe. But better than cruel optimism.
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The WE in Wednesday meets the MER in mercredi et le MIT in Mittwoch
The My Climate Story goes on a trip to Paris and to Cologne to offer a policy making workshop at UNESCO, a talk and a workshop in Cologne. Along the way, we keep building the “we” and get to play multilingually, with help from new friends.
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The WE in Climate WEek
After a decade of watching Climate Week NYC from Philadelphia, this year I got motivated to go. Festival-conferences can feel fatuous, or worse, but there’s no “outside” a planetary climate crisis. Plus, I got invited to speak at a roundtable, a student invited me to an ambitious workshop he was organizing, and other long-term collaborators told me about all the cool stuff they were planning to do. There was obviously a “WE” in Climate Week, and I realized I should show up for “my” people. Read on for a virtual visit to the events…
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WEdnesday on a Friday: Student Gratitude Edition!
This edition of putting the “WE” in Wednesday, is hitting on a Friday… But it’s the perfect time to think about Fridays for Future–and about the many young people and students whose voices are the very heart of the My Climate Story project.
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WEdnesday at City Hall (ok 1515 the Parkway actually)!
Yep, it’s Wednesday, and My Climate Story continues our journey, quixotically and just a bit chaotically, to put in the WE—for climate literacy, for climate policy, and for climate readiness and resilience. This Wednesday took us to Philadelphia’s City Hall—or actually to one of the office buildings around our beautiful city hall. I thought we were meeting at the MSB but finally figured out we were at 1515 on the Parkway… it is honestly not so beautiful as City Oenn. But the team at the City’s Sustainability Office gets a lot done there nonetheless!…
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Putting the WE in Wednesdays
It’s been a summer of climate chaos. It’s time to organize and build solidarities. I’m putting the WE into Wednesdays this fall.
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Personal updates, February 2026
At long last, a co-authored article on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River Research Corps is in press with Environmental Humanities, and all the articles, including my long co-authored introduction, for a two-volume special journal issue bringing humanistic methods to bear on the technological and social path dependencies engendered by energy regimes, are now successfully through peer review and set for publication. Huge thanks to our anonymous reviewers! That special issue collects some of the work of the Intersecting Energy Cultures working group. I also co-wrote, directed, and co-produced a series of nine short films that illuminate our working group’s methods of community…
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Transforming Climate Education (Part 1): Campus Climate Correspondents and Writing Sprints
My Climate Story aims to transform climate education. This first of two posts about transformational climate education introduces the project’s Campus Correspondents pilot program which trained undergraduate student reporters across 12 North American campuses to listen for and share their communities’ stories. Student leaders, Maria and Faith, reflect on their vision for this collaborative work and talk about what’s next. Check out their video that captures all our work, “by the numbers.” You can also click through to access the materials used for the climate story op-ed “sprint” we offered, after which CCs successfully…
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Greta Got It Half Right: Listen (Also!) to the Humanists — Transformational Environmental Research and Teaching
This essay is a lightly edited version of the Bromery Seminar I gave at the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Johns Hopkins University on April 18th, 2024. Its second part, on place-based environmental humanities work in Philadelphia, has been cut from this essay. It drew on a longer essay on that topic that is available on this blog, “Archive, River, Museum, Street.”
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Archive, River, Museum, Street: Making Spaces for Transdisciplinary Environmental Research and Environmental Justice
This essay has been lightly adapted from a presentation at the Iowa City Public Library, invited by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa on April 5th as part of a two-day seminar on “Campus and Local Community as a Collaborative Lab for Environmental Research,” parts of which were recorded and are available for viewing.
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Humanists at Work in the World: Campus Community Partnerships for Environmental Justice
This talk explores several multi-year campus-community projects to explore how environmental humanists can and perhaps should work in worlds beyond the classroom, conference, journal, and monograph. The talk opens a number of thorny questions: what skills, beyond critical skills, does it demand? What is the temporality of such work in the world? How can it coincide with the rhythms of the academic year? What does it mean for peripatetic humanists to commit to care for communities on and around their college campuses? What are the ethics of such collaborations? Do they ensure mutual benefit?
