Calling all Climate Storytellers
It’s week 2 of the new semester and I’m putting the WE into Wednesdays. If you’ve visited my pages before, you know I’ve been working on My Climate Story for a while now–with a ton of other (amazing) people. We’re ramping up now toward a campaign to insist that WE need better climate literacy. WE–Pennsylvania teachers (K-16), students, and caregivers–will be swapping our stories and sharing our insights around how climate change is impacting our lives, right here, right now. We’re aiming to deliver 1000 personal stories of climate change in Pennsylvanians’ lives to Harrisburg to demand better, climate-ready schools. We want learning and doing opportunities that address the climate crisis and that help us learn how to manage climate chaos.
I’ll be spending every Wednesday this fall and winter working to build the WE. I hope you’ll join in.
Today, on this Wednesday, I got to visit with long-time My Climate Story mentor and collaborator, genius teacher Anna Herman, of the U School, an experimental school whose mission statement is amazing: “We Love. We Dream. We Do. Students are given real world opportunities to apply knowledge and fulfill their greatest potential. Those who use the school are empowered with responsibility to create the world for themselves.” Unfortunately, as their website also says today, “Due to forecasted heat, certain schools will have early dismissal on Thursday Sept 3. Learn more here.” They also had to dismiss early yesterday because their old building can’t handle the heat. They–and the many other schools in Pennsylvania who aren’t climate ready–deserve better.
On my two-hour visit there this morning, we talked together about their work and about my students at UPenn (some of whom also don’t have enough air conditioning), and we started working toward our goal of documenting our climate stories together. I was tickled to see the My Climate Story “cookbook,” recipes for telling climate stories, in their classroom (you can see them in the images above), and I was delighted to get a guided tour of their impressive school garden, a huge series of raised beds. What a treat to nibble together on mint and graze on raspberries on a hot and muggy city summer morning. But then I was outraged when we spotted a huge Japanese beetle infestation. You can see some if you look closely at the 2nd photo in the image carousel above. I shared with my tour guides that I had battled these beetles all of August at my place in Maine where they decimated our basil plants and put huge holes in the cosmo blooms. These invasives are thriving in warmer temps, probably also in Japan, but definietly here on the east coast of the U.S. I was so pissed in fact that I used them as the poster child for a new class I’m teaching at Penn this fall designed in part to support this regional campaign for climate literacy. (More on that class below, including the syllabus.)
Summer into Fall
Despite the Japanese beetle infestation in Maine, I hated to leave, but here we are now, back in the humidity that is late August in Philadelphia. I’m teaching two new classes this term, each intersects with public humanities projects I’ve been working on, including the new “Welcome to Germantown” exhibit that opened earlier this summer. It’s so amazing, and I was so glad that Historic Germantown got a lot of really nice press about it. You should visit. The other class is on climate storytelling across the arts and sciences, and across cultures and languages. It’s a weave of climate science, media, communications, narrative studies, and storytelling, and of many esteemed guests. For many months now, together with historian Marianna Dudley, English studies scholar Roman Bartosch, and sustainability scientist Sarah Cornell (alphabetized by first name), we’ve been devising plans for our students to document and share their climate stories. In late October, Marianna’s students in Bristol (England), Roman’s in Cologne (Germany), Sarah’s in Gävle (Sweden), and mine in Philadelphia (USA) will gather together online to swap and learn from one another. Our plan is to compile our stories–and others’ too–in what will be Volume 3 of the My Climate Story Magazine. Co-editors Jakob Henningson and William Hilliard (Stockholm, Sweden) are now putting together Volume 2. What a treat to check in with them for workshops in May and in June. There’s so much percolating behind the scenes in the My Climate Story project. I am beyond excited to welcome two new superstar Penn research interns into the project, Nasira Seals and Zey Oral. Watch for big things coming from them and coming soon. In the meantime, you can check out these “road maps” for a new climate story I made to try to keep us all on track.
Looking Forward
Can you believe my great good fortune in being able to host all these super stars this fall: the great Genevieve Guenther, the astute Jessica Seddon, the generous Joshua Lowe, the savvy Stephanie LeMenager! Such super stars, and I am beyond grateful for their help. Another time, I’ll write a little about the talk I’ll give at New York’s Climate Week (that Jessica asked me to do) as well as my friend Amanda’s film screening there (incredible).
Slightly further ahead this fall, I’ll offer a workshop for humanists and allies who want to make their work transdisciplinary and policy-relevant at the meeting of BRIDGES at UNESCO in Paris (mais oui!) and will also travel on to talk with folks in Cologne for this wonderful workshop co-organized by Roman Bartosch. Looking into November, I’m super excited to teach a guest class at Swarthmore at the super generous invitation of Giovanna DiChiro who asked me to talk about “climate justice, storytelling, and hope.”
If you’ve got to be in a climate crisis, its best to do it together. You and your work are what gives me hope. Now onward into fall.