Climate Fables for Activists

Climate activists have long been inspired by fiction and media as gathering points for community, and as sources of inspiration. Take just one example: in the early 2020s, the intrepid Stop Cop City campaign was launched to protect the Atlanta forest from being felled and replaced by an enormous police training facility. Under the woodland canopy, activists gathered to screen Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 animated film of forest defense, Princess Mononoke. As police surveilled the camp, campers joined together to watch a film that spoke to the struggles they faced as defenders of an ailing planet. What a powerful assertion of storytelling and community over carcerality and extraction.

As a writer, scholar, and climate activist myself, I wondered how narrative representations of environmental action helped or inhibited me in effectively organizing. What assumptions and biases in popular media were being fed to me without my critical assessment of them? What limitations of the imagination was I accepting? Or what radical possibilities did these stories prompt me to consider? In this course, we explore narratives of environmental resistance and learn to critically think through the subliminal and overt messaging of our fiction and media. In short, we consider the “climate fables” that impart lessons about what it means to care for and fight for the environment.

The class is guided by anti-colonial values that unpack how the aftermaths of colonization, slavery, and the plantation impact the scope of the climate crisis and our approach to tackling states of emergency. We’ll consider how gender, race, ability, and class are inevitably entangled with environmental issues, and what frameworks must be reconsidered to develop climate justice approaches that don’t reiterate old harms. Finally, we will draw from today’s most radiant resources of the imagination to envision the worlds we can organize towards.

Each week will offer a journal prompt and a short reading/viewing to stimulate your imagination and critical thinking capacities, followed by an instructor presentation and ample time for discussion. Class material will reference and pull from authors such as N. K. Jemisin, Octavia Butler, Rivers Solomon, Louise Erdrich, Waubgeshig Rice, Margaret Atwood, and Kim Stanley Robinson; media such as the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022), and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021); and non-fiction on environment and organizing, such as by adrienne maree brown, Andreas Malm, Kathryn Yusoff, Amitav Ghosh, and others.

By the end of the course, you will have a robust understanding of the canon of climate resistance storytelling and its core themes, walk away with an additional syllabus for solo or communal study, be able to engage meaningfully and critically with the complexities of climate action narratives, and leave with new possibilities for imagining climate futures.

Students of this course may be climate organizers, activists interested in anticolonial thought and future envisioning, educators seeking to inform themselves on the intersection between organizing and narrative, students interested in developing an understanding of climate fiction and media, or creatives wishing to learn more about the craft of climate storytelling. The ideal student will arrive ready to engage in critical thinking, and curious to learn more about anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, anti-colonial approaches to climate issues and stories.