Creative Responses to Climate Collapse: Worldmaking with Art & Literature

Not at all. Everyone can benefit from creative expression, and there are many forms of creativity accessible to us. This is also an opportunity for you to take on a creative practice you may have been hesitating to begin.

No. I will assign weekly light reading or an art or media object to explore, but we will focus on examining material in-class together, where deeper reading happens. I will offer suggestions for more substantial reading and viewing, but these are optional, to be explored if you find it helpful.

In my work as a climate activist, and in speaking with other climate activists, journalists, and advocates, I have found creativity to be a critical component of this work. We need both to express what it means to live during fraught times, and to possess the tools to imagine better futures that we are organizing towards. Many climate advocates I know have a creative project in their spare time.

This will depend on the type of medium and project you choose. However, I am building in time for creative practice into the course meeting itself. After analyzing and discussing the day's material, we will work together on our projects, address any craft challenges, ideate, or, if you wish, work in silence with communal accountability.

We will end the course with a showcase and celebration of our creative projects. If the group wishes, we can produce a more lasting showcase of the work, such as through a zine. We will discuss these options as a group.

The climate crisis poses unique challenges to our imaginations and creative approaches. It is both planetary yet local, it affects us all but in profoundly different ways. While the tools of envisioning otherwise are exactly what we need to confront the climate crisis, this course underscores that examining a specific crisis that affects so many parts of our lives--the weather, our food systems, our ancestral homes, interspecies relationships, the very face of the earth--is important. We are imagining and building towards other worlds from within a degraded planet.

I will provide journaling exercises to help you identify and explore your art project, and will offer light creative prompts. Before the final week of the course, I will ask everyone to submit their art project so that it can be shared with the group.

I encourage collectively created projects, whether they are between members of the class or with folks in your in-person community. These can be very exciting. For such projects, I also suggest building in at least week of extra time for project creation, to cover for communication times.

If you are an experienced artist, I recommend choosing the project you feel most called to, even if it can't be completed within the course time. In this case, you would share your in-development work, and the next steps you'll be taking to complete it (group accountability goes a long way to keeping the momentum going!) However, if you are new to the art form you are exploring, I strongly recommend choosing something manageable within our time together.