learning to live with climate change
how can we learn to live-with – respect, be part of, endure and respond to – climate change?
Learning to live with climate change is a book and broader research, education and social project by Dr Blanche Verlie.
It starts with recognition that climate is living-with — climate is composed through processes of living-with ourselves, others, and the world.
In an era of planetary collapse, this can be deeply distressing.
Thus, learning to live with climate change involves appreciating the multiple ways that human lives are enmeshed with climate, and grappling with the unsettling realities of climate change.
Dwelling with grief, transforming ourselves, regenerating relationships, inspiring change, witnessing each other: these are the challenges of our times.
about the book
Learning to Live With Climate Change is an academic book published by Routledge, and is available as a free e-book.
This imaginative and empowering book explores the ways that our emotions entangle us with climate change and offers strategies for engaging with climate anxiety that can contribute to social transformation.
Climate educator Blanche Verlie draws on feminist, more-than-human and affect theories to argue that people in high-carbon societies need to learn to ‘live-with’ climate change: to appreciate that human lives are interconnected with the climate, and to cultivate the emotional capacities needed to respond to the climate crisis. Learning to Live with Climate Change explores the cultural, interpersonal and sociological dimensions of ecological distress. The book engages with Australia’s 2019/2020 ‘Black Summer’ of bushfires and smoke, undergraduate students’ experiences of climate change, and contemporary activist movements such as the youth strikes for climate. Verlie outlines how we can collectively attune to, live with, and respond to the unsettling realities of climate collapse while counteracting domineering ideals of ‘climate control.’
This impressive and timely work is both deeply philosophical and immediately practical. Its accessible style and real-world relevance ensure it will be valued by those researching, studying and working in diverse fields such as sustainability education, climate communication, human geography, cultural studies, environmental sociology and eco-psychology, as well as the broader public.
Watch the online book launch
From August 26, 2021.
Speakers:
Dr Blanche Verlie, Sydney Environment Institute
Associate Professor Astrida Neimanis (Chair), University of British Columbia Okanagan
Professor Sarah Jaquette Ray, Humboldt State University
Professor Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University
about Blanche
Dr. Blanche Verlie is an Australian climate change educator and researcher currently living on unceded Gadigal Country.
Blanche has over ten years’ experience teaching sustainability and climate change in universities, as well as experience in community-based climate change communication and activism. Blanche has a multidisciplinary background, brings an intersectional feminist approach to her work and is passionate about supporting people to engage with the emotional intensities of climate change.
Blanche is a Research Fellow in the Sydney Environment Institute, and Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies, at the University of Sydney. You can find more info here.
Blanche is currently the Chair of the Board of Climate for Change, an awesome grassroots organisation supporting community engagement in climate democracy.