about the book
praise
“Is climate change the teacher we need to help us learn to live? Perhaps counterintuitively, Verlie's answer is a resounding yes. Written for educators, young people, activists, community members, parents, researchers, and politicians—and anybody who is concerned about the fate of life on the planet— this book invites us to engage in an expansive, co-creative, and entangled relationship with climate, which Verlie defines as more a verb than a noun. This book aims more for courage, witness, and inspiration than resilience, adaptation, or coping, and outlines the faculties needed to bear, endure, and generate new worlds.”
Sarah Jaquette Ray, author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety and professor of environmental studies at Humboldt State University
"Learning to Live with Climate Change is a remarkable account of how climate change makes us feel and a powerful challenge to who we think we are. Verlie’s accessible writing style deftly holds all of climate change’s complexities without ever overwhelming us. Through careful attention to climate change’s affective dimensions, Verlie charts a personal and collective pedagogical course for learning to live with what might otherwise seem impossible: finding inspiration, solidarity and renewed energy in the face of overwhelming crisis. Most importantly, reading this book made me want to go out and do more."
Astrida Neimanis, author of Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan.
“Blanche Verlie’s book, Learning to Live with Climate Change is a must read for educators interested in developing situated and collective responses that support young people experiencing various climate change(s) in their everyday worlds. You won’t find a recipe or a how-to list of tips and tricks to solve these worldly problems in this book. Instead, Verlie brings together practices of encountering, witnessing, and storying to highlight what becomes possible when working with embodied, relational, and affective practices for change.”
Mindy Blaise, Professor and Co-director, Centre for People, Place & Planet, School of Education, Edith Cowan University, and co-author of Education for Future Survival.
“Blanche Verlie has written an insightful, moving and much needed book about the complex human response to climate change. It is an important contribution to the growing body of social science work on this topic, important too because reading it and engaging with her ideas enables us to develop strategies that can inspire and support people to engage with and respond to climate change.”
Rebecca Huntley, author of How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way that Makes a Difference.
“I see this as one of the most significant recent books on climate anxiety. This is a very high-quality work. It is a book in education in the classical sense: it con- sists of wide-ranging philosophical and practical discussions, not only depictions of methods and activities.”
Panu Pihkala, University of Helsinki, book review in the Australian Journal of Environmental Education
“Some books or ideas become our companions, concepts we come to live with and use to experience and understand the world. Some have words so beautifully placed and ideas so timely borne that they frame how we bear our encounters. This book is full of such words, as Verlie writes with integrity and generosity, inviting us into dialogue, engagement, journey, and transformation. Verlie is giving words and concepts where they have been missing; powerfully naming experiences that are unnamed; and therefore giving meaning and witness to the experiences of bodies suffering with climate through ecological destruction. In many ways, this book is a guidebook for a journey we are all facing, whether we know it or not.”
Charlotte Jones, University of Tasmania, book review in Geographical Research
chapter summaries
Chapter 1: Introduction: Climate is living-with
Humans feel climatic and meteorological phenomena in multiple ways; for example, we might sweat during a heat wave or feel anxious when learning about rising sea levels. However, our feelings are rarely accepted or leveraged as a mode of engaging with climate change. More often, dispassionate scientific or disembodied cultural methods of knowing climate change are promoted. This is largely because dominant ways of understanding what climate is position humans as separate from climate, rather than beginning from recognition that humans are part of climate. Drawing on Indigenous philosophy, feminist posthumanism and multispecies studies, this introductory chapter makes the case that conceptualising climate as a process of living-with can enable more effective climate change engagement. Understanding climate as a set of affective and embodied more-than-human relations attunes to human enmeshment in the energetic flows of climate. It also foregrounds the existential distress engaging with climate change can generate. In order to respond to these emotional challenges, we will need to learn to live with climate change. Exploring what this might entail, and how it could be fostered, is the central focus of this book. This chapter outlines what the book offers in this regard. It includes an explanation of the methodology and an introduction to the case study discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.
Chapter 2: Feeling the climate crisis
From June 2019 to March 2020, Australia experienced devastating bushfires and chronic smoke pollution, a period dubbed the ‘Black Summer.’ This chapter’s central aim is to demonstrate that climate change is an affective phenomenon that emerges from, and contributes to, more-than-human relations. Drawing on understandings of atmospheres as both climatic and affective, it explores how the bushfire smoke and media representations of the wildfires generated physiological harm, emotional distress and novel political identifications. Attuning to the ways the bushfires infiltrated people’s homes, bodies, psyches and relationships, the chapter illustrates how climate change’s affective transcorporeality enables it to flow through, disrupt and transform human selves and societies. When considered alongside appreciation that the bushfires were generated by climate change which in turn has been fuelled by denial and apathy, the 2019/2020 fires exemplify the book’s conceptualisation of climate as patterns of affect.
Chapter 3: Encountering climate anxiety
This chapter explores the practice of encountering climate change, focusing on experiences of climate anxiety. To encounter climate change is to be challenged by it to the extent that you become climate-changed. Climate anxiety is outlined as a sense that your world is ending, often accompanied by feelings of overwhelm, frustration, powerlessness, grief and guilt. This experience counters dominant neoliberal understandings of humans as capable individuals entitled to a bright future, and it brings attention to relationships that were previously taken for granted. Climate change can also affect us in less obvious ways, including in ways that are difficult to notice, identify, and interpret. This contradicts the belief that humans can fully comprehend climate change. Through these multiple modes of countering conventional understandings of humans as powerful individuals, climate anxiety opens space for new modes of human-climate relations.
Chapter 4: Witnessing multiple climate realities
Climate science is the mode of knowledge most frequently advocated to be capable of disclosing ‘the’ truth of ‘the’ reality of climate change. This knowledge is argued to be objective and therefore dispassionate. However, many climate scientists are deeply distressed by the findings of their work. This chapter focuses on the practice of witnessing climate change. Witnessing climate change is an affective labour of attuning to material worlds and validating their reality, no matter how distressing they may be. It explores how engaging other-than-scientific knowledges can enable people to witness multiple climate realities, such as everyday lived experiences, daydreams and nightmares, and animated understandings of climate. Witnessing multiple climate realities enrols people in multiple ways of relating to climate change and allows a fuller appreciation of the complex ways that climate infiltrates and affects human lives. Witnessing other people’s experiences of climate change also validates them as legitimate climate knowers. Witnessing climate change therefore changes the kinds of relationships that we are part of, and thus, who we are.
Chapter 5: Storying climate collectives
This chapter explores the practice of storying climate change. It focuses on stories told about collectives of humans and their roles in global climate change. Storying creates meaning through connecting events, beings and places into comprehensible narratives. Storying therefore both recounts and imagines, and in so doing, it normalises ways of relating and generates templates that people can inhabit. Many of the stories we tell about climate change – such as the suggestion to name the emerging geological epoch the Anthropocene – figure humans as homogeneous and inherently destructive. Yet because climate change is a collective action problem, breaking ‘humanity’ into individuals does not offer hopeful scripts either. This chapter demonstrates that stories of diverse, non-unified collectives of humans can be more promising. The figure of the ‘cloudy collective’ is offered as an example. Cloudy collectives are moody, ephemeral coalitions that congregate and disperse according to fluctuating affective responses to climate change. They are not coordinated, formalised or directed. Nevertheless, through their emotional relations, they generate affective transformation which is an important climate action.
Chapter 6: Conclusion: Bearing worlds
Emotional resilience is often advocated as an important remedy for climate anxiety. However, this approach risks re-centring the needs of individual humans (and often privileged ones). This chapter theorises and argues for affective transformation as an alternative aspiration. Affective transformation can be cultivated through encountering, witnessing and storying climate change, which the previous three chapters discussed. Affective transformation disrupts and reconfigures the emotional regime of individualistic anthropocentrism, and contributes to emergent understandings of the ‘self’ as embedded in, and composed of, relations with the more-than-human world. It also cultivates an ability to keep going in the face of the devastating realities of climate change. As such, affective transformation involves appreciating that climate is living-with and it enables us to learn to live with climate change. Through its emphasis on cultural, emotional and interpersonal change as action, affective transformation therefore enables people to bear worlds: to generate more promising relationships while enduring the distress of current worlds. This chapter concludes by offering guidance about the kinds of action that educators, teachers, activists and other facilitators can take in order to support and engage people in the ongoing work of learning to live with climate change.