Bearing worlds: Learning to live-with climate change

Find or cite the original journal article: Blanche Verlie (2019): Bearing worlds: learning to live-with climate change, Environmental Education Research, 25 (5), 751-766. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2019.1637823

Abstract

This paper explores the emotional experiences of some undergraduate sustainability students in a semester long course on climate change. Specifically, it attends to experiences of anxiety, frustration, overwhelm, guilt, grief and hope. I suggest these experiences are characteristic of a process I term learning to live-with climate change. Learning to live-with climate change involves attuning to the relational composition of the world and thus the self; mourning desirable relationships that are lost as the planet warms; and responding to these conditions in ways that may foster more liveable worlds. Collectively, these processes enrol people in practices of bearing worlds: enduring the pain of the end of the world they have known, and labouring to generate promising alternatives. As such, these processes reconfigure the self and its relations, and attunement to how climate change composes, recomposes and decomposes particular subjectivities is important. The paper argues that affective adaptation is therefore a crucial element of climate change education.

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Bearing worlds: Learning to live-with climate change

My students are environmental education’s success stories. They know ‘the Earth is fucked’ and they feel ‘angry,’ ‘devastated,’ ‘cynical,’ ‘guilty’ and ‘terrified’ about it (student quotations). Of course, these comments are from one moment in time, by individual students, and it is important not to exaggerate or homogenise. But they do speak to a general affective atmosphere (Anderson 2009) that circulates around and emerges from my students, who are studying a Bachelor of Environment and Society in Melbourne, Australia. These are students who have chosen to complete an entire degree investigating ecological problems and who are often actively striving for sustainability¾in various ways¾before, during and after their degree. Yet I also know that some of them disengage from this after graduating, or drop out during the degree, because it is all too overwhelming, too depressing, too … hopeless.

Working with (mostly) young Australian environmentalists across the last eight years has been an utter privilege, but it has also been challenging. One of the questions it has raised for me is: what do we do when environmental education works? When someone can explain a hockey stick graph, be moved to tears about dying butterflies, and is using their keep cup, do we then just abandon them? Fly the coop, sink or swim, save yourselves? Like many sustainability degree programs, at RMIT University we teach students a range of empowering professional skills. Our particular emphasis on work integrated learning complements the critical systems thinking taught in coursework subjects and develops students’ capacities as change agents. Yet while the skills such programs develop¾like community building and stakeholder and project management¾are invaluable in cultivating the capacities to improve sustainability, they are not enough. If ‘the affective’ dimension is so crucial to inspiring people to start engaging with sustainability, surely it is also essential to amplifying and maintaining their efforts.

In this paper I work with new materialist, non-representational and posthuman approaches to emotions and affect and argue that living on this planet, in these times, is (increasingly going to be) a process of learning to live-with climate change. Learning to live-with climate change involves the appreciation of the entanglement and co-becoming of the human and the climatic (Verlie 2017, Haraway 2008, Neimanis and Walker 2013) and the affective adaptation that must accompany this. Learning to live-with climate change is therefore a process of bearing worlds, as we simultaneously become more attuned to our enmeshment with the more-than-human, mourn those relationships as they are ruptured, act-with them to cultivate the most promising futures possible, and are ourselves changed throughout the process.

I develop these notions by exploring some common emotional experiences which emerged in Climate Change Responses, an undergraduate course I tutored at RMIT University in 2015 (CCR15). CCR15 was a twelve-week course which investigated the scientific, social, cultural, economic and ecological elements of climate change, and my students were highly engaged in our investigations into the interconnectedness of the human and the climatic throughout the course. I explore how the distressing emotions that arose throughout CCR15 countered existing individualistic and anthropocentric ways of relating to the world and contributed to alternatives emerging. I argue that these emotions (anxiety, frustration, overwhelm, guilt and grief), as well as hope, are characteristic, though not definitive, of the process of learning to live-with climate change. I propose that in addition to the other skills and knowledge we may seek to cultivate in climate change engagement efforts, we need to also work towards affective climate adaptation.

Emotions as affective intra-actions

The ‘affective dimension’ has recently been considered to have an ‘essential role’ (Salama and Aboukoura 2018, 141) and emotions to be the ‘missing link’ (Burke, Ockwell, and Whitmarsh 2018, 95) in engaging people with climate change. The general belief is that inspiring concern in people will motivate them to take action (Hornsey and Fielding 2016). But research into people’s emotional experiences of climate change show that many people fail to respond to climate change not because of a lack of concern, but because of their concern (Norgaard 2011, Kristin and Dilshani 2018). When people engage with climate change they can experience a wide range of intense emotions (Hayes et al. 2018, Clayton and Manning 2018, Davenport 2017), and therefore many people engage in denial, apathy or disengagement as a coping mechanism (Kristin and Dilshani 2018). When emotions are considered in climate change engagement efforts they are often understood to be something educators or communicators can or should manipulate (Burke, Ockwell, and Whitmarsh 2018, Carmi, Arnon, and Orion 2015, Stevenson and Peterson 2016, Stevenson, Nicholls, and Whitehouse 2017). As such, many studies seek to measure individual people’s emotions regarding climate change (Feldman and Hart 2017, Li and Monroe 2017), and suggest preferred emotional states that educators should try to make people feel as well as strategies for achieving them (Kelsey 2017). Recently this has moved from aiming just to inspire concern to promoting the cultivation of hope, so that people will feel that it is both important and possible to make change (Kelsey 2017, Ojala 2012, 2016). Others argue against promoting certain emotions because this is both practically and ethically questionable (Chapman, Lickel, and Markowitz 2017) and contend that emotions should be acknowledged, honoured and interrogated, not promoted or manipulated (Chapman, Lickel, and Markowitz 2017, Hufnagel 2017).

Underpinning much of this research is a liberal humanist, or anthropocentric, understanding of emotions. Such approaches typically consider emotions to be internally generated and experienced by a distinct individual human (Vermeulen 2014). Little work in climate change education has engaged with new materialist, non-representational and/or posthuman approaches to affect. Seeking to de-centre the individual human, these approaches understand ‘the affective’ as somatic, embodied, visceral and/or sensual intensities or energies. These forces are considered to emerge from, flow through, and contribute to the becoming of, bodies of all kinds: human and non-human, living and non-living (Anderson 2006, Mulcahy 2012, Latour 2004). Such approaches to affect understand emotions as just one possible way in which affect is experienced, and note that affect is far more than emotions which can be named: affect includes excessive, uninterpretable, nebulous forces that arise through relations which cannot be contained, controlled or fully known, and certainly not measured or managed (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, Roelvink and Zolkos 2015). While climate change education would do well to engage with the more-than-emotional elements of affect, excluding emotions and focusing just on affect may let us ‘off the hook’ (Boler and Zembylas 2016, 315), allowing us through its definitive vagueness from differentiating between specific forms of arousal and attachment (Johansen 2015).

Thus, in this paper, I consider emotions as affective intra-actions. Intra-action is a term from Karen Barad (2007), which I use in climate change pedagogy to refer to: how climate and humans are entangled with each other and thus contribute to each other’s ongoing becoming; how human agency unfolds through acting-with the wider socio-ecological world; and how climate actions thus emerge from and are productive of difference (and can thus be understood as ‘diffractions’) (Verlie 2017, Verlie & CCR15 2018).This approach to emotions does not situate them as individually or mentally contained or as exclusively human productions. Rather, it considers emotions as something we both experience and do (Kuby 2016), and which are generated through transcorporeal relationships with the more-than-human world (Bozalek 2016, Ryan 2016). Rather than occurring to pre-given individuals, emotions create ‘impressions’ and ‘surface’ us (Ahmed 2004, Brennan 2004) and are part of the process through which ‘the sense of the “me” or “us” harbouring the emotion’ is generated, consolidated, verified or decomposed (Johansen 2015, 50). As such, I understand emotions to be phenomena that indicate more-than-human agency is at work, and I explore how this more-than-human agency affects, counters, changes, disrupts and/or reconfigures those who experience them.

Below, I discuss the six most common emotional responses from CCR15: anxiety, frustration, being overwhelmed, grief, guilt and hope. These are common emotional responses to climate change (Clayton and Manning 2018) and generally speak to the range that were experienced in CCR15. For example, frustration does not fully account for but does align with feeling angry, resentful, challenged, disheartened, confronted, defeated, dismayed and tired, as well as a range of affective experiences which were not easily categorised, such as wriggling in a seat. As such, I believe these emotions are characteristic, though certainly not universal nor definitive, of the process of learning to live-with climate change. Rather than describing universal experiences, I use such characteristic emotional encounters to emphasise climate change’s affective agency through demonstrating how it can disrupt existing human ways of being and relating. In so doing, I hope to push climate change education towards more relational and less anthropocentric approaches to emotions and ‘the affective,’ and to stimulate efforts at supporting, rather than just compelling, people to engage with climate change and ecological crises.

Anxiety: Troubling certainty and entitlement

Specific future climate changes are both terrifying as well as highly unpredictable (Harrison 2013, Seaman 2016). Uncertainty is said to be central to anxiety, which is an emotional state characterised by worry about the future (Grupe and Nitschke 2013). Thus, given the high uncertainty of specific future climate changes, anxiety is a common affective response to climate change (Ojala 2012, Wright and Nyberg 2012, Brugger et al. 2013, Cunsolo Willox et al. 2013, Weintrobe 2013a, Weintrobe 2013b, Robbins and Moore 2013). Climate change’s uncertainty and its association with gloomy feelings like anxiety was articulated in the statement from CCR15 that ‘the future, for me, is dark, cloudy, a black hole of uncertainty. I don’t know how it will play out.’ Another student’s end of semester reflection stated that ‘a challenge in acquiring weekly knowledge of climate change has been to keep walking the scary line of learning.’ While specific outcomes are uncertain, changes of some kind are unavoidable and already happening, and so this anxiety can also be directed to the certainty of unpredictability, as this statement attests: ‘I feel an uncertain future is inevitable, and it deeply upsets me.’

It is harder to control and plan for the uncertain and the experience of climate anxiety therefore troubles modern subjectivities and futures. Settler-colonial and over-industrialised communities have been promised certainty, progress, and control of the future (Tuck, McKenzie, and McCoy 2014, Head 2016, Katona 2015). For settler communities, like CCR15, climate anxiety can be understood as a disruption of this sense of entitlement to a better future (Katona 2015) and therefore a destabilisation of privilege and discourses of planetary domination. This statement attests to the unsettling feelings of not being able to settle (i.e. identify, contain, control and manage) the future:

[climate change] often develops some sort of anxiety in me, or even just a mild sick feeling, the feeling of not being able to predict the future and predict the best thing to do whilst minimising as much harm as possible. This feeling often comes by me when I watch how the leaders of Australia approach issues like these, and it makes me feel sick.

Such visceral feelings speak to the intensity with which climate anxiety can disrupt our sense of security (Ojala 2016), and with it, the green modernism that believes that rational choices can contribute to progressive, sustainable development (Thoyre 2015). Comments regarding the uncertainty of how global humanity will respond, and that serious responses might not be catalysed until ‘a new destructive level of nature’ manifests itself emphasise that climate anxiety disrupts our taken for granted beliefs about ourselves, human nature and our individual and collective abilities to act rationally or exert control over non-human nature.

Frustration: Disabling individuals

Frustration arises when a subject is faced with barriers or obstacles and is thus unable to achieve their plans, goals, or ideals (Hufnagel 2017). It is thus a sense of a loss of agency or power and leads to a disintegration of the sense of the self as a capable actor. Frustration is a common emotion experienced by those who have tried to respond to climate change but have been confronted with inefficacy, disempowerment, disappointment, and/or non-achievement (Lenzen, Dey, and Murray 2002, Albrecht 2005, Randall 2009, Cunsolo Willox et al. 2013, Bray et al. 2018). Such inefficacy was articulated in this statement from CCR15: ‘on a daily basis, I feel like I’m not doing enough, I’m not achieving enough to create this huge impact I’m waiting for. Though I feel like I’m not doing enough, I don’t know what else I can do.’

Given climate change is a collective action problem (Tosun and Schoenefeld 2017), it makes sense that individualised efforts at agency produce frustration (Ojala 2016, Kelsey 2017). Acknowledgement of the need for coordinated collective action and the frustration that emerges from the lack of it is evident in this quotation: ‘In the real world, who really cares? I know that climate change is a collective problem, but who is going to actually contribute to a solution?’ While disabling individualised agency, frustration can thus reconfigure the boundaries between self and other. As this statement suggests, frustration can rupture otherwise close relationships: ‘I am constantly butting heads with sceptics and non-believers (particularly my father in law) regarding climate change. It is so frustrating that fellow inhabitants don’t understand the magnitude of the situation.’ On the other hand, shared feelings of frustration can be ‘we-creating’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012, 149), as this student articulates: ‘I remember a unanimous feeling of frustration shared by the whole class.’ Rather than frustration distancing this student from others, frustration served to articulate the inability and complicity they share with others: ‘I felt this frustration towards governments, companies, humans and myself.’ Throughout CCR15, climate change frustrated us, and enrolled us in a process Braidotti (2013) terms dis-identification: the breakdown of established ways of being, identifying and relating.

Overwhelm: Sinking the individual self

To be overwhelmed has a specifically climatic etymology: to be inundated by water. Overwhelm can be, like frustration, a feeling of being rendered incapable. But overwhelm emerges from encounters with problems of an incomprehensible and possibly insurmountable scale, ones that do not just disable, but dissolve our sense of self. Feeling overwhelmed feels like drowning, being engulfed and submerged as we flail against tides far exceeding our strength, which in the context of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, bigger storm surges and more intense flooding, being overwhelmed seems likely to be a characteristic experience of climate change in more ways than one.

Feeling overwhelmed is a common response to climate change, due to its temporal urgency and spatial scale (Weintrobe 2013a, Henderson et al. 2017, IPCC 2007, 101). Past emissions and potential future climates are experienced as a temporal pressure on the present, as scientists, activists and policy makers urge us to reduce emissions before it is ‘too late,’ year after year (Pearce 2005, Adam 2008, Thornhill 2013, Figueres et al. 2017, IPCC 2018). Spatially, the interconnectedness of the climate system which means that leaving the lights on in Australia may mean death for polar bears exerts a global pressure¾the ‘weight of the world’¾on the local arena. The massive scale of climate change was repeatedly discussed by students in CCR15, such as the statement that ‘climate change is everything and it is going to affect everything.’

The intensity and scale of climate change’s ‘impressions’ can ‘surface’ us otherwise (Ahmed 2004, 26–27). Being overwhelmed by climate change can thus upend or crush the self, as space-time-matter condenses and implodes in on us. As one student said in CCR15: ‘I have felt small in the face of climate change before,’ indicating the capacity of overwhelm to engage us in processes of becoming-with climate change. Another commented that ‘climate change is huge, overwhelming, and I feel frustrated and angry. I am extremely cynical that humanity will do anything to mitigate climate change before it is too late,’ which succinctly connects these issues of temporal and spatial scale and emotional responses to them. We can also be overwhelmed by a strong experience of other emotions, as articulated by this statement: ‘I have been overwhelmed by joy, fear, and passion.’ In this sense, being overwhelmed¾and the frequency with which students cited feeling overwhelmed¾demonstrates how the encounter with climate change is diffractive and affective: a process that elicits, although does not determine, the experience of a wide range of very intense, and potentially conflicting, emotions.

Guilt: Internalising responsibility

Guilt is an internally directed sensation that the self has committed wrong or failed to be accountable. Guilt is thus an internalisation of blame which can operate at individualised or collective scales (Wang and Lin 2018, Ferguson and Branscombe 2010). As such, performances of guilt function to articulate, and potentially counter, the boundary of the subject that is responsible (see e.g. Conradie 2010, 2012). Climate change engagement efforts have often sought to induce feelings of guilt as it has been thought that guilt motivates mitigative action (Markowitz and Shariff 2012, Markowitz 2012, Ferguson and Branscombe 2010). Thus, for those of us who live in high carbon economies or live high carbon lifestyles, encountering climate change commonly involves the experience of guilt (Lenzen, Dey, and Murray 2002, Randall 2009, Weintrobe 2013b, Höijer 2010, Jacquet 2017, Kleres and Wettergren 2017). 

Guilt was a common emotional response in CCR15. Frequently, guilty performances articulated a neoliberal subjectivity, as this statement suggests: ‘I questioned whether my actions were creating any positive change. Was I simply another facet at the root of this problem?’ However, at other times, climate complicity was recognised as a social phenomenon, and knowledge of these social processes functioned to blur the boundaries between the self and others, attributing responsibility to a more collective kind of subject. For example, one student stated that the course left them ‘with an overwhelming sense of guilt, and many questions surrounding the basic morality of human kind which sees so many people turn a blind eye,’ which suggests that both the individual and the species were seen to be responsible for climate change. At other times, distinguishing ‘us’ from others ‘who can barely find enough food for one meal a day,’ students argued that ‘we’ and ‘Western society’ who ‘hyperconsume and waste everything’ are ‘to blame.’ Such analyses led to moral interrogation, such as the rhetorical question ‘what happened to karma?’ As such statements indicate, guilt is a practice of articulating the responsible subject, which while uncomfortable, can be a step towards effective response-ability.

Grief: Diagnosing relationships

Grief is an intense and sustained feeling of sorrow that emerges in response to the loss of desirable relationships (Brinkmann and Kofod 2017). Loss follows undesirable change, and climate change ‘changes everything’ (Klein 2014) and will thus initiate and accelerate myriad, irreversible losses (Haraway 2016, Barnett et al. 2016, Tschakert et al. 2019). Grief and sadness are thus characteristic responses to encountering climate change, whether that is through experiencing the direct ecological impacts or through more existential modes of engagement (Randall 2009, Yusoff 2012, Hall 2013, Hobbs 2013, McKinnon 2014, Roelvink and Zolkos 2011, Cunsolo Willox et al. 2013, Drew 2013, Head and Harada 2017, Kelly 2017, Seaman 2016, Hasbach 2015).

Performances of climate grief diagnose relationships. To experience, identify and express grief involves articulating or recognising relationships at the same moment as realising that they are under threat or ailing (Ruddick 2017, Mathews 2011). As Gabrys argues ‘“the end of the world” is less a scene of the planet as an apocalyptic fireball, and more an encounter with the relations that we have ignored, overlooked or even ruined’ (2018, 61), and as Haraway states, sometimes those of us who ‘think, read, study, agitate, and care [about such ecological crises] know too much, and it is too heavy’ (Haraway 2016, 4). Yet while painful, grief ‘is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying’ (Haraway 2016, 39) as it articulates that which is or may become lost as a valuable entity, and therefore, constitutes it as a political subject (Cunsolo Willox 2012).

During CCR15, through our course learning materials we encountered the wide variety of changes that climate change engenders, and in response, performed a wide range of variations of sadness, such as being gloomy, depressed, disheartened, dismayed, etc. Our climate grief was evident in statements like ‘the Earth is fucked’ and ‘I feel emotionally tied to the fate of our environment.’ The following quotation from CCR15 concisely demonstrates a moment of identifying a relationship at the same time as noticing it is under threat:

It struck me that the world as we know it, and the way we live, is going to dramatically change. Even if we stop our current globally destructive practices right now, the climatic flow on effects will continue into the future.

The following one more explicitly articulates the upsetting affects that accompany such diagnoses: ‘[It is] a real trauma, knowing that the land is changing and there’s probably no future for you or anyone else there.’ In CCR15 many of us performed such climate grief, diagnosing relationships, as we intra-acted with the ‘everything change’ (Atwood 2015, n.p.) of climate change. This grief generated recognition that we are composed, re-composed and decomposed through our relations with the more-than-human world.

Hope: Bearing worlds

Hope is a belief that positive future outcomes are possible (Kelsey 2017) which is different to optimism (McKinnon 2014). Optimism is a sense of certainty that things will be okay, but hope emerges from the same conditions as anxiety: uncertainty and contingency (Ojala 2016, Roelvink and Zolkos 2011). We often oscillate between feeling hopeful and anxious about the same thing (Brown and Pickerill 2009), and at times can feel both simultaneously. As Anderson articulates, hope ‘is entangled in the circulation, and displacement, of other affects and emotions’ (2006, 747). Hope is thus a characteristic affective performance that emerges from encounters with climate change, which, as stated earlier, is inherently uncertain (Ojala 2016).

To hope is to expend energy bearing worlds, in two complementary ways. Hoping bears worlds in the sense of labouring to generate desirable and possible, though always uncertain and indeterminate, futures (Hauer, Østergaard Nielsen, and Niewöhner 2018, Albrecht 2005, Rose 2013, 2015). Without action towards such worlds, we can’t properly be said to be hoping¾if we feel hopeful but do nothing, we are really feeling optimistic, believing that someone else will look after it or that it will be okay. Hoping thus generates difference, creates alternatives, and strives to do things otherwise (Hauer, Østergaard Nielsen, and Niewöhner 2018, Ojala 2016). Hoping also bears worlds in the sense of enduring (Hauer, Østergaard Nielsen, and Niewöhner 2018, Ojala 2016) the pain that current and potential climate change engenders, as discussed above in the section on grief. This aligns with the work of Head (2016, 44) who believes that in a climate changing world grief will be our constant ‘companion,’ and with Cunsolo Willox (2012), Haraway (2016) and Randall (2009) who argue that in order to respond effectively to climate change we must engage in the ‘work’ (Cunsolo Willox, 2012) or ‘tasks’ (Randall, 2009) of ‘mourning irreversible losses’ (Haraway 2015, 160). Without effectively mourning, we will not be able to process our grief and we will thus be unable to effectively respond (Andrew 2016, van Dooren 2014b). And if we cannot effectively respond, then there is no hope. Thus, mourning is a necessary part of hoping. As such, mourning and hoping are understood to be complementary and entwined labours or responses (Ojala 2016, Cunsolo Willox 2012) that together ‘enable bodies to go on’ (Anderson 2006, 744) while ensuring that we make a difference in the world (Haraway, 1997).

Hope, understood as a practice of bearing worlds, was performed in CCR15, and the positive feelings associated with it were sometimes explicitly articulated. Learning about climate change was described as ‘a rollercoaster of emotions’ on more than one occasion, evidencing the oscillation between the painful and reassuring emotions (Ojala, 2016). One student stated that ‘the tutorials were scary; though I feel I learnt so much from simply listening to people speak from their heart and experience always leaving feeling refreshed.’ Such statements indicated that the affirmative affective experiences were entangled with those that overwhelmed or undermined us. Similarly, another articulated a sense of agency emerging from such entangled hoping-mourning: ‘despite the sometimes gloomy subject matter, I’ve often left lectures feeling hopeful, for I can begin to envisage the path ahead, and also how I might have a role in creating it,’ aligning with research which suggests that sensations of hope can inspire climate change action (Ojala 2012, Li and Monroe 2017, Feldman and Hart 2017, Stevenson and Peterson 2016).

Understood as an embodied labour of bearing worlds, hoping-mourning establishes novel, ethical and political relationships and subjectivities (Cunsolo Willox, 2012). As discussed above, we mourn lost or potentially threatened relationships (Yusoff 2012). Through this labouring we enact new connectivities (Brown and Pickerill 2009), losing ‘our former selves’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012, 145) and articulating new collective subjectivities (Anderson 2006). While unpredictable and uncontrollable, this ‘we-creating’ (Cunsolo Willox 2012, 149) potential of hoping-mourning is itself political and ethical (Head 2016, Roelvink and Zolkos 2011) as it destabilises the individualistic subject and enables us to act-with (Seaman 2016). Conversely, a sense of ‘we’ can create hope (Divakaran and Nerbonne 2017, Kelsey 2017), or perhaps more accurately, hope and collective subjectivities co-enact each other through intra-action (Singh 2013). Of course, if such collective subjectivities cannot be constituted, grief can be intensely isolating and individuating too (Cunsolo Willox 2012, Swim et al. 2009).

This co-emergence of connection and hopeful sensations was evident in CCR15. Students occasionally stated that they felt enthused, encouraged, inspired, motivated, joyful, reassured, empowered and/or optimistic, but much more frequently, that they felt hopeful. These feelings exclusively emerged through the actual or potential establishment of connections with other climate-changed humans: knowing that others shared their frustrations, cared about the world too, and were doing things to address climate change. This first quotation speaks to the endurance of mourning and the diffractive, hopeful potential of acting-with others on a global scale:

Through all this overwhelming, devastating news and understanding the reality of climate change, I have grasped hold of an exciting potential for global unification. I have been encouraged by the possibility that the climate changing might be the one factor that pulls our divided world together; to form a united social mass of individuals who want to see a brighter future and to see people and our environment being put over profit.

Other hopeful statements referred to physically meeting and connecting with others within the class. As one student stated, the climate action enacted by one’s peers¾whether in the present or the future¾can generate hopeful sensations: ‘knowing that all the individuals in this subject are all about making a change towards a better future and are tackling the vast amount of issues within climate change, I felt reassured and somewhat optimistic.’ This is the labour of bearing worlds: collectively working through ongoing pain to generate change and difference, and thus, better, more positive, yet never certain, futures.

Learning to live-with climate change

In CCR15, climate change’s temporal urgency and global scale, its inherent uncertainty, its nature as a collective action problem and its relational composition intra-acted with our situatedness in neoliberal, high carbon economies which had promised us individual success and better futures if we worked hard. Across the semester, our prior subjectivities were reconfigured, as our modern, individualised subjectivities were significantly decomposed, and in their place a promising, if ill defined, collective subject was emerging. As Tsing describes, we were ‘forced to be ever more aware of the process of finding allies and building collaborations when we realize[d] we are not the crest of a wave to an imagined better future’ (2018, 75). We were learning¾implicitly and explicitly, consciously and subconsciously¾that who we are and how we live is always affected by and entangled with climate, and we were also increasing our capacity to engage with and endure the unsettling and distressing realities of climate change. We were learning to live-with climate change.

Informed by various Indigenous, ecological and posthuman philosophies (Todd 2016, Wright 2011, Rose 1996, Haraway 2008, Mowaljarlai and Malnic 1993), learning to live-with climate change involves recognition that life arises through relations. Living is always living-with. There is no existence outside of ecology, and our human experiences and identities are intimately entangled with the ‘environment.’ Learning to live-with climate change is a deep attunement to the entanglement of all life and the cultivation of appropriate ways of relating to and engaging with that world. It is an informed practice that yearns for and creates more liveable climate futures. By engaging with the varied ways in which we are entangled with climate change, we can develop more embodied, animated, ecological and response-able ways of inhabiting and enacting our shared world. In managerial terms, it is therefore a process that mitigates climate change.

Relatedly, learning to live-with climate change also involves the emotional and affective forms of adaptation that are encompassed in the common idiom ‘learning to live with’ something. In an era of rapid global climate change, any effort to acknowledge interconnection or entanglement will identify that valuable relations are threatened, and thus involve grief for those changing relations (Cunsolo Willox 2012). Learning to live-with climate change is not about becoming resigned to climate change, giving up, or thinking that it is too late to do anything. It is about recognising that future ways of living-with will be radically different to those we have come to know and/or love, and grieving for the losses we are already experiencing and those we are likely to experience. Learning to live-with climate change thus refers to the entwined affective labours of identifying and mourning relationships as they are torn apart, disfigured and/or regenerated as the planet warms.

But learning to live-with climate change also involves continuing to act (-with) for a future which is desirable despite being different, or perhaps acting-with for a future that is less bad than it would have been if we did not act. It is a process of bearing-worlds, of hoping-mourning, of staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016). Learning to live-with climate change refers to

how the making of worlds and the sense of the end of a certain kind of world coincide: Here are new articulations of subjects, relations and environments that are going on and unfolding, not always with a plan, but still settling into particular lifelines that inform the possibilities of other worlds to come. (Gabrys 2018, 61)

That is, the affective labours of learning to live-with climate change are intra-actions: they emerge through more-than-human entanglements; they reconfigure identities and relationships; and they produce difference in the world. Through learning to live-with climate change we will become-other to ourselves, which is both necessary and desirable if we are to decompose, rather than just displace, the anthropocentrism that led to climate change (Head 2016). Yet despite its value, learning to live-with climate change is going to be disconcerting and distressing¾which does not mean that it will not also be joyful, reassuring, refreshing and/or invigorating. These varied affective experiences will accompany us as we transform our identities, cultivate collective response-abilities, and enact situated knowledges (Haraway 1988).

Learning to live-with climate change speaks to how the task facing us is far bigger than cognitive comprehension or behaviour change approaches to climate change education have recognised (Kagawa and Selby 2010). Learning to live-with climate change is an existential and ontological task of composing not just new lifestyles, but new conceptions of what life is, what it means to live, and how to live well. We are asking students, and people more generally, to engage with what has been described as a ‘super wicked problem’ (Lazarus 2008, 1153) and the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’ (Hudson 2017, n.p.), but I am not sure any words we have available can do justice to the political, social, personal, emotional, ethical, intellectual and ecological complexities and challenges facing us, in all our different ways. Learning to live-with climate change is a pedagogy that acknowledges that while climate change is ‘not a problem to be solved,’ nor is it simply ‘a condition in which we are enmeshed’ (Hulme 2009, 364). Learning to live-with climate change recognises the myriad, overlapping, compounding and continuously morphing situations that climate change poses, which are unfair, painful and unresolvable, but which still demand our best efforts. While 1.5°C might still be achievable and is certainly more desirable than 2 or 3 or 4, 5, or 6 degrees of warming (IPCC 2018), the 1 degree we have already experienced is horrifying, and our best-case scenarios still involve massive losses, unconscionable injustices, complex and traumatic compromises, and a whole lot of unpredictable, uncontrollable and unmanageable eventualities. Learning to live-with climate change acknowledges that there are no easy ‘solutions’; that we will be living-with climate change in some ways or others, no matter how coordinated or ethical our collective actions may be; and that we¾in all our myriad forms of ‘we’¾have to find ways to keep going despite this. Graphs, imagery and art (Hawkins and Kanngieser 2017, Chapman et al. 2016), storytelling (Carlin 2010, Veland et al. 2018, Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie, and Foster 2017), meditation and mindfulness (Panno et al. 2017, Wamsler and Brink 2018, Wang et al. 2017), community building (Cole 2016, Divakaran and Nerbonne 2017), political action (Grady-Benson and Sarathy 2016), active participation and leadership (Monroe et al. 2017, Cutter-Mackenzie and Rousell 2018), personal reflection (Leduc and Crate 2013), self-care (Lloro-Bidart and Semenko 2017), virtual reality and games (Rumore, Schenk, and Susskind 2016, Wu and Lee 2015), friendship and love (Godfrey 2015), justice framings (Stapleton 2018, Waldron et al. 2016), ethical interrogation (Krueger 2014), embodied (Neimanis 2015, Rooney 2018), place based (Hu and Chen 2016) and faith based (Hitzhusen 2012) approaches to climate change engagement are all useful. But most likely nothing we can do will be sufficient to achieve what we want or help society feel okay about it all, and we just have to grapple onwards with the ever-shifting complexities of climate change, doing our entangled best to reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts.

Learning to live-with climate change should not¾and will not¾be limited to the enclosed spaces or times that are designated for formal (or even informal) education. But suggesting that all (or at least, many) sectors of society can, should and will engage in this process (whether intentionally or not) is certainly not to say that it involves clearly definable, pre-given practices or identifiable goals or standards. It is, as Snaza (2013) articulates, a ‘bewildering’ process through which we are likely to encounter dead ends, get lost, and reconfigure individual and collective human identities as we go. What we might do in order to learn to live-with climate change will be incredibly varied, as learning to live-with climate change will always be situated in particular, unique time-places which will be experiencing context specific materialisations of climate change.

Affective adaptation

My sense is that most environmental/sustainability engagement efforts focus most energy towards teaching people about ecological connectivity, and considerably less on the emotional grit that learning to live-with climate change requires. Yet no doubt those who are able to maintain engagement with ecological crises have a suite of affective capacities, tools and practices that enable them to do so, even if they are subconscious, tacit, unacknowledged or taken for granted. As a conclusion to this paper, I would like to suggest that we consider affective adaptation as a crucial element of environmental/sustainability/climate change engagement efforts. Affective adaptation encompasses, differs from and exceeds emotional resilience (Davenport 2017). It draws on literature in climate change adaptation that critiques the neoliberalism and self-sufficiency of resilience (McEvoy, Fünfgeld, and Bosomworth 2013, Cretney and Bond 2014, Tschakert and Tuana 2013), as well as affect theory which critiques the individualism and anthropocentrism of some approaches to emotions (Ahmed 2004, Anderson 2009).

Affective adaptation is a process of socio-ecological evolution, and requires that we transform our affective expectations, skills, repertoires, routines and relations. It is a metamorphosis, a changing of the form of the self, which will no doubt be tricky, painful and probably ugly and confusing, but which will lead to necessary and beneficial changes so as to relate, integrate and work with the changing world in ways that enable multispecies ongoingness. Affective adaptation is a process of ‘getting by in terrifying times’ (Tsing 2018, 73), but also of ‘making worlds at the end of the world’ (Gabrys 2018, 63). It is an openness to emotional challenges, a capacity to endure, live through, welcome and encourage changes and to guide others in their efforts to bear worlds.

To reiterate, affective adaptation is not just coping, it is not just resilience, and it is not just a transformation of the self. Affective adaptation is also the capacity to navigate and work with the emotional and affective responses of others. This is necessary because anyone who knows and cares about ecological crises ends up a volunteer freelance environmental educator: trying to get others to know and care about, and act for, the environment. Thus, for any sustainability student (or concerned person living in the world), the skills to be with people in distress and support them in their own grief work are essential (Moser 2012). That is, we need to consider environmental and sustainability efforts as forms of care work (van Dooren 2014a) and consider the cultivation of the knowledge, skills and capacities to care for others and self as core to sustainability education. But teaching affective adaptation will not be straightforward. It is, by definition, an open-ended process that can only unfold in partnership with the dynamic, unpredictable more-than-human world, and it is also going to be traumatic. Yet there are certainly some practices that will help, which might include cultivating the capacities to attune to emotional experiences, explicitly teaching self-care and fostering connections with others who feel similarly. There will be myriad other ways as well. I think what is key is that we do not re-centre the individualised human in our efforts to enable them to begin and continue caring for others. As a process of relational regeneration, affective adaptation, in contrast to emotional resilience, can only occur through relations and is thus pedagogically more likely to cultivate the relational sense of wellbeing that is necessary if we are to learn to live-with climate change.

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