Sarah Jaquette Ray

A youth movement is reenergizing global environmental activism. The "climate generation"--late millennials and iGen, or Generation Z--is demanding that policy makers and government leaders take immediate action to address the dire outcomes predicted by climate science. Those inheriting our planet's environmental problems expect to encounter challenges, but they may not have the skills to grapple with the feelings of powerlessness and despair that may arise when they confront this seemingly intractable situation. Drawing on a decade of experience leading and teaching in college environmental studies programs, Sarah Jaquette Ray has created an "existential tool kit" for the climate generation. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, social movements, mindfulness, and the environmental humanities, Ray explains why and how we need to let go of eco-guilt, resist burnout, and cultivate resilience while advocating for climate justice. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety is the essential guidebook for the climate generation--and perhaps the rest of us--as we confront the greatest environmental threat of our time.

How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet

A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety

Jay Sibara

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between “wild” and “built” environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing “disability.” Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.

Toward an Eco-Crip Theory

Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities

Jennifer Atkinson

An easy-to-use field guide for teaching on climate injustice and building resilience in your students—and yourself—in an age of crisis. As feelings of eco-grief and climate anxiety grow, educators are grappling with how to help students learn about the violent systems causing climate change while simultaneously navigating the emotions this knowledge elicits. This book provides resources for developing emotional and existential tenacity in college classrooms so that students can stay engaged. Featuring insights from scholars, educators, activists, artists, game designers, and others who are integrating emotional wisdom into climate justice education, this user-friendly guide offers a robust menu of interdisciplinary, plug-and-play teaching strategies, lesson plans, and activities to support student transformation and build resilience. The book also includes reflections from students who have taken classes that incorporate their emotions in the curricula. Galvanizing and practical, The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators will equip both educators and their students with tools for advancing climate justice.

How to Teach in a Burning World

The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators

This two-book set provides essential resources for climate change education--ideal for teachers and students of environmental studies, sustainability, and social justice. A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety is written for climate-generation students--millennials and Gen Z--who are navigating the emotional and social challenges of climate change. * Practical focus that empowers readers to move beyond eco-guilt, prevent burnout, and build resilience * Ready-to-assign text that supports student learning and classroom discussions The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators provides instructors and TAs with a toolkit to build their climate justice and resilience courses. * Classroom-ready teaching strategies, lesson plans, and activities * Interdisciplinary approaches and student reflections * Integrates emotions, critical thinking, and justice-centered pedagogy This bundled set forms a comprehensive toolkit for climate change education, giving teachers practical resources to assign in the classroom and students a guide for building resilience and engaging in climate justice.

Teachable Bundle

A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety and the Existential Toolkit

Kevin Maier

For millennia, “the North” has held a powerful sway in Western culture. Long seen through contradictions—empty of life yet full of promise, populated by indigenous communities yet ripe for conquest, pristine yet marked by a long human history—it has moved to the foreground of contemporary life as the most dramatic stage for the reality of climate change. This book brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to ask key questions about the North and how we’ve conceived it—and how conceiving of it in those terms has caused us to fail the region’s human and nonhuman life. Engaging questions of space, place, indigeneity, identity, nature, the environment, justice, narrative, history, and more, it offers a crucial starting point for an essential rethinking of both the idea and the reality of the North.

Space, Nature, Theory

Critical Norths

Sarah D. Wald

David J. Vazquez

Priscilla Solis Ybarra

The whiteness of mainstream environmentalism often fails to account for the richness and variety of Latinx environmental thought. Building on insights of environmental justice scholarship as well as critical race and ethnic studies, the editors and contributors to Latinx Environmentalisms map the ways Latinx cultural texts integrate environmental concerns with questions of social and political justice. Original interviews with creative writers, including Cherríe Moraga, Helena María Viramontes, and Héctor Tobar, as well as new essays by noted scholars of Latinx literature and culture, show how Latinx authors and cultural producers express environmental concerns in their work. These chapters, which focus on film, visual art, and literature—and engage in fields such as disability studies, animal studies, and queer studies—emphasize the role of racial capitalism in shaping human relationships to the more-than-human world and reveal a vibrant tradition of Latinx decolonial environmentalism. Latinx Environmentalisms accounts for the ways Latinx cultures are environmental, but often do not assume the mantle of “environmentalism.”

Place, Justice, and the Decolonial

Latinx Environmentalisms

With roots in eugenics and other social-control programs, modern American environmentalism is not always as progressive as we would like to think. In The Ecological Other, Sarah Jaquette Ray examines the ways in which environmentalism can create social injustice through discourses of the body. Ray investigates three categories of ecological otherness: people with disabilities, immigrants, and Native Americans. Extending recent work in environmental justice ecocriticism, Ray argues that the expression of environmental disgust toward certain kinds of bodies draws problematic lines between ecological “subjects”—those who are good for and belong in nature—and ecological “others”—those who are threats to or out of place in nature. Ultimately, The Ecological Other urges us to be more critical of how we use nature as a tool of social control and to be careful about the ways in which we construct our arguments to ensure its protection. The book challenges long-standing assumptions in environmentalism and will be of interest to those in environmental literature and history, American studies, disability studies, and Native American studies, as well as anyone concerned with issues of environmental justice.

Environmental Exclusion in American Culture

The Ecological Other

Approaching Critical Northern Issues Critically / Sarah Jaquette Ray and Kevin Maier -- Whose Arctic? Who Cares? : Place, Responsibility, and Elegiac Purpose in the Eskimo Curlew Extinction Narrative / Elspeth Tulloch-- Raven's World : Eco-elegy and Beyond in a Changing North / Will Elliott -- "The Bear Who Began It" and the Metaphorics of Climate Change / Allison Athens -- Indigeneity and Ecology in I'upiat and Faroese Whaling / Russell Fielding -- Saving Polar Bears and Other Objects / Kurtis Boyer -- Bare Life and Bear Love : Masculinity, Capital and Arctic Animals in the Nineteenth-Century North / John Miller -- Northern Relations : Colonial Whaling, Climate Change, and the Inception of a Collective Identity in Northern Alaska and the Northern Atlantic / Chie Sakakibara -- Landscapes on Hold : The Norwegian and Russian Barents Sea Coast in the New North / Peter Hemmersen and Janike Kampevold -- Knowing Land, Quantifying Nature : Assessing Environmental Impacts in the Sahtu Region, Northwest Territories / Carly Dokis -- Writing in the Anthropocene from the Global North to the Global South : Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Richard Power's The Echo Maker / Kyndra Turner -- Surveillance and the Self : Two Sami Filmmakers Explore Indigenous and Personal Sovereignty Crossing Sami Borderlands / Cheryl Fish -- Arctic Exposure : Nature, Race, and Regional Representation in Hollywood Film / Susan Kollin -- Understanding Landscape Change Using Oral Histories and Tlingit Place Names / Dan Monteith -- Prospecting for Buried Narratives in Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park and Preserve / Margot Higgins

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability." Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.

Sarah Jaquette Ray

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