Participants in Climate Strike protest on the University of Kansas campus. Photo by Ashley Golledge. Well, our little climate strike in Lawrence, Kansas didn’t produce the numbers the ones in NYC or German cities did, but it was not bad, by Lawrence standards: about 50 people at City Hall; 75 on campus; close to 100? at the rally that evening. Fairly well-behaved, even sedate, as befits a demonstration in Kansas, but sincere and intent. Some very nice signs, too. Of course, the fact that there weren’t over 1,000 people at each of those three events suggests that people’s heads are still lodged in a very dark place, where climate is concerned.
But it was heartening to see that there were actually some young people at all of these events. Whether or not they outnumbered us grayhairs, I couldn’t tell. But the polling I’ve seen suggests that, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be worried about climate change. Which stands to reason: you’re going to experience more of it in your lifetime. The effects will be cumulative & will accumulate exponentially. Not a very reassuring prospect. My question for teachers of creative writing or leaders of writing workshops: are students/participants writing about the climate crisis? I know they’re writing about nature, or even environmentalism. But climate change per se? Personally, I haven’t seen much of it – yet. Perhaps these demos will put it on the radar of more young adults. But people, young or otherwise, write about matters of most concern to them. They write about struggles with family, with substance abuse and mental health, with racism, sexism, homophobia. They write about love (fall semester) and breakups (spring semester). They have enough problems and possibilities in life without thinking about an abstraction like “climate.” Part of it may be peer pressure: who wants to be the weirdo Debbie Downer who writes about mass extinction, weather catastrophes, and death death death? A workshop leader certainly could offer prompts relating to climate chaos (“Funny weather we’ve been having, huh?”); but I’m allergic to forcing people to write in a particular way or even about a particular subject. This issue also circles back to that fundamental question: how do you represent something that is happening everywhere at once, and therefore nowhere in particular? Call it a “hyperobject” or the “environmental sublime” or whatever, but it certainly does challenge one’s powers of imagination. So maybe that’s precisely the place to start: finding a way to challenge students to represent the unrepresentable. Such an exercise could easily devolve into talking about the globe, the big blue marble, pictures of flowers with sad faces, etc., or it’s-a-small-world-after-all faux cosmopolitanism. But more specific prompts might work. Write a story about someone your age whose house and family member have just been washed away in a flood. For the third time in two years. Do an oral history of the million-year-old person. Or a science-fiction poem from the POV of someone trying to find bugs and grubs to eat and filtering their own urine to avoid dehydration. (OK – that one’s a little traumatizing, never mind.) But you get the idea. Sure, we know we’re all immortal and invulnerable; but just imagine What if? . . . If communities and countries are going to be ready for the effects of climate chaos, their citizens and leaders are going to have to take it personally – before things really get out of hand. They are going to have to see it as a threat to their personal bodies and their families’ bodies, to their personal life routines and aspirations (e.g., starting a family and feeding them). We’ve got to make it real. And since the leaders all believe they’ll be dead before the SHTF in a big way, it de facto (and unfairly) falls to those who are going to be their age when it does. I’m averse to foisting my ideology upon students – perhaps I’m a dewy-eyed Deweyan liberal-democratic mushmind, that way. But if I can get them to envision the near future as the train wreck they can’t look away from, maybe they won’t . . .
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |