Topic: Climate Literacy

Sign that says There is No Planet B, Climate Literacy, Climate Lit

Climate Literacy (origin: NOAA)

Climate literacy—sometimes called “climate change literacy”—does not have a widely accepted definition yet. The notion of climate literacy was first used by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) in 2006 as a synonym for “climate science literacy,” i.e. “an understanding of your influence on climate and climate’s influence on you and society.” The concept of climate science literacy received more extensive treatment in NOAA’s 2009 brochure “Climate Literacy: the Essential Principles of Climate Science.” However, for scholars in the environmental humanities, climate science literacy—or, understanding the science behind climate change—is not exactly the same as climate literacy—or, understanding our entanglements with, responsibilities in, and agency in regard to climate change. Climate literacy, Hiser and Lynch argue, is a wider concept involving not just “various disciplinary lenses” but the kind of knowing that is “emotionally charged and intimately connected to one’s worldview and paradigms of time, space, and nature” (98).

As proposed by Oziewicz, climate literacy refers to “an understanding of the climate emergency—its facts, drivers, impacts, and urgency—that centers on developing values, attitudes, and behavioral change aligned with how we should live to safeguard the Earth’s integrity in the present and for future generations” (p.34). This framing of climate literacy as an integrated and multidisciplinary competence centers two forms of knowledge: the awareness that the present moment offers us a narrow window for transformative action that can usher in an ecological civilization (hope and rapture ideologies); and an understanding of how climate change today is driven by human activity in general and the ecocidal operations of neoliberal capitalism in particular (Capitalocene). The direct relationship between neoliberalism and climate change—explored, among others, in Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), Klein’s The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal (2019), and Michael Mann’s The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back the Planet (2021)—is a fundamental component of climate literacy.

©2021 ClimateLit (Marek Oziewicz)

Related terms: climate change denial, systemic drivers [of climate change], climate activismecological civilizationecocideneoliberalism

 

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by Pari Thomson

“Daisy felt all around her the unmistakeable atmosphere of Mallowmarsh on the breeze: of cool water and silver birches and plum trees, the tang of rich and concentrated green magic that had built up in one place for centuries. She was almost dizzy with it. How could she have not sensed it before?”

by Joyce Sidman

“Earth, we know you can’t answer all our questions in words. You answer in other ways.”

by Nicole Godwin

“My family are brave. And they are strong.”

by Abi Elphinstone

“My brother and my friend in Jungledrop taught me that worlds are not built by people of power!” she cried. “Worlds are built by people who care! Kingdoms go on because kindness goes on.”

by Barry Timms

“Love grows everywhere… / from country farm to city square. / From desert village, hot and dry, / to mountain home where eagles fly.”

by Claudia Dávila

“When everything starts costing too much, maybe it’s time to change the way we live.”

by John Musker, Ron Clements

“I know who you are / Who you truly are”

by Patricia MacLachlan

“She guards all the creatures in all the oceans—the black manta rays sleek like shadows, the shining parrot fish, the tiny krill who swim with millions of other krill to look big. And the whales who are big.”

by Douglas W. Tallamy, Sarah L. Thomson

“We just have to change the way we think about plants.”

by Greta Thunberg

“We will never stop fighting for the living planet and for our future.”

by Loll Kirby

“I am smart enough to read this book. I care enough to hear the news. I know enough to make the change. I am old enough to save the planet”.

by Eileen Spinelli

“One Earth, so beautiful / Remember—only one”

by Hyewon Yum

“Oh, my! What’s that? / It’s a PUDDLE!”

by Yuval Noah Harari

“Homo Sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s … eas[y] for us to imagine we’re the pinnacle of creation, separated from the rest of the animal kingdom by an unbridgeable chasm”

by Nguyen Thi Thu Trang

“Bears eat what they plant, and they plant what they eat. Bear should be wild and free.”