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 Saadia Faruqi

“You don’t have to fix the whole world. Sometimes saving one small thing is enough.”

by Paolo Bacigalupi

“The wreckage of the twin dead cities was good evidence of just how slow the people of the Accelerated Age had been to accept their changing circumstances”

by Jane Lister Reis, Margie Lister Muenzer

“Everyone needs to help make our planet healthy again. The animals are counting on us!”

by April Pulley Sayre

“Thank you for beginnings, / for endings, / for lifetimes. Thank you for being / our home”

by Greta Thunberg

“This is the biggest story in the world”

by Penelope Arlon, Susan Hayes

“This is a book that turns itself into dozens of eco-projects to inspire you to think more about the planet we all call home.”

by Bren MacDibble, Zana Fraillon

“Yes, I know people in the old days lived in giant mega-cities smothered in dirty clouds … and parts of the honoured and natural world died and the seas rose and we invaded the wild areas and new diseases took hold and killed most of their children and now we have to stay in our townships and keep our hair short and our hands clean and not make a peep of pollution and not increase our numbers even by one. … Three hundred and fifty kind, ethical, truthful people on seven hundred hectares or not at all.”

One Earth, cover

by Megan Herbert, Michael E. Mann

“I’m just a kid. What can I do? / Someone must help us. It’s now up to you.”

by M.H. Clark

“Today we will keep our eyes open for tiny, perfect things.”

by Yuval Noah Harari

“Animals and plants depend on one another, so if something happens to one kind of creature, it usually influences many others. And this law even applies to you”

by Carole Lindstrom

“We are stewards of the Earth / Our spirits have not been broken / We are water protectors. WE STAND!”

by Robert Beatty

“Do you need the wooden wheel […] more than those trees needed their lives? Do you need the meat of the deer more than the deer needs her life, more than the fawn needs her mother?”

World Without Fish

by Mark Kurlansky

“You cannot afford to be passive. … The survival of not only the oceans but of our world is at stake”

by Jason Chin

“In the vast cosmic web, in the Milky Way, in the solar system, there is a small blue planet called Earth.”