“Future Directions: Youth Climate Distress and Climate Justice”

In Climate Change & Youth Mental Health

Climate change is the biggest threat of our century, one that will impact every aspect of children’s lives: their physical, emotional, moral, financial, and social health and well-being. The relationship between the climate crisis and mental health in young people is therefore by definition multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural, requiring multiple perspectives on how to understand and guide younger generations. This book provides a unique synthesis of those perspectives – the science, psychology, and social forces that can be brought to bear on supporting young people’s psychological well-being. No matter the setting in which an adult may interact with younger people, this book provides the intellectual rigor and tools to ensure those interactions are as helpful and supportive as they can be.

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“Afterword: The Urgency of Slow Teaching”

In Teaching the Literature of Climate Change

Over the past several decades, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, Octavia E. Butler, and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner have explored climate change through literature, reflecting current anxieties about humans’ impact on the planet. Emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinarity, this volume embraces literature as a means to cultivate students’ understanding of the ongoing climate crisis, ethics in times of disaster, and the intrinsic intersectionality of environmental issues.

Contributors discuss speculative climate futures, the Anthropocene, postcolonialism, climate anxiety, and the usefulness of storytelling in engaging with catastrophe. The essays offer approaches to teaching interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses, including strategies for team-teaching across disciplines and for building connections between humanities majors and STEM majors. The volume concludes with essays that explore ways to address grief and to contemplate a hopeful future in the face of apocalyptic predictions.

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“Coming of Age at the End of the World: The Affective Arc of Environmental Studies Curricula.”

In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment

Scholars of ecocriticism have long tried to articulate emotional relationships to environments. Only recently, however, have they begun to draw on the complex interdisciplinary body of research known as affect theory. Affective Ecocriticism takes as its premise that ecocritical scholarship has much to gain from the rich work on affect and emotion happening within social and cultural theory, geography, psychology, philosophy, queer theory, feminist theory, narratology, and neuroscience, among others. This vibrant and important volume imagines a more affective—and consequently more effective—ecocriticism, as well as a more environmentally attuned affect studies.

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“Why Do Nothing When the Planet Needs Us Most?” 

In Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World

“One of the penalties of an ecological education,” wrote Aldo Leopold, “is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” As climate change and other environmental degradations become more evident, experts predict that an increasing number of people will suffer emotional and psychological distress as a result. Many are feeling these effects already. In the pages of Solastalgia, they will find a source of companionship, inspiration, and advice.

The concept of solastalgia comes from the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who describes it as “the homesickness we feel while still at home.” It’s the pain and longing we feel as we realize the world immediately around us is changing, with our love for that world serving as a catalyst for action on its behalf.

This powerful anthology brings together thirty-four writers—educators, journalists, poets, and scientists—to share their emotions in the face of environmental crisis. They share their solastalgia, their beloved places, their vulnerability, their stories, their vision of what we can create.

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