Addressing climate change is one of the mega-responsibilities of our lifetimes—and the lifetimes of our students. Philosophy offers excellent tools and relevant resources for this daunting and necessary undertaking. There are many ways that you can integrate climate into your teaching, from tiny tweaks to reorienting your whole pedagogical approach. To be sure, there are risks to teaching climate. You don’t want to convert your students to misanthropy, paralyze them with fear, ensnare them in seemingly insurmountable paradoxes, overwhelm them with guilt, grief, or the sheer scale of the problem. There are pieces of academic philosophy that, without ginger handling, can lead students in unhelpful directions. But there is also philosophy that can help us all get a grip, get our priorities straight, and get going towards meaningful responses to climate change.
Here are three concrete suggestions for ways to try bringing climate into your philosophy teaching, in order of ascending scope.
One: Add a climate element to an existing course
Climate change is relevant to an awful lot of what we already teach in philosophy courses. Think about it—there are so many facets of the issue. There are questions about how we know; like “Who counts as a relevant expert on the climate?” and questions about how we ought to treat one another, relate to nature, and structure society; like “What would decolonized environmental policy look like?” You could sprinkle in some climate change related examples or case studies in a lecture or lesson plan, host a climate change film screening and discussion with the philosophy club, or swap in a climate reading somewhere on your syllabus.
Including climate material can be as subtle as you want it to be. You might, for instance, bring in a popular article on geoengineering for an activity on evaluating informal arguments. You might watch a short film on current pipeline resistance to motivate a class discussion about ethical principles. You can introduce the veil of ignorance by having students play a game about climate harm distribution in class. You could have your students read about connections between the global pandemic and climate change as an inroads to talking about common causes, solidarity, reparations, the concept of health, or any number of other issues. Heck, you could just play ANOHNI’s “4 Degrees” as your Philosophy and Gender students are taking their seats at the start of class. Once you start looking, the bridges are really everywhere.
Here’s a challenge: choose one course or other teaching context for this year and add one reading, assignment, or activity on climate.
Two: Teach a course on climate
Climate change makes an excellent lens through which to introduce students to philosophy, and similarly, an excellent anchor around which to structure higher-level courses.
Consider revising your Philosophy 101 course to invite students into the world of philosophy through the cohesive theme of climate change. Designing a Philosophy 101 course can be difficult in part because we are faced with too much to choose from when we are deciding what to curate for the students. Having a theme, like climate change, that threads through the entire course can both give us a useful filter in building our courses, and also give students an added sense of purposiveness when approaching course material and a ready way to connect it to their worlds outside your classroom. No matter what you invite them to engage with, they can approach the material asking: how does this bear on my understanding of climate change and what we ought to do about it?
A Philosophy 101: Climate Change Edition could, for instance, include an epistemology unit where students engage with Oreskes and Intemann alongside other philosophical work in epistemology and philosophy of science. It could include a metaphysics unit in which students encounter the non-identity problem and questions about intergenerational responsibility in the context of climate change through works by Parfit and Whyte. Students could explore issues of human rights and just war in a unit drawing on Caney and Fruh and Hedahl. Students could tackle the problem of personal and collective moral responsibility, and get an efficient introduction to ethical frameworks to boot, via Cripps’ argument for prioritizing promotional duties. And there are plenty of other possibilities that might appeal to you depending on your own expertise and interests including work on activism, art, emotion, gender, Indigeneity, race, time, etc.
Besides Philosophy 101, you could of course create an entire Philosophy of Climate Change course. But there are also plenty of other courses (including upper-level seminar courses and graduate courses) that can be readily refocused on climate change. Courses like Environmental Ethics, Business Ethics, Philosophy of Science, Ethics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Technology, The Good Life, Critical Thinking, Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Media, Indigenous Philosophies, and so on, could all be modified to engage deeply with climate change fairly easily, while still giving students the opportunity to encounter more problems, texts, and perspectives that engage with more general issues in these subfields.
Here’s a second challenge: take one course that you regularly teach and spend two hours mapping out how you could transform it into a climate-focused course. Extra credit: go ahead and try teaching it!
Three: Make addressing climate a pedagogical priority
The ‘armchair’ or ‘classroom’ work of philosophy can be highly impactful in its own right—it is in large part thanks to this work that we come to our considered views on important issues and manage to rustle up justification for those views. Your worldview makes a big difference to the climate. How many of us are estranged from nature or think of the planet primarily as a reservoir of resources to be extracted? How many of us subject our fellow human beings to great harm through selfishness or willful ignorance? But in addition to reading, writing about, and discussing climate change, it is possible to gear the work that students do towards concrete change. Philosophy is an intellectual tradition, a toolset, and a discipline. Philosophy is also a way of life. Perhaps your students make a drawdown plan for their own lives out to 2050, work on a campus campaign to divest from fossil fuels, or conduct participatory action research with a community partner already doing climate work. Connect them to activists and social organizers, to lawyers and politicians, to farms and cooperatives, to schools and libraries, to independent media and art.
A third challenge: in addition to your learning goals, compose action goals to guide your teaching. Even better, compose these action goals in collaboration with your students.
No matter what you teach, at which levels, in whatever institution or non-institutional setting you find yourself in, you can incorporate climate change in some way. In many circumstances, you can not just incorporate, but prioritize engagement with climate change in your teaching. In whatever ways that you can, I encourage you to do so. We’re going to be living and breathing this issue until we shuffle off this mortal coil, and so we might as well do it intentionally. Climate change is not separate from the other major issues of our time. It is thoroughly interwoven with a host of imperative ongoing revolutions. Climate work feeds human liberation, right relationships with the land, and the making of our collective future.
And here’s a final challenge: please share the fruits of the previous challenges with colleagues, perhaps even in the comment section below. We’re all in this together.
Nora Mills Boyd
Nora Mills Boyd is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Siena College, a small Franciscan liberal arts college just north of Albany, NY in unceded Mohican territory. While her research is mostly on empiricism in philosophy of science and philosophy of astrophysics and cosmology, she loves teaching environmental ethics.
Thanks for this excellent and inspirational post, Nora! For what it’s worth, I always send my students ANOHNI’s 4 Degrees [sometimes with the Pitchfork song review: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/tracks/17851-anohni-4-degrees/ ], because it is such a powerful song–and it bangs–so I was super stoked to see that in the post!
The first step to undertake before teaching about the climate crisis can be for the teacher to inspect themselves to determine whether they are qualified for this task. How well does the teacher understand the following realities?
1) Does a teacher understand that a quite likely outcome of a failure to successfully manage climate change is geo-political instability and war, including the use of nuclear weapons? Understanding that this is the likely price tag for climate change failure reshapes our imagined schedule for the unfolding crisis.
This is the “tipping point” which should be the focus of a teacher’s attention. The end of civilization comes, not gradually over decades, but at the moment when any of the world’s great powers feel they are facing an existential threat. From that moment everything can be over in literally a matter of minutes.
2) Does a teacher understand that the real threat we face is not climate change, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, or any other particular technical problem?
KEY POINT: Do they understand that the existential challenge we face arises from a profoundly philosophical problem, our outdated relationship with knowledge?
Do they understand that trying to solve particular technical challenges one by one by one is ultimately a loser’s game so long as an ever accelerating knowledge explosion is producing new and larger challenges faster than we can meet them?
Here’s evidence of that concept. We still have no idea what to do about the nuclear weapons which were developed before even our senior citizens were born.
3) Does the teacher know how to think holistically? Or will they fall in to the death trap of focusing on climate change alone?