Breaking the Paradigm: Storying Climate Change

Abstract

Despite warnings from scientists and increased manifestations of its dire consequences, the climate crisis continues to worsen. Considering the climate problem as teacher, we can discern key features of the crisis that must be foundational to any effective pedagogy of climate change. These key features include transdisciplinarity, the spanning of large scales of space and time, complex interconnections within and between human and biophysical systems, and the central role of power hierarchies and inequality. This chapter argues that the dominant paradigm of modern globalized industrial civilization is the Newtonian or mechanistic paradigm, a way of constructing reality that is reductionist, atomistic, impersonal, and leads to the fragmentation of space, time, and relationships; as such, it is incapable of making sense of climate change. Dominant paradigms are maintained through stories, explicit and implicit, and therefore can be challenged by other stories, those that do allow us to understand the climate problem on its own terms. Beginning with real-life stories of marginalized communities and considering also stories that emerge from science, along with speculative fiction and cultural stories, this chapter elaborates on how stories can play the role of boundary objects, allowing travel between disciplines, perspectives, and paradigms, and challenging power hierarchies.

Around mid-August in 2016, a week of incessant rain caused seven trillion gallons of water to fall on Louisiana. The resulting flood killed thirteen people, including a woman called Stacy Ruffin, who had been driving with her mother and a neighbor to see her dying brother in hospital. On their way back, the floodwaters swept the truck away. Her neighbor and mother survived, but Stacy was lost, leaving behind two children and a grieving family.

Stacy was forty-four years old; a loving mother and daughter, she lived with her mother and children in a mobile home and worked at the deli counter in a nearby Walmart. The story of her death, as recounted by CNN reporter John Sutter in “What Killed Stacy Ruffin?” (Sutter, 2017), is not only an account of an African American family dealing with a devastating double loss. What could once be understood as a natural disaster turned out to be a storm made 40% more likely because of climate change. Sutter’s article includes interviews with climate scientists in the area of weather attribution—that is, finding the climate footprint in extreme weather events—as well as interviews with the bereaved family. At the end it asks the question—if an extreme weather event is partly the result of anthropogenic climate change, and we can no longer consider it a chance misfortune or an “act of God,” then what killed Stacy Ruffin? Who, or what, is responsible? Can we blame fossil fuel companies or the millions of us who drive gasoline-powered cars?

Such questions also arise in other parts of the world. One of the most climate-vulnerable states in India is Jharkhand, where climate projections include rainfall variability, always disastrous for agriculture, and heat waves. According to the Jharkhand State Climate Adaptation Plan, the heat waves are already happening: in one year alone (2010) there were a hundred of them. The region is vulnerable also because of its extreme poverty—it tends to have the lowest Human Development Index scores among Indian states.

In 2018 I had the chance to speak by phone to a woman called Parvati, who lives in a village in Jharkhand. She had to travel five kilometers before she could speak with me on a borrowed phone. She told me this remarkable story.

About twenty years ago, the water table in the area began to drop, following large-scale deforestation in the region. As a result, the two sources of survival for the villagers, forest produce and crops from subsistence agriculture, became unreliable. The thick, contiguous forests of the region, populated by a vast and diverse range of species including bears and tigers, were being cleared for mining, roads, and other projects of development. Summer temperatures began to rise, and malaria became widespread. In desperation, Parvati and other village women decided to do something about the problem.

They began by patrolling their dwindling local forest every morning in groups of three, confronting and driving away would-be loggers, a task that was sometimes dangerous. Understanding that a healthy forest is a biodiverse forest, they dug ponds for the animals and birds. They built mud check dams for the streams, ensuring that the water didn’t escape to the desertified landscape outside and evaporate. Twenty years later, as confirmed by a friend who visited the area and made my conversation with Parvati possible, the forest is thriving. Tree trunks have thickened, streams are flowing, many animals and birds are back (but not the tigers). The two hundred hectares of regenerated forest have, Parvati says, restored water security, cooled local summer temperatures, and significantly reduced the malaria menace. This is despite the fact that deforestation and desertification have increased sharply in Jharkhand in the last few years. The women continue their work today, waking up early in the morning to patrol their forest. When asked what motivates her, Parvati says she is doing it for “our people and the animals and birds.” A woman with no formal education, living in an impoverished village in a climate-vulnerable region, unlikely to be lauded on glossy magazine covers as an environmental champion, she speaks with passion, authority, and an infectious ebullience.

The climate crisis is a problem that confounds our usual frameworks for making sense of the world. This is, perhaps, one reason why education has not realized its potential as a climate mitigation tool; on the contrary, mainstream education is far more likely to reinforce the status quo. Among five roadblocks (Kwauk, 2020) that hobble education at the macro level is the lack of radical visions for climate pedagogy. This is an onto-epistemological problem at its root.

As an educator trained in theoretical physics, I began teaching climate science in my general physics college classes about twelve years ago. My motivation was primarily ethical, as young people are among those disproportionately affected by a climate-changed world. I wanted my students—mostly first generation and racially diverse, in an Eastern US public campus—to be informed change-makers in the face of an uncertain future. When I found that several of my students were, instead, becoming frustrated, angry, despairing, and apathetic, I realized that I could not just teach the science. Clearly, I had many more lessons to learn from the climate problem. Thinking of the climate problem as teacher helped me re-orient myself so that I could learn not only from climate scientists but also from the experiences of people at the forefront of climatic and other crises, and through them, from the non-human elements of the Earth system as well.

Stories like the ones I have related above led me to the formulation of a transdisciplinary, always-developing, radical pedagogy of climate change, about which I have written elsewhere (Singh, 2021). This pedagogy is built upon four dimensions of the climate problem: the scientific-technological, the transdisciplinary (which includes the socio-economic-ecological context), the onto-epistemological, and the psychosocial action dimension. Justice is the connective tissue of this approach. I make no claims to universality of application; instead, my hope is that this approach will add to and stimulate multiple transdisciplinary pedagogies in different geographies and contexts. In this chapter I focus on the onto-epistemological dimension, foregrounding the role that stories of different kinds can play when considering how justice and power are entangled with the climate issue.

If we consider the two stories above, some lessons become evident. The climate problem is a planetary phenomenon, yet it is felt and experienced locally, in very different ways. It also spans vast temporal scales—from a slow rise in temperature since the Industrial Revolution to the sudden fury of a storm made more likely by climate change. It is inherently transdisciplinary—the relevance of the socio-economic context and the history of colonialism and racism become apparent through the detailed examination of both these stories. The stories bring out the fact that the Earth’s climate is a complex, dynamic system, consisting of parts—atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and modern industrial civilization (the latter term used as an imperfect but more accurate substitute for “anthroposphere”)—that are linked through causal connections beyond simple linear causality (Grotzer, 2012). This inherent relationality of the human and the biophysical systems defies conventional modes of thinking about and conceptualizing the problem. Parvati’s story, in particular, illustrates that climate change is not the only problem that communities face; in fact, all our social-environmental problems are inter-related, from species extinction to inequality. The planetary boundaries framework (Steffen et al., 2015), an evolving concept, identifies nine biogeophysical processes that define a space within which human societies can thrive. These processes, which include the carbon and nitrogen cycles, imply thresholds that cannot be transgressed without endangering the viability of the biosphere. According to this framework, five of these boundaries have already been crossed: climate, land-system change, biosphere integrity, novel entities, and the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Even a single boundary violation is dangerous—in part because these processes are not independent of each other. For example, climate change can exacerbate species extinction, and the imbalance in the nitrogen cycle also makes global heating worse. This behooves us to start to examine the root cause of these crises and thereby uncover the role of the current destructive globalized socio-economic system, including, but not limited to, capitalism.

Here lie considerations of power and inequality, ethics and justice. Consider the fact that the suffering of the villagers in Jharkhand in Parvati’s story was not brought about directly, or even largely, by climate change, at least so far. It was due to deforestation in the service of “development.” This destructive model of development, a colonial legacy from the West, enriches the middle and upper classes at the expense of “disposable” people and species. The villagers in Jharkhand do not benefit from such “development”; they are at the receiving end of the economic exploitation, violence, and habitat destruction that development makes necessary. In addition, they have not contributed significantly to the climate problem and yet are affected disproportionately by it. Although they have agency, creativity, and useful ideas, these attributes do not hold political power; they do not get villagers a seat at negotiating tables, nor do their experiences inform policy. Stacy Ruffin lost her life due to a storm directly connected with climate change; yet, as a Black woman living in a trailer park, she did not create or exacerbate the problem in any significant way. Thus, these stories demonstrate how issues of justice and ethics are inextricably entangled with our social-environmental problems.

Any effective pedagogy of climate change must, therefore, encompass these crucial features of the climate problem: that it spans vast scales of space and time; that it is inherently transdisciplinary, involving the (macroscopic) entanglement of the human and biophysical systems; that it is rife with nonlinear interconnections that propagate through complex causal webs; that climate is intimately connected with other violations of planetary boundaries, with whom it shares common roots; and that justice is central to any serious consideration of the problem.

The Newtonian or Mechanistic Paradigm, and Paradigm Blindness

As we confront the end of the biosphere as we know it, the question comes to mind: how did we end up at this fraught moment in planetary history? As historian of science Steve Shapin (Shapin, 2018) says, we can always attempt to trace threads from the complex tangle of the past in order to understand the present.

Extending Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) original notion of a scientific paradigm to a socio-scientific framework of interconnected concepts through which societies construct their reality, the Newtonian paradigm might be considered an essential feature of modern industrial civilization. In science, the Newtonian paradigm encompasses the mechanical philosophies of Boyle, Kepler, Mersenne, Descartes, and Newton, among others (Boas, 1952), as well as the atomic materialism of Boyle and Descartes (Shapin, 2018). It considers the universe as reductionist, mechanistic, atomistic, impersonal, and deterministic. Newton’s laws of motion and gravity helped reinforce and establish this mechanistic view of the world, with the clock as its metaphor. These laws appeared to reveal an orderly, clockwork-like universe, in which phenomena could be predicted and controlled, allowing humans to manipulate Nature for their purposes. This separation of human and Nature, which relegates a de-animated Nature to a storehouse of “resources” for human exploitation, is a defining feature of modern industrial civilization and speaks to the influence of the Newtonian paradigm beyond science. We see this broad influence also in the formulation of mainstream economics, which is based in part on false analogies between physical and human systems, such as the idea of modeling human societies based on atoms of an ideal gas (Ackerman, 2018). The Newtonian paradigm arose from and helped engender large shifts in the Western conceptualization of the world, changes that included the Industrial Revolution, colonialist explorations, and—crucial to the climate crisis—the shift from water power to fossil fuels. According to scholar Cara N. Daggett (2019, p. 18), the role of science changed from describing the harmonies of Nature to harnessing the “energies of change” for human beings. “By the 19th century, not only progress, but unlimited progress had become an almost universal faith in the modern West … the preference for constant motion, action, dynamism, growth.”

A clock consists of parts—springs and gears that have a clearly defined function. Their relationships are straightforward, and neither their form nor function is subject to change. In my own field of physics, the Newtonian mechanistic view has been displaced by more accurate descriptions of Nature such as quantum physics and relativity. Yet, while physicists have provincialized Newton’s laws, in a manner of speaking, the mechanistic paradigm is still pervasive as a kind of mental baggage—and, more to the point, its influence beyond the boundaries of physics continues to be strong. We see its manifestations not only in the Nature/culture divide and in the fantasies of capitalist economics but also in education, with its power hierarchies and its separation of the body of knowledge into watertight compartments. Thus, rarely do physicists converse with poets or economists with biologists or sociologists with engineers.

The Newtonian paradigm, though somewhat simplistically described here, is a useful lens with which to become aware of the assumptions that underlie modern industrial civilization—to make visible the invisible scaffoldings of a framework is to recognize it as a construct and thereby allow us to question it and change it. The disjointed, atomistic view of the universe that is a key feature of the Newtonian paradigm manifests as the chopping up or fragmentation of space, time, and relationships within and beyond the human. We who live in modern industrial civilization are constrained by the Newtonian paradigm to think short term and local, to limit our empathetic reach, to separate our actions from their consequences, to acknowledge only simple, linear causality, and to deny our connections to multispecies others through the food we eat and the air we breathe. It is unsurprising that our economic and educational systems, as well as social arrangements in general, should reflect this reductionist, atomistic perspective. Compare these aspects of the Newtonian paradigm to the key features of the climate problem: spanning of vast spatial and temporal scales, inherent transdisciplinarity, complex causal connections within and between human and biophysical systems, and centrality of justice and power. When we recognize this mismatch between the Newtonian paradigm and the essential characteristics of the climate crisis, a troubling paradigm blindness becomes apparent: the application of Newtonian approaches to an inherently non-Newtonian problem.

Returning to the stories I told at the beginning of this chapter: what do they, and storytelling in general, have to do with paradigms? In their groundbreaking book, Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig (2022, p. 59) make the point that stories—described generally as causal accounts of something happening that includes entities with agency—have, among other roles, an ontological function; they lock in certain framings, and they help build collective identities. Specifically, dominant narratives play this role: “Individuals act based on assumptions, recollections, and anticipations acquired from the dominant cultural, social, or other public narratives available to them.” Stories, they aver, are “sites of power,” whether hegemonic or resistive, as reflected in whose stories get told and which are suppressed or ignored.

Thus, certain dominant narratives can shore up a paradigm, while other stories can challenge it. I would add that crucial to the examination of stories as ontological entities is the consideration of audience. The listeners and receivers of stories also bring their pre-conceived notions, stereotypes, and cultural and personal alignments to the process of making meaning from stories. Sometimes the same story can mean entirely different things to different listeners. Therefore, providing a context for storytelling, which also involves understanding the audience—in my case, a diverse group of students in a public university in the Eastern US—becomes crucial.

I briefly note one classroom example of how the dominant narrative is reinforced through story, via the movie Interstellar.¹ In this movie, a white male hero on a dying Earth rekindles the hope of space exploration and the “destiny” of humankind to be spacefarers, that is, explorers rather than mere caretakers. “The Earth has turned against us,” and similar statements denying responsibility are reminiscent of the abuser in a relationship of domestic violence blaming his victim before he moves on to better pastures. Student reaction to this movie, which was screened on our campus, was initially positive. Subsequent discussions made apparent the problematic onto-epistemological basis of the film.

What Might the Best Stories Do?

In their book, Dillon and Craig relate how stories’ most important roles may well be to present multiple points of view; contrary to popular belief, stories’ key function may not be the generation of empathy in the reader, and, in fact, according to the authors, there seems to be little evidence that an empathetic response results in prosocial behavior (pp. 23–30).

Because stories are onto-epistemological tools, I believe that the presentation of multiple points of view can potentially shake us loose from dominant narratives and thereby free us from the hold that the Newtonian paradigm maintains over the imagination.

In this section I focus on certain kinds of stories I have found useful (when appropriately contextualized) in the classroom. In particular, I consider the role of these stories as boundary objects, a term conceptualized by Star and Griesemer (1989) in a different context, and applied more recently by a climate scientist in whose work I first encountered the term (Shepherd & Lloyd, 2021). I categorize the kinds of stories that I’ve used in my general physics classroom and explore their functions as boundary objects and paradigm-shifters based on response from students.

The term “boundary object” originally arose in the context of communication across social worlds comprising practitioners in different fields of science. It is specific to situations where different social worlds need to interact (for scientific projects requiring multiple disciplines, for example) but does not demand consensus or interdisciplinarity. I quote from Star and Griesemer (italics mine):

Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. (1989, p. 393)

Boundary objects have interpretive flexibility that arise from their organizational and material structure, allowing for cooperation without consensus. Can we broaden the meaning of the term to help us navigate the apparent dichotomies of local/global, human/Nature, science/humanities? Climate scientist Ted Shepherd proposes what he calls storylining as a boundary object, to which I will return later. I propose certain categories of stories, more generally, as boundary objects that can help us travel across multiple boundaries, including those between contesting paradigms.

First, real-world stories like those I have mentioned above, when appropriately contextualized, can take us from the local to the global and back again. Climate change and its related ills manifest differently in different places around the globe; while climate is relatively abstract, the idea of clime as the relationship between weather, place, and culture is finding traction in recent work (Carey et al., 2014; Fleming, 2014). Multiple real-world climate stories set in distinct climes marry localness with a sense of the planetary. Further, these stories take us across various disciplinary boundaries—it becomes clear that considerations of economics, history, injustice, and politics are entangled with the biophysical changes wrought by global heating. Parvati’s story allows us to interrogate a model of economics and development globalized throughout the world through old and new forms of colonialism. It also allows us to explore the ecological and climatic role of tropical forests. The meaning that forests hold for forest-proximate and Indigenous communities invites insights from anthropology and sociology. Thus, such stories provide an opportunity for short, disciplinary deep dives into economics, history, development, ecology, anthropology, and climate science.

Perhaps most crucially, these stories, along with the discussions that follow, present perspectives that challenge the dominant narrative. In Stacy Ruffin’s story we get to know a family and its resilience in the face of tragedy that upends stereotypes about African Americans. We discuss the role of racist policies with regard to where Black people have been compelled to live. The story also opens space for considering the troubled Earth, the disturbed global climate system, whose manifestation as the extreme rainfall event is like a larger-than-life character coming on-stage. Thus, stories of marginalized peoples and elements of climate that are not generally included in the dominant narrative take center stage in the classroom. Parvati’s story further challenges the colonialist narrative of development-as-a-common-good and the rural poor as helpless victims who need to be “uplifted” to our standards and ways of life. Instead, it becomes apparent that the voices of people who experience and creatively manage their social-environmental challenges, despite social marginalization and oppression, need to be central in climate discourse. Further, the idea that the villagers are restoring the forest not just for people but also for animals and birds stands in sharp contrast to the human-centric orientation of the Newtonian paradigm, as does the ability to think long term, and the holistic-integrative (as opposed to reductionist) approach to engaging with a problem.

Parvati’s story opens the way to a deeper consideration of Indigenous and local knowledge systems. In a freshman seminar on Arctic climate change, my students and I examine these through stories from and about Indigenous experiences. One such story (“The Moose Hunters and the Bear”) is told by a Native American moose hunter in the Yukon region of Canada (Clark & Slocombe, 2009). He tells of an event when a moose had been shot, and he and his companions were cutting up the meat, planning to take it back to their homes in two trips. They then noticed a large grizzly watching them. Knowing that the grizzly would probably take the rest of the meat when they left with the first load, they covered the remaining meat with a tarp, leaving the moose head on top for the bear. They asked him not to take all the meat. When they returned for the second load, they found that the bear had, indeed, only taken the head. In gratitude they left some of the remaining meat for the bear. The hunter related a similar case of a bear watching moose hunters carve up a moose, but in that case the hunters were unaware of the Native tradition and did not leave a gift for the bear, nor did they ask the bear to leave some meat for them. When the hunters returned for the second load, the bear had dragged it away.

Stories like these illustrate what Chie Sakakibara (2016) calls “collaborative reciprocity,” the idea that humans are not superior to other species but are connected to them through webs of relationship and reciprocity, and that the human and non-human spiritually co-constitute each other. This concept is absent in the Newtonian paradigm, which places humans at the pinnacle of all life and ignores the agency, intelligence, and emotional lives of other beings. Collaborative reciprocity also makes clear another, fatal gap in the Newtonian paradigm: the inability to acknowledge deep interconnections and relationality. In Fig. 9.1, we see that the Newtonian paradigm has another boundary along the z-axis—it is limited to describing simple systems rather than complex ones. Complex systems can be understood as those in which relationships between the parts are so important that they can change the Nature and function of the parts, often in sudden and surprising ways. Examples include ecosystems, human social networks, the endocrine system, and the global climate system. Consider the fact that in a clock—the archetypal Newtonian system—gears and springs have well-defined, unchangeable functions and relationships to each other. The climate system can also be considered to be made up of parts—oceans, icy regions, atmosphere, biosphere, etc. However, the ocean, which is currently a net carbon absorber, can, under different circumstances, become a net carbon emitter, thus drastically changing its function as an element of the climate system. Complex systems therefore align with the Aristotelian dictum that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A purely reductionist, Newtonian approach does not help us understand complex systems as systems. Unfortunately, while our world is filled with complex systems, our thinking—and our approach to education—remains largely Newtonian.

Fig. 9.1

A non-Newtonian Universe

This is where the best stories, placed in the appropriate context, can serve the role of complexifying our understanding of the world. Through these stories the gaps and holes in the Newtonian edifice become apparent. Indigenous knowledge systems can then be seen as onto-epistemologies that view the world as a priori complex. Carefully curated stories can serve as boundary objects that allow travel between paradigms and onto-epistemologies, enabling a decentering from the Newtonian paradigm.

Often, a single story can mean different things to different students, depending on their backgrounds and contexts, and the extent to which they are influenced by dominant narratives. Therefore, at the beginning of our exploration of the story, I give time to listen respectfully to various student interpretations. What emerges includes recognizable commonalities—the framework, characters, and happenings of the story—as well as impressions arising unconsciously from dominant narratives, along with varied individual responses. The discussion that follows helps students make crucial connections and onto-epistemological distinctions. Thus, the story-as-boundary-object becomes a place of multiple meanings, but ambiguity and multiplicity do not prevent a kind of broad consensus from emerging, a direction away from the Newtonian paradigm toward a complex, holistic understanding of the world.

There are other useful kinds of stories. As a theoretical physicist, it has always been apparent to me that “inanimate” matter is active, not passive, in the universe. I think of physics as one way of eavesdropping on some of the conversations that matter holds with matter, tuned and filtered through the methods of science. As a writer of speculative fiction, it is also apparent to me that there is a sense in which inanimate matter can be thought of as possessing agency, as is apparent in so many cultural stories where matter becomes animated through character. In modern industrial civilization, Nature is for exploitation (hence “natural resources”), other species are (in a Cartesian sense) only machines, and matter is raw material for humans (in power) to bend (with knowledge of physical law) to their own aims and devices. Thus, matter and non-human life are merely a backdrop to the human drama. Bringing the non-human on to the stage then becomes a radical act for multiple reasons. For example, I have experimented with embodied learning in the physics classroom, where students enact physical processes through “physics theater,” thus crossing the subject-object separation so central to science-as-we-know-it toward more of a participant-observer role. It is one thing to learn about the oscillation modes of the carbon dioxide molecule, which is relevant to understanding its role as a greenhouse gas, and quite another to add on to that by performing its “dance” as part of enacting the greenhouse effect. Not only does this enhance cognitive understanding, but by “storifying” natural processes we are able to acknowledge that matter matters in our not-just-human world.

One kind of scientific “storification” is climate scientist Ted Shepherd’s concept of storylining: “A physically self-consistent unfolding of past events or of plausible future events or pathways” (Shepherd & Lloyd, 2021). An example cited is the destruction of the Mackenzie River Delta freshwater ecosystem in Canada, following a severe storm; presented as a storyline, we can see causal connections between global climatic change, such as sea ice loss and sea level rise, and local conditions. Storylining is an example of an unfolding epistemological broadening in climate science: the use of narrative to make the science meaningful and usable for decision-makers and communities.

So far I have talked about the roles that real-life stories and science-as-story can play in the classroom. Another category of useful stories is speculative fiction and cultural stories in which matter and non-human life can walk on to the stage of the story as characters in their own right. Cultural stories are often teaching stories that transmit values as well as cultural-ecological knowledge across generations. For example, a story from the Iñupiat of the North Shore of Alaska (“The Mouse on the Tundra,” as retold by Iñupiaq Elder and educator Dr. Edna MacLean [Chance, 2002, p. 13]) tells of a mouse who lives underground in the tundra and decides to dig a hole up to the surface so he can know the world. When he emerges, he finds that he can touch the ceiling and the sides of the world and concludes that he must be the biggest thing in the universe. The punchline of the story is that the poor mouse has come up into an upside-down Iñupiaq boot, the soles and sides of which constitute the boundaries of what he thinks of as the universe. This story illuminates not only the dangers of hubris but also the limitations of preconceptions and paradigms that can blind us to crucial aspects of the world. With regard to science fiction, while it is true that popular science fiction often reproduces a colonialist, frontier mentality, at its best it can broaden our horizons beyond anthropocentrism to speculate on our relationship with the non-human—whether a planet, a landscape, or another lifeform—through an interplay of the literal and metaphoric. It does so both by extrapolation of a trend or aspect of the present day in order to creatively imagine otherwise unforeseen consequences and by asking what-if questions, not only about technology and the physical universe but also about the human condition. “What if things were different?” can be a radical question (Singh, 2008), as exemplified by authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, who imagined different social arrangements on alternate worlds.² Examples of science fiction stories I have used in the classroom include Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”³ and Carrie Vaughn’s “Amaryllis.”⁴ While Asimov is a science fiction writer from the “classic” age of white male-dominated techno-fetishist science fiction, this particular story—set on a planet that has six suns and knows only the light of day—dramatically illustrates how a challenge to a dominant paradigm brought upon by a natural phenomenon outside the onto-epistemological framework of that society—nightfall every two thousand years—can wreak havoc. Carrie Vaughn’s story about the meaning of family and plenitude in an ecologically devastated world of scarcity forces the reader to reconsider what taken-for-granted concepts like family and happiness might mean under such extreme circumstances. Another good example is Nnedi Okorafor’s “Spider the Artist,”⁵ which reflects on the history of oil companies’ devastation of the Nigerian landscape and peoples through a woman’s phantasmagoric encounters with a robot created by the oil company. In these stories the non-human environment is not a backdrop but a character in its own right.

There is another crucial role that speculative stories can play in the classroom. Shaking us loose from the dominant paradigm is only the first step. By immersing us in alternate worlds informed by different concepts and paradigms, these stories can help us out of the trap of the imagination that makes it “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”⁶ Emerging from paradigm blindness allows us to see other possibilities for social-ecological futures. Subgenres of speculative fiction such as solarpunk and hopepunk, along with the liberating ethos of movements such as Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, are helping build new paradigms that foreground justice and are grounded in the more-than-human world we share with other beings.

Toward the end of the semester I engage my students in an exercise in speculative futurism. Drawing on their learnings about climate change, paradigms, and alternative epistemologies, students work in small groups to collectively create stories based on simple prompts. Instead of reductively dividing up a future desirable world into sectors like transport, power generation, agriculture, education, etc., for students to reimagine, I provide prompts that, at first sight, appear stupendously ordinary. One example is “A man goes to work.” I ask students to reimagine every noun and verb in the sentence and then construct a future world in which they would want to live. The idea is not to think (as yet) about what is practical; rather, the purpose of the exercise is to free the imagination from the paradigm trap and, within the limits of physical reality (no flying pigs), to come up with the wildest possible scenarios. So, students get to interrogate default definitions of “man,” “work,” commuting, city, family, etc., and to come up with alternatives. The mini-stories that result from these are always instructive. Sometimes they serve to remind me of the depth of the imagination trap, but more often than not, students come up with ideas that surprise and delight them and me. Through the “ordinary” sentences of the prompts, they deconstruct taken-for-granted concepts and create something new and refreshing—a cityscape powered by mushrooms, a living forest-city, a world without cars where you cannot make homes taller than the local trees, cis-men who wear skirts and flowers in their hair, and much more. While these might be implausible or impractical based on current reality, the exercise serves to nurture and free the imagination. Students also report feeling positive emotions such as hope, anticipation, and enjoyment while immersed in constructing such futures. Further, such an exercise serves to undermine existing power structures in two senses. One, students’ feeling of agency helps them feel that they need not surrender their intelligence and creativity to those in power—that they also have something to give. In addition, questioning the defaults of the dominant narrative and creating stories that provide alternatives help students take back, at least for the duration of the exercise, some of their power.

Conclusion: Re-storying and Restoring Ourselves

In this chapter I have foregrounded the role of stories in teaching and learning about climate change in a college physics classroom. Real-life stories from and about marginalized communities dealing with climatic and related ills, stories from science in which matter and non-human life are protagonists, science fiction, and cultural stories all have important roles to play in the science classroom. With a multiplicity of such stories, the key features of the crises of our troubled world can emerge, and we can begin to see the climate problem as teacher. As boundary objects, these stories serve as portals and pathways that allow travel between disciplines, geographies, histories, and paradigms. They can talk back to power by positing alternative paradigms and ways of knowing. They can help make sense of problems that seem too abstract and too overwhelming at global scales. Student responses indicate that stories as carriers of complex information are more memorable, more meaningful, and speak to the emotional as well as the intellectual selves of students. Embodied learning and creating stories of alternatives collectively in small groups can help students toward a greater sense of agency and participation as well as a deeper understanding, disrupting the pyramidal power hierarchies of our society. Crucially, for these approaches to be successful, the classroom space must also be reimagined. Students should feel comfortable challenging the “authority” in the classroom, the teacher. To do this, I employ a number of techniques (Singh, 2021) to make the classroom a place for collaborative learning, where standards remain high and mistakes can be made safely as part of learning. A key aspect of this is to build genuine relationships with students and to consistently show them that their thoughts, ideas, feelings, and whole selves are valued. These inspirations from transformational learning theory and the works of other scholars help create an environment where students feel psychologically safe, allowing them to be intellectually audacious.

I end with a quotation by the great speculative fiction writer, Ursula K. Le Guin. From her National Book Award speech⁷ in 2014: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine rights of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”