Introduction

Paradise on Fire (Rhodes, 2021) is one of a growing number of “cli-fi,” climate fiction, novels which aim to engage contemporary young adult readers in ecocritical issues, encouraging them to consider their own inclinations towards nature. Such considerations are important in the context of future support for climate literacy and as a way of knowing and living in a sustainable world. Indeed, Greta Thunberg joined the world as a young adult climate activist in 2018, as she led the “School Strikes for Climate” and “Fridays for Future” strikes. Both campaigns drew global attention to the urgency of climate change and the roles of youth activists, demonstrating the ways in which climate literacy can manifest in young adults’ actions and protests. In presenting Paradise on Fire as a resonant text for engaging readers’ climate literacy, I begin with a brief summary of the novel. Second, I outline Marek Oziewicz’s (2023) working definition of climate literacy as a framework for a critical discussion centered on notions of children’s shifting dispositions towards nature as reflective of developing climate literacy. Next, I conduct a critical examination of the novel as a vehicle for analyzing the environmental justice concepts of access to nature and environmental racism. Both sections are grounded in close textual analysis of Paradise on Fire.

Much of ecocriticism is premised on the idea that when readers engage with texts centered on environmental and climate challenges, the reading experience serves as a platform to build understanding and empathy for such issues (Schneider-Mayerson, Weik von Mossner, & Małecki, 2020). Indeed, in their discussion of empirical ecocritical research, Schneider-Mayerson, Weik von Mossner, and Małecki write, “this is especially the case in this time of accelerating environmental crises, when ecocriticism’s long-standing desire to transform culture is unambiguously aligned with planetary imperatives” (p. 327). Notably, the novel’s central conflict, surviving a forest fire, presents a compelling opportunity for readers to broadly consider our current moment as global climate emergency, especially as 2023 marked the hottest summer on record (Fox, Keck, & Richmond, 2023), punctuated by devasting global wildfires in Hawaii (Hassan & Betts, 2023), Canada, Europe, Asia, and North Africa. The Copernicus website, reporting for the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme, stated that in 2023, “many regions experienced record-breaking wildfire activity this year – wildfire carbon emissions in Canada were the highest in the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service’s record, which goes back to 2003, while Greece experienced the largest wildfire in the European Union to date” (2023: A Year of Intense Global Wildfire Activity). These global events underscore the novel’s relevancy.

Because children’s literature has the same potential to affect readers’ perspectives, beliefs, and actions as other forms of text, Paradise on Fire serves as a model for how a text may offer readers a multi-faceted opportunity to engage with climate literacy. Taking up Marek Oziewicz’s (2023) working definition of climate literacy as a framework, this critical reading analyzes aspects of characterization, plot structure, and theme to consider the messages of climate literacy and environmental justice within the text. I argue that reading Paradise on Fire generates climate literacy learning by inviting readers to consider caring dispositions towards nature and natural spaces and to develop a critical eye towards environmental justice issues, such as inequitable access to natural spaces as well as how inequities can be entangled with environmental racism.

Summary of the Novel

Paradise on Fire (Rhodes, 2021) fictionalizes stories of recent California wildfires through the eyes of the young adult protagonist Adaugo. Adaugo, who introduces herself as Addy, has been sent to California to spend summer at a rural youth camp for “Black city kids” (p. 11) called Wilderness Adventures. The novel opens with campers meeting for the first time on a shared flight from their homes in various United States’ coastal cities. Told in the first person, the reader is privy to Addy’s inner monologue as well as her perspectives and experiences through interpersonal dialogue and plot events. As the novel unfolds, Addy reveals her talents for drawing mazes and maps and begins to expand those skills as they apply to her new, nature-centered situation. The narrative is also laced with flashbacks and reflections by Addy, repeatedly returning to the traumatic apartment fire that resulted in her parents’ deaths. Readers learn that Addy lives with her grandmother, Bibi, who has sent her to camp guided by “fate” (p. 11), telling her, “You’re always journeying whether you like it or not,” (Author’s italics, p. 12). Under the mentorship of Leo, the camp director, Addy acquires outdoor survival skills, builds her confidence, and begins to attend to sights, sounds, smells, and life within the natural world in new ways. Addy also develops friendships with other campers, including Jay, Nessa, and DeShon. These relationships become integral to the group’s survival later in the novel.

Defining Climate Literacy

Marek Oziewicz (2023) presents a working definition of climate literacy that outlines four aspects of understanding climate emergency as competence development. Oziewicz suggests that as a person becomes climate literate, they are developing an evolving set of competencies that involve interpreting, connecting, synthesizing, and creating narratives of self which are transformed by conceptions of “climate” as an expression of the living natural world. Oziewicz’s (2023) definition of climate literacy includes, “understanding our entanglements with, responsibilities in, and agency in regard to climate change,” (2023) and is grounded in the practices of care that reflect indigenous ways of knowing the natural world (Kimmerer & Smith, 2022). This knowing as care is born out of conceptualizing humility as an equalizing and respect-filled construct that connects human life to the landscapes, creatures, and biomes that co-inhabit Earth before, after, and with us. Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults (Kimmerer & Smith, 2022) of human-nature mutual reciprocity as a symbiotic relationship in which, “We are the planters. The ones who clear the land, pull the weeds, pick the bugs, and save the seeds over winter to plant them again in spring. We cannot live without them, but it’s also true that they cannot live without us” (p. 117). In sharing the North American Indigenous story of the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, Kimmerer reiterates the reciprocal disposition of care that develops when people embrace the concept of human: nature symbiosis and human responsibility as an aspect of developing climate literacy.

Oziewicz’s (2023) definition of climate literacy contains four integrated aspects that can be understood to represent a multi-faceted and evolving disposition towards nature that cultivates care and positions one to enact that care. The first aspect described includes conceptualizing the climate moment as one of “climate emergency.” This aspect refers to a growing understanding of climate that is founded in, “facts, drivers, impacts, and urgency,” and centered on “developing values, attitudes, and behavioral change” (p. 34) regarding a finite world. Notably, Oziewicz’s definition forwards the current climate as an emergency situation, characterizing human action as urgent and necessary, and does not readily distinguish between critical and non-critical climate situations. A second aspect articulated in his definition (2023) “requires harmonizing multiple ways of knowing,” including, “explicit/objective” and “tacit/subjective” knowing (p. 34). Oziewicz’s third aspect includes sewing these ways of knowing into a fabric that is threaded with personal experiences and beliefs; thus, becoming climate literate includes the vulnerability to engage in “emotionally charged, and personally felt understanding” (p. 34). This aspect of climate awareness activates people to apply their developing knowledge and dispositions to situations to which they feel personally connected. The final aspect of climate literacy furthers this activist stance: “embracing our responsibility,” by integrating individual and collective responsibilities, as we “stand up for everyone’s biospheric inheritance” (p. 34). Taken together, the four aspects that encompass climate literacy are interconnected and iterative, as well as developmental, and there is a recognition that climate literacy can become a personal epistemic stance in which human relationships are interlaced with climate change, and knowing grows from and reinforces foundational concepts of reciprocity, responsibility, and care.

Climate Literacy Aspects within Paradise on Fire

Aspect One: Conceptualizing Climate Emergency as Seeing Connections

Evidence of the first aspect within Oziewicz’s (2023) definition of climate literacy, “understanding the climate emergency” bookends the novel. For example, in the second chapter, as the campers ride towards camp in the Northern California mountains, Addy notices the changes in the scenery. She asks, “Why’s everything brown?” and the camp director Leo replies, “drought” (p. 17). This small interaction serves to both foreshadow the fire and mark the beginning of Addy’s journey towards climate literacy. With this question, she begins (re)seeing her surroundings, opening herself to examine the connections between climate and flora. These new ways of looking lead to expanding Addy’s inner self. Revealed incrementally throughout the novel, readers come to understand that Addy’s life was radically altered by her parents’ accidental deaths in an apartment fire, and because of this trauma, Addy is already a keen observer of the world. She has developed a sharp eye for examining her surroundings for means of escape (p. 31). Addy reads landscapes to map them, drawing mazes, pathways, and escape routes as a means of emotional salve. By the novel’s end, Addy’s need to examine her surroundings is motivated less by self-protection and more by a need to protect others, human and nonhuman. Her attention to place expands to recognize the urgency and effects of climate change, and the roles she can take to protect people and settings. She tells the reader, “I’m going to become an environmentalist. Teach and warn people to take better care of our world – for ourselves, animals, Nature, and the planet” (p. 239).

Developing an awareness of the importance of climate emergency grows from opportunities to inculcate a sense of awe and wonder in natural spaces. To begin to recognize the urgency of climate crisis humans need to value nature, which feeds a blossoming sense of belonging. In the novel, characters experience moments of awakening to the beauty and enormity of nature spaces. The first morning she wakes at camp Addy thinks, “I never knew the night sky could be so amazing – trillions of blinking, sparkling, spinning lights in a velvet-black sky… But it’s the trees that take my breath away… The forest is calling me, inviting me to explore” (p. 26–27). Moments later, standing in the early morning darkness with Leo, Addy reflects on how “alive” she feels; “I do feel alive, like I’m shaking off old skin” (p. 28). Thus, just as she starts to recognize relationships between elements of the natural world, she, too, begins an examination of her personal relationship to nature and her own power to influence that relationship.

Other characters also experience epiphanies demonstrative of their evolving understanding of the interrelatedness of climate change, human interactions, and the urgency of action. Jay decides to join Addy and Leo on an early morning hike to map the terrain of the forest and record the “the drying effects of climate change” (p. 104). Like Addy, Jay is learning to see cause and effect relationships in natural spaces. DeShon, who enters camp with headphones to tune out the sounds of nature, discovers an affinity for reptiles. His developing curiosity includes a sense of care and responsibility for understanding reptiles’ place(s), and how climate change affects those geographies and species’ futures. Towards the end of the novel, he shares with Nessa, Jay and Addy: “Didn’t know I liked snakes. Reptiles. Lizards are like snakes’ cousins… Wish I could see a crocodile. Turtles. Big ones. Didn’t know global warming hurts reptiles. People, too. Never knew hotter weather was a problem” (p. 182). As he comes to understand the immediacy of climate conditions as an emergency, DeShon sees landscapes and the creatures that inhabit them from a perspective of personal connection. In this way, DeShon’s experience represents multiple aspects of climate literacy: his growing understanding of urgency in climate change is connected to his care for and interest in reptiles.

Aspect Two: Multiple Ways of Knowing Self and/in Nature

A second aspect of climate literacy Oziewicz (2023, p. 34) describes is “harmonizing multiple ways of knowing,” which includes objective and subjective knowing about the natural world. I interpret this aspect within the novel as best reflected in Addy’s character development. As the central protagonist and narrator, Addy’s summer camp experience represents external and internal opportunities to transform her fear of fire into a sense of belonging in nature and trust in herself and others. This change is explicitly marked in her metamorphosis from “Addy” to “Adaugo.” As Adaugo, she shifts her problem-solving and leadership skills out of her head and into the physical world. To survive the wildfire, Addy must lead the group as she syncretizes different aspects of self and experience. She must bring her current self, and the knowledge she has learned and honed into action, and she must also cede space in daylight for the painful memories of her parents’ deaths by fire that haunt her dreams. Trudging forward to escape the lit forest, Addy hears her Grandmother Bibi’s voice, “To know yourself, you need to journey, Adaugo. Remember what’s forgotten” (p. 163). Addy’s friends learn her full name, Adaugo, at this moment.

As the friends struggle to survive by outrunning the wildfire, Addy must bring forward what has been hidden – her true Nigerian name, and its symbolic meaning. Adaugo shares that her name translates to “Daughter of an eagle,” although, as she explains to Jay, her name “means different in Africa” (p. 164), representing “of the air. Farseeing. Watchful” (p. 165). This symbolic meaning represents Adaugo’s spatial reasoning and map making skills. She has unique abilities to see problems from multiple perspectives and to look above situations to identify points of conflict, danger, and strength. For Adaugo, to be like an eagle who is “of the air” and “watchful” reconciles her inner strengths and the outer self she presents to the world. This transformation into Adaugo is also representative of a reconciliation with her pasts, present, and futures. Addy has been plagued with guilt about surviving the fire that killed her parents, as she was too young to act. Adaugo, older, wiser, and emboldened by care for the forest and her friends, refuses to give up on their survival. While an inner voice tells her, “I didn’t run before. I know I didn’t,” this time, will be different. Although Adaugo goes on to explain to her friends that she doesn’t mind being “Addy,” this interaction makes public her Nigerian family history. Becoming Adaugo opens ancestral lineages to different ways of knowing the world that are already inside her; ways that are needed in this time of crisis. The trust grown from her friendships with Jay, Nessa, and DeShon give Adaugo the courage to recognize the power of ancestral knowledge, and she is able to confidently bring forward a more holistic self in the world.

At the beginning of the novel Addy is also characterized as a loner, uninterested in making friends, focused on her map-making and drawing. Initially, her feelings of loss, entrapment, and loneliness recede as she finds healing in early morning hikes with the camp dog, Ryder. Ryder is the first friend she makes at camp, and her relationship with him represents another way of knowing the natural world. Stroking his fur for the first time, Addy “feel[s] safe, happier than in a long, long time” (p. 30). This breakthrough friendship supports Addy’s embodied sense of belonging at camp and in the forest, giving her someone to care about. Their relationship comports with multiple ways of knowing nature within climate literacy, while also highlighting issues of environmental justice around pet ownership raised in the novel. Coming to know and trust Ryder provides Addy an intimate animal contact. Arguably, Addy’s care for Ryder extends out to other animals, and thus disrupts the notion of separation between humans and animals with regards to human responsibility for climate change. Their friendship can then be seen as a gateway into Addy’s reconceptualization of the natural world and human interaction within it. Like the trees, Ryder is an ambassador for the forest about which Adaugo will love and care.

Aspect Three: “Personally Felt Understanding” of Survival as Climate Literacy

Oziewicz’s (2023) working definition of climate literacy includes a third, overlapping aspect in which people apply climate literacy knowledge to situations representing personal investment. Oziewicz refers to this application and investment as, a “knowing” that manifests, “into lived, emotionally charged, and personally felt understanding” (p. 34). Although each of the campers comes to the camp with limited experience with outdoor spaces, over time, each also commits to engaging in the space in a personal and unique way. While this aspect of climate literacy arguably interconnects with the discussions of the two previous sections, there are additional stylistic conceits in the novel worth mentioning as emblematic of this aspect. As described, the construction of the narrative is such that the climax hinges on the campers’ responses to a dangerous remote wildfire situation. The narrative sections of the second half of the book, titled, “Trapped,” “Survive,” and “Flying Home,” serve to offer characters opportunities to transform knowing into being. Feelings of individual comfort in nature and the skills and knowledge that afforded the characters confidence in co-existing in natural spaces are used in the second half of the novel for survival.

Exhausted and hurt as they scramble to escape the fire, DeShon grows angry at their situation. Hoarse from screaming for a helicopter he can hear, but is unable to see, DeShon exclaims, “Leo, who? We’re his summer project. Black city kids – ‘Let’s show them what they can’t do’” (p. 181). DeShon’s frustration reminds the reader of the characters’ positionality in nature – highlighting their initial feelings of otherness, exclusion, and disconnectedness from nature/al spaces. His feelings of objectification and victimization, as someone’s transient, “summer project,” also reveals the complexity of the narrative. His friend Jay responds “softly” to DeShon’s anger, pushing against the resignation in DeShon’s positioning of them as objects without connection or will. Jay’s rebuttal, asserting that, “You wanted to stay, DeShon… All of us did” (p. 181) refutes notions of their passivity and confers agency on DeShon. To survive three days of encroaching fire, injury, and escape, the friends must act as agents for each other within the situation. Passivity, resignation, and objectivity must be surrendered for agency as subjects intimately involved in a fight for their lives, representing the immediate moment of escape, as well as foreshadowing their developing subjectivity as caretakers personally responsible for acting such that future climate emergencies, like the wildfire, can be mitigated and averted.

Climate Literacy as Responsibility, the Fourth Aspect

Becoming climate literate ultimately includes actions. Oziewicz (2023) writes that “individual and collective” responsibility is enacted as a means of communicating a disposition to “stand up for everyone’s biospheric inheritance” (p. 34). Throughout the novel, responsibility is connected to the characters’ growing recognition of the power of fire and the damage it causes. From the beginning, Addy knows that catastrophic fire and the life-changing, devastating effects can be accidental. However, by the novel’s end, each character learns uncontrollable fire can also be the result of human carelessness.

The characters of Jay and Addy initially shift from nature observers and consumers to responsible actors when they discover a still smoking firepit. Led by camp dog, Ryder, Addy, Jay, and Leo discover the shallow campground pit, surrounded by trash and cigarette stubs. This discovery becomes an opportunity to learn not only how to smother a fire, but also why careless individual actions can have destructive collective results. Jay asks, “It’ll die out, won’t it?” To which Leo replies, “sad-eyed,” “A breeze could lift a spark, start a blaze. It wouldn’t take much. There hasn’t been enough rain” (p. 117). Explaining that fire is valuable while camping, Leo warns them, “don’t you ever forget how to put it out” (p. 118). This moment of responsibility leaves Addy shaken as her fear of fire comes forward: “I clean my trembling hand. Anxiety grips me. Like a flash, I see fire everywhere” (p. 118). She reflects on the discovery as the opposite of reward – “If this were a maze, I think, the fire pit would be the END. The uncovered surprise. But instead of treasure, we averted disaster.” (p. 119).

Later in the novel, as Jay, Nessa, DeShon, and Adaugo struggle to escape the wildfire each is injured as the terrain becomes more dangerous. In the section “Survive,” Jay, feverish and unconscious, is unable to move, but Adaugo insists they leave the clearing near the river as the fire’s smoke and heat intensify. The young adults are trapped. To survive they must work collectively, and DeShon steps up, “I got an idea. Nessa, pack up, take care of Jay. Me and Addy will build a raft” (p. 204). Capable of holding only two of them, Jay is placed on the raft with Nessa while DeShon and Adaugo swim-lead the raft through the water. This collective action also shifts Adaugo’s inner narrative about who she is and her responsibility to, and need for, others. She thinks, “I never could’ve imagined this: needing someone else – DeShon, no less – to find a way out of the maze… no matter what happens… Wilderness Adventures will always mean belonging to a crew, a team. Survival is more than just me” (p. 205).

Rhodes’s narrative structure promotes future character and reader actions that manifest their concerns about climate emergency. With the text mirroring back the kinds of reflective thought needed to shift towards collective responsibility, climate literate readers have the potential to take into their lives a growing sense of self as responsibly connected to both the natural, nonhuman world and the human-centric worlds we have altered and created. In this way, Paradise on Fire supports the development of climate literacy as embodied understandings “that engage anticipatory imagination and mobilize action” (Oziewicz, 2023, p. 35).

Synthesis

Climate Literacy and the Development of Dispositions of Care and Belonging

Throughout the novel, using interpersonal dialogue and characters’ inner monologues, Jewell Parker Rhodes explores ideas about how children come to see themselves as belonging in natural spaces. This sense of belonging coincides with developing familiarity with and comfort within nature. Taken together, experiences that build familiarity, confidence, and comfort orient young adults to develop a positive disposition towards natural spaces. This disposition then facilitates more exposure, thus more confidence, and results in feelings of belonging, connection, and ultimately care for natural environments and the creatures that inhabit those spaces. In this way, feelings of belonging lead to a disposition of care that reflects a deeper understanding of climate literacy. Thus, developing climate literacy is reciprocal with engendering feelings of belonging of/in nature and care for nature(al) spaces. This assertion adds another theoretical dimension to Oziewicz’s (2023) definition of climate literacy, that of dispositions of care and belonging.

Conceptually, this exploration towards belonging is centered on the experiences of the protagonist, Adaugo, and those of her campmates-turned-friends, Jay, Nessa, and DeShon. Each of these characters ends the novel having developed feelings of comfort and belonging in natural spaces. This positive shift is notable, because the plot construction of surviving a wildfire could have just as likely led to feelings of fear, alienation, and resistance to natural spaces. The hardships these characters experienced could have resulted in negative associations. Instead, I argue that the incremental success the characters experienced in the outdoors camp not only prepared them to survive the fire, but also cultivated feelings of confidence and belonging, facilitating their climate literacy and resulting in dispositions of care.

Standing on a hill looking out over Eagle Ridge, Adaugo sees a new, unknown landscape. On her first hike, Adaugo, then Addy, begins the passage of embodying climate literacy as epistemic knowing. She discovers that the earth is ancient and awe-inspiringly beautiful in its age through witnessing (i.e., attentive seeing and listening) landscapes. This realization creates an embodied reaction that in turn supports the creation of new knowledge and understanding. She thinks, “Landscapes. I’ve seen them in books, paintings. But I’ve never felt one before. Never felt how the earth existed long, long before I was born” (Author’s italics, p. 37). Addy’s embodied awakening to the enormity of the earth, its age, and its diverse systems connects to new reflections on ancestral and multi-generational knowledge. Studying the landscape of “thick, twisted tree roots, … seeing green extending higher, glowing against craggy granite and rock” (p. 39), Addy considers her Grandma Bibi’s stories of “the African wild,” and how “most times I didn’t pay much attention,” because “living in the city, I couldn’t imagine a differing landscape… I didn’t understand her loss. Until now” (p. 39). For Addy, generational knowledge connects to care and responsibility for the Earth and its creatures. Seeing an eagle for the first time, Addy tells Leo, “Bibi tells me in Nigeria, there used to be a festival in an eagle sanctuary. Most of the eagles have disappeared, so there’s no celebration anymore” (p. 41). Leo’s reply takes Addy from the more abstract notion of climate literacy as care of nature to connecting care with responsibility for climate change.

Everywhere, eagles need protecting. From us, from people. The wilderness – rain forests, deserts, Artic tundra – need protecting, too. Fuels like coal, oil, and gas make the world hotter. See here?” Leo pats a tree trunk. His fingers flick, and bark crackles, falls. Drought stresses it. Makes it vulnerable to fire.

Bark beetles make it worse. Warming causes baby booms. Used to be one generation, now it’s two, three generations a year. Thousands of beetles laying eggs, spreading bacteria, and killing trees.

My hand scrapes the bark. Spiders scurry between cracks. But it’s the black beetles that relentlessly chew.

“Because of climate change, half of Earth’s forests are gone.” How can that be? So much beauty lost. How can we keep it? Save it?

Again, the eagle glides towards us. (p. 41–42).

Developing feelings of belonging and confidence within nature/al spaces coheres with all four aspects of climate literacy: to conceptualize our climate moment as an emergency and to “harmonize” imbricated ways of knowing require a person to cultivate a sense of self as belonging within nature. Interestingly, the denotative meanings of belonging convey feelings of affinity for/within a place, as well as conceptions of ownership and possession. From the latter perspective, feelings of nature as a belonging/possession can be understood to connote human responsibility and reciprocity, both of which correspond to the symbiotic human: nature relationship within many indigenous frameworks. This concept then overlaps with the third and fourth aspects of climate literacy – personal connection and responsive action.

Muddying the Waters: Climate Literacy and Justice

Understanding Access to Nature as Issues of Environmental Justice and Racism

Opportunities for people to enjoy time in nature and experience the outdoors, increasingly known as the “outdoors for all” movement, promoted by organizations such as The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, are built on the concept that time in nature, from immersive camping to brief park visits with caregivers, provides socio-emotional and physical health benefits for participants (Louv, 2019). This movement draws from scientific literature indicating that time in nature and access to greenspace improve physical and psychological health outcomes across all age groups (Wicks, Barton, Orbell, & Andrews, 2022; Brymer, Crabtree, & King, 2021; Tillmann, Tobin, Avison, & Gilliland, 2018; Tillmann, Clark, & Gilliland, 2018). However, accessibility to natural greenspaces is neither equitable nor equal. In the United States, access to outdoor, greenspace experience is intertwined with issues of environmental justice and environmental racism. Many communities are underserved regarding both accessible and nearby greenspace, especially, historically marginalized communities of color and lower-income communities (Rowland-Shea, Doshi, & Edberg, 2020). In addition to disparities of access and distribution, the unjust experiences of people of color when they choose activities in open spaces require our attention. We cannot expect to expand climate literacy and the expected results of care and belonging without grappling with the acts of harm and injustice experienced in natural spaces by many Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples, as well as people with dis/abilities or others who experience exclusion in nature/al spaces normatively conceived of as “exclusively white, heteronormative spaces” (Pulido, 2017, as described by David Pellow). The experiences African American men, such as Christian Cooper and Ahmaud Arbery, whose engagement in outdoor activities are met with violent and racist community and police responses, underline the problematic assumption that by promoting an “outdoors for all” approach without addressing environmental justice is itself a form of continued harm.

On the one hand, Rhodes’s book could be read as reducing the complexity of issues like access to nature and environmental justice through the construction of a plot that necessitates urban Black children, living in cities with less access to nature experiences, go to camp to become nature oriented. However, Rhodes tackles this potential interpretation explicitly, positioning Adaugo, and readers, to wrestle with such reductionist ideas from the start. On the plane heading towards camp, Addy defines their group of kids as “a special charity. Black city kids going west” (p. 11). Rising before the sun on her first morning, Addy is met outside her cabin in the dark by Leo and his dog Ryder. Leo, the White, male camp director, tells her, “There’s always one,” and Addy replies, “One what? A Black kid?” (p. 27). Addy doesn’t shy away from recognizing that many people have assumptions about who the outdoors is for, and her comments immediately confront Leo, and the reader, to confront these assumptions and beliefs. In contrast to the interpretation that for these characters climate literacy comes at the provision of white, affluent people, Adaugo and her friends come already equipped with knowledge and experience of environmental racism. They are not tabula rasa to be taught by the white camp leader. They recognize the inequities of their own experience. Yes, camp pushes them into nature spaces and one another, offering them the opportunity to deepen their climate literacy. However, their character identities have prepared them to readily engage in justice knowing, and their developing dispositions of care for nature as intersectional continue with emotional, physical, and mental costs.

For example, Rhodes deftly illuminates the issue of having the ability to swim within the novel. This issue illustrates the intersectional entanglement of environmental justice and climate literacy, because of the racialized history of access to clean water, swimming as a skill and leisure activity, and opportunities to utilize “public” swimming resources in the United States (Cruz, Berson, and Falls, 2012; Wiltse, 2007). When confronted with fording a river, DeShon, Jay, and Nessa reveal that none of them knows how to swim. Jay explains, “There’s city pools in Brooklyn. But I’ve never been,” to which DeShon replies, “lots of Black city kids can’t swim” (p. 189). In frustration DeShon adds, “This is messed up… Remind me -- ‘Don’t accept white people’s charity.’” (p. 189). DeShon’s comment highlights Rhodes’s framing that for these characters climate literacy comes at a cost. DeShon highlights how the gaze of others’ positions him as someone in need of charity. Essentially, he is questioning the motivations of the camp’s organizers and the larger culture who see him as other, as well as his own complicity in accepting the invitation to attend. The second aspect of Oziewicz’s climate literacy framework (2023) directly addresses costs many individuals bear as they attempt to live through and disentangle how the current climate emergency is connected to and representative of, “racism, colonialism, extractivism, ecocide, greed, materialist reductionism, short-termism, anthropocentrism, speciesism” (p. 35). Referring to climate literacy as “the knowledge of the implicated,” a climate literacy analysis of DeShon’s and Jay’s conversation (re)positions us, as readers, to see our entanglement in knotted interpersonal and instructional issues. As a reader comes across this passage, the question ought to be immediate: Why might none of these Black young adults know how to swim? Although a brief passage, this interaction opens inquiry into the systemic and historical racism of American segregation. Throughout the American Civil Rights movements the issue of recreational segregation manifested in restricted access to public beaches, community swimming pools, and parks. The segregated history of swimming opportunities is described by education scholars Cruz, Berson, and Falls (2012) as a chance to incorporate underrepresented aspects of Civil Rights history and systemic American racism in humanities education, stating, “while most students are aware of segregation in housing, schools, and theaters, many will be surprised to learn about the segregated history of America’s public waters” (p. 252). Such examples reveal how Rhodes’s carefully crafted novel highlights environmental justice as a key component of climate literacy.

These costs accrue for multiple reasons within the story’s action, such as the physical wounds the characters receive escaping the fire. However, readers must be encouraged to consider how these costs accrue(d) before and after the events of the story. In other words, readers can raise questions such as, what institutional and systemic decisions have resulted in urban community designs which alienate and marginalize children from natural spaces? There is climate literacy power in learning the history of systemic programs and “innovations” that led to destruction and/or bifurcation of Black neighborhoods that further eroded access to nature and nature spaces, such as the interstate highway systems (Karas, 2015; Taylor, 2023).

Character interactions and plot elements throughout serve to disrupt racist notions about who should have access to and who belongs in nature spaces. Rhodes’s construction of DeShon’s character disrupts the perpetuation of stereotypes that some people, in particular Black men, don’t care about nature. DeShon is introduced with headphones that tune out and block the sounds of nature. His headphones, however, are more than a shield. DeShon’s love of music builds connections with the other campers and helps him to take chances during their “training” (p. 87), on long hikes and climbing courses. Hesitant to climb across a high catwalk, Addy asks DeShon what song he would listen to if he could. She encourages him to “Play it in your head,” and he does:

He closes his eyes, his body bouncing, his head bobbing in time to the music running in his head. His breathing slows.

Come on,” I say.

DeShon stands, tethers himself, and crawls slowly onto and across the webbing. When he makes it to the platform, his head still bobs. He mouths: “Can’t nobody tell me nothin’…”

As described earlier, DeShon’s journey to climate literacy at Wilderness Adventures also reveals a curiosity about and affinity towards reptiles. By the end of the novel, Adaugo carries a photo of DeShon in her pocket, a picture of him wearing his headphones and cleaning a reptile cage at the zoo. DeShon, like Adaugo, is not a caricature. He is a whole, complex character who refuses to be reduced by simplistic interpretation. Thus, while acknowledging potential interpretive simplicity, it is worth considering how the young protagonists are able to transcend the “ecoambiguity,” (Thornber, 2012) that so often afflicts adults as we struggle though our “complex and often contradictory interactions” with our environments (Holgate, 2019, p. 27). Rhodes’s centering of Black characters and experiences in her narrative raises issues of environmental justice and racism often omitted from novels aiming to engage climate literacy, and positions young adults as agents capable of leading responses to the crises of climate change (Oziewicz & Saguisag, 2021).

Early in her 2017 interview with environmental justice scholar David Pellow, Lisa Pulido asked him how he became interested in environmental issues. Amongst the short stories Pellow shared, he described a memory with his father that explicitly centered race, access, and the environment. Pellow highlights how his personal experiences, early on, engaged his curiosity and activism. I see parallels between Pellow’s story about environmental racism, Adaugo’s realizations about the potential of her role as an environmentalist, and the many moments across the novel that highlight issues of access. Pellow shared:

There was another time that we parked at the lake. I opened up the glove compartment and out popped a handgun. This was not a toy. I asked my dad, “What the hell is going on?” [My dad] went into the history of violence directed against people of color in outdoor spaces. “David, look around you, at the landscape, at the people on the beach, look at yourself in the mirror, do we fit in?” I said, “Dad, we have the same right as anyone else to be here.” He told me stories about the beaches of Chicago, on the East coast, in swimming pools throughout the US where black and brown folks had been attacked, oftentimes when men of color were seen as threatening the ideals of exclusively white, heteronormative spaces. Our place in these recreational spaces was tenuous and placed us at risk. That blew my mind. It did not ruin it for me, but it definitely cast a [different] light on my summer and on my view of being out in “nature.” So that was my introduction to issues at the intersections of the environment, nature, race and gender (Pulido, p. 43).

Pellow’s story humanizes the intersectional complexity of access to natural spaces and climate/nature literacy. So, too, do multiple instances in Rhodes’s novel muddy the waters of climate literacy to underline and complicate Oziewicz’s framework with overt connections to environmental justice and racism. In fact, across the scope of Rhodes’s novels, patterns of climate literacy emerge. While this article focuses on a close reading of one novel, her young adult books Ninth Ward (2010) and Bayou Magic (2015) also grapple with issues of climate degradation, human responsibility, and environmental justice and racism. Each of these novels also tells a coming-of-age story focalizing a Black female protagonist whose experience includes climate literacy and African and African diasporic cultures and wisdom. In Paradise on Fire Adaugo’s character comes to embody her true name, with the ability to see closely, deeply, and at a distance (Rhodes’s use of italics). Adaugo’s sight allows her to literally see the natural world, as well as to find her “heart’s landscape,” (p. 74) and aspects of nature that are implied, invisible, or elided. She is placed on a journey to see the complexity of human: nature interactions and leans on that ability to save her friends from the wildfire. Importantly, she also wields this sight to develop climate literacy, as like an eagle, an “aerial perspective makes everything smaller but allows you to see the whole. Seeing the whole is important to understand what’s happening to our home” (p. 77).

Conclusion: on Authorial Positionality

In her 2017 interview Lisa Pulido also asked David Pellow to consider how environmental justice scholarship has changed, and how it grapples with climate justice movements. In response, Pellow spoke clearly to the need for positionality in environmental justice scholarship and activism, referring specifically to the need for white environmental justice scholars to recognize, “that there are boundaries and if you’re going to cross them, you do so when invited” (p. 47). These “boundaries” make explicit the need for positionality in climate literacy and environmental justice work, such that scholars recognize “particular communities of color and other marginalized groups that have struggled for centuries with racism and dispossession” (p. 47).

Thus, I end this analysis with the concept of positionality as it relates to interpretive reading, climate literacy, and environmental justice issues. As a scholar, I believe there is ample evidence of human-caused climate change, as well as copious data indicating institutional (e.g., statist) and systematic decision-making that has resulted in disproportionate effects of environmental degradation. In presenting this analysis, I recognize my position as a white, cisgender woman analyzing a novel by a Black woman author centered on Black young adult protagonists limits my ability to write from first-person knowing, and thus, I write as an ally (Love, 2019). Scholarship that highlights young adult texts for classroom and scholarly use supports fiction as an educative tool to engage young adults in the complexities of climate and justice issues (Oziewicz & Saguisag, 2021).

Ben Holgate (2019), writing about magical realism as an avenue for environmental discourse, states “Environmental literature… inherently involves looking at the extratextual world from a different perspective so that readers are prompted to at least consider how they might adjust their lifestyles, both individually and collectively, to protect the environment and persuade others to do likewise” (p. 26). My hope in examining the symmetry between Marc Oziewicz’s elements of climate literacy and Jewell Parker Rhodes’s YA narrative Paradise on.

Fire is to offer a (re)consideration of the power of story to inform how natural spaces are defined, for whom those natural spaces exist, and a willingness to quiet ourselves to learn to listen to the messages that natural spaces can teach us. Indeed, the overarching theme may be that climate literacy via narratives for children can beget a literacy of nature that communicates agency and activism. By way of Rhodes’s protagonists, readers can learn to listen into and read natural spaces, a key steppingstone towards climate literacy and the pursuit of environmental justice as care for our planet and all its creatures. Using the developing framework of climate literacy described by Oziewicz (2023), this critical essay applies that frame to Rhodes’s novel to illustrate how a close reading of YAL can offer opportunities to engage, develop, refine, and interrogate conceptions of climate literacy within and outside of classrooms.