I have been thinking a lot about environmental pedagogy in American studies, especially since I started teaching a third-year interdisciplinary course, Climate Change & Culture Wars, which focusses on the post-1970s US. I wanted to know more about how others are approaching the topic as we face up to looming climate and ecological collapse. University teachers and learners across disciplines are reckoning with it, but what's going on in American studies in Britain, and what can we learn from each other and from teachers elsewhere? How is the crisis impacting on the framing of our disciplinary fields and how are we incorporating its intellectual and practical demands into pedagogic spaces and syllabi?

On a macro level, light will soon be shed on these questions by the British Association for American Studies (BAAS) Sustainability Leads, Dr. Elsa Devienne (Northumbria) and Dr. Rebecca Tillett (University of East Anglia), who plan to oversee an important audit of environmental teaching in British American studies. This will allow us to get a fuller picture, consolidate networks and exchange practice. We know from the recently launched “Green BAAS” network that there is a lot going on, and through this process we want to ensure that environmental pedagogies are not siloed but instead disseminated, integrated and developed as fully and quickly as possible. Another response was to stage a roundtable conversation exploring the teaching of environmental American studies at Digital BAAS 2021 (our first nearly carbon-neutral annual conference, under the able green leadership of the association's chair, Dr. Cara Rodway), out of which this forum arises.

The disorienting horror and intractability of the crisis (I am writing in the week that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its “Code Red” report, as the US suffers, at once, intensified fires, droughts and flooding while still pursuing new oil exploration and pipeline construction) demands shifts in teaching content and practice. As the entries that follow attest, the crisis gives rise to and requires fundamental reframing in American historiographies; new kinds of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches and challenges; deep intersectional critiques of settler colonial, racist and patriarchal extractivist capitalism; urgent centering of alternative, marginalized and radical narratives, communities, and intellectual traditions; and ambitiously engaged and inventive teaching and assessment approaches – including those of one contributor who, with others, has set an influential blueprint for coalition-based, decolonial, radical eco-pedagogy. Responding to the emergency pushes us further, as teachers and learners, into community-facing and politically engaged forms of American studies that have deep disciplinary roots – what Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz have called “American studies as accompaniment.”Footnote ¹

One approach that emerges is to break down the distinction between teachers and learners. Student organizers and activists in our classes hold a lot of expertise. We can learn from them and give them a platform, enabling peer-to-peer communication between students about political agency, institutional critique, climate activism, resilience building, and radical alternatives. When American studies students research the mass mobilization of the first 1970 Earth Day or the activist strategies of the black freedom movement, these US protest histories are powerfully animated when accompanied by immediate student accounts of their own ecological organizing, civil disobedience and climate justice activism. These (now) hallowed histories can also install a much-needed bolster for today's brave young activists, legitimating and contextualizing their work in the face of unwarranted and continuing state vilification and even criminalization. To showcase how we can learn from students, this “teaching” forum, and the conference roundtable from which it arises, centre the voices of two students, a dialogue between a teacher and a learner and a call to decarbonize and decolonize our teaching by an American studies student activist.

Of course, not all of our students signing up to environment-themed classes share the perspective of these two contributors. One of the challenges I face each year as I launch my class on the climate crisis is that the student cohort comprises learners with vastly different levels of understanding about the peril we face. Some have read and ingested what the scientists are saying and/or have experienced environmental hazard personally (arising from their social or geographic location); many others have not. What are the appropriate starting points, particularly when the prospect of an “uninhabitable Earth” can spark such grief and anxiety? On a simple level, it is imperative that all American studies students have a basic literacy about global heating and why it causes climate disruption (if Manchester American studies is anything to go by, many still don't). From my cultural studies perspective, it also seems essential that students are media-literate, and understand the political economy of the US media landscape (few have considered, for instance, how the ownership of the top four prestige US newspapers, along with social media platforms, by billionaires might impact on climate justice risk communication).

This leads to the more fundamental point: an increasing number of social scientists are telling us that it is not so much humans as the capitalist model –premised on “growthism,” consumerism, competitive individualism, and extractivism – that is on a collision course with the living planet. The economic model of the United States – the one that the idea of “America” has emblematized – isn't tenable; system change is needed. More students than we may realize now understand this and yearn to learn more about egalitarian, circular and alternative economic and cultural paradigms (which have deep histories in the US, especially in communities that have been the most socially and economically exploited). Opinion polls suggest that a majority of people in the age bracket of our students in the US and the UK no longer support capitalism and see climate change as a capitalist problem.Footnote ² This warrants and enables the kinds of radical recalibrations in American studies teaching content and practice that the entries below, in different ways, call for.

The extraordinary contributions below slice into the topic from a number of angles. Elsa Devienne ably dismantles some basic premises in twentieth-century American history teaching, which still too often sideline or ignore the unsustainable carbon-propelled basis of postwar affluence; J. T. Roane, with Alexis Young, feeds his influential radical ‘black ecologies’ pedagogy into a course on Black Feminisms, taking us into oppressive yet expansive pre- and post-oil worlds that are nonetheless grounded in everyday life and teaching practice; Christine Okoth carefully uncovers the methodological, disciplinary and ultimately political fault lines of the “environmental turn” in relation to black studies, comparative studies, literary theory, and transnational American studies, using the work of Sylvia Wynter as her teaching guide; John Wills takes us back to the early 1970s to show how contested, socially located environmental histories can be taught in and through Hollywood film on his Inviting Doomsday module; and, in a sobering yet compelling final contribution, American and English studies student and activist Frances Henderson implores us to transform our classrooms to move beyond the dissonance of “speaking of the climate crisis as if it is just another theory in a journal.” These contributions do not, taken together, assume a unified starting point into this difficult conversation, although there is much compelling complementarity. They include contributions from different disciplines (befitting American studies), from different political perspectives, and from people at different career stages with different levels of autonomy over the courses on which they teach and learn. We hope this generates a galvanizing, provocative and useful discussion on a vital topic.

When I joined Northumbria University, I inherited a second-year option module entitled Affluence & Anxiety: US History from 1920 to 1960. Designed by a colleague who had since left the university, the module's chronological scope offered the students an opportunity to explore in depth major periods and events of the twentieth-century US, while leaving out the revolutionary decade of the 1960s and its aftermath, which were covered by another module. Affluence & Anxiety, as a module title, was not particularly original – it echoed the titles of other works about the postwar period – but it had a nice ring to it, as proven by its successful recruitment numbers each year, and it did convey pithily some of the ambiguities of the period.Footnote ¹ Yet, as I started preparing for the new academic year, I found myself increasingly uncomfortable with the title and content of the module. Affluence & Anxiety was giving me a lot of anxiety, indeed, and its framing of “postwar affluence” appeared increasingly antiquated in a time of climate crisis and ecological collapse.

According to a well-established narrative found in recent, and not so recent, US history textbooks (reflected in the module guide provided by my predecessor), in the period bookended by World War II and the first oil shock of 1973, America experienced “a golden age” fueled by “almost miraculous economic growth.”Footnote ² Propelled by mass consumerism, strong unionization and federal military spending, many Americans experienced what came to be known as “the good life”: high wages, a single-family home, holidays, etc. Of course, the traditional “postwar-affluence” narrative was never wholly celebratory. In his influential 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith already condemned the era's excessive emphasis on the consumption of luxury goods and services and the lack of investment in public infrastructure that would reduce economic inequalities.Footnote ³ Even more crucially, scholars have since shown that the “good life” remained largely outside the reach of African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities due to persistent forms of discrimination. In addition, the narrative usually integrates criticisms of the era's consensual embrace of the suburban dream and strict gender roles coming from women's history.

It soon became clear to me that this traditional narrative had remained essentially untouched since the late 1990s. More surprisingly, the “affluent-society” narrative deployed in virtually all US history textbooks of the past thirty years was seemingly impervious to the insights of environmental history. Affluence, according to this narrative, was not equally shared but it was, fundamentally, A Good Thing. More often than not, the ecological choices that had buttressed the “affluent society” were ignored.

It is high time that we challenge the standard narrative of a postwar affluence “only” marred by class, racial, and gender inequalities. The affluent lifestyle that many white Americans enjoyed in the postwar period cannot be presented to our students – who belong to the so-called “Green Generation” – without a thorough contextualization of its role in the advent of the “Anthropocene,” a new geological epoch characterized by humans’ unprecedented geological imprint on the planet.Footnote ⁴ The US “good life” was predicated on economic and racial inequalities and on stifling gender roles. But it was also fundamentally unsustainable, and it contributed to the “Great Acceleration,” which has led to a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide emissions.Footnote ⁵ We need a narrative of postwar affluence that foregrounds the dependency pathways it created and the environmental damages it generated at the time, as well as those it locked in for the future. The standard narrative repeated across the board about postwar affluence normalizes this period of extraordinary reliance on fossil fuels, contributing to a sense of misplaced nostalgia for more simple times, when it should be treated as anomalous. It is fundamentally unrepresentative in the long history of humans’ relations with their biosphere.

Before going further, let me acknowledge the fact that this challenge is not unique to US history. In France, the 1946–75 period famously earned for itself the label “thirty glorious years” in reference to the cycle of constant growth the country experienced at the time. French textbooks relay a narrative according to which French people embraced progress and modernity with open arms. Over the past ten years, historians have challenged this celebratory narrative and called for one that integrates dissenting voices and the “secondary effects of the development model adopted after 1945.”Footnote ⁶ Crucially, these scholars have highlighted the ways in which France's extraordinary growth depended on easy access to cheap resources and energy extracted from its ex-colonies, where the most egregious environmental damages were conveniently circumscribed.

Just like the “thirty glorious years” have been renamed, quite provocatively, “the thirty ravaging years” by some French historians, it is time more US historians (and US history textbooks) take note of the vast bibliography that now exists in environmental history that documents the ravages of the postwar “economic miracle.”Footnote ⁷ Since it would not be fair to base my comments on older textbooks, let me consider two recent iterations. In These United States, the excellent textbook published by Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue in 2015, the problems associated with postwar prosperity (chapter 9, “Postwar Prosperity and Its Discontents”) are decidedly not environmental in nature. Even sections dedicated to “Automobility” and “Air-Conditioned America” remain entirely silent on the question of their environmental costs. It is not until the chapter dedicated to “The Troubled 1970s” (chapter 13), which details the rise of the environmental movement and the success of the first Earth Day, that we learn about the environmental consequences associated with the suburban boom and “the economic miracle.”Footnote ⁸ The dissociation between the two stories – one of affluence in the 1950s–1960s and one of environmental awareness in the late 1960s and the 1970s – is problematic not only because it silences the environmentalist voices that were already active in the supposedly quiescent 1950s, but also because it perpetuates, unwittingly, a triumphant narrative of growth untarnished by its associated effects.

In particular, it fails to highlight the ways in which decisions made in that earlier period eliminated alternative pathways and locked the nation's future along certain energy choices. One might wonder why, for instance, the story of “air-conditioned America” is not tempered by the findings in Andrew Needham's book Power Lines, which reveals how the metropolitan growth of Phoenix and the Southwest – itself largely predicated on the democratization of air conditioning – was tied to the mining and burning of coal on Navajo land. In the 1970s, Navajo nationalists made the connection explicit when they denounced the ways in which the pollution associated with an increase in electricity use in California, Arizona, and Nevada was externalized to their territories.Footnote ⁹

Similarly, Sugrue and Gilmore do not take heed of the environmental consequences of the postwar boom in car ownership and the construction of the interstate highway system. While they do note the implication of the increase in oil consumption in terms of importations and foreign policy, they fail to frame this development as the continuation of a fundamentally unsustainable “technological ecosystem” dependent on cheap oil. Using Christopher Wells's Car Country would go a long way towards foregrounding the conditions and incentives that underpinned the creation of “car-centered landscapes” and their consequences on the nation's ecosystems (from tailpipe emissions to the loss of open space). How “growth” became synonymous with “car-dependent growth” in the postwar US is a crucial insight that we, as educators, ought to highlight to students. And yet such precious scholarship too often remains unheeded.Footnote ¹⁰

The treatment of postwar affluence in the free, online, collaborative textbook American Yawp is similarly lacking an environmental-history angle. Chapter 26, dedicated to the “Affluent Society,” zeroes in on “the rise of the suburbs,” highlighting how the postwar construction boom fueled economic growth while further entrenching racial inequality and prescriptive gender roles.Footnote ¹¹ Yet the chapter remains silent on the environmental consequences of the suburban boom, even though historian Adam Rome wrote a pathbreaking book on the topic twenty years ago.Footnote ¹² This omission prompted me to email the editors of American Yawp and offer to craft a paragraph that would account for this story. The paragraph (see below in abridged form), which will be integrated with the 2021–22 update, not only describes the environmental damages associated with suburban construction, but also foregrounds the ways in which decisions made in the postwar period paved the way for the climate crisis:

Introducing the phrase “the climate crisis” in a US history textbook for a period preceding the 1990s, or even the 1970s, is unusual and comes with potential challenges. In a context where climate denialism has been rampant, including in the highest spheres of politics under the Trump administration, making such statements requires thorough references lest readers accuse the textbook editors of politicizing history. The editors thus asked, in addition to the reference to Rome's work, for a list of more general environmental histories of the postwar period.

The case study I develop here is a stark example of the persistent failure of environmental history to influence the historical narrative of the nation at large. For all its trendiness, environmental history has yet to be fully integrated in US history survey courses. As historian Ellen Stroud remarked, the environment too often “surfaces in an occasional lecture – on the Columbian Exchange, or the Dust Bowl, or Love Canal.”Footnote ¹³ Explaining this paradox is tricky: how is it that a field rich with talented scholars and prize-winning books, and benefiting from a growing interest from undergraduates eager to understand our present challenges, remains unable to fundamentally alter the way US history is taught?

In the case of postwar affluence, I can identify at least two factors that explain the traditional narrative's persistence. First, US history and American studies remain tied to an origin story that links material abundance with democracy and the full realization of freedom. From Jefferson's agrarian ideals to the conquest of the West, to Roosevelt's four freedoms (including “freedom from want”), the idea that America's bountiful nature and unlimited natural resources served as a strong foundation for the continuing democratization of the country is difficult to dislodge. In this context, historians have been reluctant to consider together the positive social developments associated with postwar affluence – rising wages, the development of the welfare state, etc. – and its environmental costs. Second, the postwar US adopted an energy system reliant on oil, coal, and nuclear power, which enabled the externalization of environmental damages both in time (far into the future) and in space (in marginal regions of the country and the globe). It is easier to ignore environmental damages if they remain out of sight, even for historians trained to make connections between complex phenomena. In the case of the postwar US, environmental costs were often rejected outside the nation's borders. Recent environmental histories of popular consumer products have revealed how staples of the postwar American diet – the banana and Coca-Cola –implied the externalization of environmental and health costs in faraway places, from depleted underground aquifers and polluted streams in India to Honduran field hands exposed to harmful pesticides.Footnote ¹⁴ These insights need to be more systematically integrated into the standard narrative of the postwar consumer cornucopia. Shedding light on the hidden costs of American capitalism would not only give a more rounded picture of postwar affluence, but also contribute to making US history less insular and more transnational.

By offering this example of how the postwar affluence narrative can and should be challenged from a perspective of environmental history, I hope to inspire other historians and educators to question their teaching material and the assumptions that underlay standard narratives about growth and conquest. It is only by subjecting all periods and events to this kind of scrutiny that we will be able to embed the climate crisis and its origins in the American studies curriculum.

In what follows this introduction, I present some material from an interview with Alexis Young, a budding critical journalist who took my spring 2020 Black Feminisms course in African and African American Studies at Arizona State University and who subsequently co-planned and hosted a digital series that ran in spring 2021 through the Black Ecologies Initiative at ASU's Institute for Humanities Research.Footnote ¹

I taught the Black Feminisms course centering themes related to “black ecologies,” a term that Justin Hosbey and I use to describe, in part, the critical insights about present conditions and future worlds related to the realities of ecological catastrophe and generated through everyday black practices of survival, black expressive culture, and explicit black ecological organizing and intellectual traditions.Footnote ² The course mobilized the scholarship and cultural production of black women not only to theorize the ways that black women's lives have been entwined with ecocide but also to think about how writers, cultural producers, theorists, activists, and community organizers have engaged in critical work to survive and transform these conditions. Black communities, often through the erection of sometimes fleeting insurgent architectures of care provided by “captive maternals,” have been working to survive and thrive beyond environmental crises since the origin of the extractivist mining–plantation complex in the late fifteenth century.Footnote ³ Therefore they have created unique epistemes required in the consideration of a future ordering beyond environmental catastrophe, displacement, and violence, as well as the logics of dominion that underwrite humanism and its sovereign subject, Man.Footnote ⁴

The premise of the course was an understanding that we must delink ourselves from the idea that apocalypse is the kind of cinematic version of apocalypse where planetary destruction unfolds in the blink of an eye.Footnote ⁵ From the vantage of black people, we live the end of the world every day across different contexts. So black studies has a different orientation – one that invites the possibilities for heeding the demands of a “dangerous morality”:

In the course design I attempted to grapple with how to think about curriculums that are critically insurgent, that respond with depth and breadth in the heat of what's going on with this insight that the world ends every day for some. Within the course's formulation of the end or ends, I am clear that an emphasis on black loss doesn't always accomplish the work that sometimes it portrays itself as accomplishing (especially in contexts numerically dominated by white students). Therefore I felt it was critical to think about black ecologies and the traditions of black feminisms as a shared lineage centering living and vitality alongside the negation of the material and epistemic conditioning of black life into the always already dying, dead, and disposable. Black feminists have created unique epistemologies around the environment. In the context of the Americas, starting with slavery and into the present, they led a significant counterforce against the conditions of enclosure and ecocide in relation to the land, water, neighbourhoods, communities, forests, and swamps. I wanted my students to appreciate that these are usable pasts and paths in the face of the looming biospheric collapse and the dead-end political imaginaries forwarded in efforts to maintain extraction, violence, and domination while “decarbonizing.”

As the interview indexes, I have students engage in multimodal cultural production and I approach the classroom as a cultural organizer from the vantage of black studies, which has a different orientation to the means and ends of the classroom deriving from its origins in student activism and organizing.Footnote ⁷ For example, I have students write musical lyrics. At the same time as Alexis was enrolled, there was a songwriter and music major in the class. Collectively we mobilized black feminist ecological thought and employed it in ways that students found germane to their own work, including song composition.

The other thing that I do quite often with students in this course is a zine or digital zine project. That helps students to realize that you don't have to publish a book or a research article to say something about this and to be active in this struggle for the future of the planet and life across human and nonhuman communities. Most often we actually don't print the zines; it's mainly about the process. The best outcome for this kind of course for me is for the students to form a cohort of concerned artists and writers who have the energy and the motivation and the skills and the internally generated resources to do the transformative work we require as a global collective. These exercises are reflected in the movement in Alexis's own thought and practice about her personal and our collective future.

Alexis Young: When I signed up for Black Feminisms, I didn't expect it at all to be taught from an environmental or ecological perspective. I was particularly moved by the parallels between black feminine subjects, especially in relation to their bodies and the conditions of environmental degradation, how black women's bodies were tied to American soil and American land and the parallels between their treatment and the way American soil has been treated since early settlement/conquest.

J. T. Roane: Yes, one of the key texts of that class is the Delores Williams's critical essay comparing strip mining and the kind of extractionism around enslaved women's bodies thinking about the kind of ways in which extractionism in a modern context and extractionism in the context of slavery derive from the same ideologies that justify the denaturing and denuding of both. When you put in that context that black women's sexuality is tied to expansion and extraction then reproductive justice becomes part of environmental justice in a very direct way.Footnote ⁸

Has the environmental perspective of black feminist environmentalism shaped your trajectory, and if so, how? What do you plan to do with that?

Alexis Young: Right around the time I had this class, I found out about “schoolies,” or sustainable living through buying a school bus, renovating it and kind of letting that be your mobile home. And then I fell into the rabbit hole of exploring mobile and sustainable living. Purchasing a school bus and turning it into a home and running my business and living out of there for a time would be a dream. As well, I really got into “earthships” and how they're built and kind of the fact that they're built from all recyclable products and things. And it is technical. You have to know about things like your black water tank and all this other stuff that I truly had no clue about. And then it just opened, looking at “earthships” and looking at “schoolies” and van life and you know all that stuff from not just the perspective of, okay this makes the most sense for me to try and live this nomadic life, but also just looking at how liberatory it could be for the environmental conditions.

I write this contribution to the roundtable on teaching environmental humanities in American studies from a peculiar position: after three years working as a researcher in a department of English and comparative literatures I am now on the brink of teaching courses solely focussed on black literature and culture in a department of English. The distinction might at first seem small but it is important, especially in light of the geographic framing of this roundtable. Though the hemispheric and transnational turns have left a lasting mark on the field of American studies, comparison is still not always welcome, often for good reason. Comparison – as a foundational method of both literary studies and interdisciplinary fields like black studies – has a reputation: at its worst, it flattens, creates false equivalences, and then implements hierarchies that often simply reflect exactly those social hierarchies that already organize history and literature. Yet history demands that my students and I compare. The modern world and our current political and ecological predicaments only make sense if we read enslavement and colonialism, past and present regimes of extraction, and the global implementation of hierarchies of difference alongside each other.

So those of us who work in fields like black studies are faced with a problem: how do we compare without repeating those analytical gestures that have given comparison a bad name? My response to this question is organized in two parts. The first is based on experience and the second is speculation. The first is an account from a perspective of black studies, a field and method which often appear on syllabi but are rarely centered (though more so in light of last summer's events and the ongoing activist efforts to hold institutions accountable in their claims to decolonization). And the second is an account of what I hope is possible when that field is not just centered but central, by which I mean when it becomes the scholarly foundation from which to approach questions of environment and environment making. While the first is an account of integration, the second is one of a necessary analytical displacement. Both accounts take as their point of departure one text: Sylvia Wynter's 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation.”Footnote ¹

Wynter's essay is seven pages long but it covers vast theoretical ground. Ostensibly a review of V. S. Reid's 1949 novel New Day, “Novel and History” is more a contribution to theories of the novel than an aesthetic judgment of a particular text. Of central importance in this particular context is the following claim: the Caribbean novel stages a crisis of literary form by pitting the forces of the “plot” against the forces of the “plantation.” This literary antagonism corresponds to an ongoing conflict within colonized nations: the “plot” represents the interests of the formerly enslaved, who often had a plot of land to cultivate for subsistence use, and the “plantation” represents the interests of the planter class and their inheritors, who grow primarily for the market.

Wynter's essay is versatile and a joy to teach and learn with: I've encountered it on courses that are thematically focussed on environment and literature as well as on courses that offer a more general introduction to literary theory. In its focus on the dynamic relationship between political economy and cultural production, the essay chimes with other works of Marxist literary criticism – from Lukacs to Williams to Jameson – but it stresses the specificity of the colonial context to the development of literary genre and the novel form. Through Wynter's writing, we learn that the theft and reorganization of land relations, as well as the transportation and enslavement of racialized populations, necessitate a reassessment of how economic and cultural production interact with each other. “Plot and Plantation” offers an anticolonial and eco-materialist theory of the novel, which does not seek to absorb Caribbean cultural history into an already existing theoretical model but redraws the terms of the discussion around Caribbean thought.

And Wynter's essay compares: alongside Reid's novel it mentions, for example, Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Weep Not Child (1964), V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958), texts that are set within and are about colonial societies or those populated by the descendants of the formerly enslaved but stem from differing regions within these global histories. And as Sonya Posmentier notes, Wynter reads across the boundaries of genre in her invocation of folk songs, thereby developing a theory of narrative in which “a plot … is not plotted but sung and chanted.”Footnote ² Born in Cuba, raised in Jamaica, educated in London, a resident of Guyana and the US, Wynter – in her oeuvre and in this essay – is a theorist who compares but does not flatten. Moving across genres and geographies, “Plot and Plantation” is an exemplary model of what comparison can teach us about environment, colonialism, and literary form.

Environment in Wynter's essay and in the context of its production is therefore not an overdetermined critical term or an amorphous extraneous entity but the target and subject of politics – colonial and anticolonial alike. We (those who teach and learn with this text) should therefore take a moment to dwell on context. “Novel and History” was originally published in a 1971 edition of Savacou, a literary and cultural journal published out of the University of the West Indies at Mona. Wynter, who had studied for an advanced degree in Hispanic studies at King's College London, was working as a lecturer in Hispanic studies at the time. She would later move to the United States in 1971, which is where she produced most of the work she is currently best known for. “Novel and History” was therefore published right on the cusp of a major geographical and intellectual shift. As Anthony Bayani Rodriguez notes, her time in Guyana and Jamaica was marked by a series of attempts at postcolonial revolution.Footnote ³ In 1968, when the then prime minister, Hugh Shearer, banned the socialist intellectual Walter Rodney from reentering Jamaica, the students at the UWI Mona campus staged a protest that turned into an uprising. Three years later, Jamaica would elect a new government which implemented a broadly socialist agenda that included a programme of resource sovereignty focussed on the bauxite and alumina industries.

As I have learned from my colleagues at Warwick, teaching with a focus on environment is a thematic approach wedded to a critical method that refuses generalized and commonplace assumptions and opens up alternate paths through history and literature. Wynter's “Novel and History” allows for exactly this kind of approach. Both the essay itself and the context within which it was written point to multiple histories and critical positions of environment and politics that are both global and local. Building on this, I would be curious about the kind of granular comparisons that we can make if we take what J. T. Roane and others have referred to as “histories of black ecologies” as the starting point for a broadly comparative framework.Footnote ⁴ We could explore what it means to make comparisons not just between, say, coal mining in Wales, the US gold rush, and uranium mining in Niger, but also between how the management of people's relationship with the environment produces racial subjection in both the US nineteenth-century coal mining industry and gold extraction in colonial Zimbabwe. Or we could consider how extractive logics have been transported from one specific context to another, as is the case in Megan Black's recent work on the US Department of the Interior and its modes of colonial expropriation in the US and elsewhere.Footnote ⁵ Or we could think more generally about the geopolitics of what we call “environment” and how this category is still being leveraged to facilitate colonial expropriation under the guise of conservation.

Positioning black histories and literature as the central grounds of comparison challenges assumptions of universalism, shared historical responsibility, the proper constitution of “environment” and environmentalism, or the subordination of struggles around indigeneity, race, disability, gender and sexuality to the status of secondary concerns that sometimes make their way into scholarly debates around ecocriticism. The stories that we tell about ecology would be quite different, especially in relation to liberal notions of sustainability or the way we understand environmental activism that seems to have very little to say about police brutality, the carceral state, or migrant detention. So much of it might entail processes of unlearning – those acts of “reframing histories and recalibrating texts” that our panel organizers talk about. In doing so, we can also teach students to think critically about the failures and fissures of environmentalisms past and to consider why the environmental movement can, even today, morph into eco-fascism.

And we might also approach an answer to these questions through the document of the syllabus. Not only is the syllabus a supposedly cohesive and discrete unit of learning, but it is also, at its best, a series of potential avenues and methods for the collaborative investigation of a specific research question. It is also, and practically, one of the only spaces in which those of us committed to centering black and Indigenous histories and aesthetics in our accounts of environment and environment making can perform the kind of imaginative acts which might help us collaboratively construct a different kind of university. So while a syllabus and a classroom look like an already formulated entity, they are actually the opposite. Here, we can develop a more expansive but precise method of comparison.

In order to do so, the academy needs to change. Wynter's essay is popular but the academy's engagement with it might best itself be described as extractive. As with Glissant's writing on opacity – a call to black people of Caribbean descent to let themselves partially retreat into unknowability which has become a mainstay of contemporary theoretical writing – the resurgence of interest in Wynter's work has not necessarily resulted in greater interest in supporting scholars who share these thinkers’ backgrounds. This circumstance is partially attributable to the dire state of higher education in the UK and the long-standing refusal to create space for black students and academics as well as scholarship on and about black literature, history, and culture. We know the statistics and I will not recite them here – readers of this roundtable should by now be familiar with the Leading Routes report on the broken pipeline – but what I do want to highlight is that, though black Caribbean thought is good enough for the academy to use as a resource for the teaching of general topics in the environmental humanities, that same warm welcome is not extended to black Caribbean people and black people more generally.Footnote ⁶

In light of this discrepancy between critical interest in black studies and the continued refusal to support black people – within and outside the academy –we should also consider, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins has recently asked in the context of the enrolment and jobs crisis in literary studies, “Is your crisis in the humanities my crisis?”Footnote ⁷ And if the answer is “no” then what exactly are we being asked to hold on to, to sacrifice our commitments and our time for? And we might then also ask an accompanying question: what kind of planet are we seeking to preserve? And in what kind of university can we perform the creative work necessary to imagine a world in which survival is not unequally distributed?

This is a crisis, to be sure, but how we emerge from it is also up to us. If we are forced to rebuild anyway, then why not rebuild something more imaginative than what we have. How can we compare like Wynter?

Popular media provides valuable insight into how we collectively view and navigate today's unfolding climate crisis. From singer-songwriter Jackson Browne's “Before the Deluge” (1974) and Michael Jackson's “Earth Song” (1995), to Hollywood blockbusters such as The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009), through to recent ecologically framed video games such as Firewatch (2016), which depicts the life of a fire lookout in Shoshone National Forest, or Walden (2017), which transports you into the world of Henry David Thoreau, media captures and shapes our environmental concerns and sensibilities. In the classroom, the study of music, film and video games alongside specific instances of environmental challenge helps us comprehend how entertainment media informs environmental debate. While often reinforcing capitalist, consumerist and fossil-fuel tendencies in society, select examples of popular media also register growing anxieties over climate change. Positioned alongside scientific reports, protester pamphlets and presidential speeches, products of popular culture highlight artistic, commercial and citizen responses to ecological crisis. Looking at the 1980s, for example, we can see how mass concern over nuclear war (and nuclear winter) filtered into a range of music, film and video game titles united in their opposition to nuclear arms escalation, and collectively presented a powerful doomsday image of a fallen radioactive Earth. From ABC's dramatic television film The Day After (1983), which left President Ronald Reagan “greatly depressed” following a private viewing, through to Atari's Missile Command (1980), an ultimately unwinnable game of defending US cities from nuclear attack, entertainment probed the dangers of aggressive posturing in the Cold War, and presented a world on the precipice of ecocide.Footnote ¹

Hearing, seeing and even playing these popular-cultural texts in the classroom, students gain a unique glimpse into the past and the popular imaginary surrounding environmental catastrophe. In my own US environmental history module, Inviting Doomsday, I regularly deploy such media as a means not just to involve students on an intellectual level, but also to foster a sense of creative and emotional engagement with environmental issues. The module, structured around a series of case study disasters (both real and imagined), and taught in an interdisciplinary manner, explores both scientific and sentimental takes on climate change, and students are encouraged to develop their own responses, including crafting manifestos of environmental justice and designing democratic park spaces.

In a week dedicated to exploring The Population Bomb (1968), a controversial late 1960s popular-science book warning about imminent overpopulation by biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich (the latter uncredited), students watch and discuss the movie Soylent Green. Released in 1973, but set in 2022, Robert Fleischer's movie is a classic piece of eco-dystopian fiction. Based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison, the film depicts American society as wracked by resource collapse, corporate abuse, and social disorder. Charlton Heston plays NYPD detective Frank Thorn, a grimy, sweaty, old-school detective, who, aided by analyst Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson in his final movie role), investigates the death of a wealthy Soylent board member. Thorn uncovers a greater conspiracy surrounding the Soylent Corporation and the mysterious origins of food ration Soylent Green that the 40 million residents of New York City rely on for survival. The puzzle for both him and the audience quickly becomes “What is the secret of Soylent Green?” with a predictably messy reveal.Footnote ²

Shown in a classroom setting, the movie serves as a powerful visual companion to the Ehrlichs’ best-selling book. Both film and book offer alarming depictions of “future America” tied to problems of overpopulation and resource collapse. Ehrlich himself applauded Make Room! Make Room!, calling it “the most effective fictional treatment of the consequences of the population explosion that I have ever come across.”Footnote ³ Students respond in a variety of ways to reading the Ehrlichs’ text: some are enthralled by the elaborately storied disaster “Scenarios,” some disturbed by the sensationalist tone and US-centric view of the population “problem,” others intrigued by the focus (and failure) of the predictions. Soylent Green offers students a gateway to the chief concerns of Paul and Anne Ehrlich (as well as fears of the time) partly due to the accessibility of the celluloid format.

The movie discussion in class opens specific environmental avenues. First, the age of the film effectively highlights to students that popular concern over the environment is far from new or novel. A film referencing climate change and the greenhouse effect in 1973 shows that environmental awareness is historically rooted, and anxiety over global pollution dates back at least five decades. Closely associated with other forms of protest and activism, environmentalism can now be seen as part of a wave of organized action sweeping across the USA in the late 1960s. In the years surrounding the very first Earth Day, held on 22 April 1970, Hollywood produced a number of science fiction films that explored and contributed to the new national environmental consciousness. Planet of the Apes (1968), also starring Heston, showed an inverted world with humans cast as savages thanks to nuclear war; Silent Running (1972) foretold planetary collapse, with the world’s last wildernesses preserved in bio-dome spaceships; while Logan's Run (1976) combined issues of population control with wilderness rebirth after nuclear war. The group of pictures very much included Soylent Green. With its opening montage of photographic images depicting packed freeways, overcrowded spaces, smokestacks, smog, and garbage piles pushing hard on the alarm, Soylent Green quite blatantly reflected the new environmental turn.Footnote ⁴

Second, the movie offers a wealth of environmental issues for students to notice and engage with. The pressing issue of overpopulation is highlighted in a range of visceral scenes, from high-rise stairs claustrophobically packed with the homeless (Thorn gingerly navigating their bodies as he makes his way to and from his apartment) through to angry and oppressed hordes filling downtown streets. Overpopulation, the film suggests, creates a world where people, due to their vast number, are worth less (or even worthless) in the view of governmental authorities, evidenced in the authoritarian-style collection of street protesters by deploying dumper trucks, symbolically casting rioting people as nothing more than trash. The active encouragement of the elderly to end their lives at the government euthanasia clinic, as taken up by Roth, does not tie individual sacrifice with societal survival, but acts more as an indictment of contemporary life, and a register of how bleak the future is. As he dies, Roth (joined by Thorn) gazes with wonder upon beautiful, vibrant, and emotive scenes of American wilderness, pure and untouched by humans, preserved only on clinic view screens, granting him a fleeting sensory reward for taking his own life. The personal loss of Roth entwines with the grim reality of the greater loss of nature. The ominous specter of a world running out of supplies is meanwhile tackled most emotively through the subject of food, the broader picture that of a city (and world) where sustenance is rationed and controlled, with a unique moment of joy and sensory delight being that of Thorn and Roth dining on a rare fresh meal of beef stew (and a spoon of strawberry jam after) that comes from the table of the American super-rich elite.

Further of interest to today's students is how the movie consistently projects environmental damage as a product of the US capitalist system.Footnote ⁵ Thorn investigates corporate malpractice, a common eco-theme, with Soylent Corporation actively engaged in corporate greenwashing (through the product of Soylent Green), disguising its wares as environmentally friendly and plankton-based. Transported by garbage truck upon death to be recycled as food, people become literally the raw “material” of industrial capitalism. In the backdrop, the polluted natural environment appears the result of the slow violence endemic to corporate profit making. Caught up in the capitalist system and a broader narrative of environmental damage are issues of class dynamics, with the wealthy elite holed up in guarded futuristic apartments with air conditioning and the money to eat, while the powerless homeless starve on the hot dusty streets, forced to queue for used plastic ware and Soylent crumbs. Most of all, the movie strives to depict a realistic and all-encompassing picture of eco-collapse: of ocean life dying, temperatures soaring, power grids failing, and skyscraper cities caving in. Soylent Green paints a gritty and despondent picture of total climate collapse.

There are equally a range of problems with Soylent Green and The Population Bomb that spark class debate. Both are guilty of US-centrism and project blame outwards for the climate crisis, pointing the finger at the global South.Footnote ⁶ Ehrlich's insistence on population as a root cause of climate change, controversial and flawed in its day, seems wholly incongruent with contemporary ideas about human responsibility for carbon emissions and the harmful role played by the elite in the global North. Class discussions of the zero population growth (ZPG) movement, eugenics, and birth control highlight some of the dangerous tendencies of eco-fascism. Soylent Green is meanwhile riddled with period sexism, with the lead female protagonist Shirl, played by Leigh Taylor-Young, a prostitute (labelled as “furniture”) who remains firmly the property of men. Charlton Heston playing an environmental messenger as the film's hero is deeply problematic. A complicated political figure, Heston during his lifetime shifted from liberal progressive to neoconservative and played no obvious part in the environmental movement of the 1970s (unlike other Hollywood stars such as Robert Redford and Jane Fonda).Footnote ⁷

However, as a dystopian movie caught in both the 1970s and the 2020s, Soylent Green remains a great discussion piece for classes in US environmental history. Its imaginings of New York City just around the corner intrigue today's students, not simply in terms of the movie's dark and gritty presentation of the Big Apple, of a city rotten to its core, but also in the film's underlying message of environmental vulnerability, even fatalism. The movie touches on deep and innate fears of society falling apart when faced with imminent climate failure, both back in the 1970s, and very much today.

As a student activist and as someone who has spent most of my final academic year living full-time on protest camps, the lack of radicalism within academia is deeply frustrating to me. During my time as an activist, I have witnessed ecocide, watched acts of systemic racism be committed by the state against BIPOC activists, and have heard how people across the world are already suffering due to climate and ecological collapse. I have also observed the dissonance within academic circles, with lecturers speaking of the climate crisis as if it is just another theory in a journal and my university consistently failing to divest from fossil-fuel companies. Universities need to radicalize their curriculums further in order to convey the truth about the imminence, scale, and severity of the crises we face.

In this paper, I want to highlight some of the areas in which universities have failed but also want to offer solutions for teachers who are keen to break through barriers to radicalism within academia. I want to specifically focus on the need to link colonialism and forms of neocolonialism to the climate crisis as a way of embodying intersectionality in academic teaching. I will also offer some practical solutions to increasing student engagement with climate activism, something that must come alongside formal education.

At my university, I was lucky to be taught by Dr. Eithne Quinn, who is committed to incorporating radicalism into the curriculum when teaching about climate change. In her classes, I was taught a range of engaging and diverse topics around the climate crisis and was given opportunities to share my experiences as a climate activist student. However, in my experience of university education more generally, the radicalism that Quinn tries to bring to her teaching is rare. There is little effort made to link capitalism, colonialism, and the climate crisis. The narratives that are typically taught when discussing climate change are rooted in a white Western perspective, with the primary and secondary texts being almost exclusively written by white (and usually male) authors. When nonwhite perspectives are offered, they are still usually “optional” readings, meaning that students focus on white histories and solutions to the crisis. Consequently, students fail to understand the complexities that lie behind the climate crisis, and the voices of those who have already experienced the effects of Western overconsumption for generations remain muted. Teaching about the climate crisis from an intersectional perspective is essential to providing a balanced education for students. As a student, I would be keen to see more taught about black and indigenous history and to hear from black and indigenous academics about the climate and land sovereignty, particularly as so many indigenous populations have had their land colonized or stolen for the development of Western capitalism and fossil-fuel production. The link between Western capitalism and colonialism, which is accelerating climate change (the effects of which impact colonized and exploited populations most severely), needs to be made explicit. Academics who are keen to decarbonize the curriculum must simultaneously work to decolonize the curriculum – one cannot be achieved without the other.

Additionally, as capitalism is the root cause of the climate crisis and has driven both consumerism and colonialism, it must be critically challenged within the American studies classroom. Having spoken to lecturers from different universities across the country, it seems that lecturers are often fearful of making their classes too anticapitalist. In a broken education system where lecturers in humanities departments are facing staff cuts, pay freezes, and reduced funding, it may seem daunting to teach content that contradicts the business models of the educational institutions we operate within, but it is necessary. Teachers have a responsibility to prepare future generations for what is to come, and therefore teaching that capitalism has failed us, and looking to alternative methods of organizing societies and communities, are crucial to creating a better world.

Whilst I have been able to get involved in campaigns during my time at university, many students find it difficult to connect with what they are learning outside the classroom. Due to the way content around the climate crisis is taught and the lack of focus on practical skills in assessment methods at university, many students do not pursue the topics they have learned further. In order to encourage students to get involved in direct action or environmental campaigns, teachers could set assessments that involve campaigning or activism. For instance, I would like to see assessments that encourage students to join local campaigns or to start their own. This is especially important in providing students with a platform to channel their feelings of anxiety or grief around the climate crisis. Young people have grown up with the knowledge of climate collapse, so learning about the specifics of climate science can often be overwhelming and can provoke feelings of grief or panic. Getting involved in direct action or community building is a way of transferring those emotions into action and effecting change. I would advocate that teachers, where possible, promote ecological and direct-action campaigns and provide clearer pathways for students to get involved in protest groups.

I also briefly want to offer my own perspective as a student activist on what I feel needs to happen in order to prevent climate collapse. My ideas have been informed by my own experiences in activism, theories of change, and the evidence as presented by the IPCC reports that have emerged in recent years. Although a certain amount of collapse is inevitable due to government inaction, if international governments act now, we may be able to prevent greater warming that will result in total ecological collapse. We may feel a sense of helplessness and ask what we can do as individuals against a crisis that exists on such a vast scale, but it is important to remember that we have the power to change things and it is our responsibility to do as much as we can. As more information has come out about the severity of the crisis, it is clear that system change is necessary. We can help to achieve system change through two pathways: nonviolent direct action and building community resilience. Direct action is a method of resistance that has been effective across history, compellingly in the case of the US civil rights movement and the American suffragist movement, creating lasting change through protest. It involves individuals using their power and capital to highlight systemic, societal, and global issues through protest methods, typically involving disruption to “normal” life. In recent years, climate movements like Extinction Rebellion have used direct action to push norms in a pro-planet direction, challenging discourses around climate change to encompass more radical perspectives. Teachers of American studies can help join the dots between successful protest histories and current climate activism.

The other strand to system change is building community resilience. When a crisis hits or when system change occurs, we need to ensure that communities are able to survive together, and this can start now through building good community support networks and localizing the production and distribution of food and other essential resources. Consistent with “public humanities” approaches in American studies that we have learnt about, more teachers should encourage students to engage with their local communities and participate in mutual-aid groups, work with community kitchens or gardens, or start a local community group of their own that seeks to meet the needs of communities that are neglected by a failing system. These two components to achieving system change are crucial in developing our understanding of the wider picture of the climate crisis, and including them in the curriculum would provide pathways for students to channel their education into tangible positive change.

To summarize, I would like to see more teaching around climate change that focusses on intersectionality and truth around the causes behind the crisis. The link between decarbonization, decolonization, and anticapitalism needs to be made explicit and a diverse range of academic voices should be taught to students of American studies to platform experiences of climate breakdown and colonialism from marginalized US communities and from the global South. To encourage students to apply their learning outside university, publicly engaged teachers of American studies can shift the curriculum to embody more active participation in assignments and provide links to direct-action movements and histories or community groups. This link between direct action and community organizing is crucial to building resistance to the crises we face and preparing future generations to be resilient.