Fostering Hope Through Creativity: Climate Future Collages

In Spring 2024, students in WWU’s ENVS 499D: Readings in Environmental Justice are reading about climate hope and climate futures. This post reflects some of the group’s learning and discussion.

By: Quinn Gohde and Taylor Lemke

How do we grapple with a crisis that has been looming over us since birth? How do we express ourselves, build community, and remain hopeful in the face of it? In our Environmental Justice Seminar this spring, we ask a lot of big questions – questions about fear, reconciling with the past, what our dreams for the future might entail. Each Monday morning, we sit facing one another, and we share our answers to these questions, lending our ears, and exchanging looks of solidarity with one another. Through these discussions every week, we are given space to foster hope and understanding, and in that space, we are not alone. Alternating between two books, our discussion revolved around Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, an anthology of contest-winning Cli-Fi stories compiled by Grist, an online media source focusing on climate justice. The stories range in content taking place hundreds of years in the future, post-climate disaster, from America to Malaysia, with characters of diverse identities and positionalities. One common, golden thread each story has in common: their display of hope, adaptation, and collective resilience. 

Going into this discussion Taylor and I (Quinn) wanted to create a space for our peers to engage with the material in a new way; we wanted to take the time to not just talk about our readings but allow space for interaction through creativity and expression. For this reason, our hour period was spent sitting in an oblong circle, huddled around trapezoid tables as we cut up magazines and pasted our clippings of choice onto paper to create “climate future collages”. The prompt was up for interpretation; the collage could be what an ideal climate future looks like, fears about climate futures, anything the Afterglow stories inspired. As we chatted about technology’s place in a climate future and the intersectionality between gender identity and environmental justice, I smiled as I took note of the collages coming to life in front of me. Mountains and butterflies, black and white landscapes against greens and blues, poems pieced together by tiny individual magazine words. Everyone was creating and sharing through the art they were making. This act of creation may seem small, but it just so happened to be enough to give me hope. Surrounded by my peers who are full of ideas, talents, questions, and hopes of their own, I feel at ease knowing that we are building and fostering a community of people who see a future, and want to fight for it, together.

Image of a student’s “climate collage” made during discussion

            Afterglow has given me (Taylor) the opportunity to explore hopeful ideas about a climate positive future. Much of my life I have been in a headspace of doom and gloom surrounding the climate crisis. When all we see in the media is everything that is wrong with the world, it is hard to remember the efforts being made that are making progress against climate change and social/environmental injustice. The tangible progress being made in terms of climate change is not large national or global efforts, but rather small, grassroot organizations by communities who are most impacted by the climate crisis (poor, minority communities). Although Afterglow is a collection of fictional climate futures, it has allowed me to view our potential climate future from a very different lens. Bringing in perspectives from LGBTQ+ and BIPOC communities, this collection brings together different values and concerns surrounding what a just climate future looks like. 

            There was one story in particular that stood out to me, I think this is because it directly challenged most of the rhetoric I’ve heard in regard to fossil fuel usage and our history of environmental exploitation. That story was A Séance in the Anthropocene, which takes place in a post fossil fuel world with indigenous knowledge and regenerative energy as the new norm. This story follows a young girl (Wilma) in her search for answers about our exploitative past, a world she never knew, but one her grandmother helped transform. Wilma goes on to interview a fossil fuel elder, who once worked in coal mines as his career. Initially Wilma was bewildered by the fact that these folk could be engulfed by information about how environmentally harmful these fossil fuel industries were, and yet continue in these lines of work. However, by the end of the interview she came to realize that we can disapprove of the roots from which we came, while still acknowledging that those roots were a form of subsistence for many groups of people. This line of work (fossil fuel industry) was sometimes all people had in terms of providing for themselves and their families. She challenged the normative mindset of her institution, showing rage against the past, with showing kindness toward the past. Too often the operators and working class are blamed (by environmentalists) for taking part in environmentally harmful fields. But the reality is that these fields are sometimes all that is available in terms of employment, or all they’ve known as far as a career. In having these hard conversations across different communities, it is important to keep kindness and humility at the forefront. Only then can we cultivate constructive, cross-community engagement. Engagement that will ultimately lead to a more equitable climate future for all of humanity, not just for the elites.