Rethinking Climate Education: Climate as Entanglement

Abstract

Climate change education often relies on climate science's mantra that climate change is human induced, not natural. In a posttruth world, this can seem unequivocally necessary. However, I worry that this perpetuates the human/nature dualism and may thus reiterate the very distinction we are seeking to transgress. In this article, I outline my efforts toward conceptualizing a climate pedagogy that doesn't presuppose and reinforce this anthropocentrism and representationalism, while working for informed climate response-ability. Working with Barad's concept of entanglement (2007) and atmospheric temperature as an example, I show that we are part of that climate we seek to understand. I contend that neither the human nor the atmosphere (and by extension, the climate) preexist their intra-action, but rather, that they are ontologically inseparable (entangled). Through material-discursive apparatuses such as (but not limited to) the practices of climate science, the climate and the human are contingently, agentially coconstituted. Climate as an entanglement thus accounts for how climate science works while foregrounding how climate, climate knowers, and climate knowledge co-emerge. Pedagogically, this moves us from knowing about climate—which implies a disconnected knower and a static world—to diverse, worldly practices of climating and becoming-climate.

Notes

1. Which is not to ignore that climate science understands natural climate as natural climate variability, and the climate system complete with dynamic, non-linear features such as feedback loops and tipping points.