Climate fiction and young learners’ thoughts—a dialogue between literature and education

Abstract

Via thematic content analysis, this article combines approaches from educational and literary research to explore representations of nature, climate change and sustainability by children in their own reflections and for children in fiction. The primary materials consist of ethnographic studies conducted in Swedish schools in 2011 and 2013, and of close readings of Julie Bertagna’s trilogy Exodus (2002), Zenith (2003), and Aurora (2011). Representations by young learners, as well as themes in climate fiction, reflect concerns regarding climate change, a critical awareness of anthropogenic influences, and a conviction that cooperation is essential to promote change. Speculative climate fiction can assist when re-thinking current structures and patterns by letting readers encounter possible scenarios in a safe space, in this way broadening discussions regarding future sustainability. We identify a number of contact points between our materials and suggest how findings point to bright spots when re-thinking the role of literature in education for sustainable development (ESD) and, conversely, the importance of young learners’ voices within ESD for literature studies.

Keywords:

• ESD
• climate fiction
• representations
• young learners
• climate change

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Introduction

In a recent editorial, Reid notes how research in “the educational and the environmental” can be described in terms of “blank, blind, bald and bright spots,” respectively signalling topics that give rise to questions but not necessarily answers, topics so unfamiliar that they do not even give rise to questions, topics which are comprehensively covered, and topics “that inspire and innovate research” (2019, 159, 158).¹ In an editorial in a later issue of Environmental Education Research, Lundholm (2019, 1428, 1434) investigates possibilities for identifying bright spots and gaps within the broader research area, suggesting that increased “attention [is paid] to the ways various knowledges—in the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities—impact on pro-environmental behaviours” and that research benefits from merging “findings from multiple disciplines”. This article attempts to highlight blank spots and hopefully pointing to bright spots connected to research about nature and education, and climate fiction, or cli-fi. These areas are well-researched, with nature with its complex usages and values forming one important basis for environmental research, including but not confined to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and climate fiction being awarded ever-increasing attention within literary studies, particularly influenced by theoretical fields such as eco-criticism. However, respectively conducting research in education, with a special focus on sustainability education among children and Young Adults (YA), and in English literature, particularly centred on speculative fiction, we have noticed how seldom these research fields communicate with each other, and we suggest that this lack of contact may lead to a gap in knowledge.

In this interdisciplinary study we initiate a dialogue between the fields of education and English literature to begin closing this gap. We do so by investigating representations related to nature, climate change and sustainability by young learners in their own reflections and for children in fiction. Our ethnographic material (representations by young learners) was collected in two comprehensive empirical studies conducted in 2011 and 2013 with school children aged 10 to 12. The first study gathered written responses to questions targeting knowledge about environmental concerns, the second was broadened to interviews with and observations of the study participants with focus on processes of meaning-making in relation to environmental and sustainability issues. The representations by young learners are constituted by reflections on nature, sustainability, climate change and responsibility. These are prominent issues also in the fictions we address (the representations for children) but relayed in speculative rather than realistic form in Scottish author Julie Bertagna’s trilogy Exodus (2002), Bertagna (2003), and Bertagna (2011). The novels target readers between eleven and thirteen and depict a future world completely altered by climate change. Our close readings are focused on questions of past and present climate concerns, responsibility and communal action. Our data in this way incorporates both young learners’ voices and examples from contemporary literature. Importantly, however, our study is not empirical in the sense that the participants in the ethnographic studies have been asked to read and reflect on the literature. It should rather be seen as a springboard into promising future studies of this kind.

Climate change prompted the ethnographic studies and is both the starting point for and the pervasive theme in Bertagna’s trilogy. Accelerated change is surrounded both scientific and cultural complexity as it

possesses an immensity of scale both spatially (as a global event) and temporally (as an unprecedented crisis in human history). It is marked by a necessary degree of scientific imprecision about the extent and speed of climate change, met by public confusion, controversy, and scepticism, which is sometimes quick to construe scientific imprecision as uncertainty and even conspiracy. Its solutions require network and negotiation, not magic bullets nor heroes. (Trexler and Johns-Putra 2011, 185)

Work towards sustainable changes and solutions are carried out by political bodies, non-government organisations, and increasingly often inspire and demand the participation of young people, seen for example through #FridaysforFuture. The scale of climate change also gives rise to anxiety and concern, emotions that can be difficult to negotiate both within and outside educational contexts. Lundholm (2019, 1430 and 1431) nevertheless points to how accrued knowledge about climate change can give rise to emotions like hope, and lead to a heightened interest in environmental issues and a motivation to effect change. In our analyses of the ethnographic material, we address how contemporary worries are expressed but also to how possible solutions are articulated, and our examination of the novels starts from the conviction that speculative cli-fi can be seen as a safe space in which to imaginatively engage with contemporary risk. The close affinities between representations by and for young learners in our material further suggest that both formal and informal knowledge, gleaned from a multitude of disciplines and subjects, inform and are informed by each other. This can be a potentially productive cycle for fostering problem-solving skills and collective agency, called for as environmental and sustainability education practices need transformation (Bokova 2015), and as the world outside the classroom needs collective efforts.

Given the two distinct entry points (education and literary studies), we start by providing a brief background to current discussions about sustainability education and, from didactic and ecocritical perspectives, about the affordances of speculative cli-fi , and highlight blank spots that emerge when drawing out similarities between the fields. We then present the content analyses method employed when merging our findings and identifying themes that reoccur in the young learners’ reflections and the examined cli-fi, before moving into a discussion about our results, thematically organized into nature and climate change, and knowledge and social responsibility. By drawing out similarities between our materials as well as their implications, we attempt to tease out how these can be productively used if re-thinking the role of literature in ESD and, conversely, the importance of ESD for literature studies, thus signalling the potential of further studies contributing both theoretical and empirical knowledge.

Sustainability education and climate fiction

In this section we point to discussions within our respective research fields that have impacted on our gathering of and approach to our material. We address the current status of ESD and the calls for changes to environmental education in order to foster action, as well as how the traditional centrality of contact with nature can be seen as a democratic challenge. We further discuss how fiction can work in a democratizing way, and how speculative fiction in particular can function as a safe space in which to negotiate fears and anxieties stemming from climate change.

Sustainability issues that have been sees as merely “green” issues in traditional environmental education (EE), are now regarded as interdisciplinary societal questions that impact everyday life (cf. Breiting and Wickenberg 2010). ESD consequently demands a widened and critical understanding of environmental issues, adding to these economic, social, and cultural contexts, as well as the political aims and purposes behind working towards global sustainability. This broadened focus requires a transformation of knowledge as well as of values and forms of action. Formal, top-down teaching disseminating hard facts is increasingly questioned and traditional ways of knowing and doing do not adequately address unsustainability—commonly understood as a result of past and continuing human actions (cf. Hursh, Henderson, and Greenwood 2015). Although ESD is considered to represent pluralistic and democratic approaches (Sandell, Öhman, and Östman 2005), young learners’ current views on environmental issues are not always taken into account or reflected in textbooks and lack of recognition might mean that young learners risk experiencing a lack of relevance.

There is thus reason to suggest that forms for education need to be rethought (Bokova 2015), and many ESD researchers discuss changes to both content and pedagogy. Important aspects leading to individual and societal transformation and change are developing action competence and critical thinking through transgressive learning (cf. Lotz-Sisitka et al. 2015). A reoccurring recommendation is that educators use young learners’ understandings or questions as steppingstones for creating deeper knowledge, a starting point that is also connected to ethical educational responsibilities and democratic issues (cf. Hartman and Torstensson 2007 and Smith 2007). In UNESCO (2019) documents it is similarly stressed that “teaching and learning [should be designed] in an interactive, learner-centred way that enables exploratory, action oriented and transformative learning” and emphasis is placed on “learning environments [physical as well as virtual and online that] inspire learners to act for sustainability” (“What is Education for Sustainable Development?”).

Research from the Nordic countries shows that outdoor learning contributes to holistic experiences and meaning-making, relational ethics, and new perspectives on sustainability issues (cf. Sandell and Öhman 2010). As the editors of the recent anthology Ecocritical Perspectives on Children’s Texts and Cultures succinctly put it: “Contact with nature is regarded as an educational ideal, and measures are taken to provide Nordic children with frequent nature experiences through the use of natural settings for both play and learning” (Goga et al. 2018, 2). Importantly, however, cultural identity and social circumstances can produce significant differences regarding these forms of nature contact and experience. In the Swedish context, there are, for example, vast dissimilarities between inner city children with limited access to the outdoors and consequently few opportunities to observe processes in nature, and Sami children in reindeer-herding families who have an immediate and continuous relationship with nature and concerns such as climate change (for illuminating discussions about Sami children’s representations of nature and climate change, see Jonsson, Sarri, and Alerby 2012).

Fiction can function as means for letting children, regardless of circumstance, encounter representations of nature. In the syllabus for the subject of Swedish in which literature is taught, the expressed aim is to let students acquaint themselves with fiction from different cultures and time periods and “be given the preconditions to develop their language, their own identity and their understanding of the surrounding world” (Skolverket 2018, 262). Ethics, empathy and lessened prejudices are here, as well as in the overall goals, expected outcomes of the education.

Examining fiction used in the Swedish classroom, aimed at students between ten and fifteen years of age, Lyngfelt (2017, 73) notes that the short texts and excerpts young learners encounter are mainly advisory: they instruct children in how “to become children” and disseminate “ideas of what children should be like”. A tradition is thus continued in which “the best book for children … is the book which does the child most good” (Rose 1993, 2). This, then, is fiction that young learners are supposed to read, not necessarily what they prefer to read or read voluntarily.

Speculative fiction, a broad genre that embraces science fiction and fantasy as well as works in which representations are only incrementally removed from the world as we know it, is hugely popular with young readers (Oziewicz 2017). The genre “has emerged as dominant across today’s wide spectrum of risk issues [and consequently] acts as an imaginative heuristic for exploring today’s omnipresent, fundamental, multiple risk space” (Buell 2014, 277). End-of-world scenarios such as pandemics, wars and space disasters are found in works directed at both adult and young readers, but “climate change … has now eclipsed nuclear terror as the prime mover of the apocalyptic and dystopian imagination” (Hughes and Wheeler 2013, 3). A significant number of recently published speculative novels thus depict a world detrimentally altered by climate change and attempt to envisage answers to the question “what if?” stemming from contemporary real-world worries and anxieties. Among early examples of eco-dystopias targeting young readers we find Robert C. O’Brien’s 1975 Z for Zachariah and Kate Wilhelm’s 1976 Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. More recently, Cameron Stracher imagines severe water shortage following environmental disaster in The Water Wars (2011) and Saci Lloyd the effects of carbon dioxin rationing in times of increased global warming in The Carbon Diaries 2015 (2009) and The Carbon Diaries 2017 (2010).

How nature and environmental issues are depicted in fiction for children and YA has been extensively discussed within the interdisciplinary field of ecocriticism (cf. Dobrin and Kidd 2004, Goga et al. 2018). In recent years, and in tandem with the growth of cli-fi, increasing academic attention is paid to how environmental crises and climate change are represented in fiction (cf. Curry 2013a, Basu et al. 2013). A salient argument in discussions is that fiction can help foster action and responsibility in young readers, thus contributing to future sustainability. Bertagna’s trilogy, or often only Exodus, has been discussed from ecocritical perspectives broadly (Hammer 2010, Lyngstad 2019, and Ostry 2013), with other critics focusing on themes such as identity (McCulloch 2017), community (Curtis 2013) and the pursuit of knowledge (Curry 2013b).

With focus on the speculative aspects of Exodus—its extrapolation of current conditions and its far-future setting—Valentina Adami (2019, 136, 147) focuses on the novel’s “pedagogical potentialities” and on how “a critical and informed reading […] would highlight the inequalities arising from climate change and the troubled relationship between humans and the environment in the contemporary world”. In “Environmental Havoc in Teen Fiction”, Jean Webb (2018) places a selection of works along a spectrum of speculation ranging from texts that lie relatively close to the contemporary state of affairs to climate dystopias, demonstrating how different stages can be utilized in environmental education. Bertagna’s Exodus is placed at the stage “Cityscapes,” and with emphasis on the different refugee groups depicted, anthology editor Janice Bland suggests creative writing and fact-finding as classroom tasks after reading the novel.

Climate change and connected environmental problems naturally elicit emotions such as worry and despair, and in ESD there are different views on how learning is impacted by these complex affects. Some studies conclude that perceived negative emotions might be a hindrance for environmental learning (Rickinson and Lundholm 2008), and others have investigated different learner coping strategies (Ojala 2005; 2012). In the recent editorial, Lundholm (2019, 1430) points to the emotional aspect of environmental learning as a bright spot in further research, noting that increased knowledge can inspire hope and lead to action. Contemporary speculative cli-fi may certainly give rise to potentially troubling emotions, but to a greater extent than realistic works they offer a safe space in which to explore new thoughts. Seen as forms of new knowledge, these, in turn, might encourage meaningful reflection and action. Webb (2018, 209) approaches speculative fiction in the classroom in ways that have affinities with our suggestion, noting that in fiction, “possible futures can be posited in creative and imaginative ways unrestricted by reality but related to actual conditions” . Speculative fictions set on alternate, most often future, versions of Earth can make the reader recognize aspects of his or her own world while simultaneously experiencing a “cognitive estrangement” due to both subtle and radical differences from it (Suvin 1979, 3-15). Cultural and political structures and social mores of the reader’s own reality can be viewed at an imaginative distance, and raise questions related to the (un)sustainability of today’s lifestyles and choices in industrialized parts of the world.

Of importance within both ESD and ecocriticism is the development of sustainability as a frame of mind “committed to the co-evolution of human and non-human nature,” sustainability literacy which is “the ability to ‘read’ the unsustainable present and ‘write’ a more sustainable future,” and sustainability ethics which entail that the full potential of individuals can only be realized “by recognizing the ultimate meaning and value of things beyond ourselves” (Huckle 2012, 44, 37). For young learners, active classroom work with speculative cli-fi can aid in this development, not least, we argue, because the fictional representations often overlap with their own worries but also hopes for the future. In the next section, we introduce the materials and method of analysis that lead us to make this claim.

Method and material

The methodological approach for this study is a comparative thematic content analysis (cf. Cohen, Manion, and Morrison 2010; Creswell 2009). Our aim has been not only to compare the qualitative content in different sources but also to use an interdisciplinary approach by which literary studies and educational studies, with traditionally different empirical data and methods for analysis, can complement each other. This complementarity allows us to explore issues from new perspectives and point to potential bright spots.

The ethnographic material in this article, illustrating representations by children, was gathered in two separate but related Swedish studies.² The first was conducted in 2011 and posed open and closed questions to 209 school children aged 10-12. The young learners were asked to write about their knowledge of environmental issues, about connected values, and about their experiences of environmental education. A final set of open-ended questions asked for their views about what kinds of knowledge are likely important in the future and about their possibilities to act and make changes in society. In the autumn of 2013, an in-depth case study complemented the results by following one class in grade six (twelve-year-olds) with a focus on the young learners’ meaning-making processes connected to environmental and sustainability issues. Observations, field notes, interviews, and written material were gathered over a period of five months.³ For this article, we have translated the original statements in Swedish into English. When citing written responses from the 2011 study we use the participant’s anonymous ID as a reference, e.g. (ID 47). The reference (2013 study) is used when referring to the second study.

The fictional representations for young readers were addressed via close readings of Julie Bertagna’s novels Exodus, Zenith, and Aurora, with particular emphasis on the first instalment in the trilogy. Bertagna envisions life on Earth at the start of the next century, and presents a planet almost completely drowned by water. The protagonist Mara Bell, fifteen years old at the start of Exodus, encourages the last survivors of her north Atlantic island Wing to leave in search of New Mungo, a sky structure which turns out to be problematically hierarchical and reliant on its inhabitants’ ignorance of the world around them. Mara’s project becomes leading a community north to Greenland, the destination at the top of the world which tenders a promise of habitable space. The close reading, in dialogue with critical voices on Bertagna’s work and on cli-fi more generally, focused on how nature is presented, how past environmental destruction is remembered and narrated, and on how questions about choice and inclusion feature into the forming of new societies.

We thus separately gathered the initial data in line with each field’s praxis. In the next step of our interdisciplinary approach, and in accordance with Lincoln and Gubas’ (1985) model for analyzing and presenting our disparate empirical materials, we have step-by-step familiarized ourselves with the entirety of the material, coded it, and jointly identified and named common themes. Emphasis has been placed on how aspects of the novels in various ways resonate with how young learners in the ethnographic materials voice their ideas and concerns regarding climate change and sustainability. Two overarching themes: nature and climate change, and knowledge and social responsibility, will be presented in the next section, broken into attendant sub-themes.

Results

Theme 1: Nature and climate change

We will address two sub-themes connected to nature and climate change that emerge in our materials. We use the first, information and emotional responses, to introduce understandings of present and future nature in the ethnographic material and descriptions of the same in the fictional sources. The information about the current situation, characterized by climate change in particular, results in anxieties and worries, and we discuss how these affects are echoed in the novels. Our discussions in the second sub-theme, environmental responsibility, illustrate ways in which representations both by and for young learners encourage ways of living in more sustainable ways, thus ameliorating effects of climate change.

1. Information and emotional responses

When explicitly asked about what nature signifies, several young learners in the ethnographic material focus on its centrality to human life and its ability to inspire positive emotions, but they also reflect on how nature is threatened by humans. Many of the young learners evince good understandings of the basics in nature, on a scale from quite simple: “I know that the animals and the plants are important to nature” (ID 167), to more complex: “the rabbit eats the plants and the fox eats the rabbit. The fox dies and decomposes in the soil and then a plant grows again” (ID 2). The latter response illustrates an awareness of ecological processes and by extension a realization of their vulnerability. There are also more value-laden descriptions that depict nature as a friendly, welcoming place, but also one that humans impinge on. One student writes: “Humans affect nature in many good and bad ways” (ID 85) whereas another notes that “if the forest did not exist it would be dull and lonely here on earth” (ID 23). Statements also illustrate the instrumental value of nature: “Humans get air from the trees and without the trees we get no air and then we cannot breathe and be outdoors to play and have fun” (ID 107). As the last two responses illustrate, the young learners intertwine their representations of nature as they experience it with worries about what would happen if the status quo is interrupted, or with thoughts of a projected future.

One version of a projected, speculative future is depicted in Bertagna’s trilogy, and it is one where trees, indeed, have disappeared. Initially, nature is presented as uniform as a result of global flooding. On protagonist Mara’s birthplace, the island of Wing, inhabitants have moved to the highest available ground and scavenge for flotsam on the remaining land: a piece of wood is seen as a great prize. The fictional world has already been affected by climate change to the point that it is no longer welcoming, safe, or even immediately recognizable to the reader. However, as von Mossner (2017, 555) notes, “the virtual environment [in speculative fiction] tends to reflect the reading environments of their readers in ways that make them recognisable while at the same time adding one or several elements that render that environment strange and unfamiliar”. The estrangement produced by the water-covered world is coupled, then, with elements that elicit recognition, in Exodus predominantly family relations and the identity-seeking of a teenager, but importantly also by the fact that although the world is set in the future, it is dependent on the same ecological processes as real-world nature. Here as well, dead animals decompose in the remaining soil, and trees are needed to produce oxygen.

The second principal setting in Exodus is New Mungo, a city constructed above what used to be Glasgow. As Lyngstad points out, this city is sustainable in that energy and food are procured in ways that do not tax the surrounding world; the combination of “syntheticity and sustainability” produces a certain “ambiguity” in the narrative (2019, 247). Despite these ecologically friendly means of subsistence, inhabitants of the high towers are pulled towards virtual pleasures, and natural phenomena only mimic their real-world counterparts. Ponds, trees, fish and birds are artificial, Mara quickly realizes, “all fake,” as is the nutrition, to the point where smell and taste “of real food haunts her” (Exodus 246). Nature in this setting is a “mediated experience” that disconnects the inhabitants from the surrounding world and thereby also releases them from responsibility for it (Ostry 2013, 101).

The Arctic is figured as an environmentally friendly option for the future. In the dilapidated Glasgow university library, Mara finds a reference to the Arctic Athapascan people who for thousands of years preserved nature and “co-existed in fine balance with the land and its animals” (Exodus 154). Later, Mara reads about a specific Arctic location speculated to behave in an unusual way with the melting ice. Having been covered and pressed down by ice for millennia “Greenland would bob up like a cork” following climate change causing a warmer climate (Exodus 178). The ideas of Greenland appearing rather than disappearing and the Arctic as a past home for peoples respecting and living in harmony merge as Mara begins to formulate a plan for both freedom and a better future.

Together with a group of people unwanted in New Mungo, Mara finally reaches a large lake in the middle of the Greenland. On its shores grow small groves of young trees and although Mara has no real experience of forests, they “make her feel she is home, at last” (Zenith 322). Although future challenges await—in Aurora the natural resources of Greenland are targeted by the inhabitants of the sky cities— there is in this way a return in the trilogy to a world as the reader knows it. Water-covered Wing and artificial New Mungo are anomalies, signalled by Mara’s sense of homecoming in an environment that again can be described in terms that correspond to the representations by young learners. Wing and New Mungo, on the other hand, are depicted in ways that extrapolate the concerns of the young learners, expressing their worries about a future lack of trees and access to what is perceived as authentic nature.

In the ethnographic material, positive emotive reactions to nature are often intertwined with negative feelings towards anthropogenic effects. An eleven-year-old exclaims: “Bad!! I think people are violating nature, and nature is important to future generations” (ID 2). Another student responds “I think that nature is peaceful and I feel safe there” but then adds: “[i]t is bad that humans destroy nature” (ID 45). These general statements can be compared with the more specific understanding that: “We drive so many vehicles [emitting] a lot of warm gas, and now Greenland is melting” (ID 92). In general, the empirical study from 2011 shows that young Swedish learners have their own experiences of local nature, and a broad understanding of nature as a more or less complex ecological system. They furthermore address how humans are dependent on nature for their survival, and that some contemporary human activities have a negative impact on nature.

Concluding our discussions about this sub-theme, we see in representations by the young learners the value and centrality of nature, but also an awareness of the vulnerability of the natural environment and of the threat of human impact. The novels present readers with three different environments, all affected by anthropogenic climate change and thus extrapolating the present situation, but nevertheless underline the value of nature that has close affinities with the present. The speculative fiction in this way broadens and offers alternatives to the factual knowledge seen in the ethnographic material. Further, the novels echo strong feelings expressed by many young learners in relation to perceived wrong behaviour, resulting in both local and global effects on the climate. We suggest that young learners are likely to recognize themselves in Mara and thereby have their own emotions and thoughts related to climate change confirmed.

2. Environmental responsibility

Although both representations by and for young learners focus attention on the vulnerability of nature and on destructive human actions both in the past and in the present, there is also a desire to promote more sustainable ways of life. Sustainability is often perceived of as a global rather than local goal, in turn based on an awareness of the interconnectedness of processes. Based on information from digital sources, this is illustrated in the following oral response by one young learner:

Well, if you look at the polar bears that live at the North Pole, so, yeah, if you travel by car a lot, then a lot of fumes are released, right, and clouds form, right, and there’s this thing around Earth and you just get more of it and then when the Sun’s rays fly in, like, on Earth, like they stay then, well they bounce on Earth, right, and then they can’t get out again, because of that thing that’s around Earth, the gas, and then the Sun’s rays stay in there and it gets so warm that the ice melts and then the polar bears can’t live anywhere, yeah like that. (2013 study)

Here, factual knowledge about the greenhouse effect shows an additional level of complexity in young learners’ perception of environmental and sustainability relations and responsibility.

However, when asked about possibilities of effecting change, around thirty percent of the young learners in the ethnographic material responded that they cannot make a change on their own. While some responses are naturally tied to the participant’s age—“No, I am too little” (ID 60)—others targeted exiguity in a wider perspective: “I am just a small dot on our large earth” and “I am just one person.” In both latter cases, however, the children followed up by noting, respectively, that “I can be environmentally friendly by composting,” thus offsetting the smallness in relation to the bigger picture, and “more people are needed besides me,” in this way hinting at the possible hope inherent in co-operation (IDs 18, 3).

The global nature of climate change and the joint responsibility for halting its development is pronounced in the replies. “If I help the environment, things get a little better, but if everyone helps, things will be great” one student notes, and another states: “I believe that I and everyone else can affect the world. But only if everybody does small things every day” (IDs 111, 5). “If everybody worked together, we could make the world better” (ID 137) is a sentiment that echoes through the material.

In Bertagna’s trilogy, the causes of climate change are initially not actively discussed, even though the inhabitants of Wing acutely experience the consequences of global flooding. The wise old man Tain explains to Mara that lack of communication meant that Wing received no news about the rest of the world, and inhabitants became preoccupied with their own survival: “we turned our thoughts away from the outside world” (Exodus 13). The notion of human responsibility for the world’s destruction is instead communicated to Mara via a group of Treenesters, who, as their name indicates, have made their home in the few remaining trees growing on the roofs of Glasgow’s highest buildings. The Treenester Candleriggs educates Mara in respect for nature, in how the world was destroyed, and in how the two are connected. She refers back to the mid-century summers that were hotter than expected, causing the ocean levels to rise, and then emphasizes that it was a lack of global effort—a macro version of Wing’s insulated perspective—that led to the flooding of the world. “[A]ll the political agreements that were supposed to prevent global warming had long fallen through,” she tells Mara, and once the floods started “everything that held society together started to fall apart” (Exodus 195). A lack of cooperation leads to destruction, a depiction which, McCulloch (2017, 73) suggests, “offers a terse warning to myopic environmental politics in an increasingly globalized world that will depend upon neighbourly collaboration among all nations to sustain ecological balance” . Mara remembers this lesson, and her road to maturity reflects it. The move from individual empowered protagonist to collective society building in the post-disaster genre commonly “provides a potential space for those without power,” that is, the child or adolescent character and by extension the young reader, “to play a part in the creation of a new community” (Curtis 2013, 85). In Exodus, emphasis shifts from the almost exclusive focus on Mara to forms of collective effort as the only possibility to survive, and on inclusivity: everyone, regardless of origin is invited and required to contribute to survival.

In relation to environmental responsibility, representations both by and for young learners stress the interconnectedness of local and global processes. Co-operation is vital to overcome contemporary and future challenges, especially given both the young learners’ and the protagonist’s young age. It is together with others that nature can be protected, and more sustainable choices made. In this way, the novels’ depictions correspond to feelings voiced by the young learners in the ethnographic material, but unrestrained by the everyday, speculative fiction can extrapolate the future disastrous ramifications of a lack of joint efforts, thereby working as a call to action in the present.

Theme 2: Knowledge and social responsibility

Our coding of materials has generated a second overarching theme: knowledge and social responsibility, which we address by focusing on two sub-themes. Firstly, we discuss the value and character of knowledge, that is, how the young learners and the fictional representations distinguish different forms of knowledge, and determine what knowledge is important for the future. Secondly, we examine global injustice, social responsibility, and agency by targeting how narrow issues are widened and how inequalities affect what is perceived of as meaningful action.

1. The value and character of knowledge

In speculative fiction, YA protagonists are commonly confronted with or separated from various sources of knowledge—the older generation, authorities, and often systems of technology—and come of age in their own independent process of collation of information. Bertagna’s trilogy is primarily concerned with the recuperation of lost knowledge about the world’s destruction, but it also depicts how information is valued and what types of knowledge are required for a hopefully sustainable future.

Contemporary information technology has developed into the Weave, a mostly abandoned version of the Internet, and into the Noospace, a more evolved and actively used cyberspace that connects inhabitants of sky cities across the globe. It is partly Mara’s skill in navigating these spaces that make her mature and emerge as a leader (see Curry 2013b for a discussion about “knowledgescapes” in Bertagna’s novels). She also increasingly relies on information from long-forgotten books and from nature, and acts on advice from the preceding generation. The novels in this way illustrate an expansion of knowledge and how a period of ignorance comes to an end as forgotten or suppressed information is needed to rebuild more sustainable communities.

Books and stories fill an important function below New Mungo; in the remains of the Glasgow University library Mara finds the impetus for the journey north and the Treenesters’ storytelling keeps the past alive. Complementary sources of wisdom such as natural phenomena and patterns become increasingly important when travelling to Greenland and reading acquires an extended meaning: “[t]here are the September geese, flocking through hidden corridors in the sky. And the narwhals, navigating the icebergs, horns thrust at the North Star” (Zenith 95). The novels thus highlight the importance of holistic processes of meaning-making in which past and present knowledge, from a multitude of sources, co-exists.

The young learners in the ethnographic material variously address knowledge acquisition and maintenance. One young learner responds: “It is important to remember what I have learned about nature” and another that “[i]t is important to know how everything hangs together. Then, maybe, the world gets an eye-opener” (IDs 15, 129). Statements like these show an awareness of the importance of holistic knowledge to create a sustainable future, often born from an explicit questioning of the extent to which traditional school subjects can provide knowledge that is likely to be important in the future.

Many of the young learners in the studies gather knowledge from online sources and news media, and connect environmental discussions to specific problems, for example endangered animals. During an observation, one study participant’s interactions with internet images and information produce powerful emotions. The boy slumps over his computer and when asked how he feels, mumbles: “I just want to kill those people.” The World Wildlife Fund web page on the screen shows images of endangered orangutans and the boy continues: “you just want to … you don’t understand how they can …” (2013 study). The observer continues to talk to the young learner and he gradually changes his mood from sadness to engagement and describes all things he has learnt about endangered animals through the website. In this example, the boy shows intense initial emotions, which through the processes of reflection (in this case with the observer) turn into motivation to learn more. At the end of the work period, the immediate emotional responses also turned into more solid and general values regarding environmental preservation. This educational situation reveals how various sources contribute to broadened and global knowledge of sustainability issues.

In connection with this sub-theme, we see a contact point between our materials in how a variety of knowledge sources need to be combined to reach a holistic understanding about both past and present. At the same time, however, a returning reflection from the young learners in our empirical studies is that some traditional school subjects are irrelevant. In the novels, by contrast, the message relayed is that all knowledge is of importance and it is only in hindsight its use can be evaluated. When Mara sees the Northern Lights, for example, she cannot explain the phenomenon and wishes that she had “listen[ed] properly to what she has been told as a child […] Now, she could kick herself. With so much lost under the ocean, knowledge is the most precious thing in the world” (Zenith 83). This is one of few instances in which the novels are overtly advisory and might clash with young learners’ questioning of the relevance of traditional knowledge.

2. Global injustice, social responsibility, and agency

In the representations by the young learners, many statements target issues of social justice, responsibility, and agency. A majority of the participants relate sustainability problems to human behaviours and show insights into what can be done, but there is also a sense of frustration towards people—mainly adults—who cause the problems. The young learners furthermore connect environmental problems with economic and social issues, and also intertwine understandings and emotions. Two statements draw specific attention to how economic and environmental aspects intersect.

Well, those who sell bananas get some money but are still poor. When the bananas are exported the air and water are polluted (ID 116). Poor people do not have that much money and have to work very hard. Rich people just want more money to start building dirty factories. (ID 94)

Here, a seemingly fixed hierarchy is established between those who have the means and those who do not, and significantly, individuals at the top are seen as responsible for pollution.

Many representations of economic inequality leading to a lack of agency focus on other children. “Children in other countries do not have clean water and clean food” (ID 39) is one response; another similarly explicitly targets unfairness: “We get food every day while children in other countries have to work to get, like, one potato” (ID 10). It is common that Sweden in these representations is held up as an example of a homogenous and unjustly superior country, in which citizens still assume the right to complain. One young learner speculates that many young Swedes grouse about not getting pizza every day or new expensive shoes, whereas in “other countries [children] do not even get shoes or food” (ID 93). A difference is also noted in connection with war and conflict. In war-torn countries, one young learner states: “one has little money and is forced to work from around eleven years of age. They have almost no food and simple houses. In Sweden, we do not have war. We have food, clothes, big houses and plenty of money” (ID 5). Although simplified to an extent, this representation of inequality draws attention to a perceived static situation in which bad things always, unfairly befall someone else.

Climate change, however, affects humans globally and the representation of New Mungo in Bertagna’s novels can allow for reflections on this fact. The laterally built city in which citizens both figuratively and literally look down on the consequences of global flooding can be seen as a “mimetic” representation of contemporary “distancing strategies” between affluent cultures and those that “will be the first to feel the effects of global warming” (Hammer 2010, 43). Still, the existence in New Mungo is untenable as goods are scarce and the lives of the citizens are contingent on slave labour. The message relayed is that none will be exempt from the effects of disaster, levelling the hierarchy between different demographics.

Below the towers is “an immense wall [to which a] chaos of refugee boats … clings” (Exodus 66) and the rulers of the city have decided to not accept any additional inhabitants: the sea police shout through loudspeakers that the refugees have to turn back, even if there is nothing to go back to. Refugee motifs have a strong connection to real-world events (the European Migrant Crisis starting in 2015 is but one example), and the novel’s imagery is likely recognizable to young readers picking up the book today. In speculative fiction, both climate change and the displacement of people can easily be projected as “experience[s] shared by future Western civilizations” (Hammer 2010, 48) and parallels between the narrative events and current real-world discourses can establish ties between the reader and characters.

Both in representations by and for young learners, knowledge plays a central but complex part in developing increased agency and enabling responsibility for the future. In Zenith, an online site archiving a specific source of information pinpoints how lack of responsibility despite knowledge powerfully impacts Mara. At the World Wind site, past generations have left messages and calls for help as one geographical place after another is destroyed because of war and conflict or because of the changing climate. From a NASA satellite comes a broken-up message urging “all countries [to immediately] stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide […] flooded Earth would be an alien planet […] the end of civilization” (Zenith 206). The stored message and the fact that it was transmitted across the global Weave enrage Mara. “They knew. They didn’t think about the future, did they? They never thought about us” (Zenith 207). Mara emphasizes the failure of the adult world to collectively take responsibility for the environment which results in a betrayal of the children. It is underlined that the signal is a century old and McCulloch notes that this “identifies Bertagna’s twenty-first-century readership’s immediate real-life present with [the novels’] textual past” (2007, 76). The cognitive resituating that may result from this realization is commonly produced by post-disaster fiction generally and although the reader of Zenith arguably already knows that her or his present constitutes the start of the fictional world’s decline, the present-as-past can still produce a heightened awareness of the current situation and an uncomfortable but potentially productive reflection on choices and changes that can still be made.

When turning to concrete actions for a more sustainable future mentioned by the young learners in our material, we find general suggestions such as “[t]o be kind to each other,” “[t]o make better things, not things that destroy the earth,” but some also point to the need for the specific knowledge of “how to take care of the environment in a good way, so that you don’t harm it” (ID 323). The latter entails “[n]ot littering, stop making weapons of war, not emitting so many exhaust gasses” (ID 13) and the ability to “build and clear the world of dirt in an environmentally friendly way” (ID 93). Climate change has a particular place in some formulations, and the young learners desire a future in which “one can affect global warning,” “fix the greenhouse effect” and to be able to “live safely and not have to worry that the ozone layer will disappear and that the world will end!” (IDs 63, 164, 2). These statements gesture towards actions taken on an individual but also societal level.

To sum up discussions in this sub-theme, we see that climate change in representations by young learners is seen as contributing to inequality and a lack of agency, especially when it is perceived of as closely related to economic issues. In the future depicted in the novels, on the other hand, climate change is a leveller, placing all humans in the same precarious position. Although this indicates a dissimilarity, both sets of representations locate the responsibility for destructive climate change in the past and/or with the parental generation, the novels explicitly signalling that the young generation is the one that has to assume responsibility for both a better climate and social relations. To assume responsibility via action is an important contact point between our materials and soft values such as respect and care for others are knowledge areas promoted to foster a sustainable and responsible lifestyle.

Concluding discussion - Sustainability in education and the possibilities of the fictional future

Contemporary environmental and sustainability issues challenge us on both individual and societal levels. Yet, education is mainly focused on instructing young citizens in how to contribute to the “global economy,” a process in which “education unintentionally contributes to unsustainability” (Wals and Corcoran 2012, 26). The problems require us to re-think traditional knowledge, solutions and norms of doing and living, which presents a challenge to teachers everywhere. Traditional environmental education has tended to focus on the factual reasons behind climate change and within ESD there is a certain impatience with the lack of action that stems from this focus. As Wals and Corcoran maintain, “the margins of education” offer opportunities to envision alternatives and effect “change and transformation” (2012, 26), and literature has resided in this marginal space as far as climate change and sustainability are concerned. What actually constitutes useful knowledge seems to be a blank or even blind spot, but on the basis of our comparative discussion, we want to suggest that when knowledge previously regarded as marginal is incorporated in ESD research and classrooms, a bright spot can be discerned.

Speculative cli-fi does not solve environmental problems but we maintain it can assist in processes of re-thinking by moving away from real-world causes and instead let readers encounter possible scenarios in a safe space, in this way broadening discussions regarding future sustainability. Within ESD, there are calls for developing problem-solving skills and collective agency, and we espouse the view that reading and actively discussing speculative cli-fi can provide grounds for critical reflection leading in this direction. This kind of literature, as a source of informal learning, in many ways reflects already existing concerns, worries, and anxieties, illustrated in the young learner’s representations and, while connected to actual issues, speculative fiction provides alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and being human, unrestricted by the limitations of the everyday. That is, if harnessed to stimulate critical reflection in and outside the classroom, works may assist in discussions not only about the relationships between humans and their environment, but also about issues pertaining to democracy, inclusivity, identity and power.

Negative emotions, by some critics perceived of as a hindrance to learning (Rickinson and Lundholm 2008) , can via characters be explored and rather be used as grounds for critical reflection similar to what Ojala (2012) describes as a positive form of meaning-focused strategy. Given the heterogeneity of young learners regarding easy access to nature and immediate experiences of climate change consequences, fiction can work as a democratizing force, transmitting the aesthetic experience of nature as well as concrete effects of environmental problems to all readers.

It is highly likely, von Mossner (2017, 559) claims, that “that the vivid embodied simulation of a future devastated world might impact how we consider developments in our own world that may lead to such a future state”. There are numerous instances in Bertagna’s trilogy that can produce this kind of reflection, and a direct appeal appears in the preface to Exodus in which readers are invited to imagine a world after global flooding but then to “retrack to the dawn of the world’s drowning. Stand at the fragile moment before the devastation begins, and wonder. Is this where we stand now, right here on the brink?” (Exodus n. pag.). The “fragile moment” is easily read as the actual now of the novel’s publication, and the young reader is imagined as responsible and perceptive enough to effect change and avoid the consequences that are then portrayed in the fictional narrative. Young readers’ immersion in the fictional world can consequently make them absorb new concepts and alternatives but also develop ideas about what can be done to avoid the disaster or help mitigate effects of it; the fictional representation of a world in environmental crisis can thus be seen as a call to action.

Via a comparison of themes emerging in empirical materials and in close readings of Bertagna’s trilogy, this study suggests that ties between education, and then especially ESD, and literature can and should be strengthened. Returning to the editorial by Reid (2019), calling for bright spots, we find that by adopting an interdisciplinary approach to our separately gathered data, we have demonstrated a number of overlaps that, we suggest, would benefit both educators when assessing the role of literature in the classroom, and literature studies when reflecting on the real-world concerns underlying speculative fiction. Further empirical studies of a varied use of speculative fiction in the classroom, focused on students’ responses and reflections when reading cli-fi, are needed to identify concrete effects in educational practice. However, our examination of how representations by and for young learners can be combined to address both actual and projected sustainability hopefully contributes incentives and ideas for the design of such projects.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Lindgren Leavenworth

Maria Lindgren Leavenworth is Associate Professor of English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research with focus on travel literature, nordicity and the Arctic has resulted in articles on 19th-century travel writers as well as on contemporary novels, with particular emphasis on speculative fiction. Her most recent publications in the field is “Abnormal Fears: the Queer Arctic in Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter” (Journal of Gender Studies 2017) and “Andrée på äventyr” [The Adventures of Andrée] (Tidskrift för Litteraturvetenskap 2018). She is currently working on a monograph about the imagined Arctic in speculative fiction and is co-editor of the anthology The Arctic in Literature for Children and Young Adults (Routledge 2020). Other areas of interest include transmediality, cognitive approaches to literature, and contemporary modifications of the paratext. Lindgren Leavenworth has also published extensively within the field of fan studies and is co-author of Fanged Fan Fiction: Variations on Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries (2013).

Annika Manni

Annika Manni is Associate Professor of Educational Work at Umeå University, Sweden. Besides being a teacher at Umeå School of Education she conducts research mainly within the field of environmental and sustainability education. She has a special interest in children’s and youths’ experiences and meaning-making related to sustainability and education in various learning environments, as well as ethical aspects of the teaching profession. Her most recent publications are “Schoolchildren Envisioning Future Knowledge and Agency within the Context of Education for Sustainable Development” (Waxmann verlag 2018), “Contingency and Transformation: Teachers’ and Students’ Experiences of a Climate Council School Project” (Nordidactica 2018), and “A Little Less Conversation, a Little More Action Please”: Examining Students’ Voices on Education, Transgression, and Societal Change” (Sustainability 2020). Currently she is involved in a collaborative research project studying critical aspects when implementing ESD as a whole school approach.

Notes

1 All formatting in quotations corresponds to the original.

2 Ethical guidelines were followed in all studies, participation was voluntarily and permission granted from caretakers (Vetenskapsrådet 2011).

3 Results from these studies have been presented in Manni (2018b), Manni, Ottander, et al. (2017), and Manni, Sporre, and Ottander (2013, 2017).