Written by: Joshua Nodiff

Many return to the classroom and begin another semester of school while hurricanes, heat waves, and coastal flooding threaten to disrupt their studies. For students to ameliorate their anxieties and envision a more regenerative future, teachers should incorporate the arts into environmental education.

The arts provide tools and techniques for students to imagine worlds beyond the climate crisis. Along with storytelling, the arts can paint a paradigm in which the root causes of the climate emergency — hierarchies of extraction and exploitation — are uprooted in favor of a transformative vision for the future. By dreaming of a more just and regenerative future, students can use the tools of art and storytelling as blueprints to build the world they want to inherit.

The arts can also be therapeutic tools for personal, interpersonal, and communal healing. The arts can mend ecological rifts and social systems by reimagining the inextricable relationships between all living communities. The arts can express and heal the emotional and psychic traumas ascribed to climate anxiety, grief, and despair. With bold and transformative visions of the future, the arts can uplift emotions of hope and inspiration into a movement for collective liberation.

The arts — combined with social-emotional learning, mindfulness education, and community engagement — are indispensable to climate pedagogy beyond the bounds of the classroom. You are never too old to dream as big as you can.

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