CFP: ‘Critical Approaches to Climate Change and Civic Action’

Journal: Frontiers in Science and Environmental Communication Journal

Editors: Anabela Carvalho (University of Minho, Portugal), Julie Doyle (University of Brighton, UK), Chris Russill (Carleton University, Canada)

Abstract submission deadline: 31 Oct 2018

Manuscript deadline: 28 February 2019

In order to address climate change, much emphasis has been put on the need for individual behavioural change. However, as it is deeply embedded in political, social, and economic structures, climate change calls for collective action, and especially for transformative action aimed at the system level.

Civic initiatives for climate change have proliferated in recent years. These movements have emerged in diverse locations, on a variety of scales, and are led by different types of actors, from ‘legacy’ non-governmental organizations, such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, to internet-platform projects, such as 350.org or Avaaz, to place-based protectors of water and land, such as the Standing Rock resistance. 

The Biennial ASLE Conference will be held in Davis, California, in June 2019. Following a longstanding tradition, this conference gathers scholars and artists working in a diverse array of environmental humanities projects and offers a special focus on some themes that resonate well with the location of the meeting.

Paradise does not exist, and yet that never seems to stop people from finding it, or building it, or dreaming its contours – often to the detriment of humans and nonhumans on the wrong side of its walls. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy imagines a walled city with a climate-controlled dome called Paradice where genetic engineers create new forms of life, a bubble breached by human violence and climate catastrophe. In the sixteenth century Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo imagined a place called “California,” an island ruled by a dark skinned Amazonian queen with an Arabic name, Califia (Las Sergas de Esplandián). California was affixed to our maps by conquistadors, eager readers of Montalvo who believed the Earthly Paradise to be nearby. The price of its establishment was the genocide of the land’s indigenous populations. The Greek word for Eden is “Paradise,” a walled garden that bars entrance to most. Yet as Octavia Butler’s dystopian vision of California on fire has shown, walls seldom lead to lasting safety and cannot exclude a turbulent world for long (The Parable of the Sower). If as Rebecca Solnit contends, “paradise arises in hell,” when democratic communities are built from the ground up during times of disaster that leave us “free to live and act another way,” what might life in catastrophic times entail for the environmental humanities? How should we write, teach, protest, live, and act during this era when “paradise” is on fire, figuratively and literally?