As drastic changes in the climate continue to wreak havoc around the world, the question remains: Who has the tools to stop climate change? In her book, “The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis,” Caroline Levine, humanities professor at Cornell University, argues for the essential responsibility of humanists to fight the climate crisis.
Sarah Cole, dean of the School of the Arts and a climate school affiliate at Columbia University, agrees that “the climate crisis will require a rethinking of societies in many dimensions, [and] the perspective and expertise of humanists will be a critical resource,” but contrary to Levine, she sees a distinction between activism and a university’s role in educating students on social causes.
“When I was dean of humanities, I came to feel that one of the most important things I could do was to facilitate an extremely wide-ranging, rich, interdisciplinary program of courses in climate humanities. I do think that we have a responsibility to offer our students, including undergraduates, a training in climate and society/culture, that moves well beyond (but can and should include) climate science,” Cole explains. “Universities have often taken a role in advancing causes such as social and racial justice, and the climate crisis is certainly one of these… But these can be distinguished from activism.”
Cole and Levine reflect a longstanding debate in the field: How important is it for humanities scholars to think and act politically?
To delve deeper into the issue, GlacierHub interviewed Levine about her thoughts on humanities and activism, and what she believes are the necessary actions to combat the climate crisis. The interview below has been edited for clarity and concision.
What is “The Activist Humanist” about, and what was your goal in writing it?
I wrote a book about how to practice literary studies in a new way, and in it, I said that I thought [literary studies] could help us create a more just world. After I was done, I wondered, what would that entail? When we think about form and literary studies, we think about plot, narration or the structure of a poem. My argument is that you can use those same ways of understanding shapes and structures to think about social justice, like how you could reorganize and redistribute wealth and resources. Then I realized that a lot of people in literary studies and across the humanities didn’t think that it was a part of our job to use our knowledge to change the world; there is resistance to it. Once we’ve brought down that resistance, how can we go about changing the world?
Is it important to integrate political action into humanist work?
Some argue that it’s not our business and we should just read literature and look at art. But I think that studying art and literature has always had a political impulse behind it. A lot of people have argued that [the humanities] raises our consciousness and allows us to see politics in a new way. But that doesn’t give us tools for taking action, so I argue against that position. Most people now know that glaciers are melting, for example, but they don’t know how to stop that process. It’s time to move beyond raising awareness: we need to figure out what effective actions ordinary people can take. And my research makes it clear that small-scale individual actions like recycling plastic or eating a plant-based diet aren’t making enough of a difference. We need organized collective action to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
Climate anxiety can make even the most passionate activists feel hopeless. Do you think these strong emotions can be turned into sustained activism, especially in the face of relentless crises like the melting of our world’s glaciers? If yes, how?
I think hopelessness is one of the biggest dangers getting in the way of action. As a teacher and a scholar, part of my job is to think about what might be worth doing. I’m not just a sunny optimist, but I think the more hopeless we are, the less likely we are to act. It’s also a problem of understanding how power works. Many of us think we’re passive as subjects of these huge systems but that’s not correct. The key is to think about how much power we have, and what we can do with it.
In the book, you describe how the humanities prioritize artworks that “revolutionize consciousness,” or make us aware of injustices without any direct action on how to remedy them. Do you see a way for humanists to bridge the gap between the aesthetic appreciation of art and the need for on-the-ground change, particularly in the case of popular climate imagery like that of stranded polar bears or melting ice?
It’s more about how we analyze a work. Like a photograph of stranded polar bears; what are we doing to our brains when we’re analyzing it? In my classroom, we’ll think about where things are placed, how the light works, what’s in the foreground and whether there are color patterns. So we’re not thinking only of the polar bear, we’re thinking about how the photograph has its power to persuade.
I’ve noticed that almost everybody who studies art values it because it’s complex or has multiple interpretations. People like that kind of open-endedness. But is that the only defense of art? What about art that teaches you something, or comforts you instead of revolutionizing? For example, literary critics hate happy endings because they’re the opposite of open-endedness. But if you look at novels or movies that have plots where people are in crisis, at the end, they show you what it takes to make a sustainable life. If you’ve been hungry all your life, the end of the novel shows that you need lots of reliable food. Those comforting endings show us the organization and the different kinds of things we need to survive into the future.
“The Activist Humanist”includes both your writing and a political action workbook. What do you think is the most important takeaway from your work?
What I want most is for people to get involved in environmental activism, particularly collective action. In the workbook, I lay out steps so that any reader could do a series of exercises to think of ways to get involved, or why they may not be involved yet. I’m really hoping people read my books and then go and become activists.
