Personalizing Climate Justice in the College Composition Classroom

By Jessica McDermott

Though I’ve centered the complexities of the climate crisis in my English composition courses the last three years, students at the start of my current semester, more than previously, seemed scared entering and engaging in conversations surrounding these topics. It felt initially like many had nothing to say about this ever-pressing problem. But I knew this couldn’t be the case.

At Riverside City College where I teach in California’s Inland Empire (IE), most of my students are young enough that their entire lives have been impacted by extreme weather but old enough to see how their neighborhoods and communities have transformed due to the rising logistics industry.

Warehouse development in the IE has proven a strong entry point to look at terms like sacrifice zones and environmental racism and even pollution and health impacts, but this semester, I chose to have us also consider the bigger picture of the climate crisis by assigning Mikaela Loach’s book, It’s Not That Radical.

Through Loach’s text, my students are shown concrete consequences of climate change and challenged to enact Loach’s idea of climate justice, which asks us to consider how our systems of oppression (capitalism, greed, racism, colonialism and neocolonialism, etc.) function as part of the same economic system that created and perpetuates the climate crisis. In using this as our over-arching text, I’m hoping they see that we don’t have to accept the catastrophic as the new normal and instead, we can bring about change and build something new.

At the same time, I’m constantly wondering how to make the abstract concrete and the depressing hopeful. Loach herself is aware of this conundrum and begins her book with a call to “reframe” our thinking on this crisis “away from doom and gloom and toward hope – a hope that will transform the world around us” (7).

To enact this thinking, my students and I utilize the Arithmetic of Compassion website to see why so many do nothing in the face of climate change and how writers like Loach and they themselves can avoid the pitfalls of apathy when researching and discussing issues connected to climate justice.

My implementation of the website in my classes is ongoing (teaching is always an experiment), but I am finding positive results. Students like naming the apathy and inaction they see and feel. They enjoy the challenge of creating Venn diagrams that examine the unique similarities and differences between terms like psychic numbing and pseudoinefficacy. Maybe in naming something, we take away some of its power. Hopefully too, it brings us closer to action.

In my students most recent essays, I asked them to consider if a specific author fell victim to these psychological tendencies or if their argument limits them in some way. To do this, my students found the “Psychic Numbing and Climate Change” blog especially useful as it outlines the necessity in including not only scientific facts but personal and relatable stories to combat inaction and apathy and lead us closer to understanding.

In their essays, students noted Loach’s use of her grandmother’s home in Jamaica as an example of the personal and relatable. Her grandmother’s home is 10 minutes from Hellshire Beach where Loach “spent many evenings in [her] childhood” (18). Now though, the beach has mostly disappeared. The reality of the nearby restaurants and Loach’s early memories being engulfed by water add an element of emotion and understanding to a book that covers complex topics like capitalism, white environmentalism, the fossil-fuel industry, and community building.

Students noted that even in her chapter titled “So Who’s Responsible?” Loach keeps the thread of her grandmother alive. At the start, she shares how her grandmother believes the “swallowed up” beach is just mother nature “taking it all out on us” (30). In starting with this sentiment, Loach springboards to the myth that this is simply collective failure versus the reality of the richest 1 percent and fossil fuel CEOs being the real perpetrators. Students note the power dynamics at play in the chapter and the humanity in Loach’s grandmother. Even with the myths of responsibility broken, Loach ends by stating it is our duty to “tackle” this issue (57). A call to action made more personal by sharing her grandmother’s story.

In another reading, students also called attention to individual voices to break down psychic numbing and pseudoinefficacy. In Emari Pam’s article, “How is AI Fueling a New Wave of Environmental Racism,” students focused on the specific examples she provides and, in particular, the words quoted from community member Alexis Humphreys.

At a Memphis City Council hearing on the impact of Musk’s xAI data center and the 35 methane gas turbines put in without proper permits in a 90% black neighborhood, Humphreys said, “I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside. How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?” This emotional statement stuck with students. It communicates not only the rebranding of an enduring issue like environmental racism but also echoes the words of George Floyd and other interconnecting issues of racism in our country.

Something Pam emphasizes is that while she speaks, Humphrey’s holds up her asthma inhaler. This detail is something students examined as another detail that makes her voice a relatable example that we can visualize and feel.

In their research essays, students are considering their own ability to communicate complex issues in digestible, relatable ways. Students plan to focus on the stories of indigenous environmental leaders in the Amazon, share their own experiences with the warehouse industry and environmental racism in the IE, and the stories of “downwinders” in New Mexico. When we seek them out, individual stories of adaptation and survival are everywhere. The task for us then, is to share them and create a larger conversation that contextualizes the necessity to act.

With so many connections, why have my students been afraid to share their views on this subject? Sure, some are shy or unsure of their voices, but I think too that we simply don’t speak about climate issues enough.

As separate studies suggest, the “silent climate majority” phenomena permeate countries around the world, not just my classroom. A 125-country survey found that 89% of the 130,000 people surveyed thought their governments “should do more to fight global warming,” yet action is lacking.

The main problem here then isn’t that the majority of people don’t think climate change is a pressing issue we must address, but that they think others don’t believe this, causing silence and self-doubt. As Yale University, Professor Anthony Leiserowitz shares, “One of the most powerful forms of climate communication is just telling people that a majority of other people think climate change is happening, human-caused, a serious problem and a priority for action.”

Perhaps my students haven’t had to think much about their view on climate action before, but I hope in leaving my classrooms they know they aren’t alone in their concern or belief in the need to address the climate crisis.

It’s a tall order asking college freshmen to consider solutions to such a complex issue not of their making. It’s also a tall order to ask them to hold onto hope. Students, like all of us, struggle sometimes to see the world beyond the way it is right now. Until we do, though, we will continue to perpetuate many of the very types of thinking the Arithmetic of Compassion website asks us to question.

To do some of this work, my students and I have also enacted radical imagining. In their page on radical imagining, the Everyday Activism Network pushes us to “imagine without constraint” the future we want. This imagining should be “limitless” and “optimistic.”

During our imagining activity, my students reflected on futures in which houses produce their own energy, new forms of pollution-free, fast transportation, and livable, healthy communities. All of these things, I told them, are possible. All we have to do is keep believing they are and then be brave enough to make them our reality.

By putting the Arithmetic of Compassion website in conversation with these other texts and ideas, my students’ see not only what’s at stake if we do nothing, but what we can work toward. I hope the ideas they’ve wrestled with in my classes propel them forward long after our time together ends and that ultimately, they continue to see the power and experience they have and that when given the choice, they break the silence.

Sources

Carrington, Damian. “Activate climate’s ‘silent majority’ to supercharge action, experts say.” The Guardian, 22 April 2025.

Loach, Mikaela. It’s Not That Radical. Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2025.

Hanson, Joan. “IE Warehouses.” Rose Institute, 2024.

Pam, Emari. “How AI is Fueling a New Form of Environmental Racism.” Feminist Majority Foundation, 29 July 2025.