Personalizing Climate Justice in the Classroom
How the Arithmetic of Compassion helps students move from climate silence to action
At Riverside City College in California’s Inland Empire, climate change is not an abstract issue. Many students have grown up surrounded by extreme weather, pollution, and the rapid expansion of warehouses in their communities. Yet despite living through these realities, many still struggle to talk openly about climate change.
In her composition courses, educator Jessica McDermott explored a central question: How do we make climate conversations feel personal instead of overwhelming?
To address this, students used resources from the Arithmetic of Compassion (AoC) project alongside Mikaela Loach’s It’s Not That Radical. AoC became a framework for understanding why people often disengage from large-scale crises even when they care deeply about them.
Through concepts like psychic numbing and pseudoinefficacy, students examined how statistics, scale, and emotional overload can create apathy and silence around climate issues. Naming these psychological barriers helped students better understand both their own reactions and the challenges of communicating climate justice effectively.
The course then explored how storytelling can counter these effects.
Students analyzed how Loach makes systemic issues — like environmental racism, fossil fuel dependence, and colonialism — feel emotionally tangible through personal stories, such as her grandmother’s home in Jamaica near Hellshire Beach, a place increasingly threatened by rising sea levels.
Another example came from Emari Pam’s reporting on AI-driven environmental racism, where community member Alexis Humphreys described living near methane gas turbines in Memphis:
“I can’t breathe at home.”
Students reflected on how individual voices and lived experiences can break through climate apathy in ways statistics alone often cannot.
Using AoC’s ideas as a lens, students also began thinking critically about their own communication strategies: how to make complex climate issues more relatable, emotionally grounded, and actionable without falling into despair or hopelessness.
McDermott argues that one of the biggest barriers is not indifference, but silence. Research increasingly suggests that many people care deeply about climate change but wrongly believe others do not — creating what experts call a “silent climate majority.”
To counter this, the classroom became a space not only for analysis, but for imagination. Through “radical imagining” exercises, students envisioned futures with clean transportation, self-sustaining homes, and healthier communities.
By putting the Arithmetic of Compassion in conversation with climate justice, storytelling, and education, students were encouraged to see climate communication not simply as sharing information, but as creating emotional connection, collective understanding, and ultimately, the possibility for action.
Read the full classroom case study by Jessica McDermott