Introduction: Rhetorics and Literacies of Climate Change

Eileen E. Schell, Syracuse University

Charlotte Hogg, Texas Christian University

Kim Donehower, University of North Dakota

(Published November 10, 2020)

This special issue began, as many such projects do, in a conference hotel restaurant.^[1] At the Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference in 2018, Eileen mentioned to Charlotte that there appeared to be surprisingly few panels and papers addressing climate change at the biennial convention. A search of the 225-page RSA program revealed three instances of the term “climate change.” The keyword “environment” appeared in fifteen sessions and twenty-six panel or paper titles. (The word “Trump,” comparatively, had about the same number of hits.) This relatively low number of panels and papers addressing climate change seemed notable, as scientists have been warning of environmental and economic peril in the face of a warming planet deemed “the hottest in recorded history” (Frank). Over breakfast, we wondered if a special issue addressing rhetorics and literacies of climate change was needed. How should the field of rhetoric and writing studies be engaged in the vital and pressing conversations and actions surrounding climate change?

According to the United Nations, climate change is the “defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment” (“Climate Change”). We are, as Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen notes, living in the “era of the Anthropocene,” in which human-caused activity is altering the planet’s climate and natural processes (23). The start of the Anthropocene, Crutzen indicates, began with scientists finding evidence of carbon emissions in Arctic sea ice dating back to the late 18th century, the time period in which James Watts invented the steam engine (23). Journalist Dahr Jamail has upped the ante, claiming that climate change is more accurately described as “anthropogenic (human-caused) climate disruption” to signify that humans are responsible for it (36). Factors in the Anthropocene include rising human populations, exploitation of Earth’s natural resources, increased population of methane-producing cattle (corresponding with increased meat consumption across the globe), tropical rainforest destruction, dam building, river diversion, industrialized agriculture, overfishing, and increased fossil fuel usage to power technology. In fact, fossil fuels and industrialized agriculture are the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions (Crutzen 23). Given these changes, the earth’s temperature is expected to warm between 1.5 and 6 degrees Celsius over the 21st century, with scientists identifying a series of crucial tipping points that will contribute to planetary destruction (Crutzen 23).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) introduced the term “tipping points” over two decades ago, and has indicated in their most recent report that these crucial tipping points can be reached between 1 and 2 degrees Celsius of warming (Lenton et al. 592). Such tipping points include the accelerating loss of the Greenland ice sheet, which will in turn trigger sea level rise, warming ocean temperatures, and larger impacts of human and animal populations (Lenton et al. 595). Warming global temperatures are causing an increase in ocean temperatures and melting sea and glacial ice, which can contribute to more extreme weather events (e.g., hurricanes and flooding). Warming temperatures also contribute to drought and increased risk of wildfires.

In the immediate summer months that followed the 2018 RSA conference, urgency for the special issue increased as destructive wildfires in California raged—the “deadliest and most destructive wildfire season on record in the state, with a total of over 7,500 fires burning an area of over 1,670,000 acres, the largest area of burned acreage recorded in a fire season” (“2018 Incident Archive”). While several factors contributed to the wildfires, climate change was acknowledged by scientists and government officials as a major one. Yale Climate Connections, an arm of the Yale Center for Environmental Communication, notes that warming temperatures associated with climate change create a shortened rainy season and dry conditions for forest vegetation and soil, making the land more susceptible to fire. Climate change has also shifted wind conditions—namely, the Santa Ana winds that stoke the flames, carry sparks, and provoke firestorms. The slowed-down jet stream has led to “California heat waves and high-pressure ridges in the Pacific. Those ridges deflect from the state some storms that would otherwise bring much-needed moisture to slow the spread of fires” (Nuccitelli). An example like this demonstrates how interconnected ecosystems and human and non-human populations are.

Within this context in 2018, we composed a call for papers for a special issue of enculturation to “address the rhetorics and literacies surrounding climate change and the adaptations and organizing strategies being developed to address its effects” (CFP). We wanted to address the “many perils associated with climate change—superstorms, wildfires, thawing sea ice and permafrost, rising ocean levels, depleted water sources, crop failures, forced migrations, famine, increased political instability, warfare, and decreased biodiversity,” as well as rhetorics and literacies that contribute to understanding and engaging in efforts to mitigate and address climate change. We acknowledged the tendency, “especially in the U.S. in our current political moment, toward denial of climate change and an outright defiance on the part of the U.S. GOP to addressing and mitigating its effects,” as well as the ways in which climate change disproportionately affects ecologically sensitive areas and vulnerable populations—a question of environmental justice and a failure of environmental policy. Environmental justice, as initially defined and engaged at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, calls for a movement of people of color to organize and address “the destruction and taking of our lands and communities,” to respect “cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world,” and to acknowledge the roles that people of color play in their own healing. The summit statement further calls for promoting “economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods” and securing “political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression,” which brought with it the “poisoning of the land and genocide of our peoples” (“EJ Principles”). The seventeen principles developed at the summit have anchored the actions of many communities of color in resisting, organizing, and addressing racist environmental actions and policies (see also Bates, Boyles, and Soto Vega, this issue), including movements toward sustainability and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. While varied definitions of environmental justice have been adopted by different organizations, it is important to acknowledge the history of the term and its connection to both civil and indigenous rights, as well as current movements toward climate justice.

While the effects of climate change are widespread in all regions of the world, rural areas are hit particularly hard, a point notable to us with our past work on rural literacies and rhetorics (see Rural Literacies and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy). As the IPCC notes, “[n]early half of the world’s population, approximately 3.3 billion people, live in rural areas, and 90% of those people live in developing countries” (Dasgupta et al. 618). In developing nations, rural people often rely on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihood, and thus face high levels of “poverty, isolation, and marginality; neglect by policymakers” and struggle for equitable forms of development (Dasgupta et al. 618). These material conditions are also present in developed nations like the U.S., but they may manifest differently given the intertwined nature of rural, suburban, and urban areas.

Given these specific challenges, we noted in the CFP that rural areas will be an important site toward adaptation and innovation, as “rural people in many parts of the world have, over long time scales, adapted to climate variability . . . through farming practices and use of wild natural resources (often referred to as indigenous knowledge or by similar terms), as well as through diversification of livelihoods and through informal institutions for risk-sharing and risk management” (Dasgupta et al. 618). Such adaptations do not, however, relieve developed nations from the responsibility of acting to prevent further planetary destruction and taking proactive steps toward public policies and everyday rhetorics, literacies, and practices that are positive and sustainable for the planet, human, and non-human life. While our focus in the CFP was on rural areas, we also opened space for considerations of rhetorics and literacies across regions and locations—urban, suburban, farm lands, and wilderness or protected areas.

The response to our CFP was heartening, with over thirty submissions received and ten accepted. We didn’t anticipate that, after revisions were submitted from reviewer reports for one last round of review, we would find ourselves in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, with colleges and universities migrating to online education, and with colleagues, students, friends, family members, and neighbors either coming down with COVID-19 or being in danger of catching it. It was striking to read the line in Crutzen’s text that referenced a pandemic in relation to climate change: “Unless there is a global catastrophe—a meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic—mankind will remain a major environmental force for many millennia” (23). Despite headlines about the short-term (e.g., COVID-related effects of decreased carbon emissions, which resulted in improved air quality), the United Nations Environmental Chief emphasizes that environmental factors are paramount as we move from “war-time” to “building back,” and we should take “a real opportunity to meet that demand with green packages of renewable energy investments, smart buildings, green and public transport, etc.” (“First Person”). More significantly, researchers conclude that COVID-19 is a zoonosis, “a disease that jump[s] from animals to humans” (Jabr). According to Ferris Jabr, zoonosis is often connected to human-caused destruction and alteration of ecosystems:  

When diseases move from animals to humans, and vice versa, it is usually because we have reconfigured our shared ecosystems in ways that make the transition much more likely. Deforestation, mining, intensive agriculture and urban sprawl destroy natural habitats, forcing wild creatures to venture into human communities. Excessive hunting, trade and consumption of wildlife significantly increase the probability of cross-species infection. Modern transportation can disperse dangerous microbes across the world in a matter of hours.

In short, the pandemic is not a time to further neglect climate change mitigation, but one to prioritize understanding and action with regard to the interdependence of the environment, economy, racial justice, and public health. Against a backdrop of compounded threats—climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and major racial injustices that, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, have led to ongoing protests by Black Lives Matter and other organizations—there has been a call to not “return to normal,” but to transform our society and world to be more just and sustainable, to address the root causes of these compounded, intersecting issues (Thompson). We hope our special issue contributes to the questioning of a return to “normal” and maps pathways toward addressing climate change in our scholarship and teaching. 

Framing Rhetorics, Literacies, and Writing Scholarship and Pedagogies in Response to Climate Change

In 2019, we were encouraged to see the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) issue a “Resolution on Literacy Teaching on Climate Change,” which made a significant call for the intervention of writing and language arts teachers in understanding and communicating responses to climate change. The composers of the resolution argued that “[u]nderstanding climate change challenges the imagination; addressing climate change demands all the tools of language and communication, including the ability to tell compelling stories about the people and conflicts at the heart of this global discussion” (“Resolution"). Telling the stories and communicating the realities of climate change, including stories of measures to muffle discussion of climate change or deny it, is a critical element of this work. While it is but one factor, along with analyses of grassroots organizing, limitations of policy, and data, visuals, and spaces, this special issue analyzes stories and theorizes the importance of storytelling for climate change study and social action. In particular, many authors here look to why, how, for whom, and by whom stories by various stakeholders have been forwarded, relegated, and made invisible.

It is our hope that such analyses of literacies and rhetorics can fuel conversations among writing studies specialists within the classroom and in academic and public conversations, as a prime hindrance of productive climate change dialogue and subsequent action is divisiveness promulgated by distortions and myths. The NCTE resolution makes it clear that students “need our guidance in learning how to read and communicate about these vital and troubling issues,” and we, in turn, can also learn from the climate activism of many of our students. 

In an NCTE blog entry entitled “Why Our Students Need Us to Teach about Climate Change,” Millie Davis cites an NPR story and poll that indicates that four out of five parents (80%) want K-12 teachers to address climate change in their classrooms. The poll also notes that “[w]hether they have children or not, two-thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats agree that the subject needs to be taught in school,” a surprising finding given members of GOP’s oft-cited stance of denial (Davis). In addition, another poll of teachers indicated that “in theory—86% agree that climate change should be taught,” but many teachers argue that it is “outside their subject matter” (Davis). Davis also acknowledges the specific challenges that K-12 language arts teachers face when addressing climate change—fear of responses from resistant parents, or political figures and climate deniers who have increasingly politicized science and enacted legislation meant to block discussion of climate change.

Although this poll and resolution targeted K-12 teachers, there are clearly implications for post-secondary teachers and scholars of writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies. How does our research, writing, teaching, and community engagement in rhetoric and literacy studies respond proactively to addressing climate change? How are we in post-secondary education responding to the three calls to action in NCTE’s 2019 resolution, which are to: 

●      resist the politicization of climate science by evaluating curricular texts for scientific credibility;

●      lead students to engage thoughtfully with texts focusing on social and political debates surrounding climate change;

●      work with teachers in other fields to implement interdisciplinary instruction on climate change and sustainability. (“Resolution”)

In reviewing this important call, we connect these action items to the climate change-connected research that post-secondary scholars and teachers in rhetoric, writing, and literacy studies have engaged in over the past few decades. As Justin Everett’s call for papers from 2019 for a volume entitled Exigence in the Anthropocene: Teaching Ecocomposition in the Age of Climate Change also argues, scholarship in our field has not yet matched the urgency and pervasiveness of climate change. As Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Program Chair Malea Powell argued in the 2011 call for papers:

The phrase ‘all our relations’ is a familiar one for many indigenous peoples in North America. It encapsulates an entire philosophy of humans in relation to other living things—plants, animals, rocks, earth—that emphasizes the intricately connected web of relationships that sustains our mutual ability to live out our shared existence on the earth together. In those teachings all living things matter, all are important, all must be treated as relatives . . . . ‘All our relations’ is a phrase used both as invocation and conclusion—a heuristic that forces us to consider the balance between the weight of each human’s responsibility in maintaining the balance of the world and in understanding the smallness of each individual in relation to the larger web of meaning.

While Powell and other Indigenous scholars and activists have long called for us to consider “all our relations” in our work and daily living, scholarship addressing human and non-human interactions with the planet is often scattered in different pockets across our field. Scholarship on climate change in rhetoric and writing studies has often been located in the subfields of environmental rhetoric and communication (Cox and Pezzullo; Endres, Sprain, and Peterson; Eubanks; Herndl and Brown; Killingsworth and Palmer; Oravec; Pezzullo, Toxic Tourism; Ross; Sandler and Pezzullo; Waddell), ecocomposition pedagogies and sustainability studies (Dobrin and Weisser; Owens; Goggin; Peterson), feminist rhetorics of the environment (Gaard; MacGregor; Schell), rhetorics of the Anthropocene, including new materialist scholarship on that subject (Clary-Lemon; Edwards; Gries; Propen), and technical communication scholarship that addresses climate change and environmental justice (Cagle; Cagle and Tillery; Haas and Frost; Sackey), among others. Across these subfields, scholars—in spite of differences in methods, scope or sites of inquiry—have urgently addressed the need for our field to take up the rhetorics and literacies necessary to communicate, analyze, organize, and mitigate environmental crises such as climate change. While we do not have space for a comprehensive review of this scholarship, we nevertheless wish to connect this special issue to several key research areas, questions, and challenges posed by scholar-teachers in these subfields, drawing on their insights to frame the work of the special issue and the urgent need to address rhetorics and literacies of climate change.    

In her analysis of the role of the environment in relation to rhetorical criticism, Phaedra Pezzullo offers a summary and assessment of environmental communication in rhetorical studies and notes specific milestones in this area of study, including the 1991 organization of the biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) and the start of the 1996 Environmental Communication Interest Group of the National Communication Association (NCA). The Environmental Communication Yearbook started up in 2003, and the founding of the journal Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture (abbreviated to Environmental Communication in 2014) came shortly after, followed by the International Environmental Communication Association, which was established in 2011 (Pezzullo, “Unearthing” 26). As Pezzullo notes, this work has been crucial in shaping rhetorical studies in communication and answering the urgent call to “find ways to address ongoing and impending crises related to the environment, including energy, water, and climate-related disasters (such as refugees, species extinction, and more)” (“Unearthing” 26-27). Even in the midst of all of this professional activity, Pezzullo expresses disappointment that “environmental themes and thought remain marginalized in most accounts of the state of the art of rhetorical criticism” (“Unearthing” 26). She calls attention to an absence of “voice, visibility, and vision” on environmental matters in major rhetoric anthologies and journals, pointing to a “disjuncture between environmental significance and rhetorical reticence” (“Unearthing” 27). She asks: “How it is [sic] that canonical texts of rhetorical criticism have tended to treat environmental matters as irrelevant or an afterthought or a ‘new’ trend? And what can we do to change these erroneous characterizations in the future?” (“Unearthing” 27).

To bridge this divide, Pezzullo offers a thoughtful and thorough reading of the value of scholarship in environmental rhetoric and communication, and highlights the important contributions this scholarship has made to shaping rhetorical studies as a whole. She argues that environmental rhetoric scholarship has encouraged scholars in rhetoric to: 1) think about "nonhuman agency”; 2) invigorate discussions of public life and the public good; 3) consider the role of engaged public advocacy; and 4) think through how, “[f]rom an environmental justice perspective, intersectional, embodied rhetorical criticism goads us to take more seriously the ways bodies, environments, and agency are co-constituted through power, limits, and generative interconnections” (“Unearthing” 36-37). While Pezzullo’s analysis focuses primarily on environmental rhetoric in communication studies, there is a rich strand of work shared across communication and writing that focuses on sustainability.

Under the banner of rhetoric and sustainability studies, several books and edited collections have touched on questions of environmental crises, including questions of climate change: M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline Palmer’s Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (1992), Tarla Rai Peterson’s Sharing the Earth: The Rhetoric of Sustainable Development (1997), Derek Owens’s Composition and Sustainability: Teaching for a Threatened Generation (2001), and Peter Goggin’s edited collection Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability (2009). In his review of Goggin’s collection, Killingsworth succinctly defines sustainability as “the ideal of creating a way of life that reduces human impact on the natural environment and thus ensures the continuity and quality of the lifeworld for future generations” (319). Taking up the concept of sustainability and responding to environmental crises and urgent social justice challenges at the turn of the 21st century, Derek Owens in Composition and Sustainability argues that sustainability should be an organizing framework for courses and curricula in higher education, especially in first-year writing. Drawing on concepts of place, work, and the future, Owens further notes that composition courses can give sustainability a central place in students’ thinking. While the publication of Composition and Sustainability and other volumes brought a flurry of interest in sustainability studies and ecocomposition as approaches to teaching writing (informing our work in Rural Literacies, for instance), Owens later admits on his website to disappointment that these concepts did not catch on and shape the larger arc of the field and its core writing curricula in the ways he hoped: 

For a few years after publication, “ecocomposition” garnered a little bit of attention in the field of composition studies, but this was short lived and never really amounted to more than a fringe specialization. . . . The bulk of core college curricula in the U.S. still remains largely detached from the cataclysmic changes underway. (Young people, however, are now doing far more to call attention to the climate crisis than many of our academic institutions . . . ). (“Composition and Sustainability”)

In spite of Owens’s less than sanguine view of ecocomposition’s influence, a steady trickle of scholarship addressing ecocomposition, environmental rhetoric, and sustainability has influenced conversations in rhetoric and writing studies, including the creation of the CCCC Environmental Rhetoric and Advocacy Special Interest Group, and the founding of the National Consortium of Environmental Rhetoric and Writing, which has included panels on environmental rhetoric at the Rhetoric Society of America. As Everett queries in his recently proposed edited collection, “How can we go on writing, teaching, and living without acknowledging and responding to this growing crisis?” The answer is that we can’t. To directly address climate change, many colleges and universities have instituted programs, courses (including writing courses), and certificates in sustainability studies. Many higher education institutions have divested from fossil fuels and begun composting garbage and food waste, buying and preparing local food in dining halls, and engaging in other ways to consciously reduce their carbon footprints. Not surprisingly, student activists have been at the forefront of demanding that these changes happen.

This special issue builds and acknowledges earlier work on environmental rhetoric, sustainability studies, and climate change, as well as forges new paths that respond to the urgency of our particular historical moment. In particular, we seek to foster connections within our field among conversations on climate change and environmental justice, within subfields and fragmented amid various journals, conferences, or other academic spaces.

Special Issue on Rhetorics and Literacies of Climate Change

While each of the essays in this special issue can stand alone and be read in any order, we’ve arranged them to emphasize recurring and developing themes in rhetoric and composition’s current work on climate change. These pieces emphasize a range of approaches for considering critical, rhetorical interventions and fostering ecological literacies and grassroots activism that are possible or already occurring in response to climate change. Across the volume, whether focusing on barn swallows, sand mining, or transnational women acting to address natural disasters, contributors disrupt traditional, Western notions of rhetorical agency. Some critique neoliberal development policies and practices, and others address decolonial approaches to climate justice. A connective thread among all pieces is a deliberate upending of standard approaches to how we address the far-reaching and multiple problems of climate change. Authors ask readers to challenge familiar (read: Western) approaches to research by letting the landscapes and those who inhabit them drive their methodologies and analyses rather than the other way around, or being good stewards as researchers as we move through the environment through indigenous practices of relationality (see in this volume Anderson, Lyon, and Kimmerer cited in Brownlee). Locales of research range from a historical center in the American West, to coastal South Africa, to Puerto Rico—from communities, to data centers, to the classroom, to Twitter.

The first four pieces, by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Rich Shivener and Dustin Edwards, Michelle Comstock, and Stacey Anderson, Kiki Patsch, and Raquel Baker, explore the ways that we become conscious—or remain unconscious—of non-human factors that influence our perceptions of both the results and causes of climate change. Jennifer Clary-Lemon addresses rural Canadians’ experiences of species decline, centering on the common barn swallow. The decline in small family farms and flying insect populations reduces the birds’ nesting sites and food sources, and combines with changes in climate to reduce the swallows’ population in Canada by 76% over the last 40 years. Through legislated policy and individual action, humans attempt to retain this creature, so familiar in many rural contexts, by avoiding the destruction of its nesting habitat and constructing nesting boxes. Using a new materialist environmental rhetorical framework, Clary-Lemon reveals how such a seemingly simple human-animal interaction, in an attempt to address a particular effect of climate change on a certain landscape, becomes a fraught and multi-layered affectual encounter.

Michelle Comstock looks at the material-rhetorical power of museums to help visitors re-imagine familiar landscapes and better understand the culture/nature divide. She analyzes exhibits at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West that sought to impress on visitors changes in animals’ migratory patterns in, through, and around Yellowstone National Park. Housing developments, highways, and the ecological changes of a warming climate have altered the routes and constrained the timeframes of animals’ migratory movements. Comstock argues that exhibits that “choreograph” visitors’ corporeal, felt experiences of animal migration, the artificiality of park boundaries, and the consequences of human development and climate change, have greater potential to increase visitors’ ecological literacy. The “choreography” metaphor describes well the power of digital literacy tools to display data in ways that make the causes and effects of climate change truly felt, especially when combined with mapping technologies, as in Pro Publica and The New York Times Magazine’s collaborative piece, “The Great Climate Migration” (Lustgarten).

The next two essays exemplify the kind of work that can be done with digital mapping technologies to tell the often-unknown stories of practices with profound environmental effects: the mining of data and the mining of sand. Rich Shivener and Dustin Edwards offer an interactive map journal and accompanying essay that detail the ways in which data centers, typically built in rural areas, consume significant amounts of electrical energy and billions of gallons of water to power and cool their operations. Also invoking new materialist environmental rhetoric, Shivener and Edwards describe data centers as “an ever-present environmental unconscious that underpins networked life.” ArcGIS mapping technology allows the authors and readers to explore competing rhetorics about climate change invoked by the data center industry, citizen-activists, and advocacy groups.

Stacey Anderson, Kiki Patsch, and Raquel Baker also demonstrate how mapping technology such as ArcGIS and ESRI StoryMaps can create interactive tools for teaching, research, and advocacy. They experiment with map- and story-based ways to communicate the contributions of sand mining to changes in climate, rural landscapes, and people. Sand is a widely used resource in technology, manufacturing, and construction, and the typical mining practices contribute heavily to the erosion of beaches that are further threatened by climate change. Through their story map, the authors blend informational content with narrative elements that emphasize the felt effects of sand mining on human and animal populations, highlighting the importance of using story as a transnational tool to build critical literacy and empathy around lesser-known causes and effects of climate change.

Stories—from narratives driving a museum experience to multimodal mapping—are further theorized within the next cluster of essays, often in connection to grassroots, local contexts or ways of knowing that enact decolonial frameworks for climate change and climate justice activism. Julie Bates draws on an apparent decolonial feminist rhetoric of risk methodology to examine a case study of activism for environmental justice in Little Village or South Lawndale, a community with a good-sized Latinx population near Chicago, Illinois. The case study of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), formed in 1994 to combat air pollution from coal-fired power plants, demonstrates the multi-faceted rhetorical work (e.g., artwork, infographics, social media, street theater, toxic tours, storytelling, written arguments) that the residents undertook to engage in environmental justice and climate justice work for over two decades. Bates shows how the case study of LVEJO serves as a model for understanding how communities of color undertake climate justice activism in local contexts, build coalitions, and seek to effect meaningful change. Bates also argues for solidarity with activist movements such as LVEJO, and for including environmental justice activist work in our classes and in our campus and community organizing to address climate change.

In “Colonial Causes and Consequences: Climate Change and Climate Chaos in Puerto Rico,” Karrieann Soto Vega points to the important histories of organizing against colonization. She notes that when scholars address climate change in relation to Puerto Rico, it is important that they put Puerto Rican people “at the forefront when delineating a history of the conditions and contestations of climate injustice in that Caribbean space.” Soto Vega offers a “decolonial approach to studying rhetorics of climate change and a way forward in the quest for engaging in research that arcs towards climate justice, while exposing the injustices associated with climate-change-induced catastrophes like Hurricane Maria.” Furthermore, she calls for the “importance of attending to both the causes of climate change and the consequent responses by those affected,” urging scholars to draw upon decolonial methods when studying environmental justice rhetorics in “overtly colonial contexts.” Grassroots histories of struggle against colonization are key to understanding the larger implications of climate change within the Puerto Rican context and important in avoiding the presentism that haunts media representations of climate disasters.

Christina Boyles, in the same vein as Soto Vega, addresses how colonial logics have contributed to the construction of climate stories in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. As project director for the Puerto Rico Disaster Archive, she works with partner organizations, including the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras, the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and various community organizations. Through a video project recording Puerto Ricans’ lived experiences, she critiques the concept of “tellable narratives” and argues that stories of Hurricane Maria’s aftermath must center the agency of Puerto Rican activists who organized to address disaster response. Boyles contends that scholars in rhetoric, composition, and literacy are well-poised to use active listening and sovereignty-centered storytelling to “reimagine the field’s relationship to environmental justice rhetorics and the impending climate catastrophe.”

Rhetorical agency and grassroots activism in response to a natural disaster are also key for Sweta Baniya, who addresses how women in Nepal—often depicted as vulnerable and in need of rescue—were major contributors to relief efforts for the April 2015 Nepal Earthquake. Baniya examines how Nepali women exercised rhetorical agency through grassroots organizing and social media coverage of the earthquake. Women drew attention and funding to the cause of relief, bolstered data gathering on the disaster, and engaged in grassroots community organizing to attend to women’s and families’ needs in the disaster and help communities recover. Baniya argues that, by studying the ways in which Nepali women organized relief efforts and exercised rhetorical agency, we can better understand the kinds of responses that will be needed in the wake of climate change disasters and events, especially around the role that women can play transnationally in community organization. Moreover, studying the actions of these women allows us to see who the stakeholders for change may be in specific locations and communities, especially outside of recognized power structures and hierarchies, a point underscored by Julie Bates as well in this special issue.

Infusing similar decolonial approaches, Yavanna M. Brownlee’s piece provides theoretical and practical considerations for bringing climate change issues into the college writing classroom. Drawing upon conversations surrounding Indigenous rhetorics and decolonization, she subscribes to a relational practice that embodies respect, responsibility, and reciprocity in a Writing About Environmental Sustainability-themed, upper-level composition course. Brownlee includes her full syllabus and provides readers an understanding of the decolonial knowledges that scaffold the course development, as well as a forthright discussion of the ways students entrenched in Western ideologies respond to the relational practices.

Following analyses of movements, stories, and spaces from museums to classrooms, this special issue on Rhetorics and Literacies of Climate Change closes with a piece that highlights one of the thorniest challenges of climate change, one that is representative of the oft-placed binary between science and religion: how do rhetors address resistant audiences who derive their views on climate change from evangelical Christianity, a community that has often denied or dismissed scientific claims to climate change? Megan VonBergen and Bethany Mannon offer a case study of Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and evangelical Christian who has achieved acclaim as one of the public intellectuals who bridges science and religion. Through the framework of rhetorical feminism, VonBergen and Mannon examine how Hayhoe crafts an ethos that builds bridges across the seeming chasm between faith and climate action. Along the way, they model for readers, as do the other pieces here, possibilities for communicating and addressing knowledge-making and action to respond to climate change.

Whether it is Clary-Lemon’s call that “we are in deep need of rhetorical models that embrace intraspecies entanglements,” or Boyles’s note that the field of rhetoric, composition, and literacies is primed for researching “the weaponization of language and understand[ing] how cultural artifacts and stories are key components of . . . meaning making” in response to climate crisis, each author in this volume makes clear that studying and teaching rhetorics and literacies of climate change is necessary, and that research is only part of that work—social action and policy-making are needed as well. More significantly, the field of rhetoric and composition as it can be, not as it has always been, will be best equipped to do such work, and that means challenging and upending Western and neoliberal approaches, sites, and ways of knowing with decolonial knowledge and strategies.

One advantage our field may have in the classroom is the generation of young student-activists now coming to college. Jessica Taft, author of The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children, notes that “around the world, we are seeing children and youth engage as social, political, and economic actors, demonstrating their capacity to help make social change” (qtd. in McNulty). These young people come to college classrooms with activist experience in and knowledge of a variety of topics, including participation in international climate strike events modeled after the work of teen activist Greta Thunberg and activism around issues of racial justice. Decolonial rhetorics and narrative strategies for activism would be of profound interest to them, and would allow them to contribute their knowledge and experiences of activism to the writing and rhetoric classroom. In addition, the field of rhetoric and composition is well-positioned to take up action item three of the 2019 NCTE Resolution: to contribute our pedagogical and subject-area expertise to those in other fields. Movements such as Professional Science Master’s programs (professionalsciencemasters.org) create natural spaces for rhetoricians to shape the ability of those in the applied sciences to communicate more effectively with a variety of audiences about the intricacies of climate change.

The time is right to expand our field’s pedagogy and research on climate change, but as Soto Vega reminds us, a key element of this work is recognizing that “the ways we do our research, jumping on a bandwagon of kairotic appeal without a grounded understanding of place—which is often replicated in our teaching—” cannot be separated from “acknowledg[ing] the (anti)colonial histories of the place.” Contributors here show a range of ways that researchers can work to address climate change while foregrounding local, interdisciplinary contexts, places, communities, and classrooms. In 2020, amid new and enduring climate, public health, and racial justice crises and movements—all of which are intertwined—our field must be more tied to social justice and advocacy than ever, and we hope the pieces here move us forward in that direction.