Communicating—In So Many Ways—About the Changing Climate

“Words matter.”—Professor Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

Throughout the semester, students in the environmental studies course Communicating Climate Change experimented with many forms of expression. Each week, their professor, Roux Distinguished Scholar Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, asked them to channel their knowledge and emotions about the environment through different media. 

In response, they created a body of disparate, imaginative, artful, thoughtful, and sometimes multicolored dispatches. The theme knitting these all together: how to persuade people to take part in climate solutions. In her course syllabus, Johnson asks, “How, as the climate crisis accelerates, can we help people understand the risks and solutions, and welcome them into shaping the future? How do we not only inform, but de-jargonize, engage, and entertain?”

Examples of assignments for Environmental Studies 3911: Communicating Climate Change 

• Craft a social media post about a climate solution (bonus points if it goes viral). Here's an example.
• Write a limerick, haiku, rap, or sonnet about greenwashing. 
• Critique a movie with a climate theme.
• Conduct an interview with someone working on a climate solution.
• Create an art project in the form of a poem, rap, video, painting, sculpture, song, etc.
• Write (and in some cases, publish) an op-ed (and then write a limerick about your op-ed). [Johnson is on a personal quest to bring back the limerick.]
• Find and develop climate memes or jokes.

Scars on a body: Brynn Wright ’26 drew climate change tattoo art, sketching a nest laced with litter, weeds growing from a crumpled soda can, a heart ensnarled in electrical wire, a noose around a bouquet, and other stark images. Tattoo art, she said, “is a way to wear your scars on your body, a way to be at peace with the darkness—like fear and hopelessness—that might be inside you.”

Ben Norwood ’25 wrote and performed a spoken-word poem called “We shake our heads remembering,” which imagines a future in which we get things right. (His title references page 429 of Johnson's recent book, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.)

 “...i hear the buzz of bikes and giant dragonflies/soaring down, down, down the old highway lines/over red woods! bluebells! white oaks! and wind turbines!/because bullet was just one of many words we re-defined: we attached it to trains, solar-powered planes and ivy vines…/stitching  sunflower seeds into streets free/of the cars we buried!/i barely know what combustion used to be...” — An excerpt from “We shake our heads remembering,” by Norwood.

Students tapped into their funny sides and workshopped climate change jokes. Some of their witticisms were lighthearted. Others were more mordant.

Nature is both artist and subject. Bekah Jaksa ’27 created a cyanotype print of “flowing forms of kelp and seaweed, plants that not only sustain marine ecosystems, but also serve as a natural climate solution,” she wrote. “My print emerged in green-blue tones, shaped by how sunlight filtered through the objects and how water influenced the exposure—a reminder that nature is both the artist and the subject.”

A Place for All Voices

Norwood, an English and environmental studies major, and government minor, said he enrolled in Johnson's class because he saw it as “the culmination” of his Bowdoin degree.

“For myself, personally, it was good to get out of the very one-track just-writing-articles thing,” he said, “because the media landscape is a lot more complex than that. So this was good training for me to expand my horizons—there are lot of different media I can, and should, and maybe need to be using.”

”I guess one of the biggest lessons I learned in this class and over the course of my degree is that you need to be able to identify the people whose hearts you can change and focus all your efforts on them,” he said. “And there's a lot of people open to change, especially about the environment. We can convince them.”