Cover artwork by Ale Silva
Future Ecologies presents the podcast series “The Right to Feel,” a two episode mini-series on the emotional realities of the climate crisis. The stories and reflections you will hear in these episodes came from two semesters of a class at the University of British Columbia taught by award-winning author, journalist, associate professor of climate justice, and director of the Centre for Climate Justice, Naomi Klein. This class was shaped by discussions of climate feelings and attended by interdisciplinary graduate students engaging with the realities of climate change from across scientific and humanities perspectives. Some were using historical approaches to understand the transformation of human and more-than-human landscapes, others were applying scientific methods to researching the impacts of glacier retreat or the problems of bee population collapse. Across these diverse methods of scholarship, the students uncovered layers of emotion far too often left out of scholarly approaches to the climate emergency. They put these emotions into words, both personal reflections and fictional stories. You will hear excerpts of those words woven together into this podcast series, produced by Judee Burr, one of the students in the class.
As researchers do the important work of trying to understand climate changes through study and analysis, they also feel the realities of climate-driven loss and change – from calm, wonder, awe, joy, and caring to rage, numbness, melancholy, weariness, rootedness, and love. These feelings come from deep personal connections to a world that continues to be shaped by climate injustice, and feeling them is an important part of questioning what has come before and charting a different course into the future.
We hope this audio story will crack something open for you, and for each of us who is feeling through how to live on this warming planet.
The first episode opens with an introductory conversation between Naomi Klein and series producer Judee Burr that contextualizes how this class was structured and the writings it evoked.
The second and final episode, “Eulogies,” is based on fictional writing from the class. Students imagine and eulogize something that could be harmed by the climate emergency, and then imagine a speculative future in which action was taken to mitigate that harm.
Credits:
This episode was produced on the unceded and asserted territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples by Judith Burr, with the voices of Felix Giroux, Ruth Moore, Niki, Maggie O’Donnell, Annika Ord, Melissa Plisic, Sadie Rittman, Nina Robertson, Foster Salpeter, Sara Savino, Ali Tafreshi, and Rhonda Thygesen. Sadie Rittman’s full story is available online.
With music licensed from Blue Dot Sessions.
Thanks to everyone in the “Ecological Affect” classes at UBC whose thoughtful ideas fostered such generative discussion and meaningful writing. Thanks to Kendra Jewell, Audrey Irvine-Broque, Lorah Steichen, and Maggie O’Donnell for reviewing drafts of this audio story. Finally, thanks to the University of British Columbia’s Hampton Grant program for funding work on this project.
Producer Bio:
Judith (Judee) Burr is a PhD student in the Geography Program at the University of British Columbia. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar of the fire-prone ecosystems of Western North American and the historical geographies of power, governance, and knowledge that shape them. She produced the peer-reviewed scholarly podcast “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley,” which uses creative audio storytelling techniques to create a multi-vocal narration of regional fire history. It is published in the journal BC Studies, and available on podcasting platforms.
