Nathan K. Hensley’s lecture on Action After Nature: Climate Crisis and the Force of Literature was very eye-opening for me. He touched on the topic of Climate Change with a perspective I have never heard before. During the presentation, he brought up the idea of environmental racism which I will focus my reflection on.
Environmental injustices are more likely to occur in rural and low-income neighborhoods where citizens are not only not provided with the equality infrastructure to help protect against environmental inequality but are often also limited to their access to health care which exacerbates the side effects of the injustice.
In the lecture, Hensley uses the example of Fresno, California. This area consistently ranks among the most polluted for two types of air pollutants- ozone in the summer and particulates in the fall and winter. The air can be a swirl of soot from residential wood burning, smoke from wildfires, diesel exhaust from trucks and aerosol particles from dairies. Because of this air pollution, about 200,000 adults have been diagnosed with asthma and about 75,000 children have asthma. When looking at the statistics, a higher proportion of kids from an African American background have been diagnosed with asthma. The disproportionate rates of frequent asthma symptoms among Black children indicate major health disparities that require a response by local communities.
Environmental pollution and climate change are disproportionality damaging the health of Black and low-income communities. Bringing this back to the lecture, Dr. Hensley’s main point was about the power of literature and how they are very relevant to Climate Collapse. Books like In the Wake: On Blackness and Being which allows us to make trans temporal connections to history and modern society. Books like this help create a framework for environmental change and movements. Literature fosters mutual, collaborative thinking that ultimately builds collectives of people passionate about making the world a better place.
He also focused heavily on the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The story is a tale of two mutually exclusive orders of representation. One a releases world of Alice above world life. Another filled with unusually animated queer scenes that are ruled by violence. Hensley also notes how in the book there is a movement between two order of expectations and that manifests itself with nonverbal graphic marks because it cannot be captured grammatically. Hensley point in referencing this book is that since the piece was written during a transition from a rural and agricultural world to one focused on industrialization, we can mirror Alice’s dichotomy with that of real life.
During the question and answer part of the discussion, a student asked how this awareness literature creates manifests itself as tangible action. I as well had this question because it is very easy to make general and big assumptions with solutions that will work in a perfect utopian society. He answered the question by explaining how we should rewire our brains from an individual to more collective thinking. At first, this explanation didn’t make sense to me but as he elaborated, I resonated more with this idea. Often when talking about climate change, I’ve heard many people shame others for not being vegan or for using straws and equating their individual choices to the cause of global warming. But if we adopted this collective thought mindset, we would realize that the forces causing climate change are much bigger than the individual and requires all of us to work together to create real change.
Being in such a pivotal stage in the world where our decisions now will directly affect the future state of the world, Dr. Hensley’s lecture did a great job connecting the power literature has to represent the current state of the world while also pushing us towards a solution of reversing the damage our past has caused.