The People's Free School

Ecology and the Climate Crisis

4 min read

What is the relationship between capitalism and the living world? How did we arrive at the climate crisis, and what is to be done? This theme covers political ecology, environmental justice, Indigenous knowledge and stewardship, climate science, and the politics of energy, food, land, and water. It scales the analysis of growth and accumulation from How Capitalism Works up to the biosphere, and asks whether the system that made the crisis can solve it.

How to use this theme

This folder organizes resources by lens. See the Pedagogy document for what the lenses do and why they are structured this way.

  • Experiential: What is your experience with this? What does the room already know?
  • Historical: How did this come to be?
  • Theoretical: How do we understand and analyze it?
  • Practical: What is happening on the ground and what are people doing about it?
  • Liberatory: What would it mean to overcome or transform this?

A session does not need to use all five lenses. A study circle may move across them. Use what serves the room.

Anchor questions

These questions have proven useful for opening up this theme. They are starting points, not a script. Take the ones that fit the room and leave the rest.

  • Where does your water, food, power, and air come from, and what does getting them cost the earth?
  • Have you seen a place you love changed or damaged by pollution, development, or a changing climate?
  • Who lives next to the refinery, the highway, the landfill, the flood? Does it break down by race and class?
  • When you hear “we caused climate change,” who is the “we”? Who actually did, and who pays?
  • What were you taught about nature, and about humans’ place in it? Do you still believe it?
  • Can this be fixed within the system that caused it? What would have to change?
  • What would a good life look like that the planet could sustain for everyone?

Suggested arcs for groups new to this theme. Adapt freely. Every session opens with a check-in and closes with reflection (see the pedagogy document). This theme can bring despair into the room; give the experiential work real time and turn the feeling toward analysis and action.

Single-session entry point (2 hours). Start experiential: a place people love that is changing, and the grief or numbness that is hard to name. Watch a short explainer together (Second Thought’s seven-minute How Corporations Shifted The Blame For Climate Change) to move from personal guilt to systems. Read the brief Ecosocialist Manifesto aloud. Close by returning to the opening question with what has shifted. See the single-session template.

Six-week study circle. Week 1 experiential and framing (what we already carry about the living world; what are we studying and why). Week 2 historical: how fossil capital and environmental racism were made, using Malm and Bullard. Weeks 3 to 4 theoretical: the metabolic rift, cheap nature, and ecosocialism versus degrowth, reading Foster, Moore, and Löwy. Week 5 practical: climate justice organizing and just transition, using the Movement Generation and Climate Justice Alliance materials and the film Awake. Week 6 liberatory: what should replace fossil capitalism, staging the growth debate among degrowth, the Green New Deal, half-earth planning, and Land Back. See the six-week template.

Weekend intensive. Compress the arc above into a Friday-evening-through-Sunday structure, with the historical and theoretical work on Saturday and the practical and liberatory work on Sunday. A screening of Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock or Gasland works well as a Saturday-evening anchor. See the weekend-intensive template.

This theme connects closely to several others:

Status

First pass across all five lenses, and it may be a while before there is a second. If you have run a session on this theme, consider contributing back what you used and what you learned.