Lived experience as a source of knowledge. What has the room been through? What do participants already know from the inside?
See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.
The climate crisis is often taught as graphs and parts per million, far from anyone’s life. This lens starts somewhere else: the place you love that is changing, the air or water that made someone sick, the flood or fire you lived through, the grief and numbness that are hard to say out loud, and the knowledge people carry about growing food and tending land. That knowledge, and that feeling, are where the work begins.
Anchor questions
Sample prompts to open experiential work in this theme. Adapt to your room. See the facilitator guide for general guidance on experiential prompts.
- What is a place in the natural world that matters to you? What is happening to it?
- Have you breathed bad air, drunk bad water, or lived through a flood, fire, or storm? What did it teach you?
- Who near you lives closest to the pollution and the risk? Who is protected from it?
- What do you know about growing, catching, or gathering food, from your own life or your family’s?
- Have you felt grief, fear, or numbness about the climate? What do you do with it?
- What has your community done to protect its land, air, or water?
Materials that may help
Experiential work begins from the room. These outside materials extend or challenge what the room can offer. All are free unless marked otherwise.
Oral histories and testimonio
- Water Protectors Community Oral History Project. Video and podcast testimony gathered from water protectors of the NoDAPL resistance at Standing Rock, letting them tell their own stories. A first-person entry to Indigenous land defense. Creative Commons and free: waterprotectorscommunity.org
- Environmental Justice Oral History Project (EJOHP). Resilience-based storytelling collecting first-person environmental justice narratives across the US South, in oral history, article, and podcast form. Testimony from the fenceline. Free: ejohp.com
Film
- The Ants and the Grasshopper (Raj Patel and Zak Piper, 2021, 74 min). Malawian farmer and activist Anita Chitaya travels the US to talk with American farmers about climate change, grounded in her own village and her own knowledge. A rare film that centers Global South testimony. Streams free on PBS: pbs.org
Podcasts
- Emergence Magazine Podcast (2018 to present). Author-narrated essays and interviews weaving ecology, culture, and Indigenous land-based knowledge, including conversations with Robin Wall Kimmerer. Good for a reflective, first-person register. Free: emergencemagazine.org
- Mothers of Invention (Mary Robinson, Maeve Higgins, and Thimali Kodikara, 2018 to 2021). Each episode centers a Black, brown, or Indigenous woman innovating on the front lines of climate change, told largely in their own voices. Free: mothersofinvention.online
Video
- “Climate Grief” (Philosophy Tube, 2019). Roughly 30 minutes, about 1.1 million views. Ties the felt experience of climate anxiety to labor and Indigenous rights rather than to individual failure. A strong opener for naming what the room already feels. youtube.com/watch?v=CqCx9xU_-Fw
A note on method
Climate work can bring despair into the room, and despair shuts thinking down. The point of the experiential lens here is not to catalog fear but to move it: to establish that the grief is a reasonable response to real loss, that the people closest to the harm know the most about it, and that the room already holds knowledge and capacity to act. Hold the feeling, then turn it toward the history, the analysis, and the work.
Status
First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially testimony from frontline and fenceline communities, climate-displaced people, and land-based and Indigenous practitioners.