Making Space to Feel Around Climate Change

By Brandon James Costelloe-Kuehn, Lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

Today I met with a team to plan a series of talks at RPI in the fall that relate climate change to lots of other issues, providing lots of ways into a subject that many people seem to have not yet really connected with in a visceral way – which is just flabbergasting given how urgent the issue is! We are planning talks that connect climate change to conversations about hope and despair, psychology and psychoanalysis, the responsibilities of engineers and scientists to communicate publicly, strategies for educating people of all ages, and many other aspects of living and learning on this planet.

We are creating a space for people to really feel around climate change. Many of us work on climate change every day and it’s been incredible to see what happens when we step away from a purely functional approach to one that allows for the magic and connection that’s possible when people are given space to just dive deep and be truly heard. It’s incredible how many of us are walking around with such an emotional and psychological weight related to climate change (and the many things that climate change relates to) and how rarely we have the space to slow down enough to really acknowledge this.