Book Reviews: Environmental Communication

The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World

Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray, eds. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. 2024. 339 pages, including index.

Index Terms—climate justice, emotional education, environmental curriculum, sustainable teaching

Reviewed by Diane Martinez, Associate Professor, Western Carolina University.

Over the past decade or more, teaching about the climate crisis has been a matter of choice with teachers being able to choose how to address environmental issues in their classes. In recent years, it is almost impossible to avoid this subject. With so much negative news coverage, students and teachers feel overwhelmed when talking about the current climate challenges. The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World is a resource to help mitigate dark conversations about the present and the future.

The book has 37 chapters divided into eight sections. Emotion is the main theme for each chapter. Climate conversations are emotional for most people, especially for those tasked with cleaning up the previous generations’ messes. Students report feeling overwhelmed, depressed, and hopeless about their future, as well as helpless against powerful industries that continue to ravage and pollute the earth despite urgent calls to stop or modify current operations. This is where editors, Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray, step in and offer a hand to teachers who have been fielding climate conversations and activities alone.

The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators is an interdisciplinary amalgam of lesson plans and assignments for teaching about the climate crisis and climate change with the goal of helping students understand their emotions about the subject and to turn their emotions into positive activities. Most chapters are short and introduce the lesson or assignment by explaining how it evolved in the author’s classroom or how it is beneficial when teaching about a particular aspect of climate or the environment. Some chapters are more discussion-oriented, whereas others offer step-by-step instructions for implementing a lesson or project.

Although the editors explained the book’s organization in the main Introduction, each section would have benefitted from having had its own Introduction. The section titles alone are not all that descriptive or self-explanatory about what readers will find in a section. I found it hard to distinguish the chapters in one section from the chapter topics in another section. A one-page introduction for each section would have provided helpful context, making the book less overwhelming and more effective. Each chapter’s focus on helping students with their emotions felt overwhelming, leaving me depressed by the daunting task ahead. Breaking up the reading by understanding the sections better can help readers avoid this burnout. Despite these minor drawbacks, educators and counselors will find several chapters helpful for their interactions with students on this important subject.