Oregon State Climate Fiction Education Resources

If you are looking for academic research on climate fiction, Suzanne Leikam and Julia Leyda have compiled a research bibliography with a number of resources related to cli-fi in American studies.

We understand that introducing cli-fi into the curriculum will be difficult for many, and not possible for some. While we strongly encourage that cli-fi be introduced into the curriculum in order to have an in-depth engagement with the climate crisis, small inclusions of cli-fi texts into your syllabus can still create a space for these conversations. As you will see in the units below, cli-fi texts can be used in your lesson plans to discuss literary terms that are already part of your curriculum. Here are some places in which you can "sneak" cli-fi into your classroom. These texts are all deemed appropriate for high schoolers.

• Introduce cli-fi books in your genre units. cli-fi works really well in
  • Fiction
    • Dry, by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman
    • Loosed Upon the World: The Saga Anthology of Climate Fiction, edited by John Joseph Adams
  • Nonfiction
    • Everything That Rises: A Climate Change Memoir, by Brianna Craft
    • The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells
  • Dystopian
    • Weather, by Jenny Offill
    • Blue Skies, by T.C. Boyle
  • Poetry
    • Warned, by Sylvia Stults
    • Two Degrees, by Jetnil-Kijiner
  • Plays
    • Earthquakes in London, by Mike Bartlett (Age recommendation 14+ due to strong language and suicidal themes)

For background information on cli-fi from the term’s creator, follow this link to Dan Bloom’s report on the origins of cli-fi. If you’re interested in reading further about what cli-fi is and does for literature, here are a few articles describing and defining the impact of climate change on literature at large:

• Global warning: the rise of 'cli-fi'
• Cli-Fi Is the New Sci-Fi
• Why writing stories about climate change isn’t fantasy or sci-fi
• From Afrofuturism to ecotopia: A climate-fiction glossary

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to highlighting climate solutions and uncovering environmental injustices. Since 1999, they have used the power of journalism to engage the public about the perils of the most existential threat we face (Grist, 2024). Many of the suggested texts in the units are taken freely available short stories from Grist’s Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors collection. Grist has also compiled a list of helpful concepts and terms frequently used in relation to cli-fi that can be found here. 

As demonstrated in the "What is cli-fi" video, we encourage you to expand your discussions of cli-fi beyond traditional short stories. We have spent time engaging with music videos for cli-fi topics.

Poetry

When discussing poetry, take time to consider not only the words themselves but it would also be worthwhile to spend time engaging with the structure.

• Stults, Warned
• Popa, Letter to Noah’s Wife
• Santos Perez, Love Poems in the Time of Climate Change, Sonnet XVII & Sonnet XII
• Harjo, Speaking Tree
• Laux, Evening
• Parini, Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County
• Hogan, Song for the Turtles in the Gulf

Music Videos

Music videos provide a new unique way to discuss the climate crisis with an added visual element over the lyrics of the song. Though we strongly encourage having your students analyze both the lyrics and the music video, all of these songs can be analyzed alone without the video.

AURORA, The Seed

Billie Eilish, all the good girls go to hell

Childish Gambino, Feels Like Summer

Michael Jackson, Earth Song

Our video and lesson plan seek to educate ELA students on narrative arcs and how they are being altered in some climate literature. In our video "What is Narrative Arc?" we introduce students to a traditional narrative arc using the model of Freytag’s Pyramid. From this foundation, we then articulate how this traditional narrative arc is being destabilized in some climate literature by placing particular emphasis on the concept of the anti-climax, and how it might be uniquely suited to narrativize questions of climate anxiety or individual inaction in the face of climate change. The lesson plan accompanying the video helps students analyze the short story “The Tamarisk Hunter” by Paolo Bacigalupi for its anti-climatic narrative arc to understand how the main character seems helpless in the face of the state and drought. If you’d like to access more climate short stories that disrupt the traditional narrative arc, you can check out our additional resources list!

Click here to view the transcript

Additional Readings:

• Millet, Woodland
  • This story can be used as an example of how to identify altered cli-fi narrative arcs in a genre that isn’t a Western, and that utilizes a retrospective voice

• El Akkad, Factory Air

  • This can be used to work with a different type of conflict for mapping a narrative arc, and seeing how the anti-climax plays with reader expectations. 

• Young, The Last Almond

  • This story utilizes a frame story and has two different conflicts that can be mapped using a narrative arc. This can be shown as an example of a cli-fi text that doesn’t utilize an anti-climax, but it could be interesting to dig into potential reasons why that might be within the text.

This video highlights some of the changes undergone by the literary category of setting in  ‘cli-fi’ contexts and emphases their potential to shift other formal features of a narrative. Focusing on how climate change endows literary settings with newfound agency, this video demonstrates how setting becomes a force that acts directly upon the characters and plot rather than existing as a background or passive category. The corresponding lesson plan expands upon these ideas by engaging students in applying this knowledge within different cultural contexts as well as in their own personal lives. Students will work to understand how cli-fi settings exhibit agency over the text with class-wide hands-on chart and timeline making to illustrate how a setting can both be a ‘cause’ and ‘effect.’ Both of these resources encourage students to understand the temporal, and fluctuating, power of climate, environment, and setting.

Click here to view the transcript

Additional Readings:

• Robinson, Ministry of the Future (excerpt)

  • This text can be used to analyze how functions of the setting and environment (temperature, air quality, etc) can directly impact the protagonist’s goals and influence their motivations.

• Nicholls, “Replay Boomer”

  • This text can be used to demonstrate how time period functions as a part of setting. Additionally, this text offers a look into how availability of natural resources, as part of narrative setting, can impact character motivations. 

• Akkad, “Factory Air”This text offers a drastic comparison between two different settings and how they’ve been impacted, or evolved, in the face of climate change. Additionally, this text can be used to begin conversations around political and cultural aspects of setting.

This video demonstrates how the purpose of the protagonist changes in climate fiction, focusing on the way that an individual protagonist will often become part of a collective in order to reverse the effects of climate change in the story. The lesson plan works to further this idea, while illustrating how cli-fi often involves two separate conflicts, the personal conflict and the climate conflict, and how the plot of personal conflict will often reflect the climate conflict. This allows us to use the personal conflict to analyze what the story is attempting to convey about climate change. Both the video and the lesson plan work to demonstrate the need for collective action in resolving the climate crisis.

Click here to view the transcript

Additional Readings

• Jesuthasan, When We Are Ruins, Dance on Us
  • This can be used to discuss the protagonist from the point of view of a nonhuman character.
• Robinson, The Ministry of the Future
  • This can be used to discuss the failure of an individual protagonist to resolve the issue, further reiterating the need for collective action in the climate crisis. 
• El Akkad, Factory Air
  • This can be used to discuss the tension between desires of the individual protagonist and the needs of the collective.

This video and lesson plan aim to generate conversations in ELA classrooms about the ways climate fiction can help us better understand the effects of climate change. To get started with this resource, you can check out our video: “What is the Environmental Uncanny?” In this video we define the environmental uncanny and break down the way cli-fi may use the uncanny to show how our settings are becoming unfamiliar and frightening because of climate disaster. The accompanying lesson plan encourages students to analyze how the short story “Floating” by Pitchaya Sudbanthad deals with changing environments. If you’d like access to more short stories that explore the environmental uncanny, you can check out the additional resource list!

Click here to view the transcript

Additional Readings:

• Young, The Last Almond
  • This can be used to explore the ways personal and collective trauma come together as climate change renders our environments unfamiliar over time.
• Noor, Legend Has It
  • This story is especially useful for thinking about the way we can re-familiarize ourselves with uncanny environments through indigenous practices.
• Menzies, The World Away From the Rain
  • This story offers the unique perspective of an uncanny environment through the eyes of a child who did not know the world before it changed. It can be helpful for thinking about how memory works across generations.