Climate communication comes in many forms, including books. Book clubs are a great opportunity not only to read climate-themed books, but also to build community and connections, and discuss the impacts of and solutions to climate change.
Earlier this year, Re.Climate launched its first-ever book club. We asked our book club’s founder, and Re.Climate’s academic director, Dr. Barbara Leckie to share with us what motivated her to start the initiative, what she learned from the experience, and why others should include book clubs in their climate communications.
What inspired you to create the Re.Climate book club?
Reading is one way that we interact with the world and each other. When we read a book, we often start a conversation in our head with ourselves and the author. But we don’t always talk about our reading with others. I find that when I discuss the books I’m reading, I understand them differently, see things I hadn’t seen otherwise, and remember them better. By being organized around a shared focus, a book club creates a community that is focused and collaborative. That’s the beauty of book clubs.
Why a Re.Climate book club specifically? I think many people—even climate communicators—feel isolated in their climate work. A book club was one way to combat that. I also wanted to have the more intimate exchanges with our community that a book club allows. I hoped a book club might help us to approach climate issues from angles we don’t always address. It gives space both to how we respond with our senses—anger, fear, and dread but also joy, laughter and care—and how we respond with our minds.
When you originally envisioned this book club, what gap in climate communication were you trying to fill?
I wanted to fill the gap of the gap. Climate communication, in other words, is typically about what we know and how to communicate better to the public. What I think we don’t pay enough attention to is those places where we’re unsure, don’t know or can’t predict the best course of communication. Instead of passing over that gap to what we do know, I wanted to create spaces for feeling and thinking in the absence of knowledge, best practices and solutions. I wanted to create spaces of pauses and slow thinking.
I’m a professor of literary and cultural studies, and when I became involved with Re.Climate, I realized that most communicators don’t see reading literature as particularly relevant to their work. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I see culture and the arts as intimately bound up with how we understand the world. Reading helps us to see that there are multiple ways to tell a story, multiple perspectives from which the story makes sense, multiple feelings and moods that these different modes of storytelling incite.
I created the Book Club to make room in our programming for questions without easy answers. Its purpose is not to supply a single solution, but to expand the conversation—to pause, reflect and let new questions emerge.
What was the format of the club? What core principles guided you when you designed it?
We met for an hour at lunchtime on the last Friday of the month for three months. Our readings included a short story, poetry, an excerpt from a work of non-fiction, and a work of visual art. The core principle was participation. To that end, we used breakout rooms, plenary conversations, and an ongoing chat. We discussed staples of literary studies like close reading, repeated images, rhetorical strategies, and so on, along with the work’s themes, structure, and impact. We always focused on how a given work created its effects, and we discussed the “how” as part of the communication.
What were some of the pieces discussed? How did you choose them?
The Re.Climate community is composed of wonderfully engaged readers. We put out a call to our members for suggestions on both the format and possible readings. I couldn’t accommodate everyone’s suggestions, but a majority of the 200 respondents asked for short pieces that generated, in some way, hope. I also sent out a request to my different academic circles explaining what I was doing and asking for suggestions.
I decided early on that it would be interesting to group our readings thematically. Since “fire season” was just beginning, I chose titles that related to wildfires in one way or another. As a result, each reading was amplified through the lens of the others. For me, it created a rich and surprising understanding of wildfires that I’m still thinking about. I hope it did the same for others. We’re planning our new book club session now. I welcome suggestions for readings or any themes members might want to address. (You can find a list of our first-session readings here, and you can send suggestions for our next session to info@reclimate.ca)
How do you hope the book club changes the way people talk about climate in their own communities?
First and foremost, I hope it generates more conversations. I hope people share the books they’ve read in the Re.Climate Book Club with others in their community. I also hope that by reading three different works in three different genres, the Book Club opened a new lens on wildfires that helped people to understand them differently.
What can a curated climate book club do that a traditional climate lecture or webinar often cannot?
It can make a space for that gap I mentioned. It’s not about information delivery but about discussion and participation. It’s about learning and sharing together. It creates a community on the spot, even if that community doesn’t endure beyond the book club. I like lectures and webinars, and they often include time for questions, but the point of the Book Club is to build relationships and cultivate a responsiveness that isn’t necessarily about asking good questions, but about being alive to the reading and paying attention.
What did you learn from this experience? What surprised you most about who shows up and how they participate?
Most of our meetings had between 15 and 25 people. I wasn’t surprised by the participants’ wisdom or their willingness to test ideas in a new space. I was grateful, though. I’ve seen our community in action and appreciate the many different directions it pulls from.
What surprised me most about the book club? I worried about including poetry in our readings. For many people, it can seem hard to access and remote. But our conversation about poetry was perhaps the most animated of all our meetings. Several wrote to me after asking if we could discuss more poetry in future meetings.
Any advice for folks wanting to start their own climate book clubs?
I participate in many book clubs. They’re all very different, and they’re all great. I mention this because I don’t think there’s a single recipe for what works. There are obvious things to note—decide on a number of participants, a consistent time, and a place—but otherwise anything is possible.
Are you considering starting your own book club? Check out our recent summer reading list for some ideas to get you started.
Jennifer Mayville is Re.Climate’s Strategic Services Director
