Chao: Decolonizing Climate Change
What does Chao mean when she says climate should be ‘felt, not just analyzed’?
Lived experiences, not just science. Interact with the environment
bonus: Multi Sensory Imagination
Why might people in places like Kenya, Namibia, and Malawi feel more hopeful about climate change than people in Germany, even though they face greater risk?
Experience climate change directly through their daily lives → feels concrete and actionable vs.
Germany's abstract and uncontrollable
In The Ants and the Grasshopper, projects like D-Town Farm are led by Black communities to build local, sustainable systems. Can you think of a similar example of how Black activism (like BLM) might show up in renewable energy?
Community-owned solar projects, energy democracy initiatives, or local efforts where marginalized communities control their own energy resources
If climate change is a ‘crisis of imagination,’ which of Chao’s approaches (storied, sensory, emplaced, reflexive) do you think is most important for solving it and why?
Justify your choice!
Do you think people in the US (or at Georgetown) experience climate change in an engaged or disengaged way? How does that affect their behavior?
Justify your response!
Is this Big-E or little-e: A city installs a large solar farm to reduce carbon emissions. It provides clean energy to thousands of homes, but the project was planned by experts and built on land previously used by a low-income community that had little say in the decision.
Largely reflects Big-E energy because it relies on centralized, expert-driven decision-making and overlooks community input. Even though it uses renewable energy, it reproduces existing power structures rather than fully challenging them
Can you think of an example from The Ants and the Grasshoppers where people only took climate seriously after directly experiencing it?
Anita talks about droughts, clay cookstoves, failed harvests, etc.
The article suggests that hope can come from constraint and hardship. Do you think this idea is convincing, or are there situations where hardship reduces hope? What determines the difference?
Hardship can create hope when people still feel some level of agency or meaning and Can destroy hope when people feel trapped with no control.
If renewable energy can still rely on exploitative labor and unequal decision-making, what does that suggest about whether simply switching to “clean energy” is enough?
Systems of power, control, and inequality also need to change