Pedagogy for the Depressed: Empowerment and Hope in the Face of the Apocalypse

What would it look like to use environmental history to empower our students to face crises with power rather than despair? Drawing inspiration from Paolo Freire’s 1968 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a combined four decades of teaching among the authors, this chapter reframes ideas of liberation, dialogue, and knowledge to suggest practices for the environmental history classroom that centre the non-human, build up our students’ imaginations, and model inquiry-driven learning. First, the chapter carries forward insights from Freire into our present times of crisis by reframing how we can and should be teaching about the past (by centring animals beyond humans). Then, it models how to blend a sense of urgency with compassion using examples of interpretation as a choice. Finally, it embraces a position of promise and leans into the conversations that energise students (celebrating bugs and beavers rather than sadness, cynicism, and despair). Throughout, the authors suggest examples of experiential learning from their classrooms that allow students to feel connected to the world beyond them (learn outside, listen to water, deploy wildlife game cameras). In sum, the chapter outlines practices that move environmental history radically into the spaces where society most needs new relationships of care and creativity.