Butterfly Mind: Envisioning Literary Worlds of Sustainable Societies
Season 3: Episode 9
“All solutions are right here, they just have to catch on” is a conviction of Denise Baden, an ethical author and sustainability professor, that poetically resonates in all her stories: Habitat Man, No More Fairy Tales: Stories to Save Our Planet, Anthology of Short Stories for COP27, and The Assassin. Making a virtue of necessity, Denise illuminates us on how environmental literature connects people to climate change solutions by mobilizing our social awareness and conscientious into embracing the change needed.
Literature transcends Denise into an Audre Lorde for environmental literacy, “forming the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change.” On this episode of Climify, we are joined by an educator and author, whose work complements Project Drawdown Communications and Storytelling by constructing worlds infused with conversational currency toward catalyzing citizen assembly, social commentary, and critiques enabling climate reforms.
Listen to this episode on: Spotify, Apple, Google and other places you get your podcastsAbout our guest
Denise Baden is a Professor of Sustainable Business within Southampton Business School (SBS) at the University of Southampton and is on the Forbes list of Climate Leaders.
Denise is the Liaison Officer for the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education and has been involved in integrating issues of ethics, responsibility and sustainability throughout the curriculum. This has also involved developing research networks and collaborations in this area and engaging in outreach activities with local businesses and community organizations, for example, a service learning scheme whereby entrepreneurship students worked with local social enterprises as part of their coursework.
Denise is also the founder and Chair of the University of Southampton Green Group, the SBS representative on the University Sustainability Implementation Group and also sits on the Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability Committee.
She set up the series of free Green Stories writing competitions in 2018 to inspire writers to create positive visions of what a sustainable society might look like, to tell stories that showcase solutions, not just problems. In the process Denise continued to research what works in terms of fiction and climate communication and enjoys sharing her growing knowledge via workshops and talks.
Habitat Man is Denise’s first novel. Habitat Man began as an effort to illustrate what a solution-based approach might look like, and then took on a life of its own. At her characters’ insistence, Denise is now working on the sequel.
On the web
Resources from the episode
Stark, Ben Elton
Episode topic tags:
climate literature, climate storytelling, climate education, sustainability
Find more about how to teach climate design in your classroom at www.climatedesigners.org/edu
Music in this episode
Nature sound effect by bbc.co.uk – ©2023 BBC
Theme music by Casual Motive
Design Team
Consulting
Climate Design Assignments
At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.
