By Marcella Broadbooks and Kailyn Kausen
UC Santa Barbara English professor Kenneth Hiltner is one among the creators of NXTerra, a recently launched initiative that provides online resources to help educators teach climate change. Hiltner has served as director of the Literature and the Environment Center and director of the Early Modern Center.
Hiltner, along with almost 40 collaborators across the University of California and California State University systems, developed NXTerra over the course of a year. The seeds for the creation of NXTerra were planted when UC President Janet Napolitano launched the UC Carbon Neutrality Initiative in 2013, but it wasn’t until 2018 that development for the digital NXTerra platform began.
It offers materials for teachers such as syllabi from courses others have taught, videos, and bibliographies to make it easier for instructors to teach about climate change. While the resources are geared towards college-level educators, NXTerra is meant as an online archive of materials for educators at any level. The project hopes to combat climate change denial literature aimed at K-12 schools. NXTerra stands for “next Earth,” a reference to the better, cleaner Earth that creators of the program hope to see in the coming years.
Hiltner recently sat down for an interview with HFA student reporters to discuss what the NXTerra program is, who it is geared to, and how individuals can “rewrite the future” through writing and other creative works that will influence our culture and reshape our world into one that is cleaner and kinder to the environment:
UC Santa Barbara English professor Ken Hiltner discusses NXTerra, an online archive with tools for educators to teach climate change. Photo by Kailyn Kausen
Q: Tell us about NXTerra and your role in it.
A: NXTerra was put together by John Foran, who is a professor in Sociology, and some folks outside of UCSB. We started a program in which we tried to get 20 UCSB faculty members to incorporate climate change and sustainability into their courses. That created an online database of teaching materials, and it grew so it included 20 faculty from each UC campus. We wanted to take that archive and make it available to the public. It was designed to aggregate teaching material from across all of the UCs and Cal State systems regarding sustainability and climate change. Any teacher anywhere from any school, even a K-12 school, could get access to it and so can students.
Q: What is the goal in having this information taught at primary school levels?
A: Fossil fuel interest groups like the Heartland Institute have targeted K-12 secondary school teachers with denial literature. They sent out 300,000 copies of a book entitled Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming. Of course, scientists don’t disagree about global warming and it was designed to spread doubt among high school teachers and even teachers of younger students. Many high school teachers are teaching climate skepticism so we hope to provide good, solid resources to counteract that and to provide facts about climate change.
Q: What are some of the careers for students that you envision will come out of this?
A: Any career. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our culture functions. When people think about climate change, they assume ‘oh that’s going to be technology people handling that or it’s going to be the sciences that figure that out.’ We [at UCSB] have 70 or 80 faculty members working on the climate crisis in the humanities and social sciences alone.
Q: We were reading an excerpt from your book Writing a New Environmental Era: Moving Forward to Nature and it was interesting when you said one of the biggest things those of us in the humanities can do is ‘write the future’. Could you elaborate on that concept?
A: We don’t realize that everything was written into being, slowly over time. We have to write in new cultural practices about the way we eat, the way we dress, the way our houses work. We had no concept of climate change or an environmental consciousness before. Now we know all of these things so we have to rethink them. It’s a big job. That’s why I say any major, any career, can take part in it.
Q: So, should we as individuals be writing about climate solutions and putting that into the world so others can see what we are doing?
A: Yes, and you [as UCSB students], especially. The world looks to the United States for culture. We have been the standard model for decades. California, especially. The world is looking at California and the Kardashian lifestyle. If you, your generation, write a life that is happier and more fulfilling and less materialistic with a smaller climate footprint, the world will notice. Your generation is going to set the stage for what comes and you can either take the life that you’re handed and live it, or you can write a new one and if you do, the world’s going to watch your performance.
Marcella Broadbooks is in her third year and Kailyn Kausen is in her fourth year of the writing and literature program in UC Santa Barbara’s College of Creative Studies.