Podcasting for the Climate: A Conversation with Nathaniel Otjen, Juan Manuel Rubio, & Bethany Wiggin

Earlier this year, Juan Manuel Rubio and I spoke with Bethany Wiggin about the role of environmental humanities projects in higher education and public life. We reflected upon our experiences developing the podcast series Mining for the Climate (produced by Blue Lab at Princeton University), which looks at how domestic lithium mines threaten human and more-than-human communities and how the so-called “white gold rush” participates in longer histories of dispossession.

Together we discuss how multimedia projects like podcasts can generate not only alternative narratives about the environment, but also more engaged forms of public humanities, which can mobilize students at the academic, affective, and political level. Near the end of our conversation, we touch on the challenges of implementing experiential and collaborative learning models in the college classroom and how these models can help us rethink the role of the university in public life.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bethany Wiggin: I understand that students were integral to the process of making the Mining for the Climate podcast, maybe even envisioning it. Can you tell us how you came into this work?

Nathaniel Otjen: Juan and I met at Princeton. We were interested in lithium extraction and had big questions about how the energy transition was being narrated and discussed. We wanted to understand how this was playing out on the ground. We applied for a grant through the High Meadows Environmental Institute, and they thankfully funded a project in the summer that allowed us to have three [undergraduate] interns for that first year. We went to North Carolina for a week, looking at the proposed mining that’s happening in Gaston County.

Juan Manuel Rubio: We all came to this project with beginners’ minds because these are new frontiers of extraction. These are new places that are being exploited, new kinds of struggles. Approaching this slightly different topic—lithium mining—really put me in that position of being a learner with the students. That was very productive.

BW: Critical mineral mining, and energy more generally, is a global phenomenon. You have two very distinct locations—North Carolina and Nevada—and very specific, local perspectives there. Can you talk about the choice of those two spots? Why make it an American story?

JR: In my work, I’ve come to analogize mines with bodies. Once the mine is going, it creates a dynamic that is hard to stop. But at the moment of inception, the mine is more vulnerable, and in the past, mines have been denied their existence. It opens all these questions: do we need this mine? What are the real drivers? What are the points of friction? North Carolina was a perfect example of a new mine at this point of inception.

NO: We’re trying to make these stories relatable, finding ways for listeners to make these connections. We’re interested in exploring how we can move outside of these dominant paths that the energy transition is producing. These mines were participating in that narrative of that dominant trajectory, but we also see room to complicate that single path narrative—that there are other paths. We can build other ways of thinking about what the future might become, what the energy transition might look like.

BW: Many people, maybe me included, often think green energy is “better.” It feels hopeful. As climate educators, we have to have stories of hope and optimism to give ourselves and our students something positive to work on and for. Why are you complicating that a green transition is something [inherently] good?

NO: I’ve been inspired by Ruha Benjamin’s work, thinking about crisis as a moment of opportunity, and using opportunity “in place of” positivity or hope. What kind of changes do we want to see, and how can we build those changes? From a pedagogical perspective, that’s something I wanted the students to be doing: reframing and thinking in terms of opportunity. That’s part of what public humanities projects can do: you’re not necessarily giving all the solutions, but you’re part of a solution. And that’s exciting to me.

JR: One narrative is this story of modernization, that we are overcoming the sins of fossil fuel, petro-intensive culture. This is a binary opposition between the fossil fuel past and the green future.

We interrogated power and abundance. Who is benefiting? Who is getting more power, who’s getting less power, and what is the vision of abundance that is being promoted and reinforced? By complicating the historical binary of past and future, you start seeing more of the continuities of “past” processes of exploitation.

Now, how do you deal with emotions here? I think it has to do with the abundance part. Can we instill an idea of a brighter future without engaging with the modernization story? We can do a lot of work here not just with scholarship, but also in our imaginative, creative work to help with the sense of despair. The current lack of creativity is purposely enforced—power does not want us to be creative. There’s a lot more to do with art and public humanities and poetry.

BW: I’m imagining there are people listening to this podcast thinking, I love to do public humanities, but I also have my day job. In your process, how do the two practices inform and enrich one another?

NO: I do a lot of work thinking with narrative: how narratives circulate and produce particular forms of entrenched power and also about narrative as a way to understand operations of power. We come at this from a justice perspective.

It is helpful to produce my own narrative and support others in producing their own stories. It encourages me to step back and think not only about how these broader stories about the energy transition are circulating and their impacts, but also, how am I talking about those? And am I doing this in ways that could possibly be part of the problem, or am I complicating them, and how? It encourages a self-reflexive perspective.

Anytime you can break out and think about the types of knowledge that you’re producing, that’s helpful. It forces you to be conscious about the communities you’re working with and the messages you’re putting into the world.

JR: The issue, at least in my view, is not so much with the tension between public-facing work and the “disciplinary standard” work. To me, the issue is what kind of labor is valued in academia, and why. If you are really for public humanities or this kind of work, then you should protect serious, deeply engaged public work at a formal level. Then junior faculty like ourselves can rest assured that if we take some risks, we’re going to have our department backing us up.

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Featured image: Bird’s-eye view of Albemarle Lithium Operation at Silver Peak, Nevada. Photo by Formula None, 2014.

Dr. Nathaniel Otjen specializes in multispecies justice theory, critical animal studies, energy humanities, and literary and cultural studies. He is currently writing his first book—Entangled Lives: Multispecies Selves, Justice and Narratives—which asks how contemporary life narratives reorganize selfhood around nonhuman beings in ways that may be productive for multispecies justice. He is an Assistant Professor of Sustainability and Environmental Studies at Ramapo College. His last contribution to Edge Effects was “Multispecies Grief in the Wake of Megafires” (June 2023). Website. Contact.

Dr. Juan Manuel Rubio is a scholar of capitalism, labor, and the environment. His work focuses primarily on the history of the mining industry and the struggles of those touched by its environmental legacy. His book manuscript, tentatively titled Veins of Conflict: The Transcorporeal Politics of Copper Mining in Central Peru, examines a series of environmental conflicts connected to the rise of industrial copper mining in central Peru in the early twentieth century. Dr. Rubio is currently an Assistant Professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. Website. Contact.

Dr. Bethany Wiggin is a Professor of German and the Founding Director of the Program in Environmental Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She currently holds the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professorship in the Environment and Humanities at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. Her research and teaching span fields usually held apart: early modern German and Atlantic cultural history, on the one hand, and the environmental humanities, on the other. She is finishing a book, Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods, that’s been long in the making. Website. Contact.