Special Topics in Climate: Climate and P

Climate & Perception
From Aristotle to TikTok: How Biology, Culture, and Technology Shape How We See

Odds are there are microplastics in your blood right now. You’ve read that. Have you ever felt it? Today’s biggest threats, from the slow vanishing of old-growth forests to the CO₂ in the room you’re sitting in, unfold at scales of time and space no human body was built for, which is why they are so hard to see. We know about them. We don’t perceive them. And what we don’t perceive, we can’t value, let alone protect. Perception sits upstream of every law ever written to protect anything. Attention is the part of perception we choose. That makes attention a moral act, and most of us give ours away for free. In this class we trace our perceptual blind spots through biology, culture, and technology. We ask why it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, why we keep placing ourselves at the center of everything, and how the same satellites that track carbon from orbit turn a living forest into data we can know but never feel. We look at how language decides whether the living world is an object or a subject, and why a corporation can sue you while a river, almost everywhere, cannot. The course is taught by an artist, built as a collision between the humanities and the sciences, and fed by film clips, readings, and guests: scientists, philosophers, and writers whose work bears on how we see. Robin Wall Kimmerer sits next to David Foster Wallace and NASA data. Arguments rarely change minds. Stories do. Once you’ve come to know a forest through story, you can no longer see it as timber.