Understanding Climate Through Stories: Teresa Cavazos Cohn, RPL 2021–22 Climate Change Fellow 

April 18, 2022
Teresa Cavazos Cohn: RPL Climate Change Fellow

Religion and Public Life’s first Climate Change Fellow, Teresa Cavazos Cohn, says that working with the Religion and Public Life (RPL) community is a real opportunity. She shares, “RPL has proven to be a creative space in terms of my own thinking. For example, RPL is helping me think about diverse, global audiences in relation to climate in new and dynamic ways that are quite energizing.”

Cohn is a co-instructor in Harvard Divinity School’s “Religious Literacy in the Professions” course, filling the roles of issue-specific expert, teacher, and mentor. Initially, Cohn felt hesitant about her new roles because she was unfamiliar with work being done around religion and climate. Now, she seeks out climate change literature in which people are engaging with religion, saying, “I want to learn more about it and keep up with my students so that I can pivot to reach where they are, to push them to the edges of their own questions.”

Cohn recalls one experience when a student asked Cohn to review her sermon. A retelling of the creation in the Book of Genesis, it interpreted the human-nature relationship as one of interdependence rather than hierarchical dominion. An Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of New Hampshire, Cohn says, “I never imagined a student would send me a sermon. It was so interesting to me to see her presenting a more sensitive relationship with the natural world through a biblical reading.” Cohn continues, “There's no way I would be having these kinds of conversations if it weren't for this particular context. These [HDS] graduate students are pushing the envelope and deeply engaging in climate change issues and questions such as, ‘What is appropriate action? What is the relationship between action and religion? At what point is religion helpful to action? At what point does religion hinder action?’” 

Cohn has also found engaging with the fellows in RPL’s 2021–22 Fellows in the Professions cohort on each other’s issues and professions to be rewarding. She says,

“So often we design the rooms that we are in. We choose the people we want to work with. We build projects based on that group. It’s rare to be in a room that is so diverse, that you did not imagine for yourself, create yourself, or have any intention of being in. It’s creative and generative. I have appreciated being with this group in such a space with the lens of religion challenging me in exciting ways.” 

Even before engaging with religion as an RPL Fellow, the essence of Cohn’s work aligned with RPL’s goals to engage with general audiences in the complexity of challenging issues as well as collaborate meaningfully with communities and individuals who share a vision of a just peace. As an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Natural Resources and Society at the University of Idaho, Cohn’s work focuses on the Western United States. While a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Society at the University of Idaho, Cohn’s home base was the rural community of McCall “The environment is beloved in Idaho,” Cohn says. “Public lands are a huge part of the state identity.” An example Cohn gives is that one can’t navigate the state north-to-south, without going around The Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, the US’s largest contiguous wilderness outside of Alaska. She continues, “Wilderness is the heart, literally and metaphorically, of Idaho.” This may explain why “even climate skeptics maintain very strong environmental values” as found in the Idahoan climate skepticism research of Cohn’s colleagues Kristin Haltinner and Dilshani Sarathchandra. 

In 2019, Cohn co-founded the interdisciplinary Confluence Lab, a collaborative endeavor to creatively facilitate community conversations around environmental issues in rural communities. The biophysical scientists, social scientists, and arts and humanities scholars involved were faced with the challenge of inspiring productive conversations without using “language that forms an impasse from the beginning.” Tackling communication challenges has strengthened Cohn’s belief that creating spaces of dialogue around shared experience rather than divisiveness is crucial.  

Program participants share stories after a summer fire program at Ponderosa State Park.

Creating such spaces is the focus of Cohn’s current project on fire communication. Collaborating with fire ecologists, Cohn’s team gathers research on the fire ecology of local areas. They then collaborate with state and national parks and environmental education centers to create area-specific fire programming. The programs are based on storytelling rather than a deficit model, which assumes that people will change their ideas and behavior after learning information from an expert. Cohn says, “We’re starting to realize that behavioral change doesn’t happen that way. Instead, we are creating education spaces where people can share their experiences and engage in dialogue about fire. We are also learning that fine scale localized knowledge comes from communities. Knowledge isn’t a unidirectional flow from scientist to learner; fire scientists learn, too.” 

Fritz, the horse, after Wyoming’s Mullen Fire in fall 2020 (R) and spring 2021 with fireweed (L). Photos by Lissa Howe.

For Cohn, success was when people stayed after programs ended to talk about their experiences with fire, wilderness, or fear of change. She says, “It happened a lot. People weren’t talking to the experts. They were talking to each other.” Cohn continues, “The program was about more than intellectual kinds of knowing and how to have fire-wise houses. People brought poignant experiences to the table, some of which were terrifying. Trauma is one of the things we need to work through to change our relationship with fire across the American West.” 

Increasingly, Cohn believes that such stories about fire, particularly multi-generational stories, will be key in addressing trauma and changing our relationships with fire. Cohn says,

“To understand fire as part of our landscapes and lives—beyond suppression-era policies and into new climate change realities—we have to connect to expanses of time that often extend beyond our own lifetimes. For example, climate scientists use averages over 30-year increments.” The larger the time scale becomes, the more difficult it is to both think abstractly and engage emotionally with climate. 

A ridge with trees is on fire, photo by Justine Howe

With this in mind, Cohn is conducting a personal experiment of sorts by working on a book that tells her own family stories through several generations of fire. Cohn has found stories about evacuation from wildfires, World War II fires, as well as a quote from Mirabeau Lamar (1841): ‘The stout hearts and sharp swords of Texans will make the border river roll like a flood of fire.’ Cohn says, “Rather than telling the well-worn stories, the fires tell of disturbance, upheaval, community, and families connected to their environments—in my case, World War II Germany, from which my father fled; and the southern Rio Grande, where my mother’s family has lived for over 250 years. I have unearthed stories my parents have been reluctant to tell, dramatically changing what I know of my family’s history and helping me more accurately place myself in both my family and relationship to fire.” 

Whether fostering storytelling spaces for others and herself or facilitating education spaces in Idaho and Harvard Divinity School, Cohn believes that becoming personally invested in the climate conversation, and supporting diverse dialogue and community is key to enacting change with vision. Cohn recalls a moment during the Religious Literacy in the Professions class when Josiah Pinkham, who works for the Cultural Resources Department with the Nez Perce Tribe, was visiting as a guest speaker. One of the questions posed to him was along the lines of, “Is this [issue] about climate change or is it really about decolonization? Do we need to center colonization to understand climate change?” Cohn recalls feeling a sense of expectation in the room that he would say yes. Cohn says, “He didn’t say yes, though. Instead, he said something to the effect of, ‘I don't think that it’s helpful at this point to villainize and focus on whose fault this is. What we all need to do is develop more sensitive relationships to the environment around us and think carefully about how we can all do that together.’” Cohn continues, “I thought given all of the directions that he could go, he was choosing to look for spaces of dialogue and ways we can become personally invested and then engage as a community to solve the climate problems at hand.” 

For Cohn, working with the RPL community is energizing. She says,

“RPL generates a productive space that is focused on religion while also building a network of diverse people thinking about diverse issues. We desperately need spaces like this to move forward. We need new ways to see. We need creative energy. We need students. We need people from different generations to be feeding the kinds of ideas that are going to help us move forward toward a just and peaceful future. My sense is that RPL can and is doing just that.”

 

By Natalie Cherie Campbell