Translating global crisis to a manageable, graspable, and above all engaging scale requires helping students to draw connections between monumental, planetwide trends and changes in their personal lives. Individuals experience identity in terms of place, forging connections with plants, animals, and whole landscapes that contribute to a sense of home. Identity furnishes a remarkably malleable tool for grasping and communicating such changes in its capacity to render one’s surroundings and the nonhuman others that populate them meaningful. We live in a moment of great collective struggle to reckon with massive alterations to our local, regional, and global ecosystems. But individuals also experience identity in terms of place, forging connections over time with plants, animals, and whole landscapes that contribute to a sense of home. Many definitions of identity focus on how it organizes around race, class, gender, or other social indexes, gesturing toward shared characteristics or experiences around which particular communities of people gather. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey, the poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil ended her reading with a comment about the nonhuman environment that vitalizes her work: “Once you have a name for it, you start to care about it.” Her words gesture toward a point I increasingly emphasize in my environmental literature classrooms: that identity is central not only to how we understand environments, but often also to our ability to recognize both sudden and gradual changes to them.
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