Teaching about climate change is a significant problem in modern universities. Ahmed Afzaal has a book that addresses university professors who are teaching, in what he calls, our Predicament. The title, Teaching at Twilight, suggested a more downbeat view of the world than I have but that is an excellent reason to read a book. It is good to get a different perspective. I wanted to learn from the book. I wanted to find it valuable. That said, I thought it was a squandered opportunity.
Teaching About Climate Change
At its heart my complaint in this blog post is that a book about teaching doesn’t really speak to teaching. Do you have issues trying to get the balance right when teaching between pointing to problems but not disturbing students who might already worry too much in a non-constructive fashion? I have a concern about that, but I got no advice on how to deal with it. Are you navigating the problem of being attentive to greenwashing while also not wanting to dissuade companies from sharing good news (i.e., you don’t want to cause greenhushing)? You also won’t get any advice on how to navigate that problem in the book. For someone who is teaching at twilight Afzaal doesn’t seem to focus on teaching much.
To be clear, Afzaal sees our problems as well beyond climate change. As such, the book has a much wider lens than climate change. He talks of the coming Collapse and our Predicament. (More on the super-negative tone in a future post). The starting point is very much that we can’t teach about climate change in isolation. That is an interesting conjecture which broadly speaking makes sense to my mind, For example, we can’t really solve climate change without acknowledging that people very reasonably want to get out of poverty.
To broaden the focus of our teaching, Afzaal would argue that our current university structures need to be changed. I get that, but the book’s target is educators, not administrators. Teachers are often assigned courses with specific titles; they really need to focus on what they need to teach and won’t get much help from this book.
Action To Take
I am a big fan of action. When you have a problem, then doing stuff to try and solve the problem seems like a sensible approach to me. Afzaal doesn’t give the sort of specific advice that I was hoping for. For example, I find teaching the idea of tipping point(s) challenging. You need to mention them to understand the problems of sustainability, but as a business professor I don’t have the technical scientific knowledge to get into the details. I was hoping for specific advice on teaching challenges but that isn’t really the point of the book. The book seemed mostly about Afzaal getting some stuff off his chest.
Solutions
Afzaal sees the quest for solutions as part of the problem. The idea that we can solve the problem of the Predicament we are in seems foolish to him. Instead, he believes, we need to completely change the way we think instead. I do, however, still think that solutions are really quite important. I don’t see us solving the problem of human greed anytime soon, but I’m hoping that we’ll soon have better batteries to encourage people to migrate to electric vehicles.
Self-Indulgent Language
Okay, I immediately react badly when I feel someone is trying to be pompous for pomposity’s sake and Afzaal’s PhD was in pomposity. (I assume it was, I didn’t check).
The crisis we’re facing is less about our circumstances or the behavior of other people, and more about an unrecognized hunger in our own souls.
Azfaal, 2023, page 20
Surely, environmental crises are heavily related to the situation we find ourselves in and the behavior of people. I know he isn’t a fan of solutions, but I am. I don’t think disappearing up our own arses is a constructive action.
Is Teaching Right For Him?
Sometimes people just aren’t in the right job. He doesn’t seem to like teaching much. Indeed, his approach to teaching seems all about his personal thoughts and very little about the students. Maybe he shouldn’t be teaching at twilight. I’m not convinced it is twilight for human civilization but either way I am hoping that maybe he might enjoy doing something else a bit more. Perhaps he should think if there is anything else that might make him a bit happier (and fill the unrecognized hunger in his soul).
For more on climate change see The Pope And The Climate Crisis, Measuring Impact On Climate, What To Do About Climate?, and Do Americans Believe In Climate Change?
Read: Ahmed Afzaal (2025) Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse, Cascade Books
