MCS Highlight: Community Shares Handwritten Climate Stories for Earth Day
June 3, 2024
As part of the Public Environmental Humanities class taught by Professor Bethany Wiggin in Spring 2024, Faith Bochert (UPenn, W ‘24) organized a storytelling booth at the annual Earth Week festival hosted by Penn Environmental Group, GreenFest. Bochert has been an intern with My Climate Story (MCS) for two years, and her final project for the class built on her ongoing work listening to and sharing personal stories of local climate impacts.
My Climate Story is an ongoing public climate storytelling and story sharing project supported by the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. The project sparks climate conversations and guides participants of all ages to recognize how local climate impacts are impacting their lives in the here and now--and shaping their life stories.
By Faith Bochert
Each year, Penn Environmental Group hosts GreenFest, a street festival held on UPenn’s campus, during Earth Week. This year, the My Climate Story team hosted a storytelling booth at the festival on April 26, 2024.
At the storytelling booth, Penn students, staff, and faculty passing through the festival were introduced to the My Climate Story project and asked to hand-write or draw their climate stories, and take a succulent plant as a souvenir.
We found hand-writing to be a particularly moving medium for sharing a climate story. Hand-writing and drawing are a slow processes that ask participants to slow down and reflect on their experiences with climate change. Illustrations and handwritten stories take up a lot of space on the page, guiding participants to focus on the most important details of their stories.
