Stories for a Burning World: Marek Oziewicz on Climate Literacy and Youth Literature

On July 26, Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Lee Zimmerman interviewed Marek Oziewicz about the current state of climate literature for young adults and children. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.Marek Oziewicz is a comparative literature scholar specializing in the cultural work of story systems and young people’s speculative fiction. He holds the Marguerite Henry Professorship of Children’s and Young Adult Literature at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where he is also director of the Center for Climate Literacy: in this capacity he coordinates international efforts to advance universal climate literacy education as a foundation for ushering in an ecological civilization. His recent publications include “Empowering Secondary Teachers for Climate Literacy Pedagogy” (English Journal 2025), “The Climate Literacy Revolution” (Ecological Citizen 2024), and “Survival of the Richest?” (ISLE 2024), as well as book chapters in Empowering Youth to Confront the Climate Crisis in English Language Arts (2025), The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators (2024), Youth Created Media on the Climate Crisis (2024), Literature as a Lens for Climate Change (2022), Pedagogy in the Anthropocene (2022), and Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene (2022).Claudia Sadowski-Smith: To begin with a question based on the introduction to your coedited special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn, “Children’s Literature and Climate Change” (2021), we were wondering how your thinking has evolved since your introduction was written. Have you noticed any shifts in how climate change is portrayed in children’s or young adult literature since that time?Marek Oziewicz: We now have more stories—in picture books, graphic novels, YA novels, and in chapter books—where issues around climate change are prominent. Climate change appears not as a hyperobject but in one specific aspect or another: rising seas, a tornado, or a flash flood. These events are present not as new sudden danger but as a default part of the setting. This is the world in which characters operate now. For example, Paradise on Fire (2021), by Jewell Parker Rhodes, is concerned specifically about surviving wildfire. In it teenagers make decisions that save their lives and the book engages with basic skills that apply in emergency situations. You have a few characters, and a protagonist’s perspective on the experience of wildfire. An increasing number of books includes a general falling apart of a stable ecosystem in which humans operate. This is the world in which characters live, and the plot presents very specific challenges and opportunities facing young people in this altered reality. This is not to say that the climate emergency is being normalized. Rather, ecosystems collapse and extreme weather events are not featured as exceptional interruptions to the world in which young characters live but as a constant part of that world.Lee Zimmerman: When these wildfires and floods, and other such events occur, are they, in these narratives, contextualized in relationship to climate change per se? Do the works connect them back to the larger issue of climate change, or are they just there as symptoms of an unnamed but constantly present cause?MO: There are definitely books where the connection between the disaster-symptom and the climate crisis cause is explicit. In Alan Gratz’s Two Degrees (2022), young characters and their families try to escape a wildfire, and the female protagonist’s father is a climate change denier:This plot is set in the California mountains. The other plotlines in Two Degrees present different challenges. One plot is set in the Canadian tundra, with melting glaciers and hungry polar bears. Another setting is Florida, where Natalie barely survives a hurricane. These three plotlines are connected by the fact that the world has reached two degrees of global warming. We see three different communities, connected by the same underlying cause. A number of books written by Indigenous authors make these connections on multiple levels. In Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth (2021), the human world is connected to a reflecting world of spirits. Whatever happens in the human world affects the reflecting world, and the other way around. When a species of Texas toads come close to extinction, their ancestor toad Ami in the reflecting world falls sick. Ami’s spirit-animal friends come down to our world to try to prevent the extinction. They connect with a Lipan Apache girl, Nina, whose family are stewards of the ancestral lands and sacred places where the two worlds meet. The human-spirit coalition has to face a drought, a hurricane, pollution, and devastation of ecosystems—all of which are shown as driven by the same forces that accelerate the climate catastrophe. The notion of Indigenous people being stewards of the living world is front and center. It communicates that the world is a living organic whole in which climate change and loss of wildlife are forms of sickness. Many interesting formulas are used to represent the underlying reality of climate change in recent books.CSS: Have you seen an increase in representations that deal with the disproportionate impact of climate change on marginalized communities, including Indigenous people and people from the Global South? Also, to what degree do these narratives locate the historical roots of the climate crisis in colonialism and racial capitalism?MO: There is definitely a growing body of works that does that, especially works by Indigenous authors, of course. We Are Water Protectors (2020) by Michaela Goade, Joy Harjo’s Remember (2023), Brian Young’s Healer of the Water Monster (2021), and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Ashala Wolf series (2012–15) are excellent examples. Written by Indigenous authors, all these stories incorporate elements of the climate emergency. All of them show a clear connection between a colonial, or settler-colonial past and the ecocidal present. We also have a number of works by other authors, in which the climate crisis is clearly connected to the extractive mindset and notions of human supremacy: Barbara Henderson’s Wilderness Wars (2018), Jewell Parker Rhodes’s Ninth Ward (2010), Nick Fuller Googins’s The Great Transition (2023), or even books for younger readers such as Jon Scieszka’s AstroNuts series (2019–21) and Adam Gidwitz’s the Unicorn Rescue Society series (2018–22). All these books make it clear that the source and driver of the climate catastrophe is an extractive mindset at the heart of the current system and its priorities around which our societies are organized.CSS: How do these stories deal with the issue of climate anxiety, which we know is growing among young people? Do they try to balance urgency with the hope for constructing paths forward? Do they deal with crises without leaving readers with fear and despair? Are there new formulas that do that, or maybe new genres?MO: I haven’t come across a book for children or young adults that leaves you in despair. 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