Sarah Dimick traces climate change through stories that emerge from lived experience, cultural memory, and place. Her work at the intersection of literature, climate change, and environmental justice grew out of moments that revealed striking similarities across distant landscapes, listening to sheep herders in Montana describe shifting water sources as glaciers became less reliable, and later hearing women in the Himalayas recount parallel crises of glacier loss and water scarcity. Encountering these echoes across places that felt “a world apart” prompted her to ask how climate stories travel, connect, and reveal shared patterns of vulnerability and resilience.

Now jointly appointed in English and Environmental Policy and Culture, Dimick studies how literature helps people understand climate change not just as data or policy, but as something felt in rhythms disrupted, futures imagined, and injustices inherited. Her research highlights how storytelling can surface whose voices are heard in climate conversations, how histories of colonialism continue to shape climate vulnerability, and how witness and testimony make abstract climate impacts tangible.

Across her teaching, scholarship, and public engagement, Dimick sees the humanities as essential tools for climate action, helping students and communities grapple with grief, uncertainty, and responsibility, while also imagining more just ways of living together in a changing world.

(This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)

How did your academic path lead you to work at the intersection of literature and climate change and environmental justice?

When I was an undergraduate, I spent a summer working as a backpacking guide in Montana. I was leading backpacking trips through the Absaroka–Beartooth Mountains. We wouldn’t see many people while we were hiking, but we would occasionally cross paths with people who were herding sheep.

They had been sheep herding for decades, for generations, in those particular mountains. And they mentioned that it was getting more difficult in recent years because the glaciers were receding, so the water sources were less reliable.

They weren’t talking about glacial retreat in terms of climate change. It was just a story about attention to changes in their local environment over the course of many years.

The next summer, I was lucky enough to be awarded funding to go work with a women’s cooperative in Dharamshala, India, up in the Himalayas. The women I spent time with while I was there were also talking about glacial retreat. In the Himalayas, it was causing a crisis of water availability for local towns and villages.

I was hearing very similar stories from places that felt a world apart. I started wondering about how to track these observations. I wanted to help people recognize that stories unfolding in their own local environments have echoes and counterparts elsewhere.

Was there any particular book, class, or moment that really made you realize that literature could be a powerful tool to help understand climate change?

I started working on the project that eventually became my book “Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures” back in 2014. At that time, I really admired work that was unfolding within the environmental humanities around oil and oil culture and consumption. I’m thinking particularly of Stephanie LeMenager’s “Living Oil” and Jennifer Wenzel’s work on petro-magic-realism. Those were really important precedents thinking through literature and fossil fuel consumption.

One of the fascinating yet tragic elements of literary research on climate change is that in the last decade it’s gone from being a fairly narrow portion of the field to being a central topic of inquiry.

I’m glad that literary theorists and critics are attending to climate change now with such precision and a sense of gravity. On the other hand, it’s heartbreaking that this attention is so necessary.

What does literature allow us to understand about climate change that scientific reports alone can’t?

I have such incredible respect for my colleagues in the sciences. Anyone working on climate science right now is an absolute hero. It is emotionally difficult to get up every day and look at that data.

What literature can contribute to these conversations is a sense of how climate data shapes our hopes, our fears, our imaginaries of what the future will look like.

I’m trying to think through the way that rhythm—which is such a central component of climate science right now—impacts meaning. What does it mean that ice melts far earlier now than it did in the past? What does it mean that annual migrations that used to follow a relatively consistent rhythm are suddenly awry? What does that mean for us emotionally? How does that hit us? How does it reverberate?

Literary scholars have done a wonderful job thinking through rhythm as a form that generates expectations of the future. What we see within literary studies is that when a rhythm goes off course, it often leads to a profound sense of unease and a sense of instability.

But it’s also a moment when we suddenly have to reconfigure relationships and patterns. If an expected beat fails to occur, it is a void but also an opening.

How does your work challenge the assumption that climate change is just a scientific or policy issue?

Policy is so crucial. But the momentum to generate and support climate policy really comes down to how people—individuals, cities, nations, or global bodies—are imagining the future.

If there is a robust and moving vision of a potential climatic future, policy is more likely to go through.

If the future feels freighted with doom, competition, scarcity, or injustice, policy proceedings will be fractious.

Our visions of the future are very much generated through culture—fiction, movies, speeches, poetry, podcasts. All of these cultural imaginaries model potential futures for us, and they play into policy for better or for worse.

How do literary texts help surface whose voices are heard and whose are often excluded in climate conversations?

There are moments—often small moments—when writers can use their art to claim space in climate discourse that they would not have been granted otherwise.

In my book, one of these moments occurs when the United Nations holds a climate summit in 2014. The Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is invited to perform a poem near the beginning of the summit.

There are two ways to understand this invitation. One is to view it as a token gesture toward the arts, and honestly toward the Marshall Islands, before the representatives from more powerful nations proceed with the business of the summit.

But the other way to view it, particularly because Jetñil-Kijiner is such a deft performer of her work, is to watch her going up to that microphone as a poet and inserting her voice into that climate summit, her poetry reverberating over the policy conversations that unfold afterward.

How do histories of colonialism and inequality shape climate vulnerability?

The book “Water,” by the Indian writer Ashokamitran, depicts a small neighborhood within Chennai that is weathering a terrible drought. Many cities grapple with relentless droughts as precipitation patterns and monsoons become erratic.

As a reader, I wanted to understand why this particular neighborhood had less access to water than other areas of the city.

When I visited Chennai, researchers and scholars in the city explained to me that when the British colonized India, the colonial government installed the pipes for water distribution. The pipe system was set up so that colonial government officials would be the first to get water. They were located at the beginning of the pipeline.

So now, when a drought hits, there are two ways to understand water scarcity. Without an understanding of colonial history, you might say the whole city of Chennai is experiencing a drought. But when you look through the lens of colonial history, it becomes clear that while precipitation patterns are the same across the city, people living near the former colonial government buildings have more access to water than people living farther out in the pipeline system.

Essentially, colonial water infrastructure still influences who has the easiest time weathering climate change and who has the most difficult time.

The neighborhood featured in Ashokamitran’s novel is at the tail end of the pipeline, and that is why they experience a more severe water shortage than other areas of the city.

What does “climate witnessing” mean, and why is it important?

There is a difference between reading that winds reached 40 miles per hour and hearing a neighbor say their deck furniture blew three blocks away.

Stories and visceral details of on-the-ground experience make climate change tangible.

In a moment when funding for climate data is being retracted and scientific institutions are being dismantled, this kind of visceral testimony is even more important. If you are tracking when a bird species arrives in your backyard every year, or when the ice melts, those records matter. Citizen records become crucial when official records are erased.

Why do you think universities are especially important spaces for environmental humanities work right now?

This particular generation of college students has a very clear-eyed sense of what is happening environmentally, but they are not jaded in the way that people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s sometimes are.

In my classrooms, I want to cultivate that energy and give students a toolkit of narratives and literary techniques they can employ as they do climate advocacy work, scientific communication, journalism, or creative writing. I want them to know that the environmental humanities have a wide array of methodologies and strategies they can use as they move forward. I hope the environmental humanities equip them to forge a better future.

Have you noticed any shifts in how students talk about climate change now compared to earlier in your career?

When I started teaching, most students would say that climate change was not something that had yet impacted them personally.

Now, when I teach a climate literature course, I have students who have lost homes to fires. I have had students who have been displaced by flooding. I have had students from agricultural families whose livelihoods have been decimated.

Students now think of climate change as something that is here, that they are living through, and that has a very strong influence on how they envision future decades unfolding. They treat it less as an intellectual exercise and more as something of central importance for both their livelihoods and their actual lives.

How do you think your research helps students and faculty engage with global climate conversations beyond campus?

My hope is that some of my research directs readers toward books, articles, poetry, and films that they might not have encountered otherwise.

One of the great challenges of weathering the climatic future is to fully imagine what a disaster looks like in a place you have never been.

That requires cultivating a muscular empathy for places that are distant, whether geographically or politically. Stories are one way we can cultivate understanding and respect for each other across those distances. I hope my research points people toward stories they might not encounter without it.

What role do the humanities play in a large, research-focused institution when addressing climate and sustainability challenges?

The humanities do many things, but one crucial role right now is holding space for students to grapple with loss, grief, excitement, and enthusiasm around climate work.

There is a real need for emotional responses to climate change and environmental issues more broadly. Working with stories, poetry, and nonfiction helps students channel conversations that might not play out as easily in classes focused on quantitative work.

How do you see the field of environmental humanities evolving?

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the field has become much more engaged with environmental justice, multi-ethnic American literature, post-colonial literature, and global literatures.

When the field began, it focused heavily on environmental writing by straight, white, male American writers—figures like Aldo Leopold and Henry David Thoreau. Their work is fascinating, but it represents only a small portion of what environmental literature is.

The field has also diversified beyond traditional nature writing to include work on nuclear threat, toxicity, climate change, and land access.

Another important development is the strong sense of camaraderie among scholars. These are difficult times to teach and research environmental issues, and that shared difficulty has created a strong bond among those of us pursuing this work.

What responsibility do scholars have to engage the public, especially given the urgency of the climate crisis?

I did my PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a land-grant institution with a strong sense of commitment to the community, state, and nation that support it. I see my scholarship as something I do not just for students and colleagues, but for a broader public. Climate research in particular needs to be circulated as widely as possible.

At the same time, we live in a moment when scholars are targeted for their research. When I participate in news interviews or public forums, I receive emails that reflect that targeting. Scholars are constantly weighing personal safety alongside the need to speak publicly.

How do media appearances and public-facing scholarship fit into your vision of academic work?

I take inspiration from my colleagues in creative writing who imagine their work being read by people on buses, in lines at the grocery store, or on the couch after long days of work.

There is something so rewarding about sharing that space with readers. I want literary critics to think more about their work in this way, and it is something I aspire to in my own work. Literary criticism should also be a pleasure to read.

Climate work can be emotionally heavy. What sustains you in this research and teaching?

Colleagues in history often remind me that profound despair, apocalypse, and government systems at odds with human survival are not new phenomena.

Taking a long view brings perspective. Even in grim times, people draw together as communities. Some people cultivate practices of endurance.

I also live by Lake Michigan. Spending time looking at the water is calming.

What gives you hope when you think about the future of climate storytelling and environmental justice?

I have great faith in imagination. But right now, imagination is often framed through techno-optimism—the belief that innovative technologies will solve the climate crisis. That is not a hope I share.

Rather, I place my hope in writers, artists, and creators who imagine alternative ways of living and relating to one another. Those visions feel more profoundly innovative than a new device or machine.

Tracking the ideas unfolding in literature, collating them, and identifying productive threads of thought is the work of scholarship that excites me most.

What advice would you give students who want to work at the intersection of climate change, justice, and the humanities?

Read widely. Read everything. Follow your interests, talk with others in the field, gather recommendations, go to local bookstores, and immerse yourself in both the beauty and pain of the literature that exists.