Teaching the Unteachable in the Climate Era

We live in an era of extreme climate disruptions. Each passing season seems to bring new records: temperatures soaring beyond endurance, floods that overwhelm entire cities, droughts that stretch across years, and storms whose intensity unsettles even the most resilient communities. For those attentive to the science and the lived experiences unfolding all around us, a deep anxiety has taken root.

The future no longer feels like a horizon of progress; instead, it looms as a shadow of uncertainty. Yet life continues, and so does education. Students arrive in classrooms, notebooks open, eyes filled with expectation. Teachers must still teach. The responsibility, if anything, has grown heavier. But what do you say to young people today?

When you speak of sustainability, resilience, or human well-being, you are not merely lecturing on abstract concepts. You are speaking to those who will live through the decades we only imagine. And herein lies the teacher’s dilemma. How do you inspire hope without denying the scale of the crisis? How do you tell the truth without overwhelming them with despair? Students are rarely content with numbers. They listen to climate projections, to reports of biodiversity collapse, to news of sea-level rise, and then they ask questions that go far deeper: “If everything is going to get worse, why should we do anything at all?” or “If this is the world we inherit, why should we prepare for it?”

At such moments, data points feel empty. You can recite figures on global warming thresholds or species extinction rates, but these do not answer the questions of meaning. The truth is that teachers themselves carry the same fears, the same uncertainties, the same grief. To deny that feels dishonest; to admit it risks intensifying despair. And so one learns to inhabit the tension, to stand alongside students not only as a guide but as a fellow traveller, uncertain but committed. Perhaps this is the real task of teaching in these times: to hold both despair and possibility together.

Between 2025 and 2035 the world is likely to change drastically, not only through the familiar dimensions of climate change but also through cascading crises of land degradation, water scarcity, pollution, and widening inequality. These are not abstract risks. They are realities in motion, already pressing upon us. To name them is not to frighten students but to recognise what they, too, already know. And yet, recognition must not be mistaken for resignation. There is always the space for agency.

The word most often used in response to crisis is adaptation. To students, it sometimes sounds like passive surrender: accepting that the worst will happen and adjusting to survive it. But adaptation, when taught honestly, is not defeat. It is action. It is the capacity to live differently, to reorganise society, to create communities that endure in spite of disruption. It is a way of insisting that the story is not over. When a student asks, “But what happens in five years if things get worse?” one cannot truthfully say, “Nothing will happen.” Nor can one say, “All is lost.” What can be said is: “Yes, things may worsen. But you are not powerless. To adapt is to take responsibility for shaping the spaces you inhabit and the systems you influence.”

This conversation carries a particular sharpness in India. On the one hand, the current trajectory of consumption and growth is ecologically unsustainable. On the other hand, millions still live in poverty, without reliable access to basic needs such as energy, housing, and healthcare. To simply declare that growth must stop is unjust. To demand unlimited growth is catastrophic. This is the paradox our students must wrestle with. Development cannot follow the old models of consumption-heavy industrialization imported from elsewhere. At the same time, pathways for justice and dignity for the poor must remain open. The challenge is not only technical; it is deeply ethical. Teaching this paradox is not easy, but it is necessary.

Here comes the Litmus Self. Humans respond most intensely to what touches them personally. Our skin is the boundary that registers pain, comfort, danger, or relief. Imagine if the self could function like litmus paper, instantly sensitive to changes in the environment.

If we could train ourselves, and our students, to extend this sensitivity outward, then every global change would be felt as personal change. Like a frog that reacts instantly to shifts in its environment, the Litmus Self would be attuned to the fragility of ecosystems and the vulnerability of communities.

This requires a widening of identity, from “I, the individual” or “I, the citizen of a nation” to “I, the planetary citizen.” In this framing, the melting of a glacier, the choking of a river, the burning of a forest are not distant events. They are registered in the self as if happening on one’s own skin. From such recognition comes the impulse to act. Sometimes the act is small and personal, like changing consumption habits or rethinking mobility. Sometimes it is collective and confrontational, like challenging corporations, influencing government, or reshaping institutions. But always, it arises from the realisation that harm anywhere is harm everywhere, and that growth cannot continue at the expense of the future.

The Litmus Self is both a sensor and an actor. It feels, and it responds. It collapses the distance between global crisis and personal action, between abstract statistics and lived urgency. This is what we must nurture in our students, not merely knowledge of climate science but a felt recognition that the Earth’s fate is tied to their own.

Teaching this does not begin with graphs. It begins with stories. Stories of farmers who lose crops to unseasonal rains, of families displaced by coastal erosion, of students themselves struggling through heatwaves or floods. These are not case studies to be examined from a safe distance but experiences that reveal the porous boundary between self and world. To cultivate the Litmus Self, students must learn to place themselves within these stories, not as guilty bystanders but as implicated participants. The point is not to drown them in guilt, but to awaken responsibility.

This requires classrooms to be more than sites of instruction. They must become spaces where fear can be voiced, grief can be acknowledged, and creativity can be cultivated. Teachers cannot pretend to have all the answers. But they can model engagement, honesty, and resilience. They can show that it is possible to face daunting realities without paralysis.

The balance between despair and hope is delicate. Too much despair, and students will give up before they begin. Too much hope, and they are unprepared for what is to come. The task is to walk the narrow path between, never denying the truth but never abandoning the possibility of change. That path is uncertain, shifting, imperfect. Yet perhaps that is precisely what makes it real.

I do not pretend this is easy. Teachers too carry their own griefs and their own doubts. We too ask if our efforts matter, if our words reach beyond the classroom walls. Yet I return again and again to the image of the Litmus Self: a self porous and sensitive, refusing the comfort of distance, insisting on connection. If we can nurture such selves in our students and in ourselves, then perhaps teaching the unteachable is not impossible after all. It is difficult, it is painful, but it is also necessary. And within that necessity lies hope: that even in a time of crisis, we can still teach, still learn, and still act. That, perhaps, is lesson enough.