Our Climate Story
Hi, it’s Bethany. I’m a professor at UPenn, in Philadelphia (USA), where I started My Climate Story. (I wrote an in-the-weeds account of MCS‘s origins on my personal website.) “The Next Chapter” introduces a new phase in our climate story. We’re soft launching this MCS project blog in this summer of 2026 with a showcase of college students’ stories about climate’s impacts on their lives today-and about how it’s changing their future hopes and expectations, even their concrete goals. Over these summer months, we’re publishing stories developed in my class on “Sustainability and Utopianism.” In true utopian theory and practice, their stories are enmeshed in new worlds in the making. They also reflect on the kinds of changes in education that they want and need on a planet whose physical systems are being radically remade by human impacts.
My Climate Story‘s first chapter was grounded in my personal experience of how climate change was impacting my family home on the coast of Maine. Students soon got involved, and we began sharing our stories about how climate change was impacting us in the here and now–in our various home towns of Philadelphia, in Mexico, in Oregon, in New Jersey. We spoke and wrote about and how climate change was changing landscapes–but also how it was changing our lives, and changing how we imagined our futures too.
Climate Stories + Numbers
In a second chapter, students and I crafted a climate storytelling workbook, full of 4 “recipes” that you can follow to generate 4 different kinds of climate stories, intended to be accessible to writers as young as 6th grade. We also filmed a documentary about our work and our goals to promote understanding of climate’s impacts on everyday lives. We recruited and trained 9 Philadelphia high school teachers to use climate storytelling in their classrooms, and we presented 100s of high school students’ stories with the help from our local National Public Radio station who published a bunch of stories about our collaboration which you can check out in the MCS press room.
We also wanted to hear from more college students beyond our single campus, so we developed a North American Campus Correspondents program, finally selecting 12 correspondents from a pool of 102 undergraduate applicants. UPenn intern Maria Villareal Simon led our MCS team of 5 in training these students to interview 10 members of their campus communities. I helped them synthesize their campus stories in the form of an op-ed essay, and they pitched and published their essays to city and campus newspapers. UPenn intern Faith Bochert made a smart slide show about their work, “by the numbers.” We estimate My Climate Story has now reached well over 1 million readers in North American and beyond and has helped hundreds (maybe thousands) to recognize and share their climate stories.
My Climate Story Magazines
We also wanted to find ways to showcase community climate stories in more durable forms beyond newspapers and social media, so when I was a visiting faculty member at Princeton, we used that opportunity to refined the MCS curriculum and create a first magazine. Princeton’s Climate Stories features Angela Osaigbovo’s story.
Angela also kicked off the climate storytelling festival we produced online and in person in spring ’25, in partnership with Princeton’s High Meadows Environmental Institute, Yale’s Program in Climate Change Communication, and UPenn’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.
This first MCS magazine offered a template for other educational institutions to pick up, and I’m thrilled that the second magazine is now in the works at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, helmed by environmental historians and PhD Candidates, KTH Climate Stories’ co-editors, Jakob Henningsson and William Hilliard.
MCS Story Swaps
Starting this fall ’26, MCS is facilitating story swaps between four universities and college classrooms in climate science, history, and literature, with help from esteemed faculty friends in Sweden, Germany, and England. (More on that and from them soon!) We’re collaborating to pilot what we intend to become a wider story swapping program, expanding My Climate Story‘s access and availability for educators and storytellers in more places who together want to transform how we teach and learn about climate change so that we can create more sustainable and just climate futures.
The Next Chapter, Our New Blog
This new MCS blog, The Next Chapter, is a place for us to share news and notes. MCS always centers and tries to amplify students’ voices. I can’t imagine a better way to launch this blog than the remarkable stories developed, with much partner work, at UPenn. Check back for 6 installments!
And, behind the scenes, we’re also working this summer to make the MCS curriculum more share-able so that others can adopt and adapt it in your climate classroom. If you’d like to learn more about our workshops and lesson plans in the meantime, drop me a line: bwiggin@upenn.edu