The 2019 conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment was held on the idyllic campus of the University of California, Davis. I shared a panel on pedagogy with a speaker, recently appointed to a position at a midwestern university, whose paper discussed the best ways to persuade obdurate “climate denialists” taking her environmental literature course that global warming is happening, it’s serious, and humans are the main cause. Her methods were drawn from the literature on active learning – students were encouraged to identify and evaluate sources of information for themselves – and yet the ultimate objective of the exercise did not seem to be up for discussion. To paraphrase a point I’ve made previously, the speaker had accepted her role as the eco-pedagogical department of the IPCC (Garrard 2013). The headline facts about the historical trend in global mean surface tem- perature (GMST), the attribution of that trend to human activities, and the direction of travel in the absence of major reductions in greenhouse gas emis- sions are not in contention here. Responsible teachers will refer students to the latest IPCC report (presently AR5) as the authoritative source of infor- mation on these points, and refer to its findings as factual claims that come with careful expert assessments of probabilities. Instead, I want to ask this question: how did my fellow speaker come to believe that persuading students of a set of scientific claims, and by extension overcoming some students’ resist- ance or skepticism toward those claims, was a legitimate, even necessary, task for an English literature class? And then: how might that task be reframed in order to facilitate more constructive environmental (and campus) politics? I certainly don’t mean to pick out any individual colleague for criticism: her approach was pedagogically informed and well intentioned, and I imagine many ASLE delegates would have agreed with the objective. Addressing climate change is an extraordinarily urgent socio-ecological imperative, which must seem all the more pressing given the rhetoric of indifference and denial that prevails in conservative regions of the USA. University towns, from the perspective of environmental political geography, appear as islands of sanity in an ocean of hostility – and the sea level (literal and metaphoric) Chapter 4 Cultivating viewpoint diversity in ecocritical pedagogy Greg Garrard