A Western Illinois University professor participated in the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in November in Belém, Brazil.
World leaders, activists, and others gathered to discuss ways to combat climate change, according to Everett Hamner, a WIU professor of English.
“Are we capable, are we wise enough as human beings to do a little bit of preventative lifeguarding and not just the reactive variety,” he said.
Although he teaches in the Department of English, Hamner said he’s always been interdisciplinary.
“I grew up going to both space camp and Jesus camp, and needed to figure out how those worldviews might be potentially harmonizable,” he said.
He said he’s always searched for how stories about scientific reality and stories about ultimate meaning find ways of fusing.
Hamner attended seminary before earning his Ph.D. in English.
This past summer, he taught a course for the University of British Columbia on climate theology and storytelling.
He said some of those involved with the climate summit got wind of his interdisciplinary interests, which is why he was invited to attend the conference as an official observer.
He met a diverse array of people.
“From places like Saudi Arabia, where I wouldn’t have had a likely conversation before this conference, to people in Brazil of course, to people in the U.S. and Canada who are engaged internationally,” he said.
Hamner said it was a privilege to be among people from all over the world, hold one-on-one conversations, and begin to connect with them. It was also beneficial to hear a variety of panelists addressing a multitude of topics, such as China’s electrification efforts.
“You get critiques of that from a Chinese-American on a panel next to a Chinese citizen that’s fully on board with their communist party. You get a much-enriched nuanced sense of what is occurring and why. What is motivating the shifts that are occurring and how do we accelerate them,” he said.
A fire broke out at the conference venue toward the end of the summit. It was brought under control quickly, but 13 people were treated for smoke inhalation.
Hamner said as the scene unfolded, he witnessed an instantaneous shift from negotiating and posturing to immediate crisis management.
He found it similar to what needs to be done in regard to climate change.
“What has to happen is for us to be able to imagine ourselves making that shift before we’re absolutely forced to. Before the fire or the flood or the derecho or the whatever hits us. And not just us, but other people,” Hamner said.
He said climate change is not something that might happen in the future. It’s happening now.
“We’re talking about the breakup of predictable climatological patterns, and the increasing unreliability of a farmer’s almanac,” he said.
“You wrap an extra blanket or three around the cellophane that is our thickness of our atmosphere relative to the basketball that is our Earth, and you hold in so much more heat in the system that everything gets thrown out of whack.”
He also said it’s not something happening somewhere else. Its effects are being felt locally and everywhere on the planet.
He said facts and political will are needed.
“I feel like those big narratives have to take account of the fact that we are all flying around literally in a Spaceship Earth here, and that the life support systems are being sabotaged, partly in ways that we are complicit with, but also by much larger structures that need our critique and attention,” he said.
Hamner said derechos, heat waves, and polar vortexes are all the result of climate destabilization.
He thinks it’s ecologically and economically smarter to use cleaner forms of energy, and said individual solutions are increasingly accessible.
But he also believes we need to avoid attacking the issue primarily as individuals. He said people should seek opportunities to act collectively and make much bigger changes.
“What is my whole university doing for its power? What are our food systems in this community, and how are they intertwined with and enmeshed with the global systems that are out there,” he said.
Hamner said the climate emergency is unfolding slowly. He said that’s making it a challenge to convince people to act now before it gets out of hand.
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