Utopias are not only useful, they are necessary. When staring down a future loaded with climate catastrophe, there is either utopian thinking or there is the apocalypse. For this case study, we opted to stay with utopia.

      Drawing from the diverse scholarship of Lyman Tower Sargent, Henry Giroux, and Donna Haraway, we argue that utopian thinking is key to climate change education. It helps develop pathways for critical and socially conscious explorations of an ecologically secure future. Further, utopian thinking presents youth with the opportunity to consider their relationship to expansive literary genres of utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic media and the possibilities of leveraging creative media to take agency over the civic-present/future they envision.

     This chapter describes one enactment of such an approach to engaging youth in media production for climate change literacy. Our case study involved a group of seven high school youth participating in a summer solar energy engineering program that sought to situate youth as agents of change. In this program, students engaged in simultaneously learning and contributing to impending renewable energy systems transitions, creating social value through community-based energy innovation, and envisioning and inspiring others through the production of media-rich solar futures narratives. This chapter focuses on a series of information literacy activities and challenges that took place over the course of two workshops hosted by a librarian with a background in utopian literature.          

     The first workshop invited the youth to consider creative media and its application to future-oriented action. Learners were tasked with imagining the role that creative or artistic media plays in conveying climate change concepts rather than focusing on academic and scholarly mediums. As a preface to the second workshop, youth were presented with a bibliographic list of utopian, climate-focused video games, film, music, comics, books, podcasts, and other creative media forms. They were invited to explore the material and develop slide presentations indicating how the media they selected served to spark imagination and inform their own utopian visions of climate change and the future. During the second workshop, youth explored examples of storytelling as a vital medium for conceptualizing utopia.

     We conclude the chapter by outlining pathways for media-rich futures narrative production that our information literacy workshops cleared for the youth in our program. We envision how teachers might enact future workshops that engage learners by tasking them to work collectively to imagine and develop an environmentally liberatory, utopian world.