Teaching Environmental Justice through The Hunger Games

escalating ecological turmoil, we must teach environmental values earlier, equipping our students to navigate a world that will pit them against others in the ferocious fight over diminishing natural resources. To prepare them for the future, we need to make the mechanisms by which the world works—as one country exploits another and the wealthy live off the poor—visible, so they can make informed choices. In this article, I am going to show how I teach the young adult novel The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008) to do just that. The Hunger Games is perfect for teaching environmental and social justice: it has a gripping plot, it thinly veils the global food system in fiction, making it nonthreatening and visible, and it argues that practicing compassion is the only way to survive a system based on competition. To begin, I will define Environmental Justice and give some examples of how to illustrate this concept. Then, I will give a brief overview of the global food system as well as ways to frame it. Last, I will show how I lead my students to see, through the politics of Panem, how the global food system operates, and discuss how the novel instantiates compassion as an alternative to the politics of greed. Some of these methods and concepts may not be wholly suitable for every grade level, but any teacher can adapt them.