Through an interview-based study, I explore how experienced university teachers within the field of environmental humanities work with the relationship between knowledge and action in their teaching. I find that by engaging in experiments with collaboration, case work, curation of content and inviting students to implement personal changes, the teachers attempted to create teaching that corresponds to the complicated and entangled nature of the ecological crises. Based on these insights, I offer the concept of “teaching openings for action” as a climate pedagogical strategy based on experimental approaches to putting action, broadly defined, at the centre of a course.