Let’s start off on an honest note: if you were an ordinary person (and not in a cli-fi English class) would you have read any of the stories/novels we read in class? Personally, I know I wouldn’t be reading Odds Against Tomorrow for fun. However since I am in a cli-fi English class, I found a new respect for the cli-fi genre. I found a respect for the storytelling and how most of the stories grabbed my attention and opened discussion. Reading the NYTimes Room for Debate article on cli-fi, I noticed a lot of the debaters mentioned the same thing; cli-fi needs a good story and a teller to get the message out. Contine reading →

When reading the article So Hot Right Now: Has Climate Change Created A New Literary Genre?, I admired Nathaniel Rich’s emphasis of the role of a novelist. Unlike a scientist’s point of view of climate change, the novelist doesn’t obtain the responsibility to just write about climate change to get people’s attention. However they have the creative advantage to see what climate change/ global warming do to people in the modern world; what they do to the human heart. He also mentions to read the entire book of Odds Against Tomorrow, and you will not find one climate change phrase. “Climate change as a phrase, is cliché. Global warming is a cliché”(Rich). Contine reading →

 

Spending a great deal on morality and ethics in class discussions recently, I wanted to look at the challenges we face with being green. Holly Howitt’s story The Weatherman, showed drastic measures of being green people. Within the story there was a strict class system along with strict orders for the green people to maintain perfection within the world (after previous generations ruined the climate.) The weather station was built to control everything from sunshine to rain by the press of a button. Even though this was beneficial to the greens, it was not to others. In the end the main character sacrifices himself to destroy the weather station and give everyone an equal chance. Was that really the moral thing to do? Was his decision going to help his family? Would it even help the world? Some of these questions got me to think deeply into ethics and morality within today’s climate change. Contine reading →

Prior to this class, I thought of climate change just as weather changing in a particular area over a period of time. I was soon informed from our class discussions and the introduction of Mark Maslin’s book Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction, that climate has evolved in more than just a scientific term. We are now approaching climate to affect our economy, sociology, geopolitics, health, law, and local and national areas. However another problem we have with climate change is the inability to predict the future (Maslin 69.) Cli-fi genre has thus provided us with possibilities of climate changing if climate were to become more problematic than it already is.

The two stories we read in I’m with the Bears, along with the Global Weirding website provided me with particular cases of what would happen if our climate problem was to get worse. With that and learning more about cli-fi genre I was curious to find out more about the possibilities that could happen to me, locally. Mark Maslin made another point in his Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction book was that “Humanity can live, survive, and even flourish in extreme climates… each society has a coping range, a range of weather with which it can deal (Maslin 71.) Living in Oregon almost all of my life I can live, survive, and even flourish with rain and cold unlike someone who lives in the Sahara. I was curious to know if I could then be able to survive if Oregon were to change entirely.

http://www.keeporegoncool.org/content/oregons-climate was a website I found myself on that provided climate information about the present and future predictions of Oregon’s global warming. I was shocked to find out the facts of what is happening throughout Oregon now. Our average temperatures are rising, snowpack’s slowly declining, and sea level are rising an inch every 15 years. The video below provided great visual connection for me to see what was happening and the climate predictions.  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see these predictions come true.

Keep Oregon Cool also provides great insight on what we can do in order to reduce extreme climate change possibilities. I found myself then wondering what my lifestyle habits were doing to global warming. I came across a carbon footprint calculator that detects your greenhouse gas emissions through household size, transportation, consumption of foods, goods, and services: http://www.deq.state.or.us/programs/sustainability/carboncalculator.htm

At the end it gives you a list of actions you can take in order to reduce your carbon footprint. I was a little shocked at all the things I could do in order to contribute to our climate change issue. Its amazing how little things like going organic to changing your faucets can improve! Just within the last two weeks of activities we were asked to do, readings, and class discussions, I have definitely opened my mind about climate change.

Work Cited:

Maslin, Mark.  Climate Change: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014. 1 & 62-71. Print.

“Oregon’s Climate” Keep Oregon Cool. Oregon Global Warming Commission.  Web. 13 Jan. 2015.