David Mitchell’s story “The Siphoners” is probably the one story that I could not truly picture as the future. Contine reading →

Living on the Coast, my community tends to be affected by the ocean and the animals living in it. When I was younger, a trip to the beach meant I could walk on a near clean beach, spot marine birds, and the local sea lions. However, due to rising climate temperature and the effects that global warming has on the environment, the Coastal zones are changing.

Most of the Coast and Marine waters have been polluted by the expanding urbanization around us. This causes many beaches and waters to be filled with trash, toxic materials and unwelcome bacteria. These foreign objects polluting the waters have negatively affected the marine wildlife living in Coastal environments. Sea level temperatures rising can affect where species live and affect their lifestyle. It could even endanger species, forcing some into extinction. Rising temperatures directly affect a marine animal’s metabolism, life cycle and behavior. The increase of temperature can result in some marine animals engaging in reproduction and mating earlier than usual, risking the survival rate of the offspring. If offspring don’t survive, this can risk the population numbers, sending species near extinction.

Over 200,000 different species live in our oceans, all depending on different ocean environments to survive. The rising of temperature affects some species that require cold water to survive, this forces fish and other species to migrate North to colder waters. It has also affected the Caribbean and warmer waters because the water is too warm, causing coral to die. The lack of coral in a habitat will force fish move because they rely on coral and the bacteria around it to survive. In dense coral habitat, over 70% have been bleached by the warm waters. Some species are even losing their homes, like the penguins and polar bears. The melting of ice on each pole has driven both the penguins from the South and polar bears from the North, to migrate inland because the ice near the coast is continuing to melt.

Contine reading →

When the issue of climate change comes up, many people are quick to dismiss it.  It’s similar to how when we are young we can find ourselves feeling invincible.  “That may be dangerous/bad/scary but it will never happen to me.  It will never affect my life.”  While we have learned by this age that we are not immortal, there are still many people who do not think that climate change will directly affect them, and some people that do not believe in climate change at all.

I used to think about climate change as a thing of the future.  I knew that the environment was in trouble and about the green movement, but I still had a hard time understanding that the damaging effects of climate change were approaching rapidly.  Being from Berkeley, California I have been reusing, recycling, composting and conserving my whole life, but I was still under the impression that climate change was not going to create any serious problems until after I was long gone.  Contine reading →

There were three different ways climate changed was presented to us last week in class. One is the Global Weirding website that shows us how the earth will change throughout the years. The Global Weriding website has a timeline that takes you through the future years and how the earth is going to be permanently affected. The second is the scientific book, “Climate Change” by Mark Maslin which talks about the evidence of climate change, the impacts, the politics, and much more. It tells the reader about the facts surrounding climate change and what is the cause. The third way climate change is brought up is through a fictional story. One fictional story we read was “Diary of an Interesting Year” by Helen Simpson, that described how terrible global warming had become and how it has affected her family. Out of all three forms of information about climate change the story, “The Diary of an Interesting Year,” had the biggest affect on me.

The short story written by Helen Simpson was most impactful because of the obstacles the main character had to face due to global warming. She went through horrible conditions like no sewage system, no food, no heat and much more. People in this futuristic world had to fight over something as simple as a can of sardines. The bugs, due to the lack of sanitation left people with bites and sores. But, the biggest difficulty the main character had to battle with was the violence. In a society where order has been lost violence breaks out because people will do whatever it takes to survive. She had to fend for herself and in some situations she was unable to protect herself. The lack of structure allowed for peoples survivor instincts to take over, and this means doing anything and everything they can to stay alive. Doing anything and everything includes having to make one of the biggest sacrifices as a woman, and that is giving up her child. The main character writes, “I’ve wrapped your remains in my good blue shirt; sorry I couldn’t let you stay on board, but there’s no future now for any baby above ground” (114). The main character had to sacrifice her child because she thought the conditions were too horrific. To me, that’s when you know climate change has taken over. When people no longer want to reproduce and bring a beautiful baby into the world.

Even though this is a fictional story, it could one day become reality. The story is based in 2040, which means I would be 46 years old and that’s a frightening thought. I would still be young and wanting to enjoy life, but global warming could get in the way of that. People can read facts and scientific information about climate change, but I feel the real way for people to realize what is happening is through stories. People don’t understand the significance of what is happening around them, and once they read a disturbing story like the “Diary of an Interesting Year,” they start to grasp the impact of climate change. For some people facts and predictions open their eyes to the reality they can someday face, but for me reading a fictional story opens my eyes.

Cite:

Simpson, Helen. “Diary of an Interesting Year.” I’m with the Bears. N.p.: Verson, n.d. 101-15. Print.

Global warming is a word that is thrown around is today’s language. A few weeks ago, I thought it was self-explanatory; it has warming in the name. It’s a very ignorant answer but I’m probably not the only one who thought this. It brought to my attention that why I am not concerned with global warming and why haven’t I been informed?

Most of the population is probably not well informed on the topic of global warming. They are most likely just as oblivious to the significance it has to the Earth and the population as I was. For example, I have seen the Hollywood movies based on the near destruction of the world. World War Z, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow have the underlying message that “the world is coming to an end” but used that thought and made it into entertainment. They fanaticize it, focusing on one character and then, like most movies today, someone comes in and, literally, saves the world. Global warming is usually not the main headline on social media and gets swept under the rug; people are uneducated and blinded to the distresses it has already caused. The “information” people are getting about global warming from these movies may make an unconscious impact in the back of their mind. In most stories, there is shown to be this continuous pattern that everything in the end will be fine and that someone will always be there to save the day. Is that why people aren’t doing anything? That sounds almost absurd but for me, almost every movie, TV show or book I have read or seen ends on good terms. We expect things to go right; we expect things to go our way. If things don’t go our way, is it really true? If we look at the world today and see all our great innovations and history we have created over the past few decades, it’s extraordinary and shows tremendous progress. When we hear the talks on devastation and are told that it is happening but all we see is progress, then is it really happening?

Almost all of the stories we have read in class have used scare tactics to try and persuade readers to change. After retaining this information, the reader is informed on what the impacts look like but not told how to help. After the recent “Climate Change” reading, I now know ways that I can save energy. The thought I have in my head, which I’m sure most people do too, is that I am only one person, how much can I do? Social media and social networking have an enormous impact on almost everything. I feel that that may be the biggest factor that could help or hurt us. People  glorify celebrities so if more celebrities start posting about using solar panels, electric cars and  wind mills, would that encourage more people to do it? Would making movies with realistic possibilities of the future have an impact? What would happen if we as students branched out to people now that we are more educated and have found ways to help? Even though I didn’t elaborate much on all of the readings we have done, I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the massive impact that social media has and could do.

Throughout this course we have been reading short fiction stories about how global warming and climate change can/has impacted, in many negative ways, the world we live in. These stories have created a picture in all our minds, or at least in mine, of what our society could turn into with how global warming can affect the way we live day by day. Not only has it created an image in mind, but also, has influenced questions like how would our world react to such change? How would we sustain life? How would people treat eachother in such a world of panic and fear?

In the short story, “Diary of an Interesting Year” by Helen Simpson, we got the chance to experience what it could be like in a women’s position through world apocalyptic type situations.  “If we run out of beans I think he might kill me for food,” the main character states(112). In the story people were being abused, fighting or bartering over little amounts of food, and worrying if their children were going to be in safe hands if something were to happened. Scientists and researches have already made the analysis that over time our worlds water supply, food supply, electrical systems, and so on, will be affected meaning our civilization will have to be able to adapt or start preventing. As we all have seen in movies where the world is coming to an end and people are setting stores on fire and rioting like all sense of humanity is all of a sudden gone, makes me wonder if this will actually be a reality. When people are afraid and feel the need to protect themselves and the ones they care about it is natural to worry about yourself before anyone else. Which is a scary thought because if global warming and climate change does impact us in ways that creates starvation, homelessness, sickness, and so on, do you think morals and values will still be amicable to our society?  Contine reading →

Last term, I was fortunate enough to take an environmental science class. Although the class was a part of the FIG I was in and had no interest in majoring in the field, the class provided a much needed dose of reality for me. While I was aware of most of the global crises occurring in our world today, the class covered almost every problem in just a few weeks. As you can imagine it was very overwhelming and for the first time I realized the serious danger humans were putting themselves in. Especially with global warming, people are very blind to what they don’t want to hear, but the facts are real and global warming doesn’t seem to be a concern to anyone.

I relate the class very much to the story “Diary of An Interesting Year”, by Helen Simpson. For most of the class, we focused a lot on only the facts of what was happening and did very little on thinking of possible solutions. The students even addressed this issue to the teacher because it was depressing everyone. My teacher responded with saying that yes we were focusing on only the problem, but felt that focusing more on the problem would give us a greater insight into the significance of finding the solutions later. Much like in the “Diary of an Interesting Year” the whole story is mostly pessimistic. There are unhygienic conditions, society has pretty much collapsed, and many people die in the story. However, in the end the narrator does eventually escape her boyfriend’s murderer and becomes free.

She also wraps her journal in six plastic bags even though she doesn’t think anyone will ever read it. I believe that that ending contained a glimmer of hope in it, not just from the narrator but for the readers as well. The narrator takes extra care into Contine reading →

This past week, we were assigned to read “The Siphoners” by David Mitchell, a short story found in the compilation “I’m With The Bears”. In this short story, which is set in the near future, the governments essentially runs out of resources with which to support the massive population of the planet. Mitchell depicts a vaguely anarchist society where the lack of personal comforts leads the way for people to forget their general manners, laws of possession, and respect for each other in favor of their newly activated survival instincts.

Contine reading →

Being a Biochemistry major and having an immense interest in the sciences, I have approached the issue of climate change and global warming from an objective point of view, seeing both sides of the matter. While some of the issues may seem clear cut, there are a variety of issues that are not black and white. An example of one of these issues is presented in “The Siphoners” by David Mitchell, with the idea of a potential threat of overpopulation in the future.

In many of my Biology classes, especially those pertaining to evolution, the term carrying capacity has been used consistently. The Third Edition of Biological Science by Scott Freeman, the textbook used in my latest evolution based Biology class, discusses carrying capacity at length. This textbook defines carrying capacity as “the maximum population size of a certain species that a given habitat can support”. Below is an example of a carrying capacity graph taken from pixshark.com. The population of rabbits, which is the species used in this example, exponentially increases to a point. When the population hits the max that it can achieve with the given resources in their habitat, the population levels off and stays at a constant rate that the habitat can support. The idea of a carrying capacity is that every species has a population limit that a habitat can sustain, even humans.

With the population of the world already over 7 billion and with no signs of slowing down, the fear of overpopulation is an issue that is on the minds of many and should be addressed. Below is a graph from the United Nations website from 2010 which indicates that the population could more than double in the next 100 years. While the threat of overpopulation does not seem to be directly related to climate change, it is still impactful as it takes a toll on the environment and more people will undoubtedly contribute to the problem. Contine reading →