When brainstorming ideas for this project, I started to think about how climate change affects me and I came to the conclusion that the reason I check the weather each morning is to decide what to wear that day. I moved from San Francisco to Eugene and my biggest fear was not being able to adjust my wardrobe to the weather. Whenever I go on vacation, I spend roughly three weeks researching past weather patterns of the location I’m going to so that I can pack accordingly. I wish that was an exaggeration, but yes, I’m that neurotic.

So, I tried to think of a way to connect my vision of the future after climate change to my interests and I decided to write a fashion/lifestyle blog set in 2094. I created Samantha Balcorn: age 26, Portland resident and a magazine editor. Because of the melting icecaps from the north, I’ve set Portland to now be a beach town. In the posts, I depict a scenarios such as how humans eat, be entertained, communicate, etc.

My goal of this project was to give a hopeful outlook on what can happen after climate change. As I’ve expressed in previous posts and during class time, I truly believe that everything will be OK. The world has experienced catastrophes of all calibers – natural disasters, social injustice, financial failures – and we’re still living our lives well. The human race has been able to evolve and adapt over the course of its existence, and will continue to do so. Sure, there will be struggle in the midst of this change, but I don’t think that it will be the end.

Contine reading →

For my Final Project I wanted to use an animal that is endangered due to climate change, so I used Polar Bears. Since I feel like a majority of the stories we read about climate change fail to talk about the many animals that are affected by climate change conditions and are voiceless and helpless to what’s going on around them. But, I tried to make my short story as playful as possible because although most of the stories we read have a distinct ominous tone, I didn’t want mine to be completely depressing. So you could say my short story is somewhere between a children’s and an adult book, so I guess you could say it is a “young adult” story. The premise of my story is that it is the year 2075 and Polly is the last Polar Bear to live on this earth, because of the rareness of her species she gets captured and further becomes an exhibit at the zoo. As she struggles with the journey of waking up in a counterfeit Antarctica dazed and confused, to accepting that she is becoming an exhibit with hundreds of people finding joy and hope in her existence. Here is a small preview:

“Was I finally going to be able to reunite with the people I longed for in my lonely solitude of the desolate sanctuary of ice that would eventually melt. I started gaining consciousness, and as my eyes wandered to this plethora of white light all around, I faintly saw my mother in the distance, crawling towards me. I became overwhelmed with joy, and complete bliss, I hadn’t seen her since the huge wipe out of my entire family and fellow Polar Bears of the community in what was supposed to be winter of 2062, with nothing but an overabundance of sunshine. I ran towards her, and she was coming towards me looking as happy as I was, as we became closer and closer I reached out my hands and SMACK, I immediately fell to the floor with an impending headache that was quite the doozy. As I leaned back up, I saw again what I thought was my mother in the flesh, so I reached out my arms again to sadly become acquaint with nothing more than a wall of transparency glaring back at me”

For my final project I decided to create a video diary written from the perspective of a man living in the year 2115. The video features footage of the Earth’s climate changing, accompanied by a voice over of the diary entry. The man comments on how our current society dealt with climate change, and how our lack of action lead to the restructuring of the entire world’s climate and the displacement of the human race. The format of Diary of an Interesting Year was my inspiration for this project, but I wanted to add a layer of video to create, what I believe, is a more impactful piece of Cli-Fi.

I call my project The World Now. Here’s an excerpt:

Contine reading →

For my final project I decided to create an online children’s book. I wanted to make a children’s because I love children and I think they should start to learn about climate change at a young age. I decided to make the book online because technology is becoming bigger and better everyday with online textbooks/newspapers/magazines and it saves paper. I decided to create a story about a kid named Jack who loves polar bears and wants to visit them in the Arctic because what kid does not like polar bears. One night Jack wakes up in the middle of the night from train sounds coming from outside his house. He goes outside and there is a train with a conductor standing there to greet him. He tells him the train is there to pick him up to go see the polar bears in the Arctic with all the other kids who love polar bears. They travel to the Arctic and they end up seeing the ice melting and not many polar bears. The conductor explains that the ice is melting because our earth is becoming too hot because of all the gasses that are being released from cars, trains, buses, factories, and many more. The conductor tells them somethings they can do around the house to help save our environment and the polar bears. The kids come back and tell their teachers and friends what they learned from the trip and the things they can do to help save the environment. I want this book to teach younger kids about climate change in a simple way and by including polar bears it helps them realize what is happening because all kids love polar bears.

My Final Project for my Climate Change Fiction class involves making my own cli-fi novel. I will do a close reading analysis of the first chapter of my cli-fi novel, “Wild Times in Mizu-Tokyo”.

Contine reading →

For my final project, I placed my story in year 3012 when the Earth is on its last leg. The planet is experiencing a drastic change in conditions and the nation is facing a shift in governmental control. My story focuses on a middle class family’s experiences in 3012.  A young girl, Caroline, tries to do whatever it takes to survive but she will soon find out she is out of luck. This is an excerpt from the text, “The cop chased them and Caroline tried to explain to him that everything was okay, but he did not care. Max was frozen with uncontrollable fear. Without hesitation the cop shot Max in the head, showing Caroline the consequences about population control.”

I was trying to accomplish a piece of writing that showed the worst case scenarios that the Earth could face because of climate change. It would affect not only the environment, but the people as well. Societies would change, favoring one group over the other and resources would become prioritized. Although this story takes place far into the future, anything is a possibility if we don’t try to change. I decided to create this story because talking about climate change reminded me of all the commotion in 2012 when the “world was going to end.” Since the world didn’t end in 2012, I created a possible scenario of when it would end in 3012.

Contine reading →

I had a lot of fun on Futurecoast.com. I got to make my own timeline using the voice-mail messages from the people in my class, including myself. I named my timeline “Hot and Wet”. I know, not a very imaginative name for a timeline. However, I figured I should be rather straightforward about the future I had in mind. Basically, this is a future for Earth where global temperatures have increased at a semi-constant rate over the years. This has led to almost all the ice in the world melting, which has resulted in the flooding of most coastal areas around the globe. Technology level has also increased, with a more even gap between green-tech and fossil fuel tech. My vision for the future has been slightly influenced by some disaster movies and an article I read in National Geographic. However, if the human race continues on the energy using trend that it has been on for the past few decades, then this could be a likely global weirding scenario for us in the future.

Anyway, back to FutureCoast. I had a great time listening to all of the recordings on the site, not only from within my class but also from without. I admit, there were some voice-mail messages that I felt were a bit underwhelming. I believe that a recording about getting into a hovercraft accident is a bit unoriginal. That’s not even taking into account that one might not survive being in a hovercraft accident. Anyway, there were some ideas for the future that I liked. A theme park about glaciers in a world without natural ice is quite imaginative. I believe that this FutureCoast project will become very popular, even to those not in the climate change community.

I decided to write a short narrative revolving around a married couple named Brenton and Chanel who have recently moved to Portland, Oregon from California. They decided to move due to a couple of extreme climate change disasters. The narrative details their journey to Portland and once they have finally moved, they have to cope with new living situations that are extremely inconvenient and nothing like they had originally expected. Portland is also going through some serious effects of climate change which Brenton and Chanel were not aware of so this new move is more of a struggle than anticipated. This is the hardest struggle they have had to endure as a couple and after everything that has taken place during the past few weeks, they are left to wonder if they can still survive in such an unpredictable world.

I decided to create this narrative because I felt like the main events in my short story directly correlate with issues regarding climate change. I feel like Brenton and Chanel’s story sum up the way climate change fiction is portrayed. With this narrative I am trying to evoke similar emotions that I feel when I read intense and extreme climate change stories. I hope to raise more awareness of the possible repercussions of climate change and that climate change is indeed a serious issue that is happening as people read my narrative. I ultimately wish to create a desire to make a change or atleast contribute to current climate change preventative action groups and organizations. I really hope that people can read my narrative and come together and have their voices reach other folks in the community.

“The atmosphere was not welcoming, nor did it seem safe, but they had no other option. Where else would they go, especially considering that they had no family or friends on this side of the toxic infested country. They had no way of contacting their families either, who knew if they were still alive. The thought of their loved ones being engulfed by the ongoing daily catastrophes made Brenton’s heart drop to his stomach. But he could not let these dreadful thoughts distract him, he had to find safe ground for Chanel and him. He needed to make sure she was taken care of, if he could take care of her. There was barely any place to stay here. Overpopulation seemed to have taken it’s toll on this city and resources were scarce. How in the world would they survive? He heard an uproar of voices nearby and his attention immediately turned to the commotion…”

My work of climate change fiction takes it inspiration from the classic 8-bit video game, The Oregon Trail. My goal with this project is to design a video game that is both fun to play, but also is informative, educational, and adheres to the constructed genre expectations that we created in class for Climate Change Fiction. For the purpose of the project, and due to my lack of drawing ability, I am going to focus more on the plot and setting as opposed to the gameplay and visuals. The game will hold true to its predecessor and be based on text commands in order to venture through the game.

I remember growing up and playing the Oregon Trail video game in elementary and middle school. I thought it was just a cheesy game that Oregon students played during their grade school years to help them better understand the Oregon Trail. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that the game was widely popular all over the country and was considered a cult classic. This was an example of an educational video game that was popular. It was both fun to play and informative, which was my overall goal with this project. The original Oregon Trail game was released in 1971, and this could be an idea for an update that is both pertinent and helps educate the up and coming youth about climate change.

Brief Excerpt: My vision with this game, and something that will make it unique is that it will not be the same experience every time. You will start in the same location, the same year, and travel to the same location, but much like the weather and climate change, it will be entirely unpredictable. One journey you may face multiple horrific weather events that ravage your food supplies, caravan, and animals. Others you may experience various bouts of disease that once may have seemingly been things of the past. Bouts of smallpox, yellow fever, and other diseases run rampant in this world and medication for them is not cheap. You can’t protect yourself against them all, so you must make a wise prediction about what you may encounter.

Originally, I had planned to attempt to write my own “Athabasca Story”. After weeks of brainstorming for an idea that stuck and that I felt would be a convincing native tale that pertained to climate change, I have decided to change the direction with which I intend to take my fiction project. As I began to write the outer context that I had planned to situate my native allegory, I found that the voice I had been narrating with flowed much more smoothly than it had when I sought to write with a style tht=at I am not very familiar with. The “native” parts that I began to write were neither convincing, nor effective in communicating the ancientness that I had been trying to portray. Instead, I have embarked on a short story that is still set in the future, but is also rooted in the not-too-distant future of the Alaskan landscape. I chose to set my story in this context so that I could encompass the melting of the glaciers that is presently occurring in that area. I feel that we haven’t held much discussion about this particular aspect of climate change, I hope to try my hand at creative climate change fiction in this capacity. The introduction that I have tentatively completed so far reads as follows:

“The yearbook reads: “The Alokee Tribe Graduating Class of 2180”. Kayla runs her hand over the leather cover of her new yearbook, as she reminisces on the times she had with her peers both in school, and in downtown Anchorage on the weekends. As she aimlessly wanders the vacated hallways of her high school, an old newspaper clipping in the trophy case catches her eye. The photograph under the headline obviously shows her beloved town of Anchorage, and yet the surrounding landscape seems to be completely wrong. From every angle, the photograph shows what seems to be immensely thick, purely white ice stretching all the way to the horizon, covering what are now fields of growing wheat. Utterly confused by such an unsettlingly beautiful terrain, Kayla gingerly opens the trophy case to get a better look at the clipping. Kayla glances over both of her shoulders before carefully unpinning the newspaper clipping to slip it into her back packet, vowing to research the vast sheets of ice that clearly used to dominate the Anchorage area.

Upon her arrival at home, Kayla can smell the warm aroma of cinnamon and vanilla, a telltale sign that Grandmother is baking her favorite dessert. She opens the front door to be greeted as usual by three excitable, perfectly groomed husky dogs, each with their own lively demeanor. After crouching down to greet her beloved friends, Kayla’s nose leads her to the kitchen where Grandmother has just set out a steaming plate of cookies. Kayla takes a seat at the counter, pulling the newspaper clip out of her pocket before sliding it across the counter before her guardian, and best friend. With a twinkle of recognition in her creased eyes, and a slight smile playing across her weathered lips, Grandmother seems to lose herself in a memory that she has not revisited for many years, a memory of gazing across the ice that has since abandoned the barren Alaskan landscape.”

The Treasure Hunter is a short story I created that follows a young female character Jessie in her endeavor to discover what the world used to be like before 2070. While the adults of this time attempt to convince the diminishing number of children that the dying world is beautiful and a forever-luxurious place, Jessie challenges this view and goes searching for the well-hidden answers. When she finds out the world is coming to an inevitable end Jessie has to consider whether it is better to tell the truth and warn her fellow classmates or let them live in peace and die in an uneducated comfort.

The reason I chose a storyline like this was to highlight our own society and how ignorant we are in ignoring the problems that occur in the world. While this class has opened my eyes to climate change I know there are still a lot of people out there who just wipe climate change under the carpet and choose to ignore what is happening. I hope this opens some eyes and makes some people consider that we need to address climate change now as Jessie questions the reader in their reasoning for not leaving a better life for her and our future generations.

“Did you ever awaken to the sound of laughter? My guess is no. My guess is the machines woke you up easily enough. That over the years they crept and crawled and penetrated through your micro pores. I’m sure they entered your bloodstream and poisoned your mind. I bet that’s how it began, that they brainwashed you into building bigger and better technology, obsessing over it until our earth decided to finally fight back. That’s my guess at least, but then again what would I know, its not as if you actually believed we would survive or in any case cared about what would happen to us.”

For this project our goal was to create a short story that appeals to every emotion ranging from sad, intense, exciting, and leave readers with hope since the topic of global warming can be incredibly pessimistic. The outline of our story, “The Officials”, is based in the year 2028 from the perspective of a twenty year old girl who is traveling across the country with her two younger brothers. Since we know that global warming issues will start effecting us in our near future and we tend to believe that it won’t happen in our lifetime we made the story have conflicts occur sooner. We have severe weather changes occur along with lack of basic resources like water disappear earlier than the near future.

One aspect of global warming that stuck out to me specifically was the idea of regulations being made that restrict individuals basic rights. So the title of our story is the name of the people who are going around making families smaller (leaving the readers wondering where they take the people they take) so that they can “rebuild” the nation. With the limited resources left they have to choose who is worth surviving which creates emotional scenes throughout the story.

“These men, these hunters, they lurk at night just like they are creeping up on deer, and at a snap of a finger, shoot them down. But in this new world we are the helpless deer. We can run and hide for only so long.”

This is part of the story where our main goal is to appeal to the readers on a more emotional level where they can try really imagine what is going on. We want our story to be different than the typical running from a natural disaster and more about running from a corrupt government plan.

The short story that Brooke Tasker and I wrote takes place in 2028. It is called The Unofficials and is centered on a world where there is a limit on how many children a family can have because of lack of resources. We decided to write a story with this as the main idea because it is unique in comparison to the other stories that we read throughout the quarter. Most of them focused on some sort of disaster and while our story includes issues due to climate change, the main effect global warming has on the story is causing a huge lack of resources resulting in a limit of how many children a family is able to have. This is a very concerning and relatable issue because it will encourage people to think about their own lives in families if they were put in that situation

We decided to write the story in first person and in the format of a journal in order to try and connect to the audience more. In past readings this quarter, many of the people in our class felt that the stories written this way had a much greater emotional impact and that was the effect that we were trying to achieve. Climate change fiction is responsible for getting through to peoples emotions to get them to want to help the cause of climate change and we wanted our story to be an example of this in both the way it was written and the storyline itself.

““The Officials” are what they are called, but in simpler terms they are the executors. These men, these hunters, they lurk at night just like they are creeping up on deer, and at a snap of a finger, take them down. But in this new world we are the helpless deer.”

The quote above is just a small portion of the story that captures the essence of the situation these “Unofficials” are in.

I am personally really interested in television and how TV shows are written and created. For this final project, I chose to adapt the all American ABC program Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives is a primetime television series that depicts middle class families in the suburbs. I decided to take the idea of family and friends in a close-knit community, but place them in a climate-changed world.

I chose to write the pilot script of a new television show that takes place in 2046 suburbia. The characters are facing different and new challenges because suburbia no longer exists in the lavish housewife way. Women are struggling to gather water and feed their families because of the uncontrollable wildfire that just ran across the Midwest. The only way for a once successful businessman to provide for his family is by spending hours working in the fields. It is still called the fields even though it is now burnt down to nothing. It is a man’s job to try to clean and clear the area, so harvesting can hopefully begin again. I think writing a pilot script is an interesting way to tell a story because it allows for the reader to understand the characters and the way they live.

Penelope Owen is a young married woman living on Jasmine Way who is the narrator in the entire series. At the beginning of the pilot episode Penelope commits suicide and the reason is unknown to everyone including her husband. She says, “Normally there’s nothing exciting about my life, but that all changed last Tuesday. It was a typical day at first. I went to the well for water, washed my hair, and made my husband a sardine sandwich. I spent the day as I had spent any other day since the Miranda wildfire. It was so shocking when late last Tuesday I decided to take a piece of coarse rope, tie it around the banister, and let my feet come out from under me” (Salcido 1). This is how the first episode begins of my climate change housewife television series. I wanted to catch the script reader on the first page because a viewer can lose interest if something doesn’t happen in the first three minutes of a TV show.

Writing this script has been entertaining, but also challenging because I had to incorporate elements that I had not thought about like camera direction and scene. I had to really think about how I wanted the scenes to look and the direction I wanted to go.