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”