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.

I decided to pick my mom to have a conversation with about climate change because I already know my dads response on what he thinks about climate change. My first question was, “Do you believe in climate change?”. My mom said that she does believe in climate change because she has seen long term climate changes across the globe and there has been a decline in sea ice in the arctic. She also thinks that people are impacting the climate change because there are the signs of the human pollution that is making are our air warmer. My next question for her was, “Why do you think people don’t believe in climate change?”. Her first response to the question is that people are ignorant but I told her to elaborate on that. She said that climate change is obvious because of all the snow fall in the East coast right now and how it is sunny here and in California. She went on to say I don’t know why people don’t believe in climate change because the signs are there. People are not aware of whats going on in our world and they are not educated enough to understand why these things are happening to our earth. She does not believe they are convinced that is happening but it is and it is a serious problem. Another reason why they may not be convinced that it is happening because they are not experiencing climate change first hand. Experiencing climate change would result in them believing in it. For example the people in the mid west had their roofs cave in on them because of snow. She thinks after these people experienced climate change they now understand. After she went on to talk about our electric car and how she hated it in the beginning but in the end she grew to like it because she saw the outcomes of the car. She saw that we save money on gas and helped the environment by not polluting any gases. Something else she said was, “Someone who knows very little about climate change does not care a great deal about its consequences”. Which I agreed with her on that quote because if you do not care about climate change you probably wont believe in it too. The next question I asked her was, “What do you do at home to help prevent climate change?”. Her response was that we own an electric car and that helps prevent climate change because anything that uses gas pollutes the environment. She thinks cars are a big problem why our climate changes because it is something that everyone uses. She said if you can do your part to prevent climate change that it will help not only the environment but everybody.

On Thursday I went to the opening ceremonies for the Changing Currents Conference where we saw a video from Amy Goodman coming to us live from New York. One of the first things she talked about was how our government is a broken system because some power figures think global warming is a hoax. She said that people think its a hoax because people would not know what to do if global warming was actually happening. Thats when people started calling it climate change. They started calling it climate change because it was a more appropiate title and it did not sound as harmful as global warming. After she started talking about how obvious things are happening to our earth because of climate change. For example she said that no one is making the connection that Niagra Falls is freezing and there is a drought in California. To me this connection is obvious that global warming is doing this but some people are not making the connection. Amy than talked about the word climate change and said people need to think about the science behind climate change. The science is, is that the temperature has gone over .8 diagrees of the industrial level. She went on to talk about how it is good that we are even talking about climate change and how so many people showed up to hear about it instead of letting this topic go unknown. She ended her speech with a quote that says, “It always seems impossible til its done”.
Going into this conference I did not know what to expect. When I walked in the whole ballroom was filled to listen to Amys speech which I thought was impressive. Most of the people in the room were climate activists but to be honest I did not know we had that many in Eugene. I thought her speech was very powerful and interesting. I learned a lot about climate change problems happening in World War II and plenty of factual information about climate change. I really enjoyed her speech and hope I can hear her speak again.

For my final project I decided to make a children’s book for kindergarteners, first, and second graders. I decided to make a book about polar bears because I feel like all kids love polar bears and who doesn’t love polar bears? The book is going to be about how climate change is affecting the polar bears in the Artic. I thought I would use my blog post to do my research and enlighten everyone on how climate change is affecting the polar bears.

As we all know the polar bears live in the polar ice caps and the ice caps are currently melting because of climate change. The ice caps are melting because the greenhouse gases are acting like a blanket over our earth which is currently warming our environment. This is causing the polar ice caps to melt which is affecting the polar bears in a plethora of ways. It is affecting their access to food, body condition, lowering their cub survival rates, increase in drowning, and most importantly the decline of their population.

I want this book to not only teach kids about climate change but to teach them what they can do to help our environment and help the polar bears. The kids can tell their parents to switch their light bulbs to LED light bulbs and if they do that every light bulb you change can save enough light to light two million homes in one year. Another thing they can do is to make to sure to unplug something if they are not using it because we are wasting phantom power which is equal to the output from 18 power plant stations. The last thing these kids can do is use public transportation, ride their bike, or tell their parents to carpool because transportation produces 30% of all US global warming emissions. I think it is important for children to know about climate change in a simplistic way. I think it is important for them to know because they are the future and if they learn about it when they are little they are going to grow up doing all the things to save our environment and teach people about it.

This is the link I used to find my information http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/our-work/international-polar-bear-day

This past Friday I went to the Global Divestment Rally. The rally is supporting the University of Oregon Foundation to sell its investments in fossil fuel extraction companies. Right now the University of Oregon is selling their stock to make more money and people would like them to use that money to invest in fossil fuels instead of stock.
The rally consisted of a few speakers including the mayor of Eugene and student at the University of Oregon. The student really caught my attention because she was speaking on behalf of the students here and was representing the undergraduate school. She claims they took a survey last year and 73% of University of Oregon’s students approve and support the investment into fossil fuels. I think the percentage is really high and could make a difference in changing this part of our school. I thought her speech was empowering because she made it in a students perspective that we need to stand our ground and not let them take our money to invest in stock. The money should be put into use by investing fossil fuels to save our environment.
Before coming to the rally I did not really know what to expect or even know what it was. Luckily Stephen was there to explain to us what the rally was about and what they are trying to do. I was surprised to see so many people their from the community supporting this and how involved they really are in the school. I am glad I went to the rally because I got learn about something new and something I will now support at this school. Before coming to this event I did not know this existed or what the school was doing with our money and I am really happy I came and saw first hand what is happening.

This past Thursday I went to the climate change and Oregon salmon talk. There were two tribe members there talking about climate change and how it is affecting the salmon and their tribes. They told us there are four tribes that include, the Yakama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce. Each of these tribes have fishing and hunting rights on the lands. Currently climate change has been affecting the salmon and steelhead by winter flooding and it is affecting their eggs and overwinter juveniles. During the summer their has been low flows which leads into migrating or spawning adults. Than throughout the year there has been increased water temperatures which will stress on migrating. During the meeting the audience came up with a climate change improvement for the salmon by growing more trees. We also talked about how the dams are affecting the salmon because it is hard for them to go through and the warm water and climate change on top of it is making it worse. Some people in the audience brought up creating passages for the fishes which would be hard to do. I think the ideas the audience brought up during the speech were great ideas which I hope will happen in the future to save the salmon. One of the tribe members brought up towards the end of the speech that salmon is in an ingredient in a lot of things we don’t know about and if they are in danger than we are in danger. After he said that it made me realize if our food is diminishing and the necessary products we need in our body are diminishing than what is going to happen to us.
Before coming to this talk I did not really know what it was about it or what to expect. But I really enjoyed coming and learning something new. It made me more aware of some of the other things climate change is doing to our environment that we do not necessarily talk about in class. I thought this talk had a really great turn out, more people than I thought would come but I think they really liked seeing the students there supporting this.

In class when reviewing “An Athabasca Story” I noticed a plethora of people had questions on who Elder Brother is and what the last part of the story means. I did my essay on “An Athabasca Story” and figured out Elder Brothers part in the story and analyzed it. I thought I would share my information with everyone and thought it would also help with studying for the midterm.

As we all know Elder Brother cannot die but is alive through all of us. He is in our cars, our heaters, and anything we use that needs oil. In the last part of the story the narrator says, “you might hear a knocking, rattling sound down deep in the bowels of the machine. Thats Elder Brother, trying to get your attention, begging you to let him out” (Cariou, 75). When we hear these noises Elder Brother wants us to stop our car and turn it off and think about him inside of our car as oil. What he really wants us to do is to stop and think about the tar sands. He is trying to get our attention through the noise he is making by telling us to stop the car and stop the tar sands. Some may or may not have noticed when reading the story that there is also a motif, with this quote and a quote in the beginning that says, “His stomach was like the shrunken dried crop of a partridge. It rattled around inside him as he walked, and with each step he took the sound made him shiver even more” (Cariou, 70). The motif is the rattling of the partridge and the rattling of Elder Brother in the car. Elder Brothers shrunken up stomach is foreshadowing what is going to happen in the end of the story. In the end of the story Elder Brother is trying to make us more aware of the tar sands and stop them or else our world is going to shrivel up like a dried crop of a partridge.

Contine reading →

Most people in Palos Verdes, California, my hometown located in Southern California, do not believe in using the term global warming, instead they call it “climate change”. In their minds, changes on earth were brought about by an increase in temperature; however, they never really cared about learning more about the effects of “climate change”. So you can say that I grew up in an area that is not very environmentally friendly.

Luckily I have my dad who is extremely interested in global warming and wanting to save our earth. He made me watch the Al Gore movie, The Inconvenient Truth and explained to me what global warming is but at that age I still did not really understand it. After a couple years my dad went out and bought a Nissan Leaf which I was not too happy about. I thought it was the most unattractive car on the market and did not want to be seen it. To me it looked like a space ship and looked like it was from the future. My dad had to explain to me how this car is going to help our earth and to see pass the unattractiveness. After I started understanding global warming, I started seeing more electric cars everywhere.

I think many people do not buy electric cars because of the way they look which is true but they need to see the pros about the car. Some things you may not know about the leaf is it is 100% all electric, it provides an 84 miles of driving range on a single charge of its 24 kilowatt-hour battery pack, and you can lease it for $200 which is cheaper than putting gas in the car for the month. If the homeowner has solar panels installed in their home than charging the car is totally emission free. It also provides you with an on-the-go charger in case you run out of miles, you can plug it in anywhere. But charging stations are becoming more common in places like malls, grocery stores, drug stores, and even have front row parking. There is also an app where you can see on the go how much charge you have instead of going in your car to look. Other then the fact that the car looks like a space ship, the inside has a button that you move around to put the car in drive, reverse, and neutral.

Getting a Nissan Leaf will save the 100,000 ppm of carbon monoxide from driving a car for a minute. An article I read about electric cars says, “drivers should feel confident that owning an electric vehicle is a good choice for reducing global warming, pollution, cutting fuel costs, and slashing oil consumption”. Buying a Nissan Leaf is one big change to our earth and I read that Nissan Leaf outsold every other electric car manufacturer. In 2011 almost more than 40,000 Americans own a Nissan Leaf and 92,000 globally. Could you imagine what it would do to our environment if 50% of our population owned a Nissan Leaf or an electric car? It is not only saving you money on gas but it is also helping the environment. In conclusion, after owning a Nissan Leaf for three years we put $60,000 miles on the car and it still charged up to 70%.

While searching the internet to learn more about the Nissan Leaf, I came across a blog from a guy about his life owning a Nissan Leaf. I attached the link so you can all read about it