In this blog post I am going to talk about the Future Coast project that we looked at last week in class. It was definitely freaky listening to everyone’s voicemails from the future. There were a few voicemails that were more care-free that made me laugh, but there also were a few voicemails that gave me the chills and really freaked me out. The time stream that I picked out was mostly about global warming and about changes in the weather. Mostly my time stream was about the weather becoming increasingly hotter. I choose this time stream because I thought that it related most to what is happening right now for us. Even in Oregon we are having such a hotter winter term then we had last year. Last year we had two weeks where it snowed and this year it has barely rained at all. I thought that it would be interesting to make a time stream of that because I thought it would be the most relatable to everyone when they listened to it. Contine reading
Author: tashac
Only YOU Can Prevent Climate Change
We all have been constantly blogging and talking about why people should care about climate change, why it is hard to get people to care about climate change and wondering why people have not done anything to stop it. Yet we have not focused on what exactly we can do to help prevent climate change. It is easy to tell people that we need to care about it but the hard part is individually doing something to prevent it. I think that not only do we need people to notice climate change and that it is a problem in our world today but to give them action plans to prevent it. Because without giving people specific examples of what they can to do help, let’s be honest nothing is going to change. Contine reading
Can Children Handle the Topic of Climate Change?
After the past few weeks of talking about climate change, I have realized how important it is to write about it so that the world can see that this is a real thing and it is affecting us right now. This led me to think how we can educate the world better about climate change because the more people know about it, the easier it will be to change it. I started thinking about how it seems like most of the people that know about climate change are adults. This led me to think about whether or not we should educate young children about climate change. Contine reading
Scaring the World into Caring
I want to first talk about in this blog entry what Bill McKibben was addressing in the introduction of Im With the Bears. He talked about why it is important to write about climate change. I found it very interesting how he brought up the idea that we need to write about climate change so that people feel more urgent about it. A lot of our people are still unaware about what is happening to our world and what we have to do with it. (To be honest I recently became aware about climate change and how much of an impact we could have on it.) So, by writing these fictional stories people can imagine what our world will be like eventually because of climate change. People are not taking it seriously now because climate change is not affecting them in the present. By reading these stories it brings climate change to reality. They can start to see the long term effects that climate change can have on our world. People can hear facts about climate change all day long but they will actually start to listen when you bring real life situations and emotions that they can understand.
While I agree that our world today is not taking climate change seriously and should be informed on what our future will look like if we do not change; so far with all of the stories we have read, they have all been very pessimistic and scary. I wonder if using these stories as scare tactics is the only way to get people to notice that climate change is important. To be honest, when I read stories like Diary of an Interesting Year by Helen Simpson and see movies like 2012, it makes me terrified of what our future holds. Although this fear is effective in making me think about climate change it gives me no hope and leads me to believe that our world will ends without our control and we will all end up being either miserable, sick, poor, or dead. It seems that we could approach this in a different way. By now we have already caused lasting effects on this world so what if we started to write stories that would uplift the audience and cause them to want to help the world. What if we wrote a story about the effects of climate change and our world getting through it and persevering. In my opinion, when you leave an audience stripped of their hope it does not motivate them to want to change their ways and stop climate change. Even if it does it gives them no place to go afterwards. We need to start writing things that can spark solution. Although I wonder if my thoughts our too naive. Maybe saying that we can inspire the audience through wanting to help our world just by the kindness and hopefulness in our heart will never happen. Do you think that scaring the audience will end up helping the fight against climate change? Or are there other ways to approach this such as providing a solution or giving hope to the audience?