Literary Worlds: An Interactive Story Book

For my climate change video games unit, I created a sort of virtual world on a website called Literary Worlds. I would not necessarily consider it a virtual world, rather it it more of an online semi-interactive storybook. Let me start out this post by saying that this is no small project. I worked on this for the "Climate Change Video Games" and "Climate Change and Writing" unit and I am still not finished with it. It is most definitely an on-going project.

To begin with, I found inspiration in a powerful short story that we read in class called "How Close to the Savage Soul" by John Atcheson. I based the main part of the online story on the premise of the short story. A man and his grandson travel to the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the year 2050. The world has been ravaged by climate change and nothing is the same. While on the Outer Banks, the man reminisces the old days, when they didn't know. When they didn't know the impact that they were having on the climate and how quickly it would happen.

As the story continues, a theme becomes apparent. "Pay attention to the warning signs". These
warning signs are all over. The acidifying ocean. The smaller crop yields. Everything is affected by climate change. In the world that we live in now, we do not get second chances. There is no going back and fixing climate change. We can only learn to live with what we have done and work to not cause anymore damage. This story is different as gives you a second chance, one that we will not get in this world.

I can see this program being used along side of the story as supplemental material. It is one thing to read something, however it is another thing to actually experience. Many students will never get to see the world outside of the area that they live, and so it can be hard for them to imagine what it looks like, and the impact that they can have on something that they cannot directly see. While I do not believe this program is something that students have the time or energy to create a world in, I can see them spending 15 or so minutes at the beginning of each class period diving deeper and deeper into this literary world.

Overall, I have enjoyed this project/video game/writing/whatever you want to call it. I have not been able to put the time and effort into it that I would like, but as I mentioned before, this is a project that I can continue to improve as new idea and inspiration comes to me. I look forward to being able to grow my world and create more possible and very real impacts of climate change that we may face in the very near future. I do feel that this program is a little outdated and definitely not very user friendly. I like to consider myself a pretty tech savvy person, and without the introduction to this website that my professor gave me, I do not believe that I would have been able to figure out how to operate it.

Occupational Therapy: The Cause and Adaptation to Climate Change

A child's main occupation is to be a child through playing
and learning, thus what this occupational therapist is assisting
this child in doing.

As defined by the American Association of Occupational Therapy, Occupational therapy is "the therapeutic use of occupations, including everyday life activities with individuals, groups, populations, or organizations to support participation, performance, and function in roles and situations in home, school, workplace, community, and other settings. Occupational therapy services are provided for habilitation, rehabilitation, and the promotion of health and wellness to those who have or are at risk for developing an illness, injury, disease, disorder, condition, impairment, disability, activity limitation, or participation restriction. Occupational therapy addresses the physical, cognitive, psychosocial, sensory-perceptual, and other aspects of performance in a variety of contexts and environments to support engagement in occupations that affect physical and mental health, well-being, and quality of life". So in short, occupational therapy relates to what people DO, on a variety of avenues.

There is no doubt that climate change has been caused by human activity. Unfortunately, these human activities are linked to what occupational therapy calls ‘occupation’. Pay close attention to the use of occupation in the definition above. It's doing. It's driving. It's farming. It's expanding. It's got everything to do with climate change. Occupations are what have caused this ecological crisis. That's pretty crappy right? Here I am being all passionate about doing some good in the world and helping people through occupational therapy, and it goes almost directly against something else I am very passionate about, combating climate change.

On the flip side, this means that occupational therapy also can change that activities and occupations that are causing climate change. It may be a long stretch, but we as occupational therapist, the ones in charge of changing occupations, have the potential to change the way that people go about their everyday lives. In occupational therapy there is a focus on holistic health, or health of the whole being, rather than fixing an individual issue (as in physical therapy). And that is what we need in order to fix this giant problem that we call climate change. It is not caused by one specific thing, rather it is a variety of problems that have added together. (I found this wonderful piece in the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal.)

An occupational therapist could assist this man in creating
different crutches that could navigate through the muddy terrain
of his village that has been affected by climate change.

Surprisingly, as I was doing some research for this blog post, I found that the World Federation of Occupational Therapy recognizes climate change as an issue and threat to the well-being of individuals, groups, and the environment. It also supports the use of occupational therapy "in countries experiencing significant negative impact of climate change to focus their practice on the adaptation of environmental needs". So in short, the World Federation of Occupational Therapy not only believes in climate change, they also believe that occupational therapy will be necessary to combat climate change as well. Farmers are not going to be able to farm in the same way that requires so many resources, they're going to have to adapt. We are not going to be able to travel in the way that we do now a days. We're going to have to adapt. And that is where occupational therapist come in. 


While it may not be the mainstream area of solutions to help us learn to deal with climate change and combating what we do to cause it, I can foresee occupational therapists helping people adapt to the new way of living that will come with new conservation efforts and ways of combating and adapting to climate change (Sustainable Occupational Responses to Climate Change, Clinicians Respond to Climate Change). According to the Canadian Journal of Occupational Therapy (this article is really awesome), "occupational therapists have an ethical obligation to use professional reasoning strategies that, taken collectively, can help to build a sustainable and resilient future" and have "the power to initiate change in their personal actions, their workplaces, their communities, and their govern- ments to promote a sustainable and resilient future".