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".

 

 

 

A Future I'd like to Avoid: The White Horse Trick

Lately, I cant help but feel super guilty over this whole climate change thing. Every time I buy something new, use something, or drive anywhere, I second guess myself. I think twice about what I am doing. Reduce, reuse, recycle isn't enough anymore. I’ve become hyper-aware of myself and my actions and how they impact my footprint that I leave on the Earth. And while yeah, it’s great that I am conscious and sort of trying to do something about the impact I have, its kind of for a selfish reason. I really don't want to experience the “climate changed” planet that has been written about. Even though most of the pieces that I've read that project some type of crazy climate centered apocalypse have been fiction, they still scare me. I don't want to have to experience the future that these pieces portray. Is that selfish of me?

Northern Ireland

The White Horse Trick by Kate Thompson is no different with regards to the futuristic ruined world as a result of climate change. I’ll start off by saying that I read this book on a particularly wet and gloomy day, and that this book was set in Northern Ireland which is also typically wet and gloomy so I really got sucked into the overall feeling of the book. The premise of the story is based around a world that has been ruined by climate change. As discussed by The Union of Concerned Scientists, as the climate changes, storms become more frequent and stronger. Torrential rains, thunderstorms, and hurricanes are the norm now. In the particular area focused in on the book, the continuous rainfall has made it nearly impossible to grow anything. Storms wash away the topsoil and leave the soil with little nutrients left to grow anything. I found this particular problem associated with climate change to be quite interesting. We seem to focus on droughts and the obvious problems that they cause in crop yield, but I was surprised to see that there was an opposite alternative that can be just as fatal. Not only to growing, but also because of the mudslides, flooding, and clogged and polluted waterways.

As climate change effects Ireland in The White Horse Trick, it seems as though the people have reverted to the middle ages. Warlords rule the land. People are captured and become servants when they can no longer pay their taxes (of food) to the Warlords. The book focuses on a specific area of Northern Ireland ruled by Commander in Chief Aidan Liddy. Liddy rules the area as he was prepared for this climate change disaster and stock piled tons and tons of food and supplies. He lives a life of luxury accompanied by things of the past like scotch, DVD's, and fat. The people on the other hand are starving, nothing left but skin and bones. It's becoming harder and harder to live. Earth is becoming uninhabitable. There's nothing to do that they can do to save themselves, other than magic.

T'ir na n'Og

T'ir na n'Og, the land of eternal youth, a mythical land, the otherworld ends up being the answer. The people of Northern Ireland take refuge in T'ir na n'Og where the time never changes while climate change has its way with the Earth. Over millions of years desertification is followed by glaciers which then retreat and make way for new landmasses and continents. In the end, the god of this Earth with connections to T'ir na n'Og, gets a do-over. He recreates the world greater than it was before. With fruit that tastes like cinnamon rolls and the best types of apples. With beautiful beasts and birds of every color. However, there is something missing. Humans.

In the end, humans are eventually given the chance to start over in this new world, however there are limitations. Only a few are allowed in and It seems as though this is what we need now. A chance to do it over, a chance to get it right, a chance to ruin the Earth less. Except we do not have a magical land to escape to (at least not that I know of). We just have to live with the consequences of climate change, which we can only hope are not like the ones portrayed in the cli-fi that we have read.

What ARE the Odds?

WARNING: Book spoiler alert
I have to admit that I am a fairly pessimistic person. Not necessarily a "glass half empty" person, rather an expect the worst type of person. And I will admit that this class on climate change has not helped this aspect of my personality. As I have become more aware of the state of our climate and the vulnerable position that it is in, I have also become increasingly negative about the eventual outcome of it as well. I picture a dystopian world, something like the movie "The Day After Tomorrow". As Professor Allen put it, a sort of climate change apocalypse. But I have always wondered what is the possibility that we will be affected by these types of disasters due to climate change? (I found a study done that judges the accuracy and actual possibility of  "The Day After Tomorrow" of actually occurring introduced in Science Daily).

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich is only fueling my curiosity about the actual statistical probability that we will encounter the events that have been predicted by climate scientists. The main character, Mitchell, is some type of mathematical genius, or just greatly obsessed with the future and crazy events that could occur. He preforms these insane calculations of the probability that worst-case scenarios will actually occur. The thing that bothers me about Mitchell's situation is that he is hired by a big name company trying to save their asses and assets if a scenario like Mitchell predicts actually does occur. They aren't worried about their employee's and the safety of them, rather they are worried about the financial aspect of big disasters. This reminds me of certain companies trying to escape responsibilities and problems that they have created nowadays in order to stay rich (cigarette companies, oil companies, etc.). They don't care about the affect that their actions-- or inaction in this case-- have on others.

From what I assume. these crazy disasters are becoming very common in the future world that Mitchell lives in. More earthquakes and mega-storms, more damage and assets to be liable for. And the scary thing is, I feel like this future is not so far fetched. While Odds Against Tomorrow is a fiction novel, it has some very real feeling to it. This may be something that we see in 40 or 50 years, 60 if we're lucky. Granted, the novel has not come out and said that the catastrophic events that Mitchell is calculating for are directly caused by climate change, but I don't doubt it. The world that Mitchell lives in could very well be our own.

Edited to Add:
As the novel progresses, the capitalization of disasters grows and becomes something that all companies need, alongside their insurance plans and 401K payouts. FutureWorld is the future of business. Mitchell warns his clients of the imminent disasters that could strike at any moment and crush their empires and advises how to protect themselves against anything that has a minuscule chance of happening. That is, until something actually does. Hurricane Patricia (which closely resembles Hurricane Sandy that hit NYC in 2012) advances on New York City. After some research I discovered that Nathaniel Rich had been working on Odds Against Tomorrow for 5 years PRIOR to Hurricane Sandy. He actually had to go back through the book as it was being prepared to be published and edit details about Sandy into it. The rains are welcomed at first by the drought-ridden city, that is until they become stronger and don't stop. Mitchell becomes trapped in the city by one of his own disaster scenarios.

I will ruin a little of the book by saying that Mitchell and his co-worker Jane do escape the city (by a twenty thousand dollar art piece that Mitchell purchases on a whim, nonetheless). Mitchell and Jane  escape the effects of the storm, but others are not so lucky. I'm not just talking about the 15 feet of water that turned the city into modern day Venice and littered the city with floating corpses and "floatsams". I'm also talking about the monsters that the people of the city and surrounding areas became. Natural disasters set something crazy off in people. They revert to their animalistic roots. They become selfish and greedy. After all, they're working to survive and preserve themselves. Although this is a fictional piece, I am worried that this is the future that we face as the world becomes more riddled with disasters due to climate change. There is something eerie how about how wild and savage people become when there are no boundaries, no feelings of the everyday life that they are so accustomed to. Mitchell does what I have been so temped to do lately as I have learned about the future that this planet potentially faces as we deal with the effects of climate change. He walks away from it all. He starts over.

To me, this seems like the underlying reason for natural disasters. They are a chance for a fresh start. A chance to do it differently. Maybe it's the Earths way of giving us a second chance, a way of wiping the slate clean. Either that, or the Earth is punishing us for all of the damage that we have done. Destroying what we have built and lived to teach us a lesson. A lesson that we obviously aren't learning very well.

If Thoreau Saw Our World Now: Walden

One can only imagine....

From what I have read thus far in Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Thoreau would not be able to handle the world that we live in now. Thoreau wrote Walden in the mid-nineteenth century after spending over two years in the woods, away from civilization. He felt that everyone was too caught up in how everything looked and felt and did. Thoreau reiterates simplicity and practicality key. This book was written over 150 years ago, and it is more relevant than ever today. 

In the beginning of Walden, Thoreau explains his deciding to remove himself from civilization. He wanted to become more in touch with himself, and get away from the nature of everyday life. He believed that most aspects of how we live are not necessary. We do not need clothing of the highest fashion that won't last us and houses that are too big and beautiful for our means. Thoreau cites that "none of the brute creation requires more than Food and Shelter". Every other aspect of our lives is frivolous he says. We aren't really living how we are, rather just moving from place to place, doing things to take up time. Walden serves as Thoreau's journal during his time in the woods. While he recounts his time spent there, he introspectively analyzes life in sort of a meaning of life type of way.

The 10x16 foot cabin on Walden Pond that
 Henry David Thoreau built by hand and
 lived in for over 2 years, that served as the
inspiration for Walden.

I must say that I am thoroughly enjoying this book. I have to admit that I have not been the biggest fan of classic literature after being forced to read one too many classic novelist in high school. However in this classic piece, I found myself agreeing with Thoreau and his ideals and reading on actually interested in what he has to say. Thoreau experienced the most massive growth that we have ever seen, living at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Walden seems like it is Thoreau's way of expressing his displeasure with the mindset of growth that we have. 

As this class has progressed, I find myself getting more and more annoyed with how we live today and the amount of growth that we expect/need to work and thrive as a society. I feel like it shows just how greedy and selfish that we are. We always want bigger, and better, and more. And this is where we run into problems. The Earth can only handle this type of growth for so long before it stops allowing us to grow. I feel that the beginning stages of climate change are serving as its warning. We need to live differently. Below is one of the most popular quotes from Walden (it was underlined, starred, and circled in my book if that says anything), and I think it really points to the meaning of Walden and where Thoreau was go with this book.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".

Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

An Inconvenient Truth: What It Looks Like

In this lecture style documentary, Al Gore pieces together facts and figures to bring to light what climate change means and the potential effects that it will have on the Earth. Gore mentions a metaphor of a live frog placed in a hot pot of water versus a live frog placed in a pot of water that is gradually brought to a boil and the effect that it has on the frog as it relates us in our current situation regarding climate change. Gore says "it requires a sudden jolt to become aware of danger. If [the threat] seems gradual, we are capable of just sitting there and not responding".  Currently we are the frog in the pot of water gradually being brought to a boil and with this film Gore wants us to jump out of that pot of water by shocking us into action.

Here's the thing about An Inconvenient Truth. If I had watched it at the beginning of this semester, I would have been shocked as the majority of the general population that viewed it was. The purpose of this documentary was to bring to light the true reality of climate change and made it accessible to the public. The film did a great job of this,  however after being engrossed in all things climate change for the past month or so, the information provided in the film was not news to me. I can imagine it being eye opening for some, but I can also imagine it adding to their disbelief in climate change as anything inconvenient has the tendency to be disregarded. Overall I felt that the film was educational but it probably did not benefit me in the ways that it would someone who was more unaware about climate change.

That being said, I still found the documentary to be very relevant. I found it easier to connect the graphs and statistics with the real life examples and explanations that Gore provided with them. For the purpose of this blog post, I am going to focus on 3 parts that I feel coincide with what we have been talking about in class and are relevant to the effects of climate change.

Temperature Rise
The graph to the right shows the relation between carbon emissions (red) and and average global temperature (blue). Gore points out (from the top of a cherry picker fork lift) that each increase of CO2 has been accompanied by a rise in temperature that has in turn led to the last 5 ice ages. He makes a point to show how far above any previous CO2 emissions we are currently at (the yellow dot). Does this mean that once we reach a peak in temperature that we are going to experience another ice age? And if so, how long with this ice age last based on the current and increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere?

Ice Melt

Related to this increase in temperature (and ice age as remnants of the last one) is the ice cover of glaciers and Arctic sea ice. Gore provided before and after pictures of areas heavily affected by this melt. We can talk about the effect of climate change on the world but its hard to imagine what this effect looks like. Pictures can  help show this, but even then it is still hard to grasp the enormity of the effect. One that struck me the was this one of Patagonia which generally has a cool and dry climate. The melt shown here occurred in 75 years. What happens when the ice melts? The oceans warm and the sea level rises, we know that. But what will this warming and rise look like. This question has been brought up multiple times in class and this short clip from An Inconvenient Truth shows what a 20 foot rise in sea level will look like. There is some discrepancy regarding just how much the ocean will actually rise as a result of the glaciers and Arctic sea ice melting, but I think that this clip does a fantastic job of showing what this rise could look like and  just how many people this single aspect of climate change has the potential to effect.

Dealing with It

A particular piece of information in this documentary that really stood out to me was how much we can cut our emissions by increasing the efficiency of our electrical appliances, vehicles, and renewable energy sources. The graph to the left shows how what adding different types of efficiencies have the potential to do to the United States overall CO2 emissions. Part of me questions the accuracy of this graph. There is another part of me wonders if these steps have to potential to affect our output so much, why are we not requiring that every home be outfitted with energy star appliances and solar panels? According to this film we can reduce the effect that we are having on it all. We have everything that we need to do something about it. Except we know why. Politics. Business. Money. It's what runs the world, and what is going to end up costing us our world.

"Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems..."

Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow

It's Not Entirely Our Fault

Climate change is our fault, there is no doubt about that. But we 

cannot be blamed entirely for doing so little about it. In the book Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, Author George Marshall analyzes why people fail to talk about or even recognize climate change as a problem.

In previous blog posts, I've mentioned that I was one of the many people who were/are ignorant to the true problems that climate presents us with. As I became more educated as to the true nature of climate change, I became increasingly annoyed and angry. Why did it seem like nobody cared?  Why did it seem like nothing was getting done? Why are people ignoring evidence?

Marshall looks to answer why people seem to be so unwilling to accept climate change based on both internal and external forces. He also focuses on the different categories of people as those who accept climate change, those who actively deny it, those who are skeptical, and those who are unconvinced of climate change and what aspects allow them to accept climate change or not. For the purpose of this blog post I am going to focus on the psychological aspects of us as humans that make it difficult for us to accept and deal with climate change.

This graph from the Washington Post shows the fluctuations of those
 who believe in climate change and those who do not.

According to Marshall, the beginning of problems in dealing with and believing in climate change lies in our experiences as individuals and the tendencies we have as humans beings. As odd as it seems with relation to all of the negativity that is focused on today, humans tend to be positive creatures. Once something bad happens, we believe that it wont happen to us again. Marshall uses victims of natural disasters to solidify this model, citing their increased invulnerability. Climate change is not a positive problem and thus we have the tendency to tune out when it is mentioned. We also tend to believe that climate change is not our problem, that it is one that is not our problem to deal with. Marshall connects this to social cues like the bystander effect, pluralistic ignorance, and conditional cooperation, where we don't talk about climate change because no one else is and we don't do anything about climate change because we believe others are.

According to George Marshall, victims of natural disasters have
the tendency to ignore climate change as a possible factor that
may have caused the natural disaster that they experienced.

In relation to accepting and dealing with climate change, Marshall cites the tendency to ignore it is because it is not salient. There is still uncertainty about it, it is not a concrete problem. While it is an immediate problem, it does not feel immediate. As humans, we recognize threats based on the immediacy of the problem and because climate change seems like such a far off threat not based in the "here and now", rather in the "then and there", it is ranked very low in our categories of fear that allow us to process and deal with problems. According to Marshall, it ranks somewhere near extraterrestrial threats like asteroid strikes.

While climate change is our fault, the fact that we aren't talking about it or doing much about it isn't entirely our fault. Marshall cites many psychological regions as to why many people are unable to accept the climate change and the threats that accompany it, and therefore do little about it. I believe that a lot of the problem also lies in the purposeful choice to ignore climate change accompanied by the ignorance surrounding it. I hope that Marshall provides ways to deal with these psychological hurdles and ignorance in relation to climate change, as in order for people to mobilize and take action against climate change, they need to realize the true problem of it.