I really enjoyed the short film, Where the Water Runs, as a form of fiction. I think that its closeness to reality is something that makes the film more striking. A lot of the other fiction texts focus on the far-off future, whether that’s in Oryx and Crake or in Pumzi. Utilizing that setting can be very helpful in showing a possible future for humanity and our planet. But, it can make the problem feels so far off, whereas Where the Water Runs reflects our current reality, but just pushing it to only a few years off than more than a decade, half a century, or more than a century. In my journal, I noticed that both films contained a similar theme of a “conflict between stability and freedom”. Both protagonists had a higher position of power with it being stable work and was a respected profession. Fiction allows the reader to step into the shoes and lives of people that have different lives, different upbringings, and/or different ways of knowing/thinking, so that we can better connect to them and what they’re going through. It was interesting to find and discover nature fiction writing, as most types of fiction that I’ve consumed have been audio and/or visual media, as noted in my journal. That was still the case, even in this class, as we watched films as well as read texts. Fiction can allow for a wider range of mediums to engage with, whereas other forms of storytelling are best conveyed in writing such as poetry or nonfiction. This is its best strength to convey nature and climate ideas to the wider public through visual art, documentaries, films, television, music, and writing.
Ministry of the Future is a text that I really appreciated due to the optimism present in it. Most forms of climate writing can play up the “tragedy porn” for a lack of a better term. Climate change is something cataclysmic and scary and deadly. But, an overfocus on the negative can prevent action or desire for action. The way that I think can best help people understand the crisis is to use the text to convey the dangers of climate change but provide the optimism and hope that we need to see us through, to show to us that we can become more than we thought we could be. Ministry of the Future explores the fallout of a natural disaster but shows how this tragedy can turn into a rallying cry for change. The book gives the example of India pushing out its current political administration and the abolition of the caste system. I also appreciate Bergeron’s story about religion and faith in a time of climate crisis. This really spoke to me because being an environmentalist at such a young age was what caused me to question my religion/faith and convert to one that seemed more suitable for me. Unlike the author in the story, nothing too traumatizing occurred to cause the conversion.
