Fireside Chat

            In preparation for my fireside chat, I knew that I was going to talk about skiing. I knew I would talk about this because it is something I am very passionate about and so I figured it would be fairly easy and pretty enjoyable but I had a hard time coming up with what exactly I would talk about. To decide what I would talk about, thought about why I loved skiing so much and I came up with the answer because it has brought me closer to nature. I then started to think about what this change has done to me and I realized that it had made me far more aware of global warming and its severe consequences. This has made me recycle more, be more frugal, conserve energy and pay more attention to the products I am purchasing. I thought this was really interesting because I didn’t start skiing because I wanted to be closer to nature, I started it because I thought it was really fun and cool but as I got more into it I grew to really love it and everything that surrounds it, especially the environment. This is why I decided to talk about how the closer you get to something, the more you care about it.

                  To really convince the audience of this, I did a lot of research on the non profit organization POW, Protect Our Winters. A really cool group started by skiers, that was making serious stride in climate change awareness. Most notably through the program “close the loop” which was a bill put forward by them to close the loopholes allowing coal mining companies to destroy public land for very little amounts of money. I figured I would talk about this and how these coal mining companies are a leading cause of the climate change in an attempt to convince everyone to go outdoors, but last minute I decided to just scrap all of it and just talk about my own personal experience. I thought this would be much more effective not only because skiing changed the way I looked at the world but also because then I could focus more on the idea of just spending more time outdoors. I decided it would be easier and more enjoyable to just invite people to do the same thing I did, which was to go outdoors and enjoy myself. Media that influenced me to do this was my favorite ski film Sunny. Which was filmed last year and was really hard to make because of the lack of snow.

Be Concerned

During the early stages of this project we thought of a lot of different people who we could interview. While we were sifting through dozens of potential document subjects that we did not personally, our dear friend Karim Doumar, who was a local journalist, gave Aidan a call. As the phone sat in front of us buzzing away, our eyes grew double in sized. We looked at each other, both thinking the same thing, why weren’t we doing a project about someone like Karim who was someone we knew that was actually making a difference in their community. I guess it never occurred to us that someone we knew personally could be making such a big difference in their community. So we sent our documentary crew on down to Berkeley, California to find out who our friend Karim Doumar really was and how he was making a difference in his community. Once in Karim Doumar’s backyard, we immediately got to work on uncovering this exciting story. First, we found out a little about what Doumar does for the community. We thought this was the most important thing to start off with because it gave us an idea as to why he does the things he does which is what we did second. We found out why he writes for the specific newspaper he does and why he writes for any newspaper at all. As you can see in the video, Doumar is so passionate about his newspaper because it is free and is helping all members of the community, not just the affluent one. He also does this job for free because it is something he is passionate about. We finally found out how what he is doing is actually making a difference, which you can see in the video. As you can see Citizen Doumar is being a great influence in his community and is obviously very concerned. An outside media source that was very influential in the making of this documentary was Spotlight because we’d like to think that Doumar is headed in the right direction in breaking national news. In the reading for this assignment, Goldbard talks about the right that everyone has “to participate in the cultural life of the community”. We felt that Doumar was not only acting upon this right but also allowing others to more easily have this right by providing everyone with the local newspaper for free.

https://youtu.be/9-D5rqgJaUU

The Slopes

                  The social issue I addressed in this game was the idea that people aren’t taking enough care of the environment and this is a direct response to people not spending enough time outdoors. I think this is the case because if people were to spend more time with nature and become closer to it, they would grow to love it enough to want to preserve it and take care of it. The idea for this game came from a combination of a few different things. First off it came from my own personal fears of losing the winter and not being able to ski as much but also from the fear of damaging our environment. I also picked the idea of becoming one with nature from watching The Revenant which addresses a lot of issues relating to becoming one with nature and man vs. nature. Outside sources that I used when preparing for this project included an article published by NASA discussing the issue of Global climate change that can be found here, http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/. I then did research on how humans are causing this global warming and found out a lot of evidence from this website https://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm. Then lastly I researched how to fight global warming by researching it on Natural Resources Defense Council, http://www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/gsteps.asp. What I found was one of the biggest issues with global warming was that people believe global warming is an issue, no one is really doing anything about it. Although media often addresses the issue of preserving our environment, I think the audiences often chooses to do nothing and just wait around which is only making the problem worse. I addressed this problem by making those who chose to do nothing, end up down a road where they can do nothing and it drives them crazy.

                  How I got people engaged in playing this game was by relating it to something enjoyable but first making them work for it. Since they thought they eventually would be able to ski they continued to play. Although it became somewhat frustrating at times, they still would continue to play at the hopes of eventually skiing. The sad thing was that once they eventually did ski they did not have a good time because all the snow was melted. I tried to relate my own frustrations of the affects global warming has on skiing in making this game.

http://philome.la/BossTweed7/the-slopes