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.