Book review #1
Bookmark Climate Change
How climate change affects the setting of your favorite book?
stranded on island
girl and her animal friends
learn to fish, hunt, build
survival and fun
a series of adventures
mother nature rocks!
In the book Island of Blue Dolphins, author Scott O’Dell writes about a 12-year old Nicoleño girl named Karana. Through a series of unfortunate events described in the book, Karana finds herself stranded alone on an island around California Coast. She teaches herself to hunt, make spears, build canoes, learn to tame feral dogs, and make a life for herself over time. She even builds a home made out of whale bones, finds several ancient artifacts, a large octopus, and develops a kinship with other animals on the island. More time passes, and eventually, she finds her way to a mission in Santa Barbara and finally learns about the fate of the rest of her family. Any young person reading this book can likely imagine parts of themselves reflected in the heroine — making their way in the world alone — and thriving. Thus, Karana in some ways represents, among other things, a powerful symbol of growing independence.
One of the remarkable things about this book is the detailed description of life on the island that allows the reader to visualize the life on the island in the 1800s — the richness of wildlife in particular noteworthy— dolphins and sea-elephants swimming in the sea, birds like seagulls and cormorants flying carefree in the sky, pelicans and otters being playful in the shallow waters, abalones and other shellfish lying lazily along the cliffs and wild dogs stray across the island, and even the shape of the island — described as a dolphin lying on its side, with its tail pointing to the east and its nose pointing to the west and heavy winds that blow heavily making hills in the middle of the island as polished smooth and trees that were small and twisted to resist the strong winds— Now can you imagine what global warming-related changes could do to such a setting!
Climate change is an issue that will have far-reaching consequences for California, given its high concentrations of people and developments along the coast. Sea-level rise will gradually affect and threaten coastal communities through an increased frequency of flooding.
What you can do….
Check out some cool suggestions — 120 WAYS YOU CAN COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE.
And for starters, avoid buying bottled water! Tap water is just as good or better, far cheaper, and using it instead of bottled water in plastic saves a lot of greenhouse gas.
Author’s note: R. Rangan Ph.D. is feeling grateful to have recently discovered a youth organization, DoSomething.org — a not-for-profit exclusively for young people and social change. Through this organization, our family has found several teens led campaigns that are working towards making a real-world impact on causes such as health equity and climate change. Recently, we spent an afternoon on a volunteer campaign, Bookmark Climate change — to create and share bookmarks highlighting climate change’s impact on the setting of some of our favorite books — such as the one in this story. We hope you might explore Bookmark Climate change and perhaps creating and share some bookmarks of your own about raising awareness around climate change and what to do about it.
Thank you all for reading.
Check out the original :
Open invitation to join us at Story Bandits to all who feel so inspired to share any of your or your volunteer experiences in a story, poem, or a story poem — all are welcome.
