Wildlife Biology and Climate Change

For years, I have wanted to pursue a career in wildlife biology and conservation. I love nature and wildlife so much that I have a hard time calling my future in this field a "career", because it is truly more like a dream come true. However, that dream is fading and I watch my future slowly disappear as climate change is taking a hold of our planet. With the pace at which climate change is occurring, my objects of study are disappearing and dying and this is not okay with me nor should it be with anyone else.

With the effects of climate change biomes will disappear, current biomes will shift in geographic location along with every single living thing that exists in each biome. Species will suffer due to habitat loss and limited resources. This just absolutely breaks my heart as someone who is so in love with wildlife and hopes to study it for the entirety of the rest of my life. Recently, The Wildlife Society dicussed climate change and adaptation as one of their Hot Issues and included it in their Policy Priorities. Some more of their Policy Priorities include Endangered Species Recovery, Strategic Conservation Planning and Energy Development and Wildlife.

In my future as a wildlife biologist I hope to be able to enjoy the environment I'm working in and help spread awareness of climate change. Being a working person in that field it will be vital to my work to educate others in the public on the importance of protecting, preserving, and conserving the beauty and health of our planet.

Future Coast

Future Coast is an online resource to get an audible look into our future as climate change continues to impact our every day lives. Each voicemail has a specific subject matter, whether it is food, air, water, activity, etc and each voicemail has a different character each with a life that is impacted in a different way by climate change. Each voicemail also takes place in a different year in the future, some being as soon as 2020 and some as late as 2065.

Some of the voicemails are very realistic visions of our possible future an a little scary. For example, a voicemail called Lobster Order is Cancelled is the voice of a man who ordered lobster, his wife's favorite food, from a seafood company five years ago, however they had to cancel his order because they did not have a big enough supply of lobster for everyone who was on the waiting list.

Another voicemail called Grab Some Fresh Air is not so believable. A wife asks her husband to stop at the store to pick up a bottle of fresh air because she had forgotten. I just don't believe we will be bottling or will even need to be bottling "fresh air" by the 2050's.

 Future Coast is a very easily accessible activity, however not so much a game. Perhaps a way to use it in a classroom is to have students pick a few voicemails that really stand out to them and then have them write and analysis about the few they selected. They may choose to express how it made them feel or even cause them to do research to discover how realistic the voicemail might actually be. All in all, Future Coast is not really a game, but just an activity.