For this blog assignment we were to select an essay by Franke James and reflect on it. I chose the first one of hers that I read, A Green Winter: Will Global Warming Be Good For Canada?, because it was on a topic I care about and also, it caught my eye.
I thought James' essay was excellent and well written. Presenting it as a series of doodles on illustrations and snapshots really brought the message across. At one point the author is talking about how when she went to a resort, all the ski lifts were empty - on a snapshot of lonely looking ski lifts in the sky. At another point she talked about how she was looking over the mountain and not seeing any snow, alongside a photo of green and brown landscape, in the middle of January. This reminded me of a pivotal scene in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, when he showed a picture of a famous mountain (I can't remember which one) as it was years ago, capped with snow, and how it is currently, all brown and shriveled up. You can talk about global warming all you want, but nothing drives the point home like seeing an illustration of what climate change has wrought.
I also liked how James showed photos of Canadian cultural icons, like the Twoonie and a Tim Horton's cup, and how connected with snow they were. It really shows how powerfully snow is intertwined with the Canadian identity, and how much global warming threatens that identity.
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