In Pursuit of Positive Forward Momentum
An ever-aching question has been gnawing at the back of my mind these last few years. How am I, in my role as an animator, artist, and human actively participating in creating the climate issues we are now experiencing?
While I lived in Shishmaref, Alaska, I met with many wonderful neighbors and spoke with them about the changes they were seeing. Coastal erosion is a constant for sea-side communities, but the devastation and rapidity of these changes were astonishing; They detailed how entire homes were picked up and swept away from the huge weather shifts. The migration patterns of the animals many subsisted on, including my own family, were also altering due to both freeze and thaw patterns changing. In the short, three years I spent there I saw so much drastic change firsthand. In 2016 our first ocean freeze begin in September and thawed in June. By 2019 we did not see a full ocean freeze until January and the sea began thawing in April, bringing extremely unsafe conditions for folks to cross the ice for travel or hunting.
The community has been there for generations, first in seasonal migration and then in the forced settlement there via When talking with friends like Dennis Davis and neighbors like Cliff Weyiouanna, these changes were not like any in their memory. They were solemn conversations, and it furthered the question “What can we do?”
Dennis, or D-D (Double D), has been mapping the island and nearby shore with his drones each winter since I’ve known him in 2016. He’s talked about capturing it to share the change, and show people what is happening to the island.
I left the island, with my family in tow, in 2019 to pursue my goals as a filmmaker and creative educator. I still find myself pining over my need to reflect positive change after leaving. Transition is hard at the best of times, and with COVID it’s been an uphill battle towards “settling” since the moment I left Alaska with my life, family, work, and vision constantly challenged due to these changes. During the last year especially I struggled to maintain the balance of work and home, with my family torn in two locations to survive the pandemic. In the back of my head, a constant nagging has been a persistent and tiring concern of “Am I doing enough? What is enough? How can I make change happen towards reversing climate change? Why should I bother— I am only one person! Everything is too much!”
And in truth, it was and it is. We all lived through an insanely strenuous year. No one has escaped it, in some way it has affected us all. Now that I am vaccinated and my family is reunited, I find myself picking up work and trying to find the answers to the questions again; “ How can we make a change, here and now?”
This desire to both create a better world and as well as contribute in some ways is a vital element to my course as a creative. Perhaps, it is somewhat selfish in that it fulfills the “itch I want to scratch”, while providing no solution myself. This is an issue.
I have been doing research, both with others such as the 2017 NASA/ Earth SIGNS workshop in Fairbanks, Alaska as well as my own reading and delving into books and movements by scientists such as Dr. Paul A. Newman and youth climate activists such as Greta Thurnberg and Sareya Taylor. I see that so many people still do not understand the difference between “weather” and “climate”, nor the very real effects we are currently experiencing.
I have struggled to worry about the validity of creating another “art piece” about climate change; it is very easy to comment on something without providing solutions. This was a light bulb moment for me. What is needed is a better understanding of the issue, and also precisely how communities themselves can have a hand in making those changes.
While I cannot provide the infrastructure funding or major shifts themselves, I can speak to people about these very things in an appealing way; Animation. This medium is so vital to helping to speak about so many issues that can be hard for general audiences to understand by specifically making it more digestible.
