One of the most powerful aspects of It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change, by Margaret Atwood, is the inclusion of visual images throughout the article. Although we discussed this briefly in class, there was one aspect to the images that I feel like we did not spend enough time discussing. Margaret mentioned how, in the first section of the article, the visuals changed from Picture One to Picture Two to Picture Three. She mentioned how in Picture One the visuals appear futuristic and fantastical, taken from movies or of models posing for ‘future’ pictures. We also talked about how Picture Two features dystopian pictures, and how Picture Three feels more ‘realistic’ because they are pictures we are confronted with on a daily basis. One thing that struck me about this discussion, that we did not get a chance to discuss in class, is what it means that Picture Two, while appearing dystopian, also pictures real people’s lives. They simply appear dystopian because we are not confronted with them as often as Picture Three. I have included the image that I found most powerful from this section as a reference. We talked about how Pictures One and Two seemed less ‘believable,’ and how that was supported by the choice of visuals, but what does it mean when Picture Two doesn’t seem ‘believable’ to us, when it clearly depicts a real world in which real people are living? There are people on earth right now who have experienced that ‘dystopian future’ that we cannot believe. Their images are used here in an attempt to paint a picture of the end of times, with no mention of who they are or what, exactly, is happening in these photos. While I recognize the work they did in helping to paint Atwood’s version of a dystopian future, I am left to wonder how the people in those pictures would feel about their lives being used as a picture of the worst possible future.
