How often have you read a book or story on "the ice planet" or "the desert planet"? And yet, if you look at the planet where humans evolved, we live anywhere in any climate we can physically stand-- and if we can't stand it, we build a machine so we can!

Humans are immensely adapatable-- if there's a section of the world they don't live on, they will do their best to figure out how to get there. There are now people living on platforms on top of the sea, as well as people living in habitats under it. The Middle East, the most hotly-contested region in the world, is in the middle of a desert!

And yet, our fiction is filled with limited climates-- cold planets, or hot ones, or places with too much rain all the time.

Authors use climate to reinforce the mood or theme of their story and to engage the reader's emotions. Who doesn't have some emotional response to a frozen wilderness or a lush, verdant field?

Today's exercise:

Get out a map or go to an international website like National Geographic. Look everywhere. Antarctica. Saudi Arabia. The rainforests of Brazil. The rainforests of Central California. Look at how the different climates behave and appear.

The first fifteen minute exercise is to write down all the different climates you can think of-- if you need to just say a city name, do it. Sometimes "Seattle" is more evocative than "northern humid temperate climate."

In your notebook, in the "Physical Features" section, write these climates down in a list.

Next, read through the list and write one or two words that describe how that climate, either the word itself or the way the place itself makes you feel, if you've been there before.

Try to stick to abstract adjectives; emotional words, if you can, but nouns are also okay.

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Conservation maps