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Posted on 04/12/2007 6:48:52 AM PDT by P-40
In Austin, little Al Gores spread climate change news Austinites trained to present slide show featured in "An Inconvenient Truth."
By Asher Price AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Thursday, April 12, 2007
Wayne Hunt has seen Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" more than 50 times.
"When I like something, I really, really like something," Hunt said.
Colin Rowan, who now runs a communications firm, made a Climate Change Project presentation to the 'converted or near-converted' earlier this year. On Tuesday, he took his message to the House Environmental Legislative Caucus at the Capitol.
The thing he likes second-most is "Braveheart," which he reckons he has seen 15 times.
Gore's 2006 movie, half a slide-show lecture about climate change, half a documentary showing Gore roaming the Earth like some lone prophet, has won a pair of Oscars and catapulted the issue onto the national political agenda.
Hunt, 57, saw it four times in the theater last summer, and when he heard about the Climate Change Project, a program in Nashville, Tenn., that trains people to present the slide show featured in the movie, he dashed off an application.
In January, he took a few days off as the head of the University of Texas' academic conference center and flew to Tennessee.
Hunt is among the dozen or so people in the Austin area, including Mayor Will Wynn, who essentially are Al Gore apostles.
Along with nurses, schoolteachers, ministers and scientists from across the country, they paid their way to Tennessee and paid for their lodging, and in return are given an electronic version of the PowerPoint slide show — which is full of nifty maps, graphs, photos and tips for cutting down on greenhouse gases — and trained for free in how to spread Gore's Truth. (The City of Austin paid for Wynn's ticket to Nashville.)
Altogether, more than 30 Texans are among about 1,000 people from across the country who have received the training, according to Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for the program.
Months after the movie made its way to DVD, these truest of believers have presented the slide show in cafes, churches, basements, classrooms and Rotary Clubs.
Scientists agree that people are contributing to climate change.
But implicit in the mission of these presenters is that the American public as a whole, from the man in the Governor's Mansion to the man on the street, remains uncertain about how much the climate is shifting, whether the shift is inherently bad and what the public can do to better the environment.
This year, before an audience of about 25 of what he called "the converted or near-converted," (including his mother, up from Houston) Colin Rowan, then Texas spokesman for the nonprofit group Environmental Defense, offered the slide show in the tiny theater at the back of the Hideout cafe on Congress Avenue.
Admission was free: Presenters trained in Nashville pledge not to profit from show.
As he cycled through the PowerPoint slides, dressed in a white button-down shirt and jeans, Rowan made sure to give a Texas bent to the presentation.
"We are national champs, by far," he said, describing how Texas tops the nation in emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change.
"He took the science out of the scientific data," audience member Jeanne McConnell said. "He gave (climate change) a much more understandable feel."
Then Rowan flashed to a map showing the Gulf of Mexico eating away at the Texas coast as sea levels rise.
"My family has a house in Galveston, so that's a bummer," he said.
On Tuesday, at a lunchtime session in a Capitol lounge with the House Environmental Legislative Caucus, Rowan cycled through a presentation and charged his audience to plan for longer droughts as the climate changes.
"You guys need to think about what we're going to do with water," he told a dozen lawmakers and staffers as they tore into roast beef sandwiches and chips.
Admission to the Climate Project is tough: The organizers accepted 1,000 people (trained for several days apiece in groups of 200) out of 5,000 applications. Applicants had to explain their public speaking experience and describe the audience they would attract.
The most compelling part of the Nashville training is the 12 hours or so that Gore himself offers, say the Austin presenters.
Gore talks for so long that he goes hoarse.
"He said it's a moral issue, not a political issue," Hunt said. "He asked us not even to mention his name.
"He called us his cavalry," Hunt said. "He really encouraged us to be normal, to be who we are, to bring our own talents to this and not try to be Al Gore."
Hunt, a formally trained classical guitarist (and father of Phoebe Hunt, a member of the Austin musical group the Hudsons), has even composed a pair of songs about climate change that he will incorporate into the first of his presentations, May 4 at the conference center for retired UT faculty.
Austin bears a special responsibility to address climate change, said Wynn, who went through the training in January.
"We're the capital of the most polluting state in the most polluting country in the world," he said.
Wynn, who says he is one of a pair of public officials to receive the slide-show training, has given the presentation at least four times already, and city staff members from the police monitor to the fire chief to a municipal court judge have sat through it, he said.
He has lined up a dozen presentations over the next couple of months, from a breakfast meeting with the Downtown Austin Alliance to a session with his literary club to a meeting of the Jewish Community Association of Austin.
The stories told by the presenters suggest that when they saw "An Inconvenient Truth" something clicked.
Maura Nevel Thomas, who delivered the presentation at Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar in late March and offers it again today at the Crossings (a spa northwest of Austin), said she experienced an epiphany when she saw the movie last year.
"I could not live with myself if I did not do something," said the 36-year old, who consults with businesses about how to make their staff work efficiently.
Nevel Thomas already had been a humdrum recycler, but the day after the movie, she bought a Toyota Prius and soon applied for the Climate Project training.
"I felt a profound sense of responsibility," said the woman who refers to herself on her Web site as a "climate change messenger."
Arvella Oliver said the movie "felt like someone had turned the lights on." (Compact fluorescent lights, presumably.)
A 40-year-old mother of two with a master's degree in history, she thought: "This is what I'm supposed to be doing. All I do is laundry and groceries and run up and down the road."
Oliver presented the slide show in mid-February to an agreeable audience at a Methodist Church in Georgetown, where she lives.
Last month, she gave a half-hour version at the Pflugerville Rotary Club and got into a debate with a man equipped with a file of counterevidence.
"I told him he had cherry-picked his facts," Oliver said.
"I'm working up the nerve to rent a room in the library in Georgetown," she said. "I'll put fliers up and put an ad in the paper and give the presentation to whomever."
Missionaries, what’s next, bikes, ties and white shirts?
“the head of the University of Texas’ academic conference center”
‘Nuff said, the University smells money. Disgusting!
Shouldn't they be eating insects and weeds they catch and pull themselves? Roast beef and chip production spews a lot of CO2.
IMHO, anybody who watches any movie more than 50 times is either a real slow learner—or needs to get a real life!
I would feel more comfortable being around someone that watches reruns of Pee Wee Herman’s Play House for several hours a day than I would be around this guy.
That wasn’t a documentary. It was a commercial.
And they say drugs are a victimless crime! I have come to believe that the reason they called it “getting wasted” is that it results in so many wasted, less than productive lives.
There are plenty of wasted people in Austin. I read the letters to the editor and 90% are liberal, Bush and Republican haters.
Do they get capes and learn how to pronounce "Excelsior!"?
Please ping me if you find one I’ve missed.
OKSooner and I are doing the POGW
ping list while xcamel is on vacation.
What else do you expect from “Moscow on the Colorado” or the “Peoples Republic of Austin”.....
Not to mention what happens when you import most of California. :)
“Hunt is among the dozen or so people in the Austin area, including Mayor Will Wynn, who essentially are Al Gore apostles.
“Along with nurses, schoolteachers, ministers and scientists from across the country, they paid their way to Tennessee and paid for their lodging, and in return are given an electronic version of the PowerPoint slide show — which is full of nifty maps, graphs, photos and tips for cutting down on greenhouse gases — and trained for free in how to spread Gore’s Truth. (The City of Austin paid for Wynn’s ticket to Nashville.)
Altogether, more than 30 Texans are among about 1,000 people from across the country who have received the training, according to Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for the program. “
-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—<>-—
Man, Oh Man: this is so reminiscent of the Moonies and other cult groups.
“-—He took the science out of the scientific data-—”
You’re right: this is really golden - shows how poorly people (including some scientists I know) are dealing with this issue now.
I hadn’t seen that.
Thanks.
I wonder if Leslie got invited to attend. He talks to a lot of people....and that is the type they are looking for, right? :)
Who pays for this program?
I think the participants do.
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