David Orr

David Orr, our Focus the Nation keynote speaker, gave a stupendous presentation tonight! I sat up in the front row to try and get a decent recording on a DVR, while John Sopiwnik took some photos. I just posted a few of those, though I'm still working on getting a audio and/or video clip of the speech up. Keep your fingers crossed. In the meantime I'll try and summarize, as best I can, some of Orr's key points.

His speech and the accompanying Powerpoint presentation were entitled "Some Like It Hot...But Lots More Don't: The Changing Climate of U.S. Politics." In it, Orr emphasized the idea that environmentalism should be a bipartisan issue; it should not be isolated to either the left or the right of the political spectrum. According to Orr, the politics of environmentalism are complicated by the time lag between cause and effect in the environment, the complexity of climatology science, global vs. national issues and responsibilities, denial, and partisan filters, among others. He also cited some sobering statistics. Apparently, we are already committed, as a global community, to a 1.4-1.8 degree Celsius climate change, just from our past emissions. This warming, if left unchecked, could lead to what Orr called "global destabilization"--symptoms of which may include: rising seas, frequent and destructive storms, changing disease patterns (as areas of the globe that were previously inhospitable to certain disease-causing organisms become accessible), widespread drought and water shortages, changing ecosystems, coral bleaching, and political/economic disorder.

"There's no easy way out, no magic bullet," Orr said. "We need to be summoned to a different level of thinking."

Orr himself has been working closely with the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP) Advisory Committee. PCAP's goal is to promote the creation and installment of a federal climate action plan within 100 days of the 44th presidency (i.e. the next presidential administration). You can check out PCAP here; they have some very urgent and immediate goals, but at this point, I think our environmental policy needs to be fast-tracked a bit. At any rate, Orr's speech and powerpoint presentation ran to about 90 minutes, and you can see from the photos that we had at least 150 people in attendance!

Update: All right, so I've made good on my earlier promise...sort of...Here's a link to the introductory portion of David Orr's speech. The video is pretty dark, and it's occasionally hard to make out what he's saying. Bear with us, though, we have a recording of his whole presentation, and we're working on getting that online.