The Climate Project, the experience

It's time that I share a bit more about my experience in Nashville over the winter break... I've been thinking about it quite a bit in preparation for sharing through a dialog with my class tomorrow, but with getting back here and immediately jumping into a big presentation and a final exam (taken yesterday) - well, life has been full. So. The Climate Project.

Many of you have seen Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" in which he talks about global warming -- how he became familiar with the concept, the science behind it, how it is affecting the world (planet, people, and other animals), and what we need to do in order to start addressing it. Apparently one time when he was giving the presentation in person, he said something sort of off-the-cuff about training 1,000 people who could also deliver the presentation in order to get the word out.

From Jan. 4-6 of this year, 200 people -- mostly from the US, but some from around the world -- gathered at one of five scheduled training sessions near Gore's home in Nashville. Before I go into the details, let me say that I -- as well as 999 other people -- are looking for opportunities to share this presentation with you and your groups -- friends, faith groups, businesses, schools, environmental clubs, Rotary, Kiwanis -- anyone. So email me if you're interested in setting something up, and we'll work out the details for me to visit, or I'll connect you with someone more local.

So. Now I'm one of the calvary.

Thursday afternoon we began to pour into the lobby of the hotel. As we arrived and checked in at the registration table, we were given a binder full of information, an organic t-shirt, and a name badge with a colored sticker on it... the colored sticker is important as it determined which group of ~50 we would be working in. My sticker was blue... which made me happy, because I like blue. So after checking in, I meandered my way through a maze of tables to find the place where the blue group was beginning to gather. (The color groups were basically assigned geographically, the somehow Hawaii was placed in with the middle of the country... I guess "middle" could mean middle of the contiguous US or middle of the Pacific.)

For the next hour or two, we mixed and mingled and met each other... senior managers from very large companies, high school students, PhDs, and people with every experience and every age in between. Then we walked to Union Station for dinner... and had more time to get to know each other... and hear from Mr. Gore.

The next morning, the training officially began. Mr. Gore was with us all day on Friday. After his staff went through the schedule for the two days, he started going through the slideshow, basically just as he would if he were normally sharing it with an audience... that was the first 2 hours. We had another 6 hours for him to go back through the slides and talk about why each was included in the slideshow, explain the talking points for the slide, the transitions between the slides, and the overall structure for the presentation. Unfortunately, by around 3:00, we'd only made it through 50 of the 250+ slides that we were supposed to go through... so we rushed a bit at the end and stayed a little late in order to get through them all. For dinner we went to BB King's for good food and live music!

Saturday morning began with Kevin Coyle of the National Wildlife Federation talking about discussing global warming solutions with diverse audiences. Kevin's a neat guy -- and I'll come back to his topic later. Andy Goodman followed Kevin's presentation. Andy's also a neat guy -- he's done some writing for television, as well as written "Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes" -- which is both entertaining and very informing, in addition to being available online at www.agoodmanonline.com -- highly recommended to any of you who do any presenting. Then in the afternoon we went into our color groups and a few of us had a chance to practice talking through some of the more science-intense parts of the presentation, then returned to the larger group to practice Q&A time. So Andy had the microphone and would choose someone from the audience, then he would ask a question that Gore commonly receives when he delivers the presentation... then we would all realize how much work we needed to do in order to know the basics of the presentation well enough in order to answer the basic questions... or direct them to other sources to find answers.

So that's a rundown on the experience of being at The Climate Project training. I'm going to share more of my thoughts just as soon as I get time about how this project fits in with the concept of sustainability...