It's been seven weeks since I stepped onto the Al Gore freight train in Nashville and still no sign of it slowing down. There's been media interviews, frenzied bookings for over two dozen events, reading hundreds of pages of new reports on the impacts of climate change, harried lessons in remote control power point projectors, four new and voluminous email listserves or various Climate Project trainee groupings, lunches, dinners, phone calls, emails...it's all climate change all the time and it just keeps coming.
On the plus side, of the two thousand some odd generations that have walked the Earth in 50,000 years of civilization, how many have gotten to live through the broad scale paradigm shift we are standing in the eye of right now? A case in point was the BC government's throne speech -- incidentally possibly also the longest throne speech in 50,000 years of history -- last Tuesday. If someone had told me a year ago even one sentence of the section on climate change would be spoken in our legislature, I would have told them it was impossible. It's a satisfying thing to see a government change its mind, but it's a beautiful thing to see a government change its heart.
Me, I'm cautiously optimistic - but a really long throne speech is not enough to convince me that both the heart and mind has changed.
The proof will be in the action that follows all the talk.
And if the required action does not occur, that would be worth less than zero.
Way less.
OK?
.
Posted by: RossK | February 17, 2007 at 05:26 PM