Tough Talking
30/03/08 21:00
I'm just back from a
quick three-day trip to Austin, Texas, where I gave
a talk with a Hewlett-Packard manager to some
undergrads. I gave three of these talks in
Pennsylvania about a month ago at three different
universities. The basic point of these talks can be
summarized as an answer to the question, What is
anyone doing about climate change? I'm describing
climate adaptation, and then talking a little about
my work in China. Then the other person -- Pierre
in PA, John in TX -- talk about HP's climate
mitigation work to reduce the company's carbon
footprint.
Much of my talk, frankly, is a bit canned -- slides of greenhouse gases over time, trends in temperature and precipitation, a few general categories of impacts, and so on. Lara Hansen has a fairly standard set of about four points that describe climate adaptation strategies. I added a few slides that talk about regional climate trends and potential and realized impacts, then I move on to the Yangtze.
I find these talks very difficult and quite emotional and the same time that I know they are, in terms of giving undergrads some fear and hope, extremely effective. I'm not a canned speaker. I am out there, somewhere, doing something. The talks in PA were not easy, and I found my voice catching a few times over particular issues. But I almost lost it in Austin.
I ran into two glitches during the talk. First, I had altered the canned slide on global water impacts. Originally this slide showed two children, probably in the subcontinent, gleefully pumping water from a handpump. It's bright, pretty, and happy. I cut this photo and added several of my own from India: men digging a well by hand in a field in India to get access to groundwater, two WWF colleagues standing in a dry river bed about 40 or 50 feet below a mark on the pylon of a bridge that shows where the flood level was in 1992, one of the world experts on e-flows walking across another dry stretch of river bed, and a terrible image of cremation sites in a river bed. In fact, all of these photos are from my last trip to India and the Gambiri river, which has been dry along a significant stretch for over five years -- a victim of a long drought and an inter-caste war. Explaining these images to the 40 undergrads in the room, the timbre of my voice went from amusement (at the bridge) to the horrifying crisis of people hoping that the river returns so that, in keeping with their religion, their relatives can enter the sea and find salvation. But I kept myself in a reasonable amount of control and went on talking.
But then I hit the second glitch on one of the canned slides. There are two photos: one is a closeup of an apparently smiling polar bear. I said, The last time I gave this talk, there was a public debate on whether or not to list the polar bear as an endangered species. This doesn't really matter anymore, though. Polar bears will soon be functionally extinct, and your children or grandchildren will see them in their new habitat: zoos. And that's the only place. I then pointed at a pretty picture of an alpine meadow of wildflowers, a ridgeline, and the sky beyond. And this shows the kind of high-altitude habitat that is rapidly disappearing worldwide -- these wildflowers and their little specialized butterflies are getting pushed off the mountain top. They have no place to go. And they will disappear, unknown and unnoticed by almost everyone because they aren't photogenic or charismatic or big or have a backbone.
At least, that was what I tried to say. The choke came back while talking about the endangered species act and I had to stop for a moment. I thought about leaving or just turning away. I tried not to look at the audience or Eliot or my co-speaker John. Just to power through the moment. But the choke stayed there, letting me squeeze out the rest of the words only through a serious effort. To get to the next slide, to finish and move on. To think about something more positive.
In truth, I really hate this talk. I am often disturbed that I have seen such horrible things in this job already, and I feel very concerned that I can see into the future several awful, depressing decades. The 20th century was so horrifying, so terrible for the death, waste, and destruction. The 20th century was a miserable failure. And this century will clearly be worse. But while I am worried and afraid, I am most motivated by positive action. I cannot think about the loss, only what we can do for redemption, to carry as much over the river as we can. Whether or not we make it as well.
Moving on in the talk, I saw two young women chuckling to each other in the back, but I am too old to worry about such concerns. And I saw an older man dressed in a custodian's uniform sitting alone in the back row, arms crossed and shaking his head. I hope his grandchildren do not despise him in a few years. I know this worldview is hard to reconcile.
The denouement is relatively good, at least. As soon as the second talk was over, perhaps a quarter of the room's arms shot up with questions. Almost all of them were focused and showed that they were listening, and listening very hard, to both of us. Some stayed for an hour to ask questions and to be in touch with our message that bad things are happening while some people are trying to make a change.
Nonetheless, I am glad this is the last of these talks. I could not do these regularly.
