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My March 8, 2006 Climate Project presentation was part of The Adventures in Learning series sponsored by the Shepherd’s Center (http://www.shepherdscenter.org) which has the credo - Promoting and Supporting Successful Aging. The meeting location was Salemtowne Moravian retirement community (http://www.salemtowne.org).

The Adventures in Learning series was well attended this day with about 100 retirees attending 4 tracks of day long one hour lectures on various topics ranging from Middle Eastern society, Environmental Awareness to Pilates. I was invited to speak to this group by our friends, retired Wake Forest Anthropologist Dr. Tony Layng and his wife Donna. They are very active in their 70’s and my husband and I met them playing tennis at the Wake Forest indoor tennis center. Tony and Donna were also the ones that invited us to take a Peace Bus to DC to protest the Iraq war.

I set up in the impressive board room of Salemtowne’s community center. There were about 25 people in attendance gathered around the long board room table and along the walls of the room. I presented the 40 minute version of the slide show that I created using the notes posted that recanted The Oprah Winfrey Show slide show version. Afterward I had many questions. I assumed correctly that there would be retirees from RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company there. I was displaced during the KKR buyout of RJR and incorporated the tobacco lobbyist reference into my talk but not into the slides. I am very careful doing this saying, “I worked on the Joe Camel promotional system and was part of the PAC when I worked there. Mr. Jim Johnston, the former RJR CEO was part of our Old North State Winegrowers Cooperative. I understand the mind numbing duality of making your living from a product the world is against, and should be. But people change. I know I have.”

A retired RJR Asian woman research scientist asked, “What are governmental plans for the impending disasters and what other GHG do we need to consider.” I mentioned that FEMA is the best disaster relief organization in the world and we saw how badly they handled Katrina. Governments are not ready and this is why it will cost us less in human lives and GDP to do more about GW now rather than later. I brought up the Alaskan government’s predicament involved in moving small villages which cost millions of dollars better spent someplace else if they did not have this inconvenient GW. Regarding the other GHG, I mentioned methane and how covering landfills to trap methane as an alternative fuel was a double good whammy in that it reduced two GHG at least if not more by displacing some quantity of CO2 that would ultimately have been burned instead of the methane and also the net loss of the methane that would have gone into the atmosphere as a GHG had it not been captured. I also mentioned that we eat too much meat. If we could cut our meat consumption in half, we and the planet would be healthier. Rainforest are being cleared to provide grazing space for cattle which is a negative double whammy because cows give off lots of methane (they fart a lot, I said and got a good shared embarrassed laugh) and the trees are no longer there to absorb the excess CO2.

One question was, “What happened to you to get “The Religion” regarding wanting to proselytize about Global Warming?” This being the south and my being from the south, I understood this to be a compliment and not a stab. Religious lingo is commonplace in the south. I pulled out Dr. Seuss’s “The Larax”. I told them to buy this book for their grandchildren and make sure they talked to their grandchildren about nature to instill that sense of awe. This was how I started, as a 'wee child'. I think if we instill a love - a true love of nature- one can not help but want to take care and be appreciative of all that we have been given. I told them the micro and macro solution action items. I only printed 10 copies of my solutions hand out and needed many more. I did have enough surveys to give out but only got 6 back. They were all positive. I really enjoyed speaking to this group of caring retirees. It made my day!
 

Posted by vivianfulk at 08:51 AM | Permalink

The meeting took place during lunch from 11:30 AM to 1 PM on Wednesday February 21, 2007 for a group of 20 middle aged business men that are members of The National Exchange Club. This group sponsors and helped start SCAN- Stop Child Abuse Now- in Winston-Salem, NC. A co-worker is a member and invited me to speak to her group. They meet for lunch each Wednesday at The Piedmont Club which is a member’s only dinning club described as:
ClubCorp Business Clubs provide a network of comfortable and inviting venues for Members to meet and entertain clients and associates; skillfully integrating personalized service and technology within a business-conducive environment; orchestrated to support and leverage the business objectives of the membership.

The Piedmont Club could be described as the hob-knob place for the movers and shakers of Winston-Salem. My tennis partner’s husband is the United Way director for Forsyth County and he dines there with the CEO’s of his major contributors: Wachovia Bank, RJ Reynolds, Sara Lee, Hanes, etc.

I set up the slide show as per Al Gore’s show which he used on the Oprah Show since I only had 30 minutes to speak. I set up my projector, computer, screen and materials at 7 AM that morning before going to work which is only a couple of blocks away. I placed my Climate Project calling card and a “Call to Action” sticker at each place setting.

Things were going great until I started getting heckling with statements like “This is garbage science”, “But I read in the papers that Antarctic ice is increasing”, “We’re never getting those ugly wind machines up on our mountains”.  I ignored him and stayed on track until I got to the Three-Misconceptions-Slide. By then my blood pressure was as high as the decibel level of my voice. I added sound effects- “Isn’t there disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not?” like the sound made during a TV game show- “nnnnnnnngh WRONG! There are ZERO REAL scientists that disagree!!!!,” and I punctuated it with the shape of a big “O” with my fist pointing at my heckler. I was so angry because he would not shut up. But I pressed on to a standing ovation. I think his club mates were embarrassed for him. Afterward, people were looking at the books I brought – US Climate Change studies and other literature I had bought. I handed out the surveys.

And that was it. The best thing that happened out of all of it is I made connections at the Piedmont Club. I had lunch with the membership committee chair on Friday and joined the club to use as my place to make my future presentations. We are organizing an event for the Professional Women’s Forum which meets at the club for me to speak to them in the fall as a joint event with the Wine Club since my husband and I are winegrape growers. She hopes it will be well attended. But in the mean time, I can use the lovely meeting facilities to host any other talks. I tentatively have a meeting with the Sierra Club’s cool cities group to make a joint presentation to the City of Winston-Salem. This would be an ideal location to host that event.
 

Posted by vivianfulk at 08:49 AM | Permalink

Saturday Feb 3, 2007 was National Arbor Day.

In order to spread the word about the global warming crisis, I set up a vendor booth along with about twenty five other vendors showing their wine industry wares at the North Carolina Winegrowers Association annual meeting.  For my booth, I created three talking point posters.
One large three panel poster was the centerpiece with twenty slides from the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” titled “The Climate Project”. I set up a flat panel monitor with AIT slide show on automatic. On the second poster board, in order to draw people, were beautiful photographs of our vineyard in each season: spring, summer, fall and winter. As people walked by, I could see the quizzical look on their face. I told them I was not selling anything but asked, “Did they know today was National Arbor Day?” I had them come closer to look at the third poster with the hardiness zone map changes I downloaded from www.arborday.com that shows the U.S. hardiness zone changes from 1990 to 2006. Also on this poster I showed a classic viticulturist zone map of grape varietals by zone broken down by growing degree days which is the heat summation of the growing season. I showed our vineyard’s 2006 GGD and how we are on the verge of heating up too much. I then said, “If we continue to increase heat summation the next 16 years in the same fashion that we have the last 16 years, the Yadkin Valley will no longer be a viable wine region.”
The reactions varied.  There were winegrowers at higher elevations that were not worried. However, after I moved to the second poster on which I used 25 slides from the AIT slide show, I segued into the other problems with global warming – more vineyard damage from stronger hurricanes, tornados, soil moisture decline and increased pressure of infectious diseases from insect vectors not dying out because of less frost days. Dr. Turner Sutton, a pierces disease researcher at NCSU was very interested. He pressed me to tell him what we could do about it.
On the back of a third poster, I dramatically turned it over and said we had to turn over a new leaf. It contained a NC Green Power application and information from NCSU “Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency”. I explained that my goal is to make the Yadkin Valley AVA the first carbon-neutral wine region in the world. I said, “What a marketing plan, eh?” As the day went on, two other professors, Dr. Grant Holder and Dr. Lucian Georgescu said they would help write a grant requesting funds for Yadkin Valley wineries to achieve this goal.   
One reporter, Rebel Goode, the editor of “One the Vine” at yadkinvalley.com, talked to me at length and wants to do a story for the next issue. I think I was well received. I have a lot of follow-up work!

Posted by vivianfulk at 08:43 AM | Permalink