"Regular Folks Join Gore's Fight to Save the Planet"
Patricia Yollin
April 22, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle (front page)
Link
Excerpts:
A few months ago, Taylor Francis went to Nashville. It wasn't for the music.
Taylor, a 15-year-old from Menlo Park, is one of 1,000 "climate change messengers" around the country. Trained in Tennessee by Al Gore, they are taking up where his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," left off, giving slide-show presentations about what global warming is doing to us and how we can fight back.
They are popping up everywhere -- in churches, synagogues, Rotary Clubs, ski lodges, design firms, museums, senior centers -- and California, with 111 trainees, leads the pack.
They include Wal-Mart employees, a winemaker from Carmel, actress Cameron Diaz, biologists, housewives, a circus juggler, football player Dhani Jones of the Philadelphia Eagles, a beauty queen, Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr and teenagers such as Taylor, one of the three youngest trainees.
"I think that the climate crisis is going to be the defining issue of our generation because it defines the world we live in and every element of the way that we live," Taylor recently told about 400 students and teachers at Hillsborough's Crystal Springs Uplands School, where he is a freshman. "But this is also an issue we can define, because what we do every day can contribute to the solution."
Roaming the stage of the school theater for 35 minutes, he showed 167 slides and spoke with depth and eloquence -- without a note in his hand. He talked about glaciers, hurricanes and droughts, and threw in the Sierra snowpack, too. When he finished, he got a standing ovation from the 350 students -- grades 6 through 12 -- and their teachers.
Seeing "An Inconvenient Truth" was a "life-changing experience," Taylor said.
"Global warming had been just another distant problem," he said. "It didn't seem super-urgent. The movie was a catalyst."
Taylor Francis has given nine slide shows so far, some aimed at young people and others at adults.
Taylor, whose birthday is in late March, was 14 when he was trained in Nashville.
"He's like Johnny Carson," Stanton said. "It's like, 'How old are you, really?' "
After the presentation Thursday at his Hillsborough school, there was plenty that students wanted to know: Does America need to adhere to the Kyoto Protocol and, if so, will it threaten our economy? What about the batteries that hybrids use? Won't emissions in China and India be higher than ours as they get more industrialized? When will ozone-creation technologies be financially available? Should the United States switch to nuclear power? What about ethanol?
Afterward, the reviews were good.
"He talked about California," said Eric Allen, an 18-year-old junior from San Jose. "And he brought up skiing. He really did a good job of bringing it close to home."