While politicians congregate downtown at last week’s Climate Summit Of The Americas, at the International Centre by Pearson a small army of some 600 up-and-coming climate leaders are getting a crash course in environmental activism from Al Gore.
Some have travelled from as far away as Pakistan and Nigeria to be part of Gore’s Climate Reality Project training session and learn how to present the former U.S. vice-president’s slide show on climate change, made famous in Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, which dropped a mind bomb on the global consciousness back in 2006.
Others, like 19-year-old Port Elgin native Corrina Serda, are there as mentors. Serda has already made the presentation 180 times since her first training in 2008.
Up on the stage, Gore launches into a few basics on how the steep rise of CO2 is cooking the planet, though these days he doesn’t have to linger quite as long on the how and why. Gore says all you have to do is watch the nightly news to see climate is changing “like taking a nature hike through the Book Of Revelations.”
Slide after heartbreaking slide of all the latest record-shattering floods, lake-sucking droughts, wild fires, extreme storms, melting glaciers and shattered infrastructure flash across the large screen along with a parade of broken lives left in their wake. It’s paralyzing to watch.
But Gore snaps the diverse crowd into focus. “You cannot allow yourself to feel despair – we have work to do.”
Then he catapults into something new: a long, enthusiastic list of big-picture solutions. He’s found optimism in the global renewables explosion. He’s also using his Reality Project platform and upcoming Live Earth concerts to call not just for “zero global warming pollution” but “zero extreme poverty,” reflecting some of the messaging you’re hearing from Naomi Klein and Pope Francis.
“This is part of their basic philosophy now. It’s radical stuff he’s talking about,” says Gideon Forman, former head of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and current climate policy analyst with the Suzuki Foundation. “It’s very exhilarating.”
With nearly 8,000 people trained in 126 countries to date, Gore isn’t just lobbying leaders at the top, he’s spawning them from the ground up.
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