Earth Charter Climate Crisis Community Summit of October 11

I reluctantly accepted the challenge to coordinate this Summit as part of the www.earthcharterus.org national campaign. It has taken me several weeks in April to line up two outstanding keynoters: climatologist James Hansen of NASA/GISS and sustainable communities specialist Gwendolyn Hallsmith of Montpelier, Vermont. It is taking me September and these first two weeks of October to organize the Summit, particularly its publicity.

Thus, all TV stations and newspapers in NYC were contacted, mostly by email, four universities had point persons for the Summit’s publicity, business world was contacted particularly the chambers of commerce in the five boroughs and unflinching pressure to participate was put on the Mayor’s Office of Operations which is charged with the implementation of PlaNYC2030. At the last UN Global Affairs meeting at Community Church of New York UU the tally was about 85, about one third of them are students who are attending (at least in the morning) because their professor has given them extra credit.

For the next couple of days still many things to be done, particularly the web streaming part of the Summit where my laptop had to be equipped (with difficulty) with two extra gigs of memory.