Earth Day, 2007

Dear Al Gore,
My name is joaquin behr, I am argentine and I am very interested about Global Warming. I fanally find the way contacting you. Maybe you dont believe me a I am 15 years old. Sorry about the gramatically mistakes. I love your film, and I want to take with you because of that. I want you to know that here in argentina some people are with you and It would be wonderful that you give`s one more conferation about this
Yours faithfully,
Joaquin

“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
- President Eisenhower

EARTH DAY 2007
Regular folks join Gore's fight to rescue the planet

Patricia Yollin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 22, 2007

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.

"There was much greater interest than usual," said theater manager John Hauer. "Being one of them is a huge part of connecting with the audience. This is a nerdy scientific topic."

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."

When Gore was asked what he'd do next after the film's premiere in May, he came up with the idea of training messengers to spread the word about the climate crisis. More than 10,000 people applied.

"They found us -- we didn't have a chance to look for them," said Jenny Clad, executive director of Gore's nonprofit, the Climate Project. "We were overwhelmed and awestruck. People are on fire."

Continued:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/22/MNGEMPDE6T1....