Standing Ovations for Al Gore and Bethine Church

Former Vice President, Al Gore received several standing ovations in Boise, Idaho last night at the 2007 Frank Church Institute Conference on Public Affairs. Bethine Church also received standing ovations as she introduced Gore and noted that their families had been close friends for many years. For me and many of the "age 50+ crowd" it was a heartwarming and stimulating remembrance of the environmental movement in action 36 years ago.

As early as 1970, at the first Earth Day Idaho's Senator Frank Church warned of the "Green-House effect" and the melting of the polar ice caps. Al Gore has been publicly involved in trying to promote citizen and congressional attention to this issue since the early 1980's.

Gore encouraged a full house of 10,000 enthusiastic people to do everything possible to affect changes in attitudes and behavior related to the negative changes taking place all over the world because of human related "Global Warming" activities. The Keynote presentation was powerful and parts were tailored to an Idaho audience. It was also similar to the recently Academy Award nominated movie "An Inconvenient Truth," that has become one of the best documentary feature films of our times and has been viewed by many millions of people worldwide.

This huge issue and the many subtopics involved illustrates the growing need for Social Networking communication projects I have advocated on this Blog. If all of the 10,000 people who listened to Al Gore last night were to redouble their efforts to be actively involved locally, regionally, nationally and globally I feel it would make a difference. Add the millions of people around the world who have also seen the slide show or the movie and this would be a powerful force to dramatically affect changes in the political will needed to effect changes in Global Warming trends.

I will look for Social Networking Internet opportunities on this issue and report them in this blog as time permits. A few web sites that encourage education and participation include; stopglobalwarming.org, climatecrises.net, Union of Concerned Scientists, and Wikipedia (lots of information and references) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has changed its web page title from Global Warming to Climate Change and also provides interesting information and sections on "What you can do".

Al Gore's active and highly visible involvement in the late 1980's and 90's promoting public computer networks, the Information Highway and the Internet should also be noted in this context. A good condensed source of information about Al Gore's life and work is found on Wikipedia.