Barack Obama - Boise, Idaho - Community and Environmental Service

Senator Barack Obama visited Idaho and gave a campaign speech in Boise, to about 14,000 people on February 2, 2008. (Notice in the photo to the right, taken by Katy Flanagan on a cell phone, that only a few seats are empty and these are located directly behind a curtain and a crowd of standing people hiding a view of Obama) This was an absolutely amazing turnout for a Democrat in possibly the most conservative Republican State in the U.S. The media and conversations on the street indicate that there will probably be a record number of participants in the Idaho Democratic Caucus being held tonight, February 5. Katy and I plan to participate.

Obama's campaign speech was inspiring and full of good ideas of hope and action for our country in the near future. One of the action themes both Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton (and possibly some Republicans) are developing will provide more opportunities for citizens to perform some significant community/public service contribution. This will apply especially to college students who have had to borrow money for their education, and the service will reduce this debt.

I would expect that many of these community/public service action opportunities could be oriented to environmental and ecosystem restoration and recovery efforts. In addition, I assume that people of all ages, including younger students, families, older citizens, and community groups will also be encouraged to initiate or become involved in the same public service projects.

Advancements in Social Networking software, including new ways to explore, create and share geospatial maps, semantic data, photographs and animated visualizations that I have discussed in this Blog are tools that should help make the next generation of participation in environmental social service a lot of short run productive fun. Collectively, this effort should also provide much better and needed long range environmental and ecosystem decisions.

National Day of Climate Action

I am seeing many efforts on the Internet to engage people in Global Warming actions now and in the future. Al Gore's book and movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" is one of the most well known. An associated effort is the web site "Stop Global Warming.org" where over 600,000 people have already joined a "Virtual March." It is encouraging to see efforts to organize action groups in local communities starting in the next few months. The links below go to a specific effort to organize a National Day of Climate Action in cities across the U.S. I hope this day will extend out to actions by everyone every day of the year in the future.

I plan to attend the organizational meeting in Boise and, as I noted in my recent February 5, post, to suggest we should organize some local social networking tools to help this important action continue.

Visit the national Step it Up 2007 web site for for information about 675 similar events that are already planned in 48 states across the country!

In Boise a group of people have registered for Boise to participate in this important nationwide day on April 14, 2007 to begin to reshape our Global Warming future. If interested in attending an organizational meeting there is an online RSVP form you can send in or you can ask questions by e-mail.

An e-mail notice has been distributed that notes "Our first organizing meeting will be held on Thursday, February 22nd, at 7pm, at the Boise Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, located at 6200 N. Garrett St., in Garden City. This meeting will be to decide on what type of event we would like to have here in Boise, and then making the plans to make that even a success! We hope to see you all there!"