Field Journal #9 - 14 Sep 2008
by Anthony Marr
founder of HOPE
lead campaigner of GEO
“road warrior” of CARE-1, CARE-2, CARE-3, CARE-4, CARE-5 & CARE-6
Since the AR Conference, I've been to Pennsylvania (e.g. Allentown)
and New Jersey (e.g. Freehold) to give a few presentations, and am now
back in Charlotte's place in St. Michaels, Maryland. Following are the
new developments:
1. HOPE-GEO has changed focus to target secondary schools as of
September. The HOPE-GEO team has been developing school databases and
contacting the principals, aiming for talks starting around
mid-September.
2. Another new focus is the mayors of U.S. cities. Recall that back
in May this year in Florida the Conference of U.S. Mayors, involving
several hundred mayors from across the country, resolved to ban the use
of Alberta-tar-sands-derived gasoline in their city vehicular fleets.
The objective of this new focus is to induce more U.S. mayors to sign on
to this resolution. So, the HOPE-GEO team has also been compiling a
database of the mayors of the cities in the states I'll be traversing
for the rest of the tour, and started sending exploratory emails to
their offices.
3. A special focus of this is to target the cities on the seaward
side of the new coastline given a certain amount of sea-level rise due
to global warming - e.g. 7 meters (23 ft.) if the Greenland ice-sheet
melts off (which of course won't happen in isolation - with the mountain
glaciers and the Antarctic ice-shelves melting along with it, raising
the sea-level even higher). If all the land ice has melted off, the sea
level would be some 100 meters or 330 ft higher than today's. I'm
calling this outreach the Future-Submerged-Cities Tour. If we use this
ultimate figure of total global ice meltdown, almost all the states in
the US east coast, southeast and south coasts would be submerged. This
should have media potential.
4. To expand the media potential, HOPE-GEO could tie a line of
ribbons (the survey type) along the new coastline. The local papers in
all the cities along the ribbon-line, and of course those on the seaward
side of it, should be interested.
5. Since the beginning of the tour on July 1, I've taken some 300GB's
worth of videos: of the fly-over of the Alberta tar sands, of Taina
Ketola interviewing me while I was driving to and from the tar sands
through British Columbia and Alberta, my lectures to various audiences
from states to state, and my 13 speeches at the Animal Rights National
Conference. It does our children, the animals and the Earth no good to
have the footage sitting in my external hard-drive. So, I spent the last
2 weeks self-teaching video conversion, video editing and video
launching on to YouTube and MySpace, starting from a know-nothing
position. My initial impulse was to send the raw videos in DVD or
flash-drive forms to a volunteer who knows what he/she is doing, but
eventually I arrived at the position of wanting to do it myself. First
thing I found out was that most video editing and conversion programs
require at least 2GB RAM, some say 3GB, for enough power to process
video, in which light my old laptop, with only a 512MB RAM and a
near-full 70GB hard-drive, was entirely inadequate. I tried it and it
was indeed a video-snail. So I went shopping, and got a Toshiba with a
2GB RAM and a 250GB hard-drive ($490 @ Best Buy). As of day before
yesterday, I've begun uploading videos on to YouTube, beginning with 2
events at the AR2008 conference (the Sharon Christman song and my
plenary speech Acting Globally, both in lo-res), then 16 segments of my
flight over the tar sands, followed by several of my other conference
sessions plus the Christman song and my plenary again, but in hi-res).
Now I've loaded about half of my dozen AR2008 speeches (usually maximum
12 minutes each - ideal for YouTube). I'll upload the rest of the
speeches in the coming days, plus some of my interviews while driving to
and from the tar sands. To view the videos go to www.YouTube.com and
search for "Anthony Marr"; they should all appear. And keep checking
over the next weeks. Now is the time to beginning publicising the
videos.
6. Future bookings are trickling in, including a presentation in
Middlesex NJ on Oct. 4 (Steve Ember, whose functions are often well
attended), one in Lower Manhattan NY on Oct. 9 (Adam Weissman, Wetlands
Preserve), and one in Bethlehem PA, date to be determined..
More later.
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