21 Oct TNCC leads 350 Day in Telluride
[click “Play” to hear Walter Wright speaking about the 350.org celebration in Telluride]
Environmentalist/writer Bill McKibben came to Telluride in May for Telluride Mountainfilm, hair on fire about the number 350. That’s the maximum CO2 parts per million the Earth’s atmosphere can handle without a catastrophic meltdown. And we are already above that safe zone at 390 ppm and rising by about 2 parts per million annually. The number is higher than any time in recorded history of our planet and we are already witnessing the consequences: glaciers, the source of drinking water for hundreds of millions, are melting and disappearing; drought is becoming more common; sea levels are rising; mosquitoes, which like the warming, are spreading disease like malaria.
Bill McKibben’s first book, “The End of Nature, published in 1989 by Random House, was one of the first, if not the first to explain climate change to a wide audience. (“The End of Nature” was published in 20 languages and reprinted as recently as 2006.) McKibben’s 350.org turns his words into deeds.
Telluride was the first town in America to use alternating current. Today, under the mayoral challenge known as Telluride Renewed, our community, with support and collaboration from The New Community Coalition (TNCC) and local and regional politicians and businesspeople, is going for another first: Get 100% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2020. On October 24, Tellluride takes one more step towards that goal, when we join our global neighbors – 2,000 rallies are scheduled in more than 140 nations – to find local living solutions for climate change. One small example is the Applied Weatherization Workshop, providing tips for attendees about ways to weatherize our homes in winter and save money in the process.
[click to view scedule in larger format]
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