SustainableLA panel with Alicia Silverstone and Ed Begley Jr and Bill Nye
Archived from May 19, 2007
So last week or so I went to a panel called "SustainableLA" put on by the Silverlake Film Festival.
Last year, I went to this really educational panel about Building Green at the Silver Lake Film Fest. The audience watched a few episodes of this PBS show called Building Green, and then a video about the NRDC building in Santa Monica. Then there was this amazing heated discussion because the panelists were made up of 4 or 5 relatively high profile people (although apparently not to me), like some LA representative, whose name I don't remember and the director of Environment California's Clean Energy Program and some other people I don't remember (but may later if I find the program for it), and some sweet ass green activits came in on the scene to confront the representative about destroying this great big urban green space that had been used by locals for a big community garden but the city was letting it go to developers FOR MORE BUILDINGS. (You might remember it as the action that made Darrel Hannah go up a tree). Anyway, the point is, last year I was really jazzed up on this green panel, it was really educational and exciting so I figured this year would follow suit. I was wrong.
The panel consisted of about a dozen people. 3 were celebrities, 2 were architects, one guy ran the bio-diesel hut on Sunset, 2 or 3 "used to climb the corporate ladder" and now were into "low impact urban living", One woman biked to work and another made fountains. The woman from Environment California was there again, and then there were 2 moderators. It was REALLY random and poorly thought out, considering the panel was so big; it made up about 1/4 of the people in the room.
I was thinking this panel would be like a town meeting style discussion/debate of hard hitting subjects regarding living in LA and what your resources are to stop destroying the city. I thought there might be some hashing out of political issues. I figured some incensed green activist would confront the panel, like last year and open my eyes to some issue I didn't know anything about. I also thought "whoa, Alicia Silverstone is an environmental activist? I had no idea."
The gigantic panel got through two "questions" which were akin to the suggestion you might expect a "teacher" or "guide" to ask a child in hardcore hippie alternative school about his/her "impressions" of math.
Both questions started with the three celebrities on the panel, the first of which was Alicia Silverstone. I was hoping she was more hardcore environmentalist, but she's really into saving adorable animals. That's fine, but I don't need to hear about it for 15 minutes, which is basically what happened. The celebrities each got 15 minutes to answer the question and the non-celebrities were asked to keep their responses to about 30 seconds.
That aside, the real issue was that the responses and the questions were basically meaningless to the crowd. We're talking about a pack of (generally speaking) well educated, environmentally concerned, Silverlake professionals who rent. Many of whom biked there. The panel was basically just telling people to recycle, and "don't feel bad if you can't do it, just thinking about it is one step in the right direction." What? I wouldn't be surprised if every single person in that room not only recycled in their homes since adulthood, but started recycling programs in their hometowns as children.
The part of the experience that really blew my mind was the second (and final) question of the day, which was "What was your 'a-ha' moment, regarding the environment". A significant portion like 1/3 - 1/2 of the panel said that "watching al gore's movie" was their environmental a-ha moment.
EXCUSE ME?
I've known about global warming SINCE I WAS BORN. Al Gore's movie came out LAST YEAR. How could you NOT know about the destruction of the environment until you watch Al Gore's movie? Am I the weirdo here? Did I somehow intuit "Al Gore's message" 2 decades before it was "released"? Do I have some kind of special relationship with Mother Nature that allows me pre-knowledge of environmental issues? What? These people are ADULTS. They are older than I am; they lived through the first Earth Day. Where have they been? It just blew my mind. It was so surreal.
I must say, the overwhelming feeling I got was that this experience was geared toward middle America. It was most appropriate for people who own homes (which most of LA does not) and have been so busy the past few decades to realize their global impact. It was not really worth my time to hear folks tell me to "compost and recycle" when I live in an apartment building with no soil and no recycling bins (I actually put my recycling in the neighbor's bins in the middle of the night so no one accuses me of messing with their trash.)
But, the panel was free, so suppose I got my money's worth.
PS: I would love to hang out with Ed Begley Jr and Bill Nye. Those guys are cards, and totally best friends. I'd probably love to hang out with most of the people on the panel, even those who just found out about global warming from Al Gore's movie.
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