As I wrote in my previous column, The Climate Reality Project is hosting a climate leadership training event in Manila this week. Participants came from all over the Philippines to learn about climate change and how to communicate about this challenge. The objective is to train many Filipinos to join the Climate Reality Leadership Corps, described by the Climate Reality Project as “a global network of activists committed to taking on the climate crisis and solving what is far and away the greatest challenge of our time.” The aim is to catalyze a “dynamic group of world-changers shaping the conversation on climate in forums from family dinners to international summits and building a 21st-century movement for solutions.”
The training program, being held in the Philippines for the first time, forms leaders and makes them exceptional. Participants are exposed to climate science and provided communications and organizing skills so they can share the story of climate change. The hope is that these leaders will inspire communities everywhere to take action.
The idea, as the Climate Reality Project has articulated, “is to bring a global challenge down to street level.” According to their website: “We hear it on the news and see it in the headlines: climate change is transforming our seasons and our planet. But in between all the media chatter, it can be hard to know what climate change actually means for our daily lives—or what we can do to solve it.”
This is the role then of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps: “Climate Reality Leaders are messengers and activists personally trained by former US Vice President Al Gore to share the truth about what climate change is doing to our world and how we can stop it by shifting to clean, renewable energy. Climate Reality Leaders break down the complex terms of science and policy into the language of everyday life so people everywhere can understand how climate change directly affects them and join the millions worldwide working for solutions. Climate Reality Leaders regularly hold public forums on climate change and solutions all around the world.”
Its founder and Chairman Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States inspires the Climate Reality Project. He is leading the training in Manila, delivering several talks, including moderating the panel I will be joining on Wednesday.
On the first day of the training (that was yesterday, Monday), Mr. Gore presented the updated version of his “An Inconvenient Truth” which won him an Emmy and eventually the Nobel Peace Prize. Before the training, to be sure he could speak from experience about climate change and the Philippines, Mr. Gore went to Tacloban City and toured the Yolanda/Haiyan-devastated city with Mayor Alfred Romualdez and Senator Loren Legarda. In his presentations yesterday, he also bothered to use the Filipino names of the biggest storms, again grounding the problem of climate change in our experience.
As I shared in the training yesterday, I must confess to being personally inspired by Al Gore. Among others, I did my doctoral dissertation in Yale University on climate change because of his book “Earth in the Balance.” I remember particularly these words from that book:
“We can believe in the future and work to achieve it and preserve it, or we can whirl blindly on, behaving as if one day there will be no children to inherit our legacy. The choice is ours; the earth is in balance.”
Later in Kyoto, Japan, when I negotiated the Kyoto Protocol for the Philippines, I rejoiced when Mr. Gore, then US Vice-President, instructed the American delegation to be more flexible in the final stretch of the negotiations. That intervention was critical to get the Kyoto Protocol adopted.
I was working in Washington, DC in 2000 when Mr. Gore lost the presidential elections by act of the US Supreme Court. I was heartbroken with that, even as that later enabled me to meet him in person as he joined the board of the World Resources Institute where I worked as a senior fellow.
Finally, in 2006, having returned to the Philippines to become the Dean of the Ateneo School of Government, I was persuaded by Mr. Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” to jump back into the climate issue. Eventually, I returned to the climate change negotiations and have been a lead negotiator of the Philippines all the way to the Paris conference on climate change.
In Paris last December, I met Mr. Gore again and was touched by the empathy he showed when, as Rappler recalled, he told us “When the suffering of the people of Tacloban was understood and felt by people around the world, it had a profound effect on the way people understood the impact of this stronger storm.”
In the final stretch of the Paris negotiations, as we went sleepless to nail down the historic agreement, I found myself recalling the opening words of Mr. Gore as he showed us the iconic picture of our planet:
“You see that pale, blue dot? That’s us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars, all the famines, all the major advances…. It’s our only home. And that is what is at stake: our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue. It is your time to seize this issue; it is our time to rise again to secure our future.”
His final words in that documentary are also memorable and inspired me to complete the work in Paris:
“Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, “What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?” We have to hear that question from them, now.”
“I believe this is a moral issue. It is your time to seize this issue. It is our time to rise again, to secure our future.”
Yesterday, here in Manila, Mr. Gore echoed this again. He quoting from a favorite American poet, Wallace Stevens: “After the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes, the future world depends.” Mr. Gore recalled the most important moral struggles of history—slavery, women’s suffrage, racism, among others—and pointed out how the fight to change these was met by a no many times. Eventually the tide was turn and the choice became binary—right or wrong, good or evil. We are at this moment on climate change, Mr. Gore said, and that is why we will win this fight.
I have worked on helping the world overcome the challenge of climate change for 25 years. With Gore’s inspiring words, I can do another 25, even more.
Facebook: Dean Tony La Viña Twitter: tonylavs
