At that moment, I am just about to raise my hand, to ask my question. Which of course, was the crucial question for the conference. But I now feel somewhat relaxed, ready for the questions to begin…

But at this precise moment it is time to break for lunch. You could hear the stomachs growling, I guess. My stomach too was growling and my hand was almost up. But then there were no other questions. The activist panel sat dumb-faced. And just then I realized that there were no bouncing, energetic young college girls, no vigorous young men alert and driven with the sense of civic responsibility anywhere to be heard from in this audience. The activist panel was ushered from the stage without a question.

I listened to my stomach for a moment, wondering what it might be saying. Was I really all that hungry? Why did I not jump up with my question and risk once again being one of those partly arrogant, partly shabby, but ultimately wise gadfly types who won’t let go even when they know that essentially no one is listening and further words are waste of time.

So, I moved on. During lunch break I ran into the city planner, the committee members one-by-one, for the most part like me, grinning with enthusiasm. Then, I had one of those brief, but necessary conversations with a county commissioner who happened through. The conference was coming off in great form and wasn’t it super, positively super that so much first-rate science was getting done at the university? Then as I sit, munching gazpacho beans shoved into a pita roll, I try to imagine the population explosion reflected somehow at our eating table. My conference name-tag squarely in place, my plastic fork poised with some fruit upraised. For an instant, I see six billion human mouths munching, crunching, jammed with food—the tons and tons of wheat, corn, barley and other cereals shoveled into open furnaces, burning, burning, smokestacks belching.

After lunch, it’s on to the break-out sessions at Leutze Hall.

I follow the red tape laid out so carefully in the hot June sun by Carol Johnson, one of our committee co-chairmen. Then I arrive in good form with only a mild sweat before this imposing ivy-tiered edifice.

The break-out sessions include eight different presentation topics by speakers taking on various aspects of the environmental problem: green building and remodeling, transportation, urban development, coastal climate change, growth and management, plus workshops on food and water and energy conservation. On top of these sessions, there were two additional full panel discussion groups. One of these was again concerned with global warming science—now the skeptics and the believers could square off and have it out with audience participation. Then there was a second panel on Poverty, Social Change and Global Warming.

I make my way to this one especially because I get to deliver my paper on history, politics, poverty, racism and global warming, and because I have something to say.

But on the way in to our session room, I feel immediately that something is wrong. When I ask the other members of the panel if they’ve enjoyed the conference so far, it is obvious that none of them have attended the previous sessions, nor have they heard the science presented by Cahoon or by Drake. So, something must be wrong on the promo end, I think. Of course, all these people are top professionals, employed by the university, professors in their various fields. I’d selected them to participate in our session because I thought their credentials were excellent. And--I even put myself last on the menu out of deference toward them.

But as our panel begins, I could tell that these scholarly pros, learned in the fields of history, political science, climatology and social science were mostly still skeptics on the subject of global warming. And to top it off, I had to wait patiently until it was my turn to speak. I liked all of them well enough, and respected their views. But it wasn’t as if I was going to get Al Gore on the firing line, or even Cindy Watson, the one who took on the big corporate hog operations all across North Carolina. So now I have to sit and wait until it’s my turn to finally speak, and this is my own doing.

Of course, I won’t say that when my turn finally rolled around and our two hours was almost up, that I was more inspirational than the other presenters. I won’t say that my visionary concepts really had all that much appeal. But by the time I stood up our session was almost over and a least three people from the audience had already departed. And where was the sense of global warming’s impact on the poor, the out-groups of society, the disadvantaged?

Then, I heard myself saying: in the impending global eco-apocalypse the poor will suffer the most. And they will be the first to suffer. They will become dead weight, pulling the rest of society down into the wider nightmare of famine, pestilence, social disruption, and ultimately starvation, disease and mass death. But since it is the poor who will suffer the most, in a democratic society, the poor must be equipped to defend themselves, to actually lead the way in the new paradigm of reform.

I could tell at this point that I had few believers in the audience. Our climatologist, Doug Gamble, was not convinced that global warming is actually the result of human causes. I found myself wondering if, with all those hydrocarbons in the atmosphere, he would ever really get around to seeing the connection. And if he couldn’t really see the connection, would he ever believe in global warming? Then I heard Steve McNamee, our sociologist, say those dreaded words. With a partly dignified, partly satirical if not ironic air, he says, “it’s academic. Just a lot of academic hot air…”

So there it is. After all the effort we had put into the conference, I could see that Steve was right, or mostly right, or at least partly right. Here we were at a major university of the Southeast, giving our talks in all seriousness—doing our best to make the conference the best conference on the environment we could conceive. But what had we really accomplished?

And just like that, it was over. The conference was history, and we were walking the corridors and the campus sidewalks, basking in the sunshine of our accomplishment.

On the way out, I ran into the city planner once again, and he had glowing words of praise for the conference, which had obviously been a big success. We’d attracted quite a few people, raised interesting and thoughtful questions, stimulated science and maybe helped to energize a few people. And there were compliments and accolades from all of the believers I could see on their way out.

Where had the press been through all of this? Well, it wasn’t as if science had actually forecasted the END OF LIFE ON EARTH. Or even, THE END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT.

I could just see that on the front page of the Star-News, our daily paper. Larry Cahoon or maybe the grandfather, Bert Drake, dressed out in flowing robes, holding up the stone tablet with a new commandment inscribed: “Thou shalt live in harmony with nature.”

Or better still, a headline something like this: “Global Warming Scientists Predict Eco-Apocalypse”.

Well, after the conference, we talked a lot about where to go from here. We’d done it big at UNCW and we’d done it right and everyone was convinced we did make a difference. And I mostly refrained from comment that where ever we go from here, it will require activists, those who will speak out on the issues, to ask people to change and to get them involved, to alter their lifestyles and to contact their Congressmen. The true believers, of course, already seemed to know that. And yes, we knew there was a deeper message to conference, that ultimately the people would change because they would have to change, because global warming would demand that, would ultimately compel a massive change throughout society.

But for now, it was clear also that at our conference, the big event happened when the medium became the message. And when the medium became the message, the real message somehow had failed to find its way outside the medium itself. And so, the man on the street somehow never heard it. Or if he did hear it, it was done in such a way as to mute its ultimate effect. For this global warming conference, we had accomplished a lot, but now we were all left wondering—what would be next?

The Medium or the Message?

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The Cape Fear activists’ table: (L to R) Leonard Jenkins of Brunswick Citizens (standing), Desi Horton of Sierra Club, Tracy Skrabal of N.C. Coastal Federation, Bill Murray of Cape Fear River Watch, Donald Ellson of Penderwatch, and Andy Wood, of the Audubon Society.  (Photo by Vicki Merbler)

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