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Inaugural Climate Salon Helps Usher in a Consequential Year

Knuckey larger_ — Deborah Knuckey leads off the Bay Area chapter’s first-ever climate salon.

This piece was published in shorter form in the February 2020 newsletter of the Bay Area Chapter of the Climate Reality Project.

On January 22nd the Bay Area chapter held its first-ever climate salon at marketing firm Kiterocket’s SF outpost. Titled Predictions & Hope, this inaugural salon aimed to, in the words of chapter co-presidents Steve Richard and Wei-Tai Kwok, “share fun or bold predictions that we’d like to make for the upcoming decade, reasons for hope, and effective methods of coping while we wait for the changes we need.”

It was inspired programming for the first of these TED-style talks, given that we’re entering a tumultuous year that will define whether the US moves to boldly stem the climate crisis or sinks further into the swampy muck now lapping at our literal and figurative shores. Let’s start the year with some hope, shall we? Over 30 folks found that notion promising enough to show up and hear four speakers spin their tales.

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24 Hours of Reality: Dispatch from San Francisco’s Embarcadero District

This piece was published in the December, 2019 newsletter of the Bay Area Chapter of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. This year, rather than Mr. Gore hosting a day-long broadcast of reports from around the globe on the climate crisis and how it can be solved, he challenged Climate Reality Leaders everywhere to present at least 1,000 of the CRP slide shows for which the he and the organization are known.

In fact, we blew that number out of the water on November 20-21, 2019. A proud graduate of the 2018 Los Angeles training, I attended a unique presentation event in San Francisco and penned a brief description of it for the newsletter. It was my first time live-tweeting, a role the Project specifically requested of us, and that was a fun and interesting experience!

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For This Leader, the Local Informs the National

Sized to 1200 — De la Fuente, left, campaigning for a 2018 Texas House candidate with fellow Sierra Club Austin Group members. All photos courtesy of Flavia de la Fuente.

This article was published on the Sierra Club’s national website on May 24, 2019 and can be found here.

Last November Flavia de la Fuente and her husband, Christopher, took their two kids into the voting booth with them in Austin, Texas, on Election Day. “We wanted to show them it’s another way to protect the planet,” says de la Fuente. Samantha, who at age seven was adamant that they vote only for girls, was impressed by the process. “She was worried it wouldn’t be fun, but even with ‘boys’ on the ballot she enjoyed it. If a seven-year-old thinks voting is worthwhile, that’s a good sign.”

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