By Mike Gervais
Register Staff

5-31-2008

A Bishop woman has not only taken the “think globally, act locally” adage to heart, but she is helping to provide other local residents with the knowledge and tools to also do what they can for Mother Earth right here in the Eastern Sierra.
Thanks to the efforts of Coco Sly, The Climate Project will host a presentation at the United Methodist Church Hall, 205 N. Fowler St. in Bishop on Wednesday, June 4 at 7 p.m., featuring Tricia Mynster, one of 1,000 volunteers who were personally trained by Nobel Laureate Al Gore.
Sly personally contacted TCP to arrange for the local presentation. “I just decided that I should do something, do something on my behalf and on the behalf of the community,” she said.
Mynster will be speaking to the importance of energy conservation and the role residents can take to preserve natural resources.

The presentation is “a consolidation on Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ without the politics, and more of a focus on what can be done on a local level, which I appreciate,” said Sly.
“This is also going to touch on policy, but in a non-partisan way,” Sly said.
The presentation will also feature an extended question and answer period entitled “Everything You Wanted to Know About Climate Change But Were Afraid to Ask.”
Mynster is a visiting faculty member of the Environmental Studies Department at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Originally from Northern California, she graduated with an undergraduate degree from Cal State Monterey with a degree in ecology before working as an environmental science contractor for a NASA environmental education program. Later she became a park ranger, then returned to school and earned a masters degree in science in environmental policy.

Coco Sly points out some garbage in a local field. In part because of the notable local pollution, Sly has contacted The Climate Project, which will host a presentation later this week. Photo by Mike Gervais

She received her Climate Project training in December 2006 while working on a clean air campaign with the Sierra Club.
“Tricia Mynster is an outstanding example of the millions of Americans who have been energized by the call to action on the climate crisis,” Gore said in a TCP press release. “We are so pleased that she has made a serious commitment to this challenge.”
TCP was founded by Al Gore in June 2006 for the purpose of raising awareness among members of the public about global warming and climate change. Staff is based in Nashville, Tenn., “but we have volunteer presenters, who deliver versions of the slideshow featured in the film ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ in every state,” said TCP Communications Manager Alex Carey.
In addition to domestic efforts, there are chapters of TCP in Australia, Canada, India, Spain and the United Kingdom, with a total of 1,300 presenters dispersed throughout those nations. There are 2,300 TCP presenters worldwide.
“Our training sessions consist of three days of instruction, with Mr. Gore himself doing much of the instructing,” said Carey. “Presenters learn the fundamentals of global warming and climate change from Mr. Gore as well as from well-known climate scientists such as Henry Pollack and Michael MacCracken,” said Carey. “They also receive training in delivering presentations.”
As of May 2008, The Climate Project volunteers had delivered more than 15,000 presentations and reached a combined audience of more than a million people.
Sly said she selected the TCP presentation “because I admired the work of Al Gore and I felt his connections and information would be quality. I wanted to have a global scope, not local scope to begin with,” she said.
Sly hopes to use momentum from the presentation to develop an organization that could work within the community to move the Eastern Sierra in a greener direction.
“My hope is that we could have a grassroots organization to improve, let’s say, recycling,” Sly said.
She noted that she has learned that some local recycling centers have been forced to throw recyclable materials away due to high gas prices and the cost of taking local recycling to major refineries.
But that isn’t all Sly is hoping to focus on. She said that with community support, a grassroots group could work towards purchasing solar panels to begin producing more renewable energy in the area, or help raise awareness about fuel efficiency.