from oil to sustainability to campuses now!

Photo from 1973, the first global oil crisis...from U.S. News and World Report

As it turns out, college progressive activists come across as surprisingly articulate and not surprisingly, good at sniffing out the snow jobs anyone might give to win over their collective power and influence. Check out the very well written Campus Progress magazine. The group as a whole loved the sincere and earnest speech given by Barack Obama, who laid out some simple guidelines for remaining to true to oneself and making a difference in a world, the master that he is at stating most elegantly oft-overlooked fundamentals.

Speaking of truth, our panel was called "Making Truth Convenient," which tried to cover the oil crisis's connection to sustainable communities and still come out on the positive side. It was lots of fun; John Holtzclaw turned out to be a darling and Aaron Naparstek was his usual keen, droll self (his description of sitting on one particular community meeting - "I feel like a bear in a trap in the middle of the woods, when gnawing on my arm is a better alternative than being there.")

Both had very compelling stories - John was armed to the teeth with data that showed irrevocably how sprawl was abusing us, and Aaron had lots of inspiring examples of how getting involved in the community and working towards sustainability, no matter how small the delta might be, were worth the fight. And of course, there's all that stuff that PPS does, but you know that already. John and Aaron were awesome spokespeople for PPS. I think we ended up a bit negatively (to the tune of, there's so much work to do and we're only getting started!) but we were a kind of support group, the three of us recognizing that we couldn't make an impact without the other. I hope people were inspired enough to get involved in projects happening around them.