As I mentioned earlier, this week I went to the State of the Planet 2006. This Columbia thing has its perks. Here, on the campus I go to every day is one of the most important and largest gatherings of environmental thinkers for me to gawk at.
Seed let me miss work and go to the convention on a reconnaissance mission. My goal was to meet people like Denis Hayes, founder and President of Earth Day, to try and schedule an interview for 
Seed’s Earth Day coverage. Unfortunately Hayes was sick so I had to plan the interview the old-fashioned way via e-mail.
But I did get to meet a lot of interesting people and I heard lots of good talks. Speeches were given by some of the greatest minds in the field of environmental studies today. So while they were informative and compelling, they were also scary. These brilliant men and women have dedicated their lives to studying some niche of the environment and all they can report is that we are all going to hell. Well, perhaps that’s exaggerating it — many had positive ideas and were hopeful, but the general trend they were presenting was downward.
I could go off on details, but I won’t. All the information is on the web anyways and I’m not really a source for that stuff, I just find the sources who are knowledgeable in this area.
Another person I spoke with briefly was Jeff Gibs.
I noticed this guy was making a documentary so I asked him what it was about.
After explaining his take on the environment, he decided to “come out
of the closet to me” as the producer of Bowling for Columbine and
Fahrenheit 9-11. Wow, here was the producer behind two of the most
influential documentaries of my generation.
Personally I hate most documentaries.
I often think of them as pretentious and I think even worse of the
people that are being bankrolled by their parents to make them. Now I realize that statement might be unfair, and I can admit there are lots of good documentaries out there — so let’s save this rant for another time, because no matter what I think of them as a genre, thi
s was the guy that started the
trend that everyone else was following. He was one of the firsts to break down a huge wall and for that
I have to respect him. I also think it’s great he is doing his next project on the enviornment.
It was also interesting to see Jeff Sachs
who was more or less the rock star of the event — as director of the
Earth Institute at Columbia. So I’ve included some pictures of him. Here is one where he is talking with Joe Romm
who went out of his way to give me his card when he found out I was a writer for
Seed Magazine. I hope he wants to talk to me about cars of the future (he is an expert on the case for hydrogen cars).
Overall it was a good convention, depressing but good. I enjoyed the free meals and used every chance I got to hand out my card and take others in return — I guess that’s what you do at these things. I wasn’t too gum-shoe on this one, I didn’t put myself out there too much. I just tried to position myself and listened to what everyone had to say.
Feel free to differ, but I think that’s the best way to go about these large conventions. With 1,600 people there is just too much going on. There is no way I could possibly interview everyone. The best idea is to take a chill-pill, keep your ears open and take mental notes for the future.