NAL Revisited
Robin Schachat
It’s almost like being there – well, not really. But a few of the presentations Cynthia Druckenbrod and I enjoyed at the GCA’s NAL Meeting are available, as slide presentations, on the GCA website. The quality of professionalism and research represented in these presentations is astounding. Rather than recap all of them for you, I shall take this opportunity to refer you directly to the original material itself. As the next months go by, Cynthia and I will continue to offer more glimpses of the great information GCA offers to us all relative to Conservation and Legislation topics. We are so very lucky to have access to the wonderful information we received!
The talk which I found most astonishing, and astonishingly thorough, and frightfully compelling, was presented by Jeremy Grantham of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo (GMO), an international investment firm with assets valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Mr. Grantham’s research is impeccable, and informs the future planning of many governments and industries worldwide. He and his wife have also established the $900 million Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. The title of his presentation at NAL, Dealing with Climate Change: The Race for Our Lives, makes clear the conclusions to which his research has brought him. His slides are presented here, concluding with the final, brutal statement: “Your Grandchildren Have No Value” – this is based on the direction the world now takes. Can we alter that path? Maybe. It is our only hope.
Another great speaker we heard from was Mace Vaughan, co-director of Pollinator Programs for the Xerces Society. It’s a micro-snapshot of ecological concerns of the day, as opposed to the macro-vision given in the previous discussion. We’ve all heard from GCA and from speakers at our own club about critical pollinator issues, and we heard from Ann Cicarella on bee issues at this month’s meeting. Here is the slide presentation that Mace presented on the next steps we must take to preserve pollinator health, and in so doing to preserve our food stream nationally and internationally.
https://www.gcamerica.org/index.cfm/members:main.getprotectedfile?common/file/NAL/Vaughanfinal.pdf