Cathy Blair is a volunteer soldier in the war on global warming
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Katherine Bish
A memo to President Bush: Al Gore is prepping a surge of his own. Still riding the critical success—and post-Oscars bump—of the eco–alarm clock An Inconvenient Truth, the former vice president has hand-picked an army of 1,000 global-warming warriors to join his Climate Project and educate their peers about climate change. St. Louisan Cathy Blair is one of them. After learning from Gore himself how to give the presentation that was the subject of Truth, she’s ready to start spreading the word around St. Louis this month.
Why did you get involved? When I saw An Inconvenient Truth, I changed during the movie. I think I was in a state of despair for a couple weeks. I thought global warming was the most important problem facing civilization right now, but I didn’t know what I could do about it until I heard about the Climate Project. I was so determined to be a part of it that I sent them e-mails or called Al Gore’s office every three or four weeks to follow up.
You’re a social worker—what made you think you had something to offer? I kept saying to myself, “Who am I? I’m not a science teacher, I’ve never joined the Sierra Club, and I think I’m going to get up and talk to people about global warming?” But as a social worker, I truly see the global warming crisis as a social-justice issue.
How so? So many of the crises that we’re already beginning to see that might be related to global warming tend to occur in developing countries or affect areas where people with limited resources are living. We saw what happened in New Orleans when we weren’t prepared for a disaster that we were certainly warned about.
Based on what you learned, what’s the best-case scenario? A lot of what we’ve done in the recent past is a done deal. But most of the scientists feel that we have a short period of time, and we can get a handle on this and turn it around.
There are those out there who think this is all garbage. This argument is over. An overwhelming number of scientists agrees that global warming is real, it’s coming and that humans have caused it. It seems to me that people are approaching this like a religion: “I don’t believe in that.” It’s fact. It’s there.
Some of the backlash might have something to do with the fact that it’s coming from Al Gore. It’s too bad, because he does a fabulous job. For those people who won’t go to An Inconvenient Truth, I’m often saying, “Let me ask you this: If it was the same movie but John McCain narrated it, would you go?”
