‘Messenger’ Offers Talk Of Global Hope

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Shannon Wood (with husband Jim) will talk about
climate change Saturday at a Summer Solstice
program in Kaneohe. See related story. Photo by
Byron Lee, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Kailua resident Shannon Wood survived three intense days of seminars and training in Nashville last winter and returned home a “climate change messenger.”

She and eight other Hawaii residents were there to absorb The Climate Project’s global-warming message, which is based on the Al Gore book and documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

“It’s a message of hope,” said Wood, who will present her first free talk from 12:25 to 2 p.m. Saturday as part of the fourth annual Summer Solstice Celebration at Ho’omaluhia Botanical Garden. (To reserve seats by noon Friday, call 223-4481 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address))

“The message is it’s here, it’s real, it’s human-caused and we can do something about it,” said Wood. Saturday’s talk - Global Warming, Climate Change and Thee & Me - will be the abbreviated 20-minute version, followed by breakout group discussions with experts on renewable energy, global warming and climate change.

“People will have the opportunity to talk to two different experts in the field,” she said. “Normally I wouldn’t be doing that, but for this particular event it seems to be working much better.” The briefing can take up to 90 minutes.

Anticipating her first talk, Wood said she has enough material to offer an entire course on global warming. “I have a huge library of material papers and research, and I found 58 questions that skeptics are liable to ask and respond to.

Though she was trained in January, she hasn’t made any official presentations because of car troubles and the lack of a laptop and projection system, which costs around $3,000. Instead, she gives informal talks with borrowed systems or her own desktop computer.

“A couple of neighbors came by three weeks ago ... we were all clustered around a monitor,” she said. “It’s not exactly the greatest thing in the world, but I certainly wasn’t going to turn people away if I had the chance to spread the word.”

To raise funds for her own system, the Windward Ahupua’a Alliance collected recyclables at the Crater Festival and plans to sell malassadas at the upcoming Flavors of Honolulu. (Wood is interim chair of WAA, the nonprofit group sponsoring the Summer Solstice program.)

Her inaugural talk comes after the environmental lobby successfully urged state lawmakers to pass a bill making Hawaii the only state in the nation after California to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2020. (The bill needs Gov. Lingle’s signature to become law.)

At the Nashville training, Wood recalled that Gore “ran all the seminars” and signed her copy of An Inconvenient Truth. When she mentioned to him that she had bought it from an independent bookseller (Bookends in Kailua), the former vice president replied approvingly, ‘That’s what we’re talking about ... sustainability, supporting local businesses.’”

Like other climate-change messengers, Wood doesn’t charge a fee, but she does require a venue with electricity. For presentation updates, visit www.waa-hawaii.org. For more information on The Climate Project, see www.theclimateproject.org