Climate Reality Leadership Mt Rainier Retreat at Wellspring Spa

I\’ve been very lucky in my life, but one of the luckiest things I\’ve ever done is attend a 3-day training event led by Al Gore in August 2012, which is the reason this website exists and explains all the volunteer work that I\’ve done this year. The Climate Reality Project is Al Gore\’s educational effort, which has trained  over 3,000 leaders in over 50 countries to present Mr. Gore\’s powerpoint slideshow made famous in the movie \”An Inconvenient Truth\” (2006), now customized for our local audiences and continuously updated with new slides and ongoing research. (The Upcoming Events that say Climate Reality or Slideshow are my presentations for local audiences.)

And very lucky again, when this weekend 12 of us Climate Leaders from around Washington and Oregon gathered for a retreat — the first of it\’s kind — at a beautiful little place called Wellspring Spa near the entrance to the sacred mountain, Tahoma, Mt. Rainier National Park. The owner is a mom who devoted the last 30 years of her life to creating this unique collection of cabins (and a treehouse). She also hosted Al Gore when he visited Mt. Rainier years ago, and became a Climate Leader with us in 2012.

We spent Friday Saturday and Sunday in a yurt sharing ideas and research, improving our presentations and looking at trends. As a team we were welcomed and ended with a native blessing from our native Climate Leader Dan Carpita, an elder who works with youth and addictions. He shared native ceremony and wisdom  from his experience, helping us feel our Carbon Addiction more fully for what it really is.

The gathering, not only inspiring, underscored the urgency and importance of sharing what we know about climate in our presentations, and also in our interactions with neighbors, friends, and families. Most of the people reading this blog know more than we tell about our current climate crisis and what we need to do in our daily lives. By talking about it, regularly, we can make the \”invisible emergency\” visible, and the behavioral solutions will become the rule not the alternative, as in \”Should I walk to the park or drive?\”

Our kids deserve a chance at a habitable future. Let\’s do something different each day to make that our new Climate Reality.