by Coco Gordon
You wouldn’t believe what we heard buzzing about around PlanBoulder’s year end Celebration event at the Boulderado Hotel! There was a greek style dinner buffet, swanky drinks (yumm) with featured keynote speaker, Van Jones, “ Does dense make sense?,” author of “The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems.”
Colloquially jovial at his best, Van Jones has the style of a stand up comic of green jobs perceptions. It was our luck to be representing Lyons, Lavern Johnson and myself; we fell in with old and new friends.
Albert Bartlett, astounding professor emeritus guru of the “Exponential Function” that guides the future of world usage by the ways population can function within it, was in top shape. In a wink of timeless moment, he offered his sincere brilliance to the Lyons community, extending his card saying, “Telephone me to make a date, I will speak to any Lyons group you wish.” Check that out. Wow! What a fab offer! Followed up by an email offering: six awesome papers of his to read in preparation.
Shortly after the enthusiastic introduction by PlanBoulder’s Zan Jones of Van Jones, Van took the podium off to green submarine depths into future lands of trust, and way up, to manageable heights through the air around us, in us, for us and about us, extolling our destiny through solar and wind energies, reminding us our indigenous kin are already prototyping manageable-scale projects, giving out loud and clear his message of emancipation from huge decades-long intractable contracts that giant energy companies offer us to make us dependent, then withdraw at whim their functioning support of rebates for Colorado’s affordability of renewables for the public good.
Van called for a mantra, charging us to take up our own energy generation wherever we are. Just take it back. Lyons has that same gleam in its eye. His roadmap signaled our way would be led by the technology-braving children, our Earth Guardians, who were there feasting with us, to lead us as a family cluster; and he tenderly asked them to make a declaration:
Easy! Standing on a chair like a tall bear, child energy charged the room with taking up their own, our own future. You might ask, how would they proceed to do that? Aaaahhh! An iMatter March, May 14, 12 noon! (http://www.earthguardians.info/imatter.shtml) commitment duly heard.
Van Jones stuck with them in his insights long enough to make them the newborn heroes of tech, of being born into tech, the blood of tech, taking the i-pad, i-pod out of its limited commercial realms into new territories of real needs of “I”, our needs but more-so the children’s needs, for they are the future. Van telling us all, yes, the children are the youngest natural experts using technology for social, ecological purpose. Look up to them, our future leaders.
The overall message Van Jones delivered that evening was emblematic for its reaction to the ubiquitous concern that comes often to him on the streets with fear in the voice, Yyyoouuuuu, ittt’’s yyyyyouuuu, whhhatt they did Toooo Yyouuuuu! Answering with magnanimous gratefulness for having lived through seeing everything going on inside that Whitehouse sanctum during his tenure working for the Administration, spreading his ideas and his humor around that many chambered level with a will wrenched from politic. Yes, at Van’s will. If he made the Whitehouse laugh as much as he made us all laugh on Wed., March 2, it must have left at least some of his everlasting barbs, tears, and wonderment behind.
To see his style watch some of the many YouTube videos like this one: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlOv8RCkcXE. And find our Colorado Earth Guardian children here: http://www.earthguardians.info/pastarticles1.html,http://www.dailycamera.com/news/ci_15043256#axzz0nLkzHJ7q and http://www.gayainternational.org.
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