A long day with journalists

Today was a long, long day. The museum played host to the society of environmental journalists for their conference. This meant a day of polishing the section for an open house for the professionals in the evening after dinner and the key note speaker. I am glad I went to this lecture. I was all fired up afterward.

Actually going to the talk was the highlight of the night, Bobby Kennedy Jr. was speaking. He is a passionate speaker and environmentalist and has command of the issues and facts of what he speaks of. I was particularly impressed with the poignancy of some of the points he was making. His entire talk was riddled with recent statistics on health impacts as a result of the amount of pollutant allowances currently allowable due to Bush administration changes in environmental policies.

What if we were told that terrorists were poisoning one in six American women with such toxic levels of Mercury, that they will have a child with mental impairment?

What if we were told that terrorists were releasing toxins into our air such that 60% of children born in our country will have asthma?

What if we were told that terrorists were causing 30,000 deaths per year due to poisons they were releasing into our air and water?

The point being made here is that we are doing more damage to ourselves than any terrorist organization could even hope to dream of doing and for some reason we just have not been seeing this, or hearing it within this context. BK Jr. was even criticizing the journalists for not getting the message out, is it not their job to inform the public. Just because it’s an election year and there’s a war going on, does not excuse them from being more bold in reporting the egregious changes going on in our environmental policies.

The conference sponsors did not do their job in advertising the open houses that we lowly employees stayed until 11pm for. There were hundreds of journalists there and only a couple dozen actually made it into the bug rooms. Each person more or less received personal tours through the section and each one enjoyed it. I guess the tasty min-desserts and alcohol available on the floor below were too enticing to get away from.