Guy at Toastmasters convention: Toastmasters can help solve global warming

He said he believed they had the power to influence people "to contribute towards making a positive change in the world around us" in all the current global concerns and issues, such as the financial crisis, global warming and political upheavals.

Some crops damaged after cold, rain | BlueRidgeNow.com | Times-News Online | Hendersonville, NC

It may be too late for the peaches. Kenny Barnwell, who farms in the Edneyville area, said the county’s peaches and nectarines were hit the hardest, almost wiped out.

NPR science reporter Richard Harris weighs in

Harris will contribute his perspective on the role of the media in an age when going green is finally trendy, but the challenges are bigger than ever. “My job is not to be an advocate per se, but help people understand what all the facts are, and the facts often lead us to an obvious direction we should be heading in,” he says. “I’ve watched this issue evolve for well over 20 years. I’ve seen the scientific consensus congeal around this.”

With that duty also comes the need to impart the complexity and gravity of these issues and the difficulties ahead in solving them. Harris says he also tries to show in his pieces that there is no quick fix, but rather that sweeping societal changes will have to be to made to slow the pace of global warming. “It’s so much more than, you go buy a Prius and the problem is solved,” he says.

In his many years behind the microphone, Harris has also witnessed the decline in the fourth estate, which he sees as having real consequences in the realm of science journalism—not just on the writers who’ve lost their jobs as newspapers axe their science sections but on the public’s access to unbiased information about important issues.

“It does add to the polarization of the issues. It’s not black and white. It’s not certain to be a catastrophe, but you have to recognize that it is a very real possibility,” he says. “Then some news outlets or blogs work full-time to say climate change is a hoax. There is a collection of people who focus their attention only on information that supports their own belief system.” That, he says, given the extraordinary amount of work to be done, is just not productive. Because as trendy as the Klean Kanteens and sustainable cotton T-shirts may be, the real solution will be a revolution. “I think we need to quietly find out a way to transform our technology,” he says. “You create technology so that everyone will naturally want to adapt and not be talked into it. That’s an incredibly tall order. It may be impossible.”

Richard Harris takes advantage of fossil-fueled travel

Harris, who joined NPR in 1986, has traveled to the ends of the earth for NPR, reporting from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest, and the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis).