Post-Ivan Civic Recovery

Photo courtesy of Canadian Ice Service

Enid Siskin's message earlier this week about MMS's suppression of public turn-out at the one-and-only Gulf of Mexico drilling meeting in Tallahassee mentions "Ivan fatigue" as one of the reasons why so many Pensacola area community groups seem to be comotose. It's hard working up enthusiasm for a night out to repair the foundations of participatory democracy when you're still suing your wind insurance company or staring at contractor estimates for elevating your home.

This, too, shall pass -- eventually. In the meantime, it will take imaginative leadership, creative ideas, and the help of ordinary people like you, dear reader, to help restore verve to our most important citizen volunteer organizations.

Here's one idea for kick-starting post-Ivan civic group recovery: The remnants of residents' and business groups on Pensacola Beach and affinity organizations like Gulf Coast Environmental Defense, Santa Rosa Sound Coalition, the League of Women Voters, and others could get together and buy a showing of Davis Guggenheim's forthcoming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Invite the public to a "Free Movie Day." Maybe organize a "Volunteer Organization Marketplace" around the event. Talk your child's teacher into an educational field day trip to the movies.

The 90-minute movie is scheduled for release by Paramount Classics around May 24. The documentary is said to be "a cinematic version of the lecture that [Al] Gore has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming."

If that sounds boring, you haven't been paying attention to the new Al Gore. The movie is getting tremendous reviews in advance of its May 2006 release.

"Funny... riveting... personal... impassioned... provocative" are just some of the encomiums being heaped on the film by Sundance Film Festival reviewer Geraldine Bell, Paris-based U.S. journalist Tara Bradford, and others. As Richard Cohen wrote the other day in the Washington Post:

"You will be captivated, and then riveted and then scared out of your wits.

You will see the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from space of what the ice caps looked like once and what they look like now and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be underwater."

Don't think this isn't the sort of movie to lift the spirits of hurricane victims. The news actually is very good and Gore's outlook is optimistic, as the Hollywood Reporter review makes clear:

"What Gore strives to make crystal clear to anyone in opposition is that the tools and methods to reverse these calamitous changes are at hand -- no new inventions required -- and that the economic consequences of tackling the problem are positive rather than negative. The idea that responsible environmental protection is bad for the economy is exposed here through facts and science for what it is -- a Big Lie."

Locally, Cinema 4 in Gulf Breeze might be the perfect venue for a post-Ivan civic recovery "Free Movie Day."

Write, phone, or email the moviehouse manager and ask him how much it would take to rent the theater for a day and if he'll make arrangements to be one of the first to show "An Inconvenient Truth."