Climate activists sign up for “Conference on Wheels,” Brita Climate Ride
By Geraldine Carter
Co-Founder, Brita Climate Ride
Just another couple of months until the second annual Brita Climate Ride, to benefit Clean Air-Cool Planet, Focus the Nation and the Rails to Trails Conservancy! With my friend and colleague Caeli Quinn, I’m the co-founder and co-director of Climate Ride – and proud to be dropping in on CoolPlanet.org.
Sign up for the Ride and you’ll spend five days seeing the country, challenging your body, and advocating for smart climate policies at a time when citizen voices can make a bigger difference than ever before! In case you’re still not convinced, I’d like to mention a few of the environmental experts and all-around interesting people who are already committed to participating in all or part of the Ride.
Colin Beavan (a.k.a. No Impact Man) spent a year living in New York City with his family, working on getting their net environmental impact down to zero. A documentary on his experiment (also called “No Impact Man”) was just featured at Sundance, and he continues to maintain a blog about what each of us can do to “end the environmental crisis, make a better place to live for ourselves and everyone else, and hopefully come up with a happier way of life along the way.” If you’re like me, you have a ton of questions about how he fared during his No Impact year – join us on Brita Climate Ride and you’ll have three days to ask him all the questions you want (although preferably not during tough climbs)!
If you’ve caught The Lazy Environmentalist, a brand-new show airing each Tuesday at 9pm on the Sundance Channel, then you know Josh Dorfman – the Lazy Environmentalist himself! Josh is joining Brita Climate Ride for his second year (his first year since becoming a star of the small screen), to show that the Lazy E can ride 300 miles without training. I should add here that we don’t advise this for anyone but Josh!
Alison Gannett – world champion free skier, Patagonia Ambassador, founder of the Save our Snow Foundation, and star of Warren Miller ski films – will be pedaling with the Climate Riders all the way from New York City to DC. I know I can’t wait to meet her – she’s got an approach to solving the problem of climate change that is both pragmatic and eclectic. Her environmental resume includes converting the first solar-powered SUV PHEV in the world to get more than 100 mpg; designing and building the first straw bale home in a National Historic District; and leading ski expeditions to Pakistan, Bolivia, Bhutan and India to document global warming.
We’ve even got Denmark’s Ambassador to the U.S. signed up – Friis Arne Petersen will be joining the journey to Washington, DC. Ambassador Petersen will brief the group on the upcoming COP15 United Nations Climate Conference, the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol to be negotiated in Copenhagen, Denmark this December. It gets better – one Climate Rider will be selected for a trip to Denmark during the conference, courtesy of the Embassy of Denmark.
If you think these people sound interesting, why not join up with Brita Climate Ride 2009? (Details, including the fundraising requirement, are available here.) We promise you it will be the ride of a lifetime. How far would you pedal for a new energy future?
Explore posts in the same categories: Advocacy, Climate, FundraisingTags: Alison Gannett, Brita Climate Ride, climate change, Friis Arne Petersen, No Impact Man, The Lazy Environmentalist
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