Here was a copy of my proposal:
Speaker
Charles ScamahornAffiliation
The Earth Ark ProjectURL
probaway.wordpress.comBiography
After graduating from WSC in Pullman, Washington, I became a pilot in the US Air Force. One day while sitting on a Hydrogen bomb I decided it was a really bad thing to kill a million people with that thing and departed that occupation as quickly as possible. Since that time my life goal has been to find a way to defeat those weapons. I haven’t found one except recovery from the effects.Description
The environment is always changing and at present it is changing very quickly, but plants and animals adapt slowly and many are going extinct. There are efforts to preserve seeds like the seed-bank at Longyear north of Norway but it is very small and selective. The Earth Ark Project aims to preserve wild seeds from every square mile of Earth, by having local individuals send local plant samples to a permanent cold storage.
That is my brief proposal and I thought it had the potential to interest people. There were twenty-eight proposals and only ten people were to be given the five minutes of stage time. These are ecologically sensitive people here in Bend, Oregon and I thought they would be interested enough in the Earth Ark to hear even a five minute proposal, but there doesn’t seem to be much psychological pull to my present proposal. At least there is little interest in the form I put it in. Perhaps it was just too freakish, and what the Ignite Bend usually concerns itself with is stand-up comedy. I had hoped they would be willing to listen to five minutes of serious stuff which was really wild, and I would have tried to make it as light-hearted and comic as possible. I just watched the movie Dr. Strangelove last week and that dark comedy dealing with a similar subject is hilarious.
After last week’s blog posts about The Occupy Wall Street movement and after analyzing that movement it was obvious that it has very little possibility of creating any impact. Now I should consider The Earth Ark using the same cool logic. With the Occupy movement there are powerful forces which are arrayed against it, and those powers have everything on their side. The people in real power probably call it the bowel movement. The Earth Ark Movement shouldn’t have anyone against it because it requires so little of anyone and it will provide so very much to future people and perhaps even to living people. If the ecology really goes sour and many species are quickly lost then after a period of time when the environment has improved all of these areas which had sent seeds to the Earth Ark could once again look as they did before the collapse. Who could possibly be against regaining the beauty we presently enjoy especially if it didn’t cost very much?
Yesterday, I briefly visited our Congressional Representative Walden’s office. He is interested in ecology and so perhaps if I can get him interested in supporting these obviously needed things, designed to save the ecology in the long term, then perhaps something could get done.
Quit being a comic and prepare a presentation for the people who can get things done.
