Rather than give the person by person account this time. I’m just going to mention Ann McElhinney. Not because Nina Owcharenko (the Chapel Hill alumna did give a plug for the Burr amendment), Bob Luddy, or the other speakers did a bad job, but because McElhinney got one of two spontaneous standing ovations in her talk about global warming. Her Irish brogue won everybody over from the start, as did her confession that she is a “recovering European.” The filmmaker who was half of the team behind the documentary Mine Your Own Business injected personal stories, telling details, and a lot of humor into her talk.
McElhinney spoke of filming in Madagascar where children don’t get proper nutrition but environmentalists are more concerned about lemurs. As one site puts it: “The Malagasy people often carve out a subsistence living on a per capita income equal to US$200 per year, so on an individual level getting by often seems more important than preserving the environment.” McElhinney said she told students “with perfect teeth” at UCLA about the disparity between concern for children and for lemurs she saw on Madagascar then shocked them by saying
I think we can do just fine without the lemurs: we’ve managed okay without the dinosaurs.
