Global warming activist and founder of the Stop Global Warming Virtual March Laurie David and nine-time Grammy Award winner recording artist Sheryl Crow will kick off their Stop Global Warming College Tour at SMU on Monday.
The tour continues on to select cities in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Maryland. On April 22, the tour will conclude at the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. where special guests will join Crow and David to celebrate Earth Day.
Then, on behalf of the Americans who joined the virtual march, Crow and David will ask that Congress provide immediate federal action to prevent global warming.
Sponsored by SMU’s Program Council, the 90-minute Monday event, open only to the SMU community, will be held in McFarlin Auditorium at 8 p.m.
The tour seeks to educate students about the effects of global warming and mobilize them to curb its effects.
Crow will play songs and David will present clips from the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which she produced, and play clips from top comedians including her husband, Larry David, co-creator of “Seinfeld” and creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
David will give a speech informing students “where we’re at right now, what the cold hard facts are, and what everyone can do” and a student dialogue will take place.
“This is such a pressing issue facing our society right now and I would encourage everyone to try to attend this event,” said Program Council member Van-Ann Bui, who helped organize the event for SMU.
“I don’t think there’s been anything that anyone out there is doing like this,” said David.
“It’s going to be an interesting night. People are going to get a little bit of fun, a little bit of information. Everyone’s going to feel good when they leave, I think, and I think everyone’s going to join the virtual march and become part of this solution,” she said.
David has tried to bring global warming into the mainstream media. She has worked with many celebrities to amplify what scientists are saying about the dangers of global warming.
In addition to producing “An Inconvenient Truth,” David wrote “The Solution is You: Stop Global Warming – An Activist’s Guide” and helped produce the comedy special “Earth to America!”
David was featured as one of Glamour Magazine’s “Women of the Year” in 2006 and has received several accolades for her accomplishments as a global warming activist.
Crow will use her talents as a singer and songwriter to bring attention to the issue. Crow first became involved with the environmentalist cause after working with singer-songwriter and environmentalist Don Henley in 1991.
“Don was declaring the problem that he was foreseeing with forests being cut down and with just the whole movement away from environmentalism. He actually founded the Walden Woods Project at that time. Don sort of foresaw … that it was going to affect the future,” said Crow. “That was sort of the beginning for me, I felt, with my interest in environmentalism.”
The idea for the historical Stop Global Warming College Tour came about over a casual lunch between Crow and David.
Crow said deciding which audience to target was one of the first steps in the campaign.
“It’s difficult to talk to older people about changing their ways. The enthusiasm of college students is very affecting and contagious,” she said. “We wanted to create some sort of activist movement. Students are savvy, they know what’s going on and they’re concerned.”
The idea of an actual tour began as a joke on Crow’s part, but it caught on.
“It seemed like a really good idea to just go out and take the message that we can be a part of trying to fix the problem as opposed to being overwhelmed by it,” she said. “We want to make it a fun, informative evening.”
The tour will inform students about how they can strike a balance between their lifestyles and how they can reduce their impact on the effects of global warming.
The tour will suggest reasonable solutions to global warming; not everyone has to go out and buy a hybrid car, avoid airplanes, eschew dry cleaning, or downsize their houses to help curb global warming.
David wants people to realize that they do not need to have an all-or-nothing approach to reducing their impact on the environment. They can do little things that eventually add up to diminish the effects of global warming if enough people join the effort.
Crow and David hope that college students will make up for previous generations’ apathy on the issue of global warming. They see college students as the generation that has the power and potential to put an end to it.
The hope is for students to join the Stop Global Warming Virtual March at www.stopglobalwarming.org, where they can demand solutions to global warming and show leaders in the business world and government that people will no longer accepting passiveness as a solution for reducing emissions.
David founded the Global Warming Virtual March with Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
According to David’s personal Web site, The Virtual March engages politicians, business leaders, religious leaders, labor unions from all sides of the political spectrum to urge the United States to focus on the “ticking time bomb that is global warming.”
“College students have changed the world before, and we need them to change it again,” said David. “That’s one of the hopes of the Stop Global Warming College Tour.”
She added that “the movement to stop global warming really has to become the biggest movement in the country, and that’s not going to happen without our college campuses getting ignited on it.”
The Lone Star State was the ideal starting place for the tour given its reputation as the No. 1 emitter of carbon dioxide in the U.S.
“It’s important that we come to Texas and talk to students about what’s going on with global warming,” said David.
“We wanted to go places where you might not expect us to go,” she said. “Starting in Texas seemed like a logical place.”
David decided to kick off the tour at SMU partly because of what was happening at the time with Dallas-based utility company TXU Corp.’s plan to spend $10 billion on 11 new coal-powered plants around Texas.
If the plants had been built, they would have emitted millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“By the time we decided to come to Dallas, a couple weeks later they pulled the power plants. That’s the power of picking SMU, I think,” said David. After the tour visits SMU, it will move on to Texas A&M.
“I think this is a great opportunity for SMU to get informed as well as have some fun learning about global warming,” said first-year Kelly Pearson.
“It is an honor to have SMU be the starting location for this tour,” she said, ” and we have the potential to start this thing off right and help inform not only SMU but the rest of the locations about the issue of global warming.”
Junior Lauren Hill thinks the tour will help students recognize that they are the inheritors of escalated global warming conditions and must do everything to stop it.
“This event is perfect for getting the message out there,” she said. “I am personally worried about the effects of global warming and I think that students should be more aware of the problem because we are the ones who can affect change in the world.”
“We need everyone marching on the internet, we need everybody demanding that their countries freeze and reduce emissions,” said David.
“There’s a window of time and the window is closing. That’s what’s so urgent about this,” she said. “That’s why it’s so important. We’re not going to solve this until everyone starts demanding solutions now,” said David.
“The goal is to turn everyone into a global warming activist. We’re all a part of this problem, all of us, every single one of us is part of the problem, so every single one of us has to be a part of the solution.”