Pacific Index

Issue date: 2/15/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Contributed Photo Professor Jules Boykoff helped organize the Focus the Nation events, one of which featured Bill Bradbury, Oregon's Secretary of State. Mark Truax, head of the PLF, along with PUCC, SEA and selected Pacific departments also helped organize the event.

The Focus the Nation events, hosted on campus Jan. 29-31, came and went quickly but left more than 300 attendees with some serious issues to contemplate.

The difference those three days of environmental and global warming awareness will make on campus, in Forest Grove and across the nation is yet to be determined.

The idea for a nation-wide teach-in on global warming came from Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College. What started as an idea has become a program for spreading the word about changes that need to be made quickly in order to ensure a healthier environment in the future for our nation and the world.

There have been more than 1800 events hosted at institutions, mostly at colleges and universities but also churches, civic groups and high schools.

Pacific has been named as one of the top 50 event holders.

Jules Boykoff, politics and government professor at Pacific and an acquaintance of Goodstein's, presented the idea of hosting events on campus.

Many students, staff and faculty assisted in the efforts to hold Focus the Nation at Pacific. Pacific Undergraduate Community Council, PUCC, the Politics and Government Department, the Environmental Studies Program, Politics and Low Forum and Students for Environmental Awareness (SEA) together sponsored the three-day affair.

Gary Braasch, a nationally recognized photojournalist, Bill Bradbury, the Oregon Secretary of State and a panel of Pacific's own led the presentations.

Now that the events are finished the question is what should be done now.

"Let's get on to the real business. I feel good about how it went […] but there's still global warming right?" said Boykoff.

Evidence shows that people are becoming more environmentally considerate, but it has been made clear by many leaders in this new environmental movement that this isn't enough.

Continued...

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