(photo by spork_incident)

As noted in a previous blog entry, on Saturday we had the pleasure and the privilege of joining JK & THK, a few hundred bookstore guests, and a double handful of local media types for a “This Moment on Earth” book event in greater Pittsburgh, PA.

While we’ve written often in this space about the book, its contents, and other stops on the ongoing series of TMOE Tour appearances by JK and THK, today we’d like to follow up on the previous post by talking about the other people who were in the room on Saturday, too.

Certainly, JK and THK wanted to spend some time talking to local folks about their book - more specifically, talking about the issues and especially the people that they wrote about in their book - and the local folks also wanted a chance to see, hear, and get their copies of TMOE signed by JK and THK. So that’s why the event took place. But it’s not really what the event was about.

Yes, TMOE was the cause and the Kerrys were the catalyst. But the real message of the day wasn’t just about the book, or even about the book’s authors. The real message was all about the Pittsburgh people who participated in the occasion, as attendees and staffers and bloggers and reporters, and about what made their shared experience on Saturday so special for each of them in turn.

(video by GlobalVillage)
First, a recap from the bloggers’ point of view—regular JK blog contributors GlobalVillage and wisteria were there for the occasion, as were representatives of Pittsburgh’s sizable contingent of intrepid political/environmental/cultural bloggers. The Fox Chapel Barnes & Noble store’s management and staff graciously set aside extra space for the bloggers in the media section of the already-crowded seating area, and they were also provided with the same level of access to JK and THK that the more traditional media representatives were.

The idea of treating bloggers as legitimate media representatives is not as uncommon now as it was even just a few years ago. Nowadays we think nothing of seeing big-name bloggers morphing into news-show celebrities or writing bylined op-ed columns in Time magazine. (For that matter, nowadays we think nothing of seeing news-show celebrities and Time magazine columnists morphing into bloggers, too.)

But it’s not just big-name bloggers who are part of the TMOE experience. At every stop on this JK/THK book tour, bloggers of all kinds have been invited and encouraged to participate. Some of them have well-known blogs on a national level, some have blogs that are recognized on a regional level, some have relatively low-circulation blogs, and some don’t even have blogs of their own at all (preferring to write for shared group blogs and for the bigger blogsites like DU, dKos, and FDL instead.)

This extra level of inclusiveness is not accidental. It’s not a calculated public-relations move on the part of back-room media consultants, either. It’s just the way things are when it comes to JK, THK, and their personal connection to their cyberspace constituencies. They have a great deal of respect, not to mention genuine affection, for the diverse blogging community that they view as being part of their extended Kerry family. <!-more-> That sense of personal connection to the online community was clearly evident during this Saturday’s event, when JK and THK insisted on making time in their packed schedule to sit down with bloggers for a special one-on-one interview. And sit down they certainly did, as GlobalVillage described in her DU thread about the day’s happenings:

I wasn’t the least bit surprised that the Senator offered the only three chairs in the room to Teresa and the two women bloggers in the group, and made do with a cardboard box. The conversation was as informal as the setting, as the Senator answered a question from one of the bloggers about how to deal with pseudo science and climate change deniers. Senator Kerry noted that the real science around climate change is peer reviewed and that anything put out by the flat earthers isn’t. When Inhofe’s name was called out by someone in the group, the Senator referred to him as the “leader of the Flat Earth Conference”.

Sadly, there’s no good way to sequester what Inhofe spews, so voting him out of office is about the only solution.

Dayvoe, the Pittsburgh-area blogger who asked that particular question, also got a chance to write about the experience on his 2 Political Junkies blog:

We were graciously given a few minutes of the Kerry’s time before the book event to ask a question or two. As I was the tallest of the bloggers there, it seemed only natural for me to go first. I asked when dealing with environmental questions, how does one deal with the large amount of pseudoscience masquerading as science?

Senator Kerry pointed out that all the science in his book is fully annotated, that there are 928 peer reviewed studies that all point out that human beings are actively contributing to global climate change. Peer-review, he added, is the system used by the scientific community whereby a study is submitted anonymously to a separate group of scientists (ergo “peer”) for the methodology and data to be checked. The point being, of course, that if it makes it into a peer-reviewed journal, the science is solid.

Of the studies that disagree, he said, none are published in peer-reviewed journals. The evidence is so overwhelming that one would have to a member of the “flat-Earth caucus (Senator Inhofe, presiding)” in order to believe otherwise.

Not to be outdone, however, GV then trumped her text-based blogging colleague dayvoe by posting a video recording of that very answer to her YouTube channel (a recording in which you can see the easy intimacy that JK and THK always exude when they’re meeting with their blogging constituents, not to mention the matter-of-fact cardboard-box casualness that GV mentioned in her description of the seating arrangements).

(video by GlobalVillage)

Perhaps sensing a challenge, members of the local broadcast media managed to step up and claim equal space with the bloggers at this event. WPXI covered it with video footage in their evening news broadcast on Saturday, but KDKA took it to the next level with streaming web-video presentations of two clips from their evening and morning broadcasts and also with the full uncut videotape of their one-on-one interview with JK and THK, all of which can be viewed on the KDKA website here.

As we noted in our earlier post, the room itself was packed full of people eager to hear what JK and THK had to say on Saturday. There were two hundred folding chairs carefully laid out down a long narrow space between the bookshelves in the center of the store, with the first few rows reserved for media representatives and to bloggers respectively. Admittance to the event was free of charge, of course, but due to the limited seating space available those who wished to stay for the discussion and the book signing were asked to arrive early and were given a brightly-colored wristband with a number matching that on the chair that was assigned to them for the duration.

At the close of the Q&A session, the store staff directed the attendees row by row to step between the bookshelves to their left and queue up for a return loop past the table where JK and THK were signing their copies of the books as they passed by on their way to the front of the store. It was a well-planned and well-executed strategy, and it worked quite well to keep things moving along without everything getting clogged up tighter than rush-hour traffic on the Beltway.

There were a few inevitable interruptions in the steady flow of movement, though. Part of that was caused by the bloggers ourselves, as we tried to pack up our laptops and get out of the tightly-packed seating rows as adeptly as possible. As I pointed out in the previous post and at greater length in this comment on DU afterwards, it was very gracious of the bookstore’s management and staff to accommodate the relatively late-breaking addition of a half-dozen bloggers to their seating plan when they already knew that their store would be filled to its maximum practical capacity by those wanting to come see and hear JK and THK speak in their hometown:

They have a store that’s not exactly ideally laid out for high-attendance book events such as this one, but Susan Hillman (the Customer Relations Manager for that particular BN branch store) and the rest of her staff had everything carefully planned out in advance to handle the expected extra traffic in a timely and expeditious manner.

The store and its staff did a beautiful job of setting things up so that everyone who attended the event had the best experience possible. Everyone there with BN - which included people from other stores and extra volunteers they brought in for the event - were very professional, very friendly, and very pleased to have the chance to be part of this particular happening. They made everything work as well for we pesky bloggers as possible, just as we did everything we could to make their lives as easy as possible given the circumstances.

I understand they did excellent business as a result of their hosting this unusually high-profile book signing event; and that is great news, because they definitely deserve the success they earned with it. Everyone involved with the event on B&N’s end, from store staff to add-on employees & volunteers, deserve all the props we can give them for what they did on that day and for how well they did it. Without them, none of it would have come off anywhere near as it did for all concerned.

A different kind of challenge to the traffic plan was caused by the attendees themselves, though. Rather than just grabbing their books and heading out to their cars, they tended to linger around after the event was over so that they could continue to discuss the issues that were brought up in the book and in the Kerrys’ remarks. People who had asked questions during the Q&A were given additional answers by other attendees, and those who didn’t have time to ask their questions during the event itself got a chance to ask them afterwards in small clusters of exited, involved individuals. It was an informal but no less significant impromptu symposium cum conference cum classroom, and those in attendance were clearly excited to be a part of it.

Several groups of well-qualified, well-informed environmental activists took advantage of the opportunity to keep exchanging information and resources with each other even after the book part of the event was long over. Documentary filmmakers and global-climate scientists eagerly networked with clean-coal specialists and activists bushing to change the way our government regulates the industries and corporations that have been allowed to ignore the consequences of their actions for too many years now.

(photo by spork_incident)

The same thing has happened at each of the other stops on this TMOE Tour. In every city, it’s not just a book-signing moment or a chance for people to shake hands with a well-known author and then go on their separate ways. It’s an invigorating, eye-opening experience that brings people together and helps them forge new connections and alliances with those who feel the same way they do about saving our planet before it’s too late. It’s about people realizing that they really can take correction action themselves rather than passively awaiting their fates.

And that is, after all, the whole reason that JK and THK wrote the book in the first place. So it’s good to see how effectively their message is getting across each time they get a chance to talk to people in their own personal, impassioned ways. Pittsburgh blogger and photographer spork_incident described the net experience up quite well in the post he wrote for his A Spork in the Drawer blog the next morning:

Summarizing their book, the Senator said: “This book is, really, an optimistic book. It should make you angry for five minutes, ten minutes, we hope, and then transfer that into the inspiration that comes out of the stories of all the people we write about and the great things they’ve accomplished. Average citizens who’ve made changes and who fought the government to get the accountability and enforcement that they deserve and the law says they should have.”

What separates this book from Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is the focus on everyday people who have practical solutions to the environmental problems facing us. “I was involved in the first Earth Day in 1970.

Twenty million people came out and said, ‘We’re gonna change things.’ They created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and even the Environmental Protection Agency was signed into existence by Richard Nixon in 1972 because of that effort. We made the environment a voting issue.”

Mrs. Kerry summed it up best: “This book is a reaffirmation of the quality of thinking and conversation that the American people shared with us on the road.”