Talk Radio

I’m doing a virtual tour of the country. A media savy person in Toronto has been hired by my publisher and she organizes radio interviews that I can do between meetings at City Hall. It’s an environmentally friendly, no getting on planes and churning jet fuel exhaust into the atmosphere kind of tour.

A lot of them are on ‘talk’ radio. Do folks who listen to ‘Talk Radio’ buy books? I hope they do because the interviews themselves are quite difficult. My first interview was on a Halifax radio station and it was for a full hour. Both the length of the interview and the enthusiasm of the show’s host caught me by surprise. He had actually read the book, liked it and asked good questions. I tried to answer them as I would to someone over the garden fence.

On reflection, my answers were too long and discursive. We had one caller who was concerned that solar flares and new cracks in the earth’s crust appearing in Ethiopia were insufficiently reported on. I tried to make the point that we couldn’t do much about solar flares or cracks in the earth’s crust but we could do something about human activities which were loading the atmosphere with carbon. He was not convinced. 

To make a long story short, my apologies to Halifax.. I’ve since learned that no matter what the question, I’ve got to respond in a simple, uncomplicated way. On ‘Talk Radio’ you can’t afford to wander.

But there are no real rules. If you stick resolutely to some formula, you will end up trivializing yourself and your listeners. On CFAX, a Victoria Radio station, the host asked me to read the poem which starts Chapter 13: Care of the Soul/Care of the City/ Care for the Planet.

                If you came from the stars
                Across eons of dark and cold
                Upon a planet
                That was not cold, that did not burn,
                That sparkled in a great and glorious disk
                Of sea blue and white swirl;
                That was bright like a great jewel,
                You might be forgiven if, for a moment,
                You’d thought, you’d found heaven.

This begins the chapter that advances the idea that the soul is not a singular Benedictine flight to heaven, nor is the poetry of existence a solitary affair, but a shared facility, connected like a string of DNA to the community, to the city and to the planet.

A bientot,

Clive

Comments

[John Schmitz]

Dear Clive,

I am the author of "The Second Law of Life" that explains in layman language how the concept of entropy plays a role in our daily lifes and thus also in the discussion on climate change and global resources.
With respect to your caller who was concerned about the solar flares and so, I agree with you that we can do a lot ourselves already to improve on the planet's environment. No reason to wait for this or for that. For that purpose I made a brief analysis of the 4th Action Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) and the proposed measures to mitigate the emission of Green House Gases and what we can do about it ourselves. The interested reader can go to: http://secondlawoflife.wordpress.com/

Best regards, John Schmitz