Australian actress Cate Blanchett has opened up about being inspired by Al Gore and the way he helped her become a warrior for the Environment.
“We all know the facts about dangerous climate change,” she told Mindfood magazine in Australia. "It’s very easy to shift from despair to suicidal depression in the wake of that information.
“In 2006 the inspirational Al Gore came out to ignite the Climate Project (TCP), which is generously supported by the ACF, where citizens from all walks of life in Australia are indoctrinated and empowered with the information [and a version of the slide show featured in Gore’s documentary film] An Inconvenient Truth to go out into their communities and spread the word.
“He trained 70 people then [in Sydney]. My husband and I went. We went as citizens and we went as concerned parents. We wanted to do something with our anxiety and to turn our anxiety into action. We were so inspired by the passion of the people doing the training, who were obviously inspired by Al Gore himself. It was the individuals [attending] who were then asking pertinent and specific questions about climate change and had the passion to go back and communicate to their communities.
Blanchett helped launch the Australian Conservation Foundation's Who On Earth Cares campaign, which aims to inspire people to achieve a healthy environment for all Australians. She has also filmed a special appeal for SolarAid that can be viewed on YouTube.
“I think there is an opportunity in climate change. We all know the depressing facts but there is also the opportunity to re-ignite that sense of community. We are a very big, vast country and we forget that we have individual concerns in our communities, which are made up of individuals who all vote and all consume. We are all consumers and if we change the way we consume and think in our communities we can have an enormously powerful effect on governments that need to be lobbied and on the big polluters who need to be shamed into action. But it is the grassroots action where the real opportunity in climate change lies.”
Source: Mindfood
