NEWS FLASH!
To the St. Lawrence Community:

Regrettably, due to the inability of many of our expected guests to travel here and our worries about safety for all planning to attend Focus the Nation tonight, the event has been canceled.

Focus the Nation Planning Team

Everyone’s doing it; your parents bought LED lights to decorate for the holidays, Wal-Mart plans to design stores that use 30% less energy, 468 educational institutions have pledged climate neutrality…everyone is going green. 2008 has promise to be the year the U.S. focuses on climate change. Over 1,300 colleges and universities are getting us started on January 31^st with Focus the Nation a national teach-in on global warming solutions.

St. Lawrence, Clarkson, SUNY-Canton and SUNY-Potsdam have joined forces to host a community forum on February 1^st at 7pm in Gulick Theater. The goal of the forum is to discuss the creation and implementation of tangible actions on climate change with politicians, community members and academic institutions (high school and college). North County Public Radio’s Brian Mann will be the facilitator of this conversation on North County solutions to climate change. During the forum audience members will have a chance to ask researches, community experts and politicians questions about climate change. State and local political leaders have been invited to speak about their plans for global warming action and Community Energy Services’ Ann Heidenreich has drafted a position paper outlining the North Country’s framework for action.

All four schools are taking time on Thursday, January 31^st and Friday, February 1^st before the forum to hold teach-ins at their own institutions. These teach-ins will inform participants on climate change science, impacts and solutions enabling them to fully engage in the conversation at the forum and ask questions relevant to the North County situation. Spanning a wide variety of disciplines, teach-in leaders are faculty and students who work in the field, have done research, or are otherwise educated on climate change topics. Public participation at all teach-ins is encouraged.

This is the beginning of a series of very meaningful conversations about local actions on climate change. Together we must determine how we will change our heating and electricity sources and our modes of transportation. We hope you will be a part of this process. E-mail for more information to find out how.