By Doug Brunk, San Diego Bureau
When Dr. Lise Van Susteren learned she was one of the 50 trainees chosen by former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore to present their version of his global warming slide show, “An Inconvenient Truth,” to audiences around the world, she was overjoyed.
“My husband kept saying to me, 'Of course they'll pick you. You have all the criteria,'” said Dr. Van Susteren, a Bethesda, Md.-based forensic psychiatrist who applied online in the fall of 2006, just weeks before training was to begin for successful applicants.
She described the wait for the response from Mr. Gore's camp, the Climate Project (www.theclimateproject.org
Dr. Van Susteren is no stranger to politics. In 2006, she ran for a Democratic seat in the U.S. Senate representing Maryland but withdrew because of insufficient campaign funding. Her desire to seek public office was prompted not only by her concern about global warming, she said, but also when then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who also is a physician, blocked federally funded research on embryonic stem cells in 2005.
“I said to myself, 'the American people are going to think that doctors don't care about their suffering,'” said Dr. Van Susteren, who grew up in Appleton, Wis., as the daughter of a judge. “I said, 'This is insane. Why am I in my office anymore if I believe that as a psychiatrist I might be able to present things with a psychological mindedness that gives me an edge? Why am I not out there?' I recognized that so often the people who have power are probably not the ones that should have it. I exhorted myself to do what I was wishing others would do.”
Today, that undertaking involves educating people from all walks of life about global warming. The first meeting of the 50 trainees took place during a dinner meeting in the Nashville, Tenn., home of Al Gore, whose slide show on global warming became the basis for “An Inconvenient Truth,” an Academy Award-winning documentary film. Mr. Gore “is brilliant. He has prescience about so many issues, global warming being the one that is foremost in our minds today,” Dr. Van Susteren said. “He told us that, for the last 25 years since he first started talking about climate issues, he kept looking over his shoulder and asking, 'Where is my cavalry?' He looked at us and said, 'You are my cavalry.' We were thrilled. Later, we presented him with an antique bugle and identified it as having come from the first 50.”
During the course of the weekend, Mr. Gore gave his slide show to the trainees “and we were absolutely riveted and determined to show it to as many people as possible. The facts are terrifying and the need to warn the public is urgent. People don't understand how close we are to disaster.”
Energized, she returned home to work on her own, shorter version of the slide show. Her first public lecture was just 6 weeks away. Dr. Van Susteren's husband and close friends sat through her early runs of the presentation. Then she moved the data projector to the basement and practiced her show solo at least a half-dozen times. “I needed to find just the right phrases so that I'd have the right cadence and the right words, because for many people words like 'greenhouse effect' are a new language,” she said. “I made a rule that I would not have a slide up unless I knew three things that I was going to say about each.”
Her first lecture was to a group of legislative aides in Washington in November 2006, and she's been presenting at a rapid-fire pace ever since, logging more than 75 presentations to civic, educational, and environmental groups in metropolitan D.C. and in Spain, South Africa, the Dutch West Indies, Puerto Rico, and Anchorage, Alaska, while managing a part-time psychiatry practice.
Dr. Van Susteren said her audiences have responded enthusiastically to the presentation. She credits their response to the credibility of the scientific data and to her experience as a psychiatrist “in recognizing the value of a simple message. People must have an emotional connection in order to change. Gore's slide show offers the science and the drama that assure that.”
“You can't just scare people,” she commented. “That's one method, but it doesn't sustain change. I've been very careful that everybody understands every concept during the slide show well before we go into the numbers. We start off defining fossil fuel, what greenhouse gases are, and why scientists are worried. I talk to them about carbon being the common element in fossil fuel and that when we burn things with carbon in them, we mix them with oxygen and that forms CO2. That's the greenhouse gas that we're talking the most about.”