2025 Life Logs, Day 78: Meeting, Meeting, Meeting, Meeting
Date: Wednesday March 19, 2025
Weather: Partly Sunny; High Temp 48, Low 38 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
My two-year term as Co-President of Encore is coming to an end, but I somehow got myself nominated to be the Vice President of Programs for next year. At some point, I did say I would fill the position if absolutely no one else would do it. Evidently, no one would. So, this morning I met with the woman who will be the Assistant VP with me, along with the other Co-President and next year’s President. The woman I will be working with next year on programming is a delightful person. I look forward to working with her to bring interesting programs to our Encore monthly meetings.
Next was a Woodwell Climate Research Center (WCRC) webinar entitled, “Navigating Federal Policy with Woodwell Climate.” I wanted to tune in to this to try and understand how Woodwell plans to keep their presence at the federal government level in these trying times.
I had a lunch break, took Shadow to the Vet for annual vaccinations, answered some emails, and then was off to an Exploring Public Policy meeting. Charlotte Harris, Chair of the Town of Falmouth Planning Committee, came to talk with us about the role of the Planning Committee in terms of dealing with Falmouth’s affordable/attainable housing crisis. I had never met Charlotte, but she has been on the Planning Committee for ten years and is a wealth of information.
One more meeting to go. I went to Woodwell for a documentary screening and Zoom ‘conversation’ with John Francis. The documentary tells the story of his 17 years of silence and 22 years of walking. John Francis. Born in Philadelphia in 1946, the son of a West Indian immigrant, he moved to Marin County in California as a young man and has been an American environmentalist for over 55 of years. It all began with the oil spill in the Gulf of San Francisco in 1971. His struggle to rationalize his lifestyle in the face of such destruction led him to give up traveling in motorized vehicles and eventually to stop talking for 17 years. He felt like he needed to listen, not talk. He started walking from California to Oregon where he stopped to get a college degree. He walked on to Montana where he got his master’s degree, all the while remaining silent. Walking on to Wisconsin, he got his Ph.D. And then on to Washington, DC, to assist the US Coast Guard in their response to the Exxon Valdez disaster. He is an amazing man and question and answer session with him afterwards was truly inspiring.
