The Kerrys, the Environment, the West and Me

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The Kerrys, the Environment, the West and Me

By Dan Whipple, 4-18-07

I had a very Kerry weekend.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) was in Denver to promote his new book, and he wouldn’t leave me alone. The senator and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have co-written This Moment on Earth: Today’s New Environmentalists and Their Vision for the Future (Public Affairs Books, $25).

I have always felt a strong identification with Sen. Kerry, except for the fact that he is senatorially tall and slender, with full, flowing grey locks that catch the sunlight just so and chiseled granite good looks, while I am short, bald and ugly. But we both were vigorous opponents of the Vietnam War, and ... well, that’s all I can think of right now, but I’m sure other similarities will occur to me.

The senator, recognizing our long spiritual kinship, invited me to join in a four-way telephone conversation on Friday afternoon with himself, me and two other bloggers. I don’t know which is the sorrier situation: that I am now a “blogger,” or that U.S. senators and former presidential candidates are reduced to holding intimate conversations with the species.

...

The senator said when he finally arrived, “We are pleased to be here. So many people have told us about this wonderful store, the Tattered Cover. They said that when you get here, you won’t want to leave, you’ll make it a second home. One of the reasons we are late, the weather on the East Coast is such that we may have to make this our home for a while.” This had the advantage of being charming, but the disadvantage of not explaining anything.

I had meant to offer him some tips from my own experience on how to wow the bookish Tattered Cover audience. But he didn’t need it. Clearly Kerry has spoken in public before. He was by turns funny, modest, self-assured, charming and informative. Teresa Heinz Kerry was, if anything, even more charming than he was when she spoke softly and knowledgeably in her lightly accented English.

But Kerry hadn’t come to just joke around. He was here to talk about serious matters: The Environment. Kerry said that he was heartened when he spoke to Americans during his presidential run.

In their book, the Kerrys write of the “new environmentalists” of the subtitle. They cited a couple of westerners: Janine Fitzgerald of Colorado, a rancher who is fighting coalbed methane development; and Helen Reddout of Washington, who battled to enforce water quality standards for dairy farms.
Dan Whipple is a guest columnist for New West writing from Broomfield, Colorado. Find his “Due West” columns at http://www.newwest.net/duewest.