In early December, I had the profound honor and privilege of representing the Sierra Club of Florida at the Hurricane Science for Safety Leadership Forum, which took place at Walt Disney World. The event was the quarterly fruition of a movement begun roughly a decade ago by a fine organization called FLASH, the Federal Alliance for Safe Homes. If you live in an area which is targeted by hurricanes or other wind storms with any regularity, I exhort you to visit flash.org today and learn more about preparedness.

The Hurricane Science for Safety Leadership Forum was a convocation of dozens of the brightest minds in climatology, meteorology, risk management, urban planning and other disciplines and I left with my head throbbing from the dozens of insights I gleaned. Indeed, while my main purpose was to represent the Sierra Club in order to be certain that a strong environmental voice was present, after the very first plenary session, several people made the effort to approach me and express gratitude for my presence and I knew that I had found a unique conference.

I could fill my posts here on Keyboard Culture for the entire first half of 2009 with all of the material presented at the forum but what left the most lasting impression on me was that of the profound difference in damage to property caused by category 4 and category 5 hurricanes versus category 3. I already knew that global warming has a significant impact on this question but now, thanks to the brilliant presentation of Dr. Amanda Staudt of the National Wildlife Federation, I have a PowerPoint presentation to share with you.

In my next post, I will provide the presentation file to you and the context in which the frightening data on her slides should be consumed.

Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line

Corbett Kroehler