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We’re big on walking the walk at AHA! In our work for financial services and technology clients, you’ll often find us reading Investment News, debating the best ways to diversify our personal investments, or descending on Best Buy to check out the new printers and PCs.

That’s because to write about something, you really have to know a lot about it. You have to experience what your audience experiences. You can’t just sit at a desk and make this stuff up! You have to live the stuff.

So it makes sense that because of the work we do to tell our clients’ sustainability stories, we figured we should do a little work to build and tell our own story. Many of us have been biking into work and recycling our pop cans for years. But this year, we’ve gotten a bit more serious—we’re looking at ways to be more responsible in everything from our energy use and waste output to the carbon footprint of our commutes.

Bill Bradbury speaks on climate change at AHA!

We kicked things off by inviting Bill Bradbury, former Oregon Secretary of State, to share his version of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth presentation, tailored to the Pacific Northwest. Bradbury, a longtime advocate for sustainability, was one of the first to be trained by the former vice president and Nobel laureate to present the slide show on climate change.

If you’ve seen the film version, you know that An Inconvenient Truth combines hard scientific evidence with gut-wrenching stories about starving polar bears to make the case that climate change is real and is affecting our planet right now. Bradbury’s presentation echoes that approach, but instead of polar bears, he talks about the impact of a warmer planet on salmon, wine grapes and pine forests. For example, climate change is making it harder for winemakers to grow the delicate grapes that create Oregon’s beloved Pinot noir. Our carbon-generating habits are making for tough times in the fishing and timber industries, putting our fruit farmers at risk and producing increasingly bad consequences to human health.

But if you’ve seen the film version, you also know that An Inconvenient Truth ends with a positive message. We have the means to do something about climate change—right now.

I for one, was inspired by Bradbury’s message. I decided I was going to walk the walk—or bike the bike—this morning. I put on my helmet and pedaled my way to work for the first time this year. I have faith that my efforts, and the efforts that AHA! makes, can make a real difference.

If you’d like to watch a brief interview we conducted with Bill Bradbury during his time here, click here to go to the AHA! website.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under CSR reporting, Communications, Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.