NEW YORK (April 20, 2005) - Mikhail Gorbachev, Ted Turner and Jane Goodall held a press conference today to discuss global peace, nuclear weapons and sustainable development. Oddly enough (or within its usual populist context), most questions from the media focused on off-topic, non-issues such the long-term friendship between Messrs. Gorbachev and Turner, and their thoughts about the selection of a new pope.
I found it ironic that no members of the media were asking about security and environment, the major issues debated several floors below us at the Commission for Sustainable Development sessions. I slipped in the last question of the conference (see picture), asking Mr. Gorbachev about the reticence of world leaders to embrace these issues of environment, poverty and development, and what would be effective tools to motivate world leaders to act.
The UN press office included Mr. Gorbachev’s response in its coverage: “Asked how leaders could be motivated to work towards sustainable development, Mr. Gorbachev said action could not be postponed on security, poverty and the environment.  He called poverty ‘a slow fuse bomb’, saying that it was not possible to deal with anything else unless that was dealt with first.”

NEW YORK (April 20, 2005) - I ran into Ron Sawyer in the hallway near the UN’s mini-cafe in the lower hallways outside the General Assembly. Ron runs EcoSan in Tepotzlan, Mexico. Our Wilson Center water working group spent two days on the ground viewing his “dry sanitation” project, an innovative approach to improving the traditional outhouse. (Sanitation, even though an equal part of the water equation, receives much less coverage in water and health discussions.)
Ron and I popped into an NGO stakeholders meeting to get a pulse on the progress.
We couldn’t have entered at a more powerful moment, a poignant metaphor of the frustration and feeling of molasses-like progress. As we stood in the back, one member reminded her colleagues that their week’s worth of work had to be distilled into a 90-second statement. That left something like 15 seconds to articulate each major issue. The vacuum, as optimism slipped out under the door in stunned silence, left the group staring into space.
As a radio moment, the pregnant pauses would have been powerful. I wish I knew more of the context and had brought my microphone.