Miller recalls Clinton-Gore visit to Tahoe in ‘97

[babylonsister]

Miller recalls Clinton-Gore visit to Tahoe in ‘97

Story by: John Trent

8/15/2007

It was the opportunity of a lifetime.

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It was all part of an historic visit by Gore and President Clinton during that weekend, the Lake Tahoe Presidential Forum. Many have credited the ’97 presidential visit for jump-starting the effort to save Tahoe’s legendary clarity. On Friday, at 3 p.m. at Sierra Nevada College, Clinton and a host of other dignitaries will commemorate the 10th anniversary of the forum.

Ten years later, Miller remembers how his heart momentarily sank as the 1997 event’s organizers prepped those participating.

“They told us, ‘These are the questions that the Vice President is going to ask you ... he’s going to ask you this, and you need to say that,’” Miller remembered. The memory of scripted science didn’t sit very well with Miller then, nor does it hold much sentimental value 10 years later. “But the way it turned out was really great. It turned out to be the opposite. Vice President Gore didn’t stick to the script. The breadth of his knowledge about the environment and Lake Tahoe was very impressive.

“He was so well-informed about the issues, he didn’t have to rely on a canned question or a canned response. It made for some lively and really very interesting conversations that day.”

Today, Miller believes that the Lake Tahoe Presidential was a seminal event in the effort of researchers and managers, of citizens and politicians, to unify in their effort to save Lake Tahoe.

“(Until the ’97 event) there were a lot of people doing a lot of independent research, but we really weren’t looking at issues from a collective perspective,” Miller said, noting that UC-Davis, Nevada and the Desert Research Institute had all developed pockets of excellent research devoted to limnology, or the watershed, or the impacts of particulate matter from the air. “As researchers, we had always talked of the need to get together and collaborate, but (research) competition is competition and we had gone about as far as we could go without a little bit of nudging form the outside world.

“The forum gave us the added incentive to start coordinating our research and to try and just approach issues in a more comprehensive manner. I don’t think we’d be where we are today without the forum.”

more...

http://www.unr.edu/nevadanews/detail.aspx?id=2273

[JNelson6563]

1. Great story.

K&R for President Gore!

Julie