Friday, March 12, 2010

March 8 - Day 8

Governement PRG and Gemestones

Today, instead of taking the Metro, we drove the van into town. Since we were early for our 11:00 appointment, we went to the White House Visitor’s Center. After emptying our pockets in order to step through security, we spent half an hour looking at pictures of paintings and people and little models of buildings and read cute, touristy little blurbs about them.

Then, we walked about two blocks to an office building called a “think tank”. There we met with a woman named Sharon Burke who works with the Center for New American Security. Sharon’s job is to think of things that could happen in the future and think of ways to deal with those situations. Specifically she works on environment and resources (climate change, fossil fuels), but other people in CNAS work on military scenarios. About a year ago, CNAS put together a scenario about the year 2015. In this scenario, the earth is running out of natural resources and numerous natural disasters have hit worldwide. People from all over Europe, Asia and America came to Washington D.C. to act out this scenario. People played the roles of the governments of different countries in the scenario and discussed what to do about these issues as if they were real countries. The game took 6 months to plan and lasted two days.

After talking with Sharon Burke, we went to the Appalachian Voices headquarters to eat lunch and learn how to do drop-off lobbying. We came up with a few beginning lines of what to say to whoever we got to speak to, then added parts of our about our own experience with Mountain Top Removal and why we want it stopped.

The last stop we made was the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. There are lots of bones, and quite a few stuffed animals jumping out at you from the walls. There were huge, colorful gemstones and glowing minerals and weird insects. Eventually though, the long day began to wear on us and we got into the van and drove back for the day.

Emma

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