Tomorrow I get the pleasure and privilege of emceeing TedxOilSpill, one of the great spinoffs of the TED conferences. Spinoff is not quite the right word… they are things-in-themselves, self-organized series of talks but very organized… yet always with a bit of entropy.

(A slideshow from the TedxOilSpill Expedition…. independent documentation of what’s happening in the Gulf.)

I remember that a decade ago, Gerry Laybourne of Oxygen sat me down with one of the founders of TED and every part of her being just vibrated with how great her experience at TED was. I didn’t quite get it. I get it now.

I’ve never been to TED, but of course I’ve listen to the TED Talks, and watched ones from other Tedx conferences. These kinds of talks are about connections, idea sharing, status, and validation. I had a chance to speak tonight with John Francis, the remarkable mind and spirit behind the book Planetwalker and the organization Planetwalk. Y’all can read… go to these links and read his story. He made a series of ethical, spiritual, and emotional decisions that completely transformed his life and his relationship to what we consider normal modern consumption of fossil fuels and to what we consider normal human communication. He sought connection through silence. He spent years on his own path.

Now, he is one of the very few globally well-known African-American environmentalists. At the sound-check for TedxOilSpill today, we spoke about that fact. Rooms like the TED and TEDx conferences are places where people are not only exposed to ideas, but they recruit fans and funders and patrons. Still relatively few African-Americans make it into these spaces; nor, by and large, do we seek them. Yes, there are questions of resources — it costs six thousand dollars to attend TED, and there is a waitlist — but I also think it’s a question of what kinds of power people value. The minimum contribution for this Tedx conference was only fifty dollars. There are plenty of African-Americans and other people of color who could afford to be in rooms like this, or to to press to be put on the agendas, but I’m not sure if we are making the connection about how influential events like this are in bringing together people with money and power and the will to make change.

Dr. Francis and I also reminisced about our time spent crabbing with our parents… both of us grew up on the East Coast and he went to the docks with his father; I with my mother. Those waters are more polluted and less fertile for crabs, oysters and fish these days. It hurts me to think of the Chesapeake being as damaged as it is, and still the Chesapeake is in splendid shape compared to the Gulf.

Dr. Francis mentioned the enormity of what is happening. This is not a situation that can be reversed in a generation. Even under the best of circumstances, it will take decades to mitigate the effects of this oil spill… if it is ever mitigated. (Remember it is not only the oil but the dispersants that are changing the ecosystem of the sea and wetlands).

It all seems tragic, but it’s just life. What I mean by that is part of the human experience is that we often have more power than we have good sense. We fumble forward through history, destroying and rebuilding. That is part of what we humans do.

We’re in this together…. how few people don’t use some form of fossil fuels? The questions that face us are not just how to solve this disaster, but how to raise our appetite for honest discussion of where we are today.

I look forward to tomorrow. Having seen some of the presentations, I can already sense that it will be both emotionally draining and spiritually renewing… as well, of course, as informative. I look forward to sharing more.

You can tune in all day tomorrow, from 9am to 7pm, for talks at TedxOillSpill.com

P.S.: The team of photographers and videographers who went out and did independent, self-funded photography and documentation of the oil spill are still thousands of dollars in the red… paying expenses out of their own pockets. They’ve done some great work and deserve to break even on it. Consider making a donation. (You can learn more about their work at the same part of the site.)