Ten years after the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award, former Vice President Al Gore is still a champion of the cause of environmentalism. With much still to do, Gore visited Amazon in Seattle last week to speak to a company trying to do its own part in addressing sustainability.
In a talk at Amazon’s new corporate headquarters meeting center, 1,600 Amazon employees heard Gore speak about the environment, climate change, demographic changes and the role we can play. Amazon’s Kara Hurst, the company’s director of worldwide sustainability, served as host and wrote about the event in a blog post today.
Hurst said that it seemed appropriate to welcome Gore at its new downtown meeting center, at the foot of its Doppler office tower and across the street from the under-construction biospheres. The center, according to Hurst, has many sustainable features, “including recycled heat, a green roof, and other green building materials.”
Hurst’s blog post also points to a company announcement on its largest wind farm yet, to be built in western Texas as the “newest renewable energy project in our long-term sustainability efforts.” Other links promote Amazon’s aim to put its “scale and inventive culture to work” protecting the environment.
For his part, Gore — who joked in front of an MTV town hall audience in 2000 that he “invented the environment” — touched on the Zika outbreak and natural disasters like the recent flooding in Louisiana. But he also had an optimistic message about progress being made, Hurst wrote.
“We are going to prevail, but we have to act quickly because Earth is our only home,” Gore said. “Fortunately, the will to act is in and of itself a renewable resource.”
