Their appearance last Friday at the nexStage Theater in Ketchum was billed as a book signing of their new tome, "This Moment on Earth," a 254-page assault on industry's environmental abuses that can only add to the anxiety of environmentalists who fear the worst for the planet.
But to the authors, U.S. Sen. John Kerry and his spouse, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the late afternoon gathering had the passion of a small-town religious camp meeting with husband-wife evangelists leading a crusade to stir the brethren into action against satanic forces.
For just short of an hour, 266 attendees packed tightly into the theater's 296 grandstand seats quietly clung to Kerry's effusive, senatorial speaking style (gesticulating arm waving, punching the air with his index finger, strolling back and forth across the stage), and Heinz-Kerry's more subdued remarks, spoken almost in a hush.
After documenting the failures of government to stem industry's environmental onslaught, the Kerrys urged the audience to take action—and conveniently lists in their book dozens of organizations looking for enlistees in their causes, as well as dozens of specific actions consumers can take to do their part in an environmental cleanup.
This is no Al Gore "Inconvenient Truth" book, although Gore gives the Kerrys' work a three-cheers endorsement.
"Way back when it was not at all fashionable," Gore's back-cover endorsement reads, "indeed when very few people in the world were even paying attention to it, John and Teresa were providing outstanding and courageous leadership" in the environmental cause.
At least 20 pages of the book are devoted to a chapter-by-chapter footnoting with facts about environmental degradation and industrial abuses.
Right out of the box, Kerry provided a chilling statistic about the human body's daily exposure to chemicals.
Everyday exposure could involve as many as 60,000 chemicals in the workplace, the home, in the environment—the number of chemicals that have been opted out of bans of other substances.
In Europe, Kerry added, 250 chemicals have been banned totally, while in the United States only five have been banned.
Heinz-Kerry added to the chilling visual image of exposure to chemicals: she said human skin is the body's largest organ—"everything we're exposed to goes in" the body.
As if to challenge the audience to action, Kerry said he's introduced legislation to ban all coal-powered plants that don't have "capture and sequestration" systems to prevent poisonous emissions.
But individuals can be just as effective. Kerry cited women in Acton, N.C., who rose up against city dumps in their neighborhood and had them banned.
After discovering that 25 percent of the children in the Bronx suffered respiratory ailments, a woman there campaigned to end garbage and waste trucks driving through housing areas.
To dramatize the reality of global warming, Kerry said the Russians are staking sea-bottom claims in the Arctic for mineral and oil exploration because, he said, Moscow believes eventually the polar ice cap will have melted.
At least 5,000 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, Kerry said, are "dying" each year because of the effect of pollutants and global warming.
As a consequence, he said, pollutants in the ocean and in inland waterways are poisoning fish to the point they're inedible.
To the eternal shame of the United States, Kerry said, American politicians are still squabbling over whether the planet is being defiled by pollutants and warming—a certainty that was accepted as long ago as 1992 by 150 nations at the Earth Summit in Brazil.
Quoting the chief climatologist of NASA, Dr. James Hansen, Kerry said that world powers have but 10 years in which to take decisive action to stem further deterioration of the Earth's ecosystems and environment.
However, striking a sobering note, Kerry said that the Bush administration has reversed the criteria in determining chemical threats. Now, he said, "you have to prove they (chemicals) will do you harm, not that they (industry) have to prove you're safe" from their products.
After their stage presentation, the Kerrys remained well over another hour autographing more than 100 copies of their book.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., speaks Friday evening in Ketchum as his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, shows her support. Photo by Willy Cook
