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A Light in Oslo
12/22/2009

As I arrived in Norway for a seventh year of handling global media relations for the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, I saw the light in more ways than I ever could have imagined.

Moments after landing in Oslo, a spiral glow illuminated the skies just a day before our President was to be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. The “mysterious light” story captivated the country and even momentarily upstaged the man poised to become laureate. The astronomy and extra terrestrial communities were abuzz with wild theories, although a few days later it was determined that a failed Russian missile test caused all of the commotion. It was an eventful start to my trip, albeit an ironic and sobering reminder that even as we all gathered to celebrate peace, the reality of war was ever present.

Enlightenment of a different kind followed as I focused on my task at hand, managing the media, hosts and artists for the peace concert, this year honoring our own commander-in-chief.

I’d never seen the streets of Oslo, or any city, so alive.

Giant murals of Obama greeted me at Central Station, thousands braved the Arctic chill for a glimpse of the First Couple waving from a balcony at the Grand Hotel and Scandinavian children with “hope” candles and American flags were everywhere. It was a sight to see and illustrated how much the perception of our country had changed from my previous visits.

I started working on the Nobel Peace Prize concert my first year at DKC and still remember the skeptical Nords wondering who this brash New Yorker was on their hallowed turf. As years passed, it began to feel more like old home week and I’m now hugging it out with guys named Knut and Geir, butchering a bit of the native tongue and wondering why more people haven’t heard of Vigeland Park.

Despite their reputation as provincial, the Norwegians decided fifteen years ago that inviting American celebrities to host the annual Nobel Concert would serve as a powerful way to spread the message of peace to a wider audience and more youthful demographic. It also morphed from a local classical show into a globally televised “happening” which attracts music’s biggest stars, from Alicia Keys and Diana Ross to Elton John and Paul McCartney. DKC was brought in to secure talent, land media coverage and manage all communications.

Will Smith and his wife Jada were gracious hosts this year. We arranged for them to chat with President Obama for a segment to air within the concert broadcast. An exclusive, no less, chosen by the White House as the only sit-down interview by the President during his Oslo visit.

My favorite quip involved the planet’s biggest movie star admitting to the planet’s most powerful man that he was actually nervous on camera for the first time since Jazzy Jeff was his sidekick. Obama paused, and as Will waited for a sage piece of presidential wisdom, Obama smiled broadly and instead told him to “just channel the Fresh Prince.”

Of course, more substantive dialogue followed, including talk of the President’s prize acceptance speech earlier in the day at City Hall and his overarching theme of “just wars.” The conversation turned out to be a centerpiece of the final show, which also featured Will and Jada’s supremely talented kids, Jaden and Willow, joining them on stage for surprise co-hosting duties. Wyclef Jean, Lang Lang, Donna Summer and Toby Keith had the traditionally reserved crowd on its feet, throwing Obama a celebration fit for a newly-minted laureate. Often stoic Nobel Committee members were dancing in the aisles. Alfred Nobel’s presence was felt in the house.

Throughout the evening, I found myself struggling to truly understand the historic magnitude of what I’d experienced over the past few days.

Backstage after the show, I spoke at length with Harvard professor Dr. Allen Counter, who so eloquently crystallized what we all witnessed here in Oslo. “Do you realize 20 years ago Barack Obama was a young law student with me in Cambridge and at that same time my friend Nelson Mandela was a prisoner serving a life sentence in South Africa. Could anyone in their wildest dreams have predicted that both of these men would each become Presidents and more improbably Nobel Peace Prize winners? Hope is truly alive.”

At that moment, I realized the light in the Norwegian sky a few days earlier had never left.

Posted by: Dave Donovan, Senior Vice President

Posted in Public affairs, Sustainability

A Walk in Yosemite Valley
08/10/2009

On a walk last spring through Yosemite National Park with the filmmakers Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan – I was there with them to screen their upcoming film “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” – John Muir stopped us to describe in his Scottish drawl where he slept when he wandered into Yosemite Valley in the late 1860s.

John Muir – actually the actor and Muir scholar Lee Stetson – was a real life echo of a long-ago conservation movement that gave us the National Park system and helped create the larger sustainability movement that continues today.

Muir is a constant presence throughout the film (which will air on PBS beginning on September 27th). He is a prescient voice of warning – “How far destruction may go is not easy to guess. Every landscape low and high seems doomed to be trampled and harried”– but also one that speaks to the rejuvenation of the spirit through the immersion into nature:

“Nothing can be done well at a speed of forty miles a day. . . .Walk away quietly in any direction and taste the freedom of the mountaineer….Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”

Muir and others in the early parks movement set out to protect these wild places in part because they allowed humans to find their true selves. There’s a spiritualism that stems as much from his religious upbringing as it does from a belief that the flurry of change in the late 19th century was unhinging mankind, disconnecting us from what was true and good.

The voice is one that is completely of its time but yet relevant – it rings true even when the soaring language seems so noticeably distant from the snarky cynicism of today.

But most, from his writings and during the walk (and certainly in the film), there’s this thankful sense that something came first – that Muir and many others came together forcefully in their time to create something that we can experience today. There’s an appreciation, a moment of recognition, that what is there – in Yosemite and other places – was there before. But equally satisfying is the awareness that we have a history – that we are not the end of history or history’s greatest moment. We are just part of it.

There’s also the irony that in nature’s wildest places we are reminded not just of nature and wildlife, we are reminded of us. At a conference in San Francisco in April on diversity and the national parks, one participant noted that the early park advocates saw nature as saving mankind. Today, he continued, it is mankind trying to save nature (more aptly, trying to reverse what we destroyed). Regardless, there’s a story to all of it – a human story with real people fighting real battles. It is all refreshingly kind of familiar.

“The battle for conservation will go on endlessly,” Muir wrote toward the end of his life in 1914. “It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong. Fortunately wrong cannot last, soon or late it must fall back home to Hades, while some compensating good must surely follow. They will see what I meant in time. There must be places for human beings to satisfy their souls. Food and drink is not all. There is the spiritual. In some it is only a germ, of course, but the germ will grow!”

The John Muir quotes cited above were taken from Burns’s film.  You can follow the outreach for the film on Facebook: National Parks: America’s Best Idea (PBS)

Posted by: Joe DePlasco – Managing Director

Posted in Non-profit, Public affairs