Here at Sustainable Life Media's Sustainable Brands '07 conference in New Orleans, which is *not* still underwater, though its economy and viability are still 'a work in progress'.
Last night the whole shebang began with Green to Gold co-author Andrew Winston's spirited romp through the awakening of Fortune 500 and Global 1000 companies to the issues of global environmental issues and business sustainability.
Irvin Mayfield, Jr., a Jazz trumpeter and bandleader who is the city's youthful cultural ambassador, described how he's still asked at concerts outside Louisiana if they've cleared city streets of water yet [yes they have], even now two years after Hurricane Katrina and the bursting of insufficient levees flooded many parts of the city.
New Orleans is indeed a deeply appropriate venue to for the premier of a conference on sustainability, having been the poster 'child' for our era of human vulnerability to nature, and the frequent insufficiency of our past ways of doing 'business as usual' to handle the impending ravages of climate change and the impact of human activities on the environment.
However the city may have been tested by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, it remains open and eager for visitors, and it even seemed as though "laissez les bon tems roulez" had returned as the assemblage of a couple of hundred people moved to the Ritz Carlton Hotel's open-air atrium for drinks and dinner serenaded by a Jazz band and feted with cocktail concoctions of Finlandia vodka, Southern Comfort and Jack Daniels wiskeys hosted by Brown-Forman.
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