UPCOMING SPEAKERS & PRESENTATIONS

"I love people and asking questions," says Galen Druke. He will be answering some of the questions we all have about the upcoming election on Friday, Oct. 18 in the Betsy Kennedy Community Room at the Cazenovia Public Library. His talk, "Making Sense of the 2024 Election," will be presented by the Cazenovia Forum at 7 p.m.

Druke, who attended Cazenovia High School, is the host of the "FiveThirtyEight Politics" podcast, which aims to explain politics through an engaging blend of statistics and traditional reporting. He has appeared on ABC News, BBC, NPR, C-Span, CBC, WNYC, Sky News, Deutsche Welle and more.

An expert on American democracy and electoral politics, Druke's first full-time job after graduating from Johns Hopkins University was at Wisconsin Public Radio where he was one of the creators of a popular daily newsmagazine.

In his public presentations, Druke analyzes polling data and synthesizes complex information into a coherent narrative, providing context and perspective on the current issues. "Key to representing the content for audio is to try to avoid listing numbers and try to tell a story around the numbers that you are talking about," he said in a 2018 interview with Northeastern University's School of Journalism. "Hopefully we've helped people learn about how probability, elections and uncertainty work over time."

In that interview, he noted that polls do not predict outcomes with certainty, but instead provide an estimate. Although pollsters in 2016 were accused of getting it wrong, Druke points out that Donald Trump was given a 30% chance of winning and that "things with a 30 percent chance of happening are going to happen all the time."

"It's important to think about the ways that we confront uncertainty in our own daily lives," he said. "Part of living is understanding that not always the most expected outcome happens. That's something we try to help people understand on the podcast – that just because the most expected outcomes won't always happen, it doesn't mean you should reject the method altogether."

The presentation is free, but seating is limited so we ask that you RSVP in advance. By going to  www.tinyurl.com/galendruke you can reserve a free ticket. A reception will immediately follow the presentation.

The Cazenovia Forum hosts a regularly scheduled public affairs lecture series that offers citizens from Cazenovia and surrounding areas an opportunity to hear nationally and internationally known experts on a variety of key issues and to engage in thoughtful discussion.

Art and science collide in Michael O. Snyder's work. His photographs tell stories of people struggling with climate change, and offer hope that despite the struggles, there will be a future. His own hope is firm. "After 50,000 generations," he says, "we're still here."

Snyder, Assistant professor of visual communications at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, will speak at 7 p.m. Friday, September 20, at Cazenovia High School as part of the Cazenovia Forum Lecture series. The presentation is free and open to the public with a reception at the Brewster Inn to follow.

Growing up on reclaimed mining land in Appalachia, amid "the innumerable scars" that industrial extraction had left on lives and landscapes, he was inspired to study environmental science in hopes of helping to "bind the wounds of my home and contribute to resolving the core crisis of our times: global climate change."

But he soon learned that science alone is not enough to drive such monumental change. His interest in behavioral models of how people adapt to environmental conditions led him to a revelation: "the real power to drive durable cultural change lies" in creating stories that challenge conventional thinking and that provide tools for transformation. "In short," he says, "reason alone does not a revolution make. We have to learn to tell a better story."

His visual works tells "a story about individuals inside the larger story of environmental disasters", he says. His arresting photographs of people and places throughout the world tell the story of climate change and how we face it. They tell "a story about individuals inside the larger story of environmental disasters," he says. He acknowledges the need to reach as broad an audience as possible, beyond those already in agreement.

"We often wind up preaching to the choir, so it's important to understand what the audience wants," he says. And he recognizes the fine line between entertaining and educating that audience., "We are entertainers first, we have to have a hook, as with all good journalism, and surprise people."

To reach that bigger audience he uses diverse media and diverse stories, he says, "using the same data to shift it in diverse directions for diverse audiences." He publishes in a variety of areas, local, national and international and tries to work with those who can effect change, whether it's in education, business or politics. Sometimes, he says, he will compress a message into something that will be seen and heard by someone in a position to vote on environmental policy. Whatever it takes to get the message heard.

"I believe in the power of narratives to shift what it means to live well on this planet without destroying it," he writes on his webpage. "I am driven to explore the relationship between environment and culture and how we can produce visual stories that lead to durable social change.  

Snyder's work has been featured by outlets such as National Geographic, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He is a Pulitzer Grantee, a Climate Journalism Fellow at the Bertha Foundation, and a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.

Through his production company, Interdependent Pictures, he has directed films in the Arctic, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and East Africa. His films have been selected to over 60 festivals, have taken home numerous awards, have been sponsored by companies such as Sony and GoPro, and have been distributed by outlets such as New Day Films and Films for Change. He has been a featured speaker at the United Nations Climate Conference and has lectured at universities such as Yale, Columbia, and the Alfred Wegener Institute. In 2022, the University of Edinburgh named him one of its most "influential alumni making a significant contribution to climate science and justice."

The Cazenovia Forum hosts a regularly scheduled public affairs lecture series that offers citizens from Cazenovia and surrounding areas an opportunity to hear nationally and internationally known experts on a variety of key issues and to engage in thoughtful discussion. For more information, go to: https://cazenoviaforum.com.