"GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, LIBERALS DO."

The banner flew over the National Rifle Association booth at the recent Delaware County Fair in Walton, New York.  In front of the booth people milled about, listening as raffle tickets were being read off. There were families with young children, old people sitting on benches, some people in wheelchairs and many others robust and glowing in the health of hard farm work and rural living. There were also summer vacationers, dressed in casual urban attire.

I stopped for a moment and looked around at the people gathered under this banner. It was a week after Sarah Palin had announced that she did not support the Health Care Bill because of the "death panels" it would establish. This was clearly what had inspired the banner. Whether all the people there agreed with the message was unclear but, right or wrong, the message was simple and emotional. And it got me to thinking.

John and I go to this fair every summer and we always have fun. It was great circling up on the Ferris wheel seated next to our granddaughter, Zelda, with the bright lights below and the mountains in the distance.

In the animal tents, it was gratifying to see the many kids joking with each other as they cleaned and fed the cows, sheep, goats, chickens and rabbits.  Cots had been set up by the stalls where these young people would spend the night to watch their charges. This is the rural America we all celebrate, the American that is part of the nostalgia we have.

We sat in the high bleachers waiting for the tractor pull. A young man in front of us was eating a plate filled with some slivers of a fried substance- glistening in the dim light. John thought it must be fried fish. Our son was convinced it was fried dough. I asked and learned that it was a whole onion, sliced into multiple sections and deep fried. He asked if I wanted to taste it. It was delicious. Fried, fried, fried! That is the County Fair, a place where we also love to celebrate excess as in fried dough, fried fish, French fries, fried Snickers, fried pickles and a new addition for this summer - fried Oreo cookies.

The Tractor Pull was also excessive. But there's good news here in that the tractor pull has replaced the draft horse pull. Not that long ago, great magnificent draft horses were harnessed up to thousands of pounds of dead weight - cement blocks -- and forced to pull with all their might. However, after the death of more than one of the horses, they were replaced with tractors. One doesn't have the same feeling for a tractor huffing and lurching as one does for a living animal. (And while it is good that living creatures are no longer abused this way, the tractors presented their own challenges: clouds of black smoke filled the sky as these heaving machines spouted diesel exhaust so intense that we literally had droplets of oil on our foreheads.)

County fairs are as American as Apple pie and represent a broad swath of the American populace. They celebrate and honor the hard working families who bring food to our tables. They are nostalgic, fun and over the top - everything is a little bit bigger and wilder at the fair.

Seeing the banner and watching the tractor pull, however, made me think of the challenge both our politicians and our own NRDC colleagues have in communicating environmental concerns with so many Americans. It would take more than just a brave person to stand before the families at the NRA booth and talk about health care. It would take more than someone just having the loud speaker in hand to talk about climate change or dirty diesels to the hundreds of people cheering the tractors on.

At the NRDC Board retreat in September, guest speaker Drew Westen, author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," talked about how Democrats, environmentalists - and yes, liberals -- must learn how to talk about their issues in a more productive way. He used gun control as an example of different ways of viewing an issue. 

Consider the associations that are likely to appear when a city dweller hears the word "gun," Westen said, "handguns, murder, mugging, robbery, killing and crime. But for rural residents, "gun" is likely to activate an entirely different network that includes: my daddy, my son, gun collection, rifle, deer, buddies, protecting my family, my rights.

Westen argues that environmental issues are also viewed differently and   before environmentalists can communicate with the majority of Americans, we need to understand our different audiences and change the very language we use everyday. Not that we need to "dumb down" our message, but instead we must use language other than reference to "CO2 emissions, cap and trade, market transformation, clean coal technologies or global warming controls."

One of the most transformative moments for me was when Westen noted that all Americans, in fact everyone on the planet, want the same things: clean water for our families, clean air for our grandchildren, healthy food for ourselves.

No one wants a global "melt down" - a time when even the most basic community and family structure will change because of the displacement of millions of people and a resulting scarcity of water and food.

But the question remains: how do we talk about this in a way that resonates with the majority of people throughout the world? That is the challenge.