Breakfast for 10,000 with Desmond Tutu

Posted live from Greenbuild.

Stream it if you aren't here. (You'll have to set up a username and password.)

About ten minutes before show time, the room (seriously, they tell me there's seating for 10,000) was about a quarter full, but people were pouring in. Ten minutes after start time, they still are. No biggie — if history is an indication, Desmond won't mount the stage until after a lot of self-congratulatory remarks from a handful of green building industry types.

This year, they're serving breakfast right in the hall so people can take it to their seats. I think that's a good idea. It's also a good way to marshall the crowd into filling the front of the room first. (Has anybody heard preliminary registration numbers for this year's event?)

I'll be watching the plenary from the press room, the same stream that I linked to above. And I fully expect to be mocked for that. My wife's cousin took a semester at sea, and Desmond joined them for a leg. I figure hearing her talk about that is closer than I'll ever get to him. And for this address, I don't feel like I need to be in the room to get just as elevated as the throng.

I'll update this post below as thing progress.

1, 8:10. And the first update will be right now: the streaming video, at least on the press wifi at Greenbuild, sucks. A lot. I've gotten about four seconds of audio and a pixellated, generally frozen video.

2, 8:30. The stream is working better now, the only problem being out-of-sync audio. Rick Fedrizzi, USGBC head honcho, is talking about how green building will save the world. For most of us, the things he's saying are not new news — but the green building industry is growing by leaps and bounds, and it's important to bring new adopters up to speed as quickly as possible.

3, 8:40. There's a bunch of little kids singing, drumming, clapping, dancing. I'm not sure what's going on, but they're pretty good, doing some kind of African thing. The crowd loved 'em. OK, it was the African Children's Choir — they'll perform again during this plenary session, Rick promises.

4, 8:45. Desmond is live.

5, 9:00. He opened by chastising the crowd for being non-responsive — pretty funny — he was just loosening them up. He tells the crowd that he wants to "clap you," praises the movement for the changes it's introducing in the world. Green building has helped usher in a new era. He speaks to the global stage, of course — human rights, politics (he said "On November the 4th [election day, remember?], God looked down and said... God sort of rubbed God's hands... and said Thank you, thank you, because you just don't know what you have done for the world.") He smiles, and he's serious, and he likes to laugh, and he cares. And the audio on the stream is properly synced now.

6, 9:20. Desmond wraps up his address to great appreciation. It will surely be archived at the USGBC website, and I bet it hits YouTube before long. It was a fairly short address — 20 minutes — but it was just about right. The African Children's Choir is back on; this will be my last update to this post.