Programming expands with security, environment, remodeled Paepcke building
On Friday, Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking American military officer, traveled to Afghanistan to reassure leaders and citizens of the war-torn nation that America’s mission there was on track despite the sudden ouster of Gen. Stanley McChrystal last week.
Tomorrow, Adm. Mullen is due to give a public address at the Aspen Meadows campus of the Aspen Institute, kicking off the think tank’s first annual Security Forum.
Mullen’s appearance, which he was still expected to make as of Saturday, marks the opening of a lively summer season tackling timely topics at the Institute.
Along with the sixth annual Ideas Festival (July 5-11), the Institute is hosting the Security Forum (this Monday through Wednesday) at the very moment when the nation’s longest war in history is in flux and an Environment Forum (July 25-28) as the worst environmental disaster in America’s history wreaks havoc on the Gulf Coast.
In other words, the convocations promise more than standard masturbatory think-tank jawing, and may help shape public policy on the nation’s most pressing topics at this critical juncture.
“Ideas Fest was very successful and people said, ‘Oh you’ve got to make it much longer,’” Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson said this week. “But I think the goal is to drill down deeper on certain other important topics. So we’re going to do environment and homeland security, and I think maybe next year we’ll do health and one of the others.”
Along with Adm. Mullen, this week’s security forum is scheduled to bring in former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, National Counterterrorism Center Director Michael Leiter, 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, and 9/11 intelligence whistleblower Richard Clarke, along with a gaggle of national news reporters. The forum is co-sponsored by The New York Times and GSN: Government Security News.
The conference was spearheaded by Clark Ervin, director of the Institute’s security program and the Bush administration’s inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security.
“The forum is intended to put the issue of homeland security and counterterrorism on the national radar screen in a way it’s never been done before,” Ervin said this winter as he was putting together the forum’s lineup.
Attendees are traveling to Aspen from around the country — most of them insiders who work in law enforcement and security. But the program is also open to the public.
Full passes are still available for $950, and day passes for Tuesday and Wednesday are on sale for $400. Tickets to Adm. Mullen’s speech Monday evening are $150.
Days after the security forum wraps, Ideas Fest begins. This year’s festival, run in collaboration with The Atlantic, includes participants like the oft-controversial Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, Attorney General Eric Holder, whose hands-off medical marijuana proclamation bred the explosion of pot shops in Aspen and throughout Colorado, and Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, as he battles the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
The lineup also features U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue, whose campaign against congressional climate change legislation last year sparked a letter of rebuke from the Aspen Chamber Resort Association. In March, Donohue dispatched a regional representative to Aspen to address the chamber’s concerns, which in turn instigated an organized protest from local environmentalists.
Technology and new media innovators will also play a prominent role at this year’s festival, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.
In late July, the Environment Forum will bring in experts on sustainability and energy, in the third annual conference run in collaboration with National Geographic. Participants include Lisa Jackson, who runs the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The Gulf oil spill will loom large at the conference, but CEO Isaacson said he expects the conversation to revolve around the apparent long-term needs raised by the spill — coastal wetlands restoration and development of renewable energy — rather than the day’s crisis management or capping the well.
“I’d like to use the Gulf spill as a way to focus on the need to restore the coastal areas of our country, which are very fragile, and a way to find alternatives to oil,” Isaacson said, “and I think Lisa Jackson, who I deeply admire, is on the same page.”
New Paepcke, more public programs
All day today, the Institute is hosting a reception celebrating the reopening of the Walter Paepcke Memorial Building. Named for the institute’s founder and Aspen icon, the Bauhaus structure has undergone an $11 million renovation and today’s party will include presentations on the Institute’s 61-year history and showings of short films on a new 3D-capable projection screen.
On July 5, Paepcke will play host to a free screening of “Shrek Forever After,” showing off the new 3-D theater. Such first-run feature films are not expected to be standard fare at the new Paepcke.
“Our intention is not to compete with commercial entities in this valley,” said Kitty Boone, the Institute’s director of public programs. “The objective is to bring great conversation.”
To that end, on July 6, DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg will host an interactive discussion on the future of film, making use of Paepcke’s new capability. Titled “Journey into the Third Dimension,” the event is open to the public. Tickets are $20.
Two days later, on July 8, the Institute is launching “New Views,” a series of documentary film screenings running each Monday night from July 8 to August 9. The series kicks off with an advance viewing of “The Furious Force of Rhymes,” a documentary studying hip-hop music’s rise as an international form of protest music.
Among the one-off public programs hosted by the Institute is a July 15 panel of Republican governors, among them rumored presidential candidate and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty along with Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, Hawaii’s Linda Lingle and Virginia’s Bob McDonnell.
Their McCloskey Speaker Series runs through August and includes speeches and public interviews with the likes of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and Ambassador Peter Galbraith. A scheduled appearance by writer Christopher Hitchens was canceled last week.
You can find a full schedule of Institute programs at www.aspeninstitute.org [1].
Looking ahead
This summer’s expanded public events and forums on security and the environment, along with the Ideas Fest anchor, signal an emerging template of programming at the Institute. Last summer, they hosted a forum on health, as the debate over federal healthcare reform heated up.
Next year, CEO Isaacson suggests, they may tackle the topic again, in addition to education.
Along with writing books and running the Institute, Isaacson is chairman of the board at Teach for America, the nonprofit that sends recent college graduates to low-income areas where public education suffers.
This week at an Aspen Writers’ Foundation event showcasing Young Writers’ Workshop participants Troy Simon and James Jones, Isaacson stressed the importance of bringing not only policymakers, CEOs and elected officials to Aspen, but also the people they effect.
Simon and Jones are both New Orleans teenagers who survived Hurricane Katrina and are looking forward to college careers after having found the first effective schooling of their lives in the charter school system that emerged after the hurricane.
“People in Aspen know a lot of things,” Isaacson said, “but there are also a whole lot of things they don’t know. And people like James and Troy can actually teach them as anybody else who comes to Aspen.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
