So I was flipping through the channels last night when I spotted one of those new Planet Green shows called Supper Club with Tom Bergeron, and I noticed that one of the guests was Discover enviro-blogger Thomas Kostigen, which caught my attention because I had dinner with him when I was out in Los Angeles for BookExpo America, as part of HarperOne‘s effort to build some buzz for his forthcoming You Are Here, a book about “the surprising link between what we do and what that does to our planet.” (Well, by “I had dinner with him” I mean “I was one of twenty-four people around two tables,” but you get the idea.) I was a bit surprised, actually, to see them promoting the book at the end of the hour-long episode, since it’s not out for at least three months, but it did make me go back to my stacks of ARCs in the foyer and move it to the top of the pile…
The show turned out to be a very lively debate about environmentalism and the tensions between personal and governmental responsibility, with vocal contributions from Kostigen and fellow authors Sophie Uliano (Gorgeously Green) and Michael Shellenberger (Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility), as well as Keenan Wayans—if I could change anything about the episode, in fact, I would have cleared out some more space for Wayans to talk about his “Green Your ‘Hood” project, which sounds like an interesting grassroots development.
I don’t know how the talent roster on future episodes of Supper Club is going to look, but this episode at least was an entertaining platform for some serious nonfiction writers to discuss their areas of expertise in an engaging and accessible way. (Sorry for the less-than-crisp title card; I grabbed it off a YouTube feed… of a different episode, otherwise I would’ve just embedded the video, natch.)
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