On September 15, 2003, prolific novelist Michael Crichton was honored with a Commonwealth Club Medallion. In return he honored the Club with his thoughts about the most difficult issues facing our world in the coming century. His talk was a hard-hitting critique of extreme actions taken not for scientific reasons, but rather as part of a fundamentalist environmental "religion." Crichton pointed out that articles of environmental faith, though held with religious fervency, often cannot withstand scientific scrutiny. Moreover, unnecessary measures taken to "protect" the environment can inflict unintended harm on third world peoples and even degrade the economies of developed countries.
These are the best photographs of an event that I have seen on the internet. Bill Adam has captured not only the event but also the personality and humanity of Michael Crichton. Not even any of the Hollywood movie websites have anything that come close to the quality I see here.
