Re: No GWA handouts--paper prohibition

**f*@aol.com**

Great discussion.
I deliver several presentations a year, more some years than others, attend many more, and help to organize others. I find handouts pretty nearly indispensable on either side of the podium. 
For a straight plant talk, particularly if it's on new, exotic or underused plants, plant names (Genus, specific epithet, variety) should be, nay, must be, on the slides and on the handout. For one thing, it saves a lot of time answering, "What was that name again? How do you spell that?" We've all seen lecturers who blew through fifty binomials faster than a stenographer could write them, or forgot to even mention the names of the plants he/she was showing except in the vaguest terms. Very frustrating. Handouts save the day.
All organizations have rules about presentations, and yes, they do have to regulate what speakers choose to do or there'd be no point in publishing an agenda. Fewer and fewer venues allow 35mm slides. All have to limit the length of presentations, and those egotists who ignore the guidelines and encroach on the next speaker's time don't get invited back. The perennial conference at Swarthmore (mid-October) gets speakers to send at least a plant list by a certain comfortable date by bribing them: There's a substantial bonus for getting that info to the office by deadline. 
As for wasted paper, I have seen mountains of leftover handouts at seminars. At last year's New England Grows, show, a blizzard kept most people home the first day. If you prepare for an audience of 300 and only 50 are able to get there, what can you do?
I don't get as worked up as I once did about unused handouts. You can make more paper out of them, or shred them and feed them to your vermicomposters. Loggers & paper mill workers have to earn a living so they can plant gardens. And so on. My feeling is, better to have them and not need them than vice-versa.
JF
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