By Marlena Chertock
About 500 residents, politicians and activists showed support for climate-change policies at an Organizing For Action town hall last week at the Silver Spring Civic Center.
“Cleaner air leads to healthier families,” said Neeta Datt, the county director of OFA.
The nearly four-hour meeting was the first in a month of action for OFA, a nonprofit that supports President Barack Obama’s agenda.
Speakers focused on the president’s plan, but also encouraged action on an individual level.
“Climate change is the most important issue in our generation,” said Donald Boesch, the president of the Center for Environmental Science at the University of Maryland. “We have a special responsibility and opportunity to lead.”
Pushing for more clean energy in the state has the potential to create jobs, Boesch said.
“We don’t need to invent anything, all we need is more policy,” said Mike Tidwell, the director of Chesapeake Climate Change Action Network. “The fossil-fuel industry is allowed to treat our atmosphere as a sewer.”
Because of climate change, cases of asthma and heart attacks are increasing in the U.S., said Cindy Parker, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins who is on the board of directors for Physicians for Social Responsibility.
“Health is the only thing that has the potential to engage everyone across the political spectrum on climate change,” she said. “Everyone cares about their health, their family’s health and their neighbor’s health.”
Katherine Magruder, the executive director of the Maryland Clean Energy Center, encouraged people to share books they’re reading about environmental topics with people who are doubtful of climate change.
Datt told residents to send letters to the editor to local newspapers and call their representatives to push climate change legislation.
“Maybe with a nudge and a push we can get them to take a side,” she said. “It’s about time they take a side for or in denial. And OFA will start holding people in Congress accountable.”
Datt said Maryland, and the nation, needs to change the climate change conversation.
“We don’t hear the impacts enough in Congress or the media,” she said. “We’re already changing the conversation by filling up this room. We get it in Montgomery County, but we have to reach out and help others.”
