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Episode 1 - An Interview with Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay.org
28 Plays20 days ago
Please visit: https://earthday.org
About Kathleen Rogers
Kathleen Rogers is the President of Earth Day Network. Under her leadership, EARTHDAY.ORG has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international professional staff.
Kathleen has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement. In 2002, she spearheaded the creation of Campaign for Communities (C4C). C4C is a coalition of African American and Latino partner organizations focused on voter registration and voter mobilization, which also works year-round on environmental issues in low income communities. Kathleen also helped create innovative financial mechanisms to “green” low income schools and communities. She created the National Civic Education campaign, which works with K-12 schools on projects that solve local environmental issues while teaching civic skills.
Kathleen also founded Earth Day Network’s groundbreaking Billion Acts of Green program, which has now recorded close to 3 billion individual actions to improve the environment. She is a frequent commentator on environmental issues in the media and has appeared on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, as well as in Time Magazine, The Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times and many other international and national newspapers and journals.
Prior to her work at Earth Day Network, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. As Chief Wildlife Counsel for the National Audubon Society, she oversaw international trade, migratory species, and biodiversity programs, and was responsible for bringing the first citizen complaint before the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the tri-national agency created to oversee North American environmental issues. She also worked for the BBC and other television networks. She once owned a bakery with a friend who was on the U.S. luge team.
Kathleen serves on various boards and as Regional Focal point for North America Region of the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Network of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), now known as the GEF-CSO Network to serve a four-year term from June 30, 2018, to June 29, 2022. She is an advisor and judge for a number of global prizes, including the annual Hult Prize which awards $1 million to college teams who create companies that solve pressing social issues.
She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
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Transcript
00:00:14
Robert Fine
welcome
Podcast Launch with Kathleen Rogers
00:00:15
Robert Fine
everyone. Kathleen, thank you so much for being my guest today. Kathleen Rogers, president of the, uh, Earth Day Network.
00:00:24
Robert Fine
Kathleen, you might not be aware or not, but you are my, my first interviewee. Uh, the timing just happened to to work out the way it did. I've been planning and and working on this podcast for for a while now and, finally decided to pull the trigger on it. And then I got the,
00:00:42
Robert Fine
the email from your PR firm yesterday and the the timing just worked out. I'll apologize in advance for my um ah newly getting started and having quite found my rhythm yet, but I'm not worried about
00:00:59
kathleen
but all right.
Kathleen's Career Journey
00:01:02
Robert Fine
But listen, we have, there is so much that we could cover and so many subtopics that could be you know, full podcast conversations of their own.
00:01:13
Robert Fine
um but I do want to, you know, try to, um, go deep into a couple of areas, and, uh, and we can just kind of go where the conversation takes us, but if we could, I'd really love to learn a little bit more about your background, um, how you ended up working in environmental law, um,
00:01:35
Robert Fine
and and then and your journey towards the ah to the Earth Day Network.
00:01:42
kathleen
Yeah, I saw a graph the other day. um was sort of a right angle with an arrow pointed at 90 degrees and it said what you plan and then underneath it was another one, same right angle with an arrow, but it went in circles and twists and knots and pointed off sort of in a
00:02:09
kathleen
into space You'd have to see the diagram, but it really felt like me and many people.
00:02:13
Robert Fine
yeah
00:02:15
kathleen
um We all take you know come to crossroads, um and I came to many, and I tended to choose whatever sounded fun and interesting. um and so I took a very circuitous route,
00:02:35
kathleen
to becoming a lawyer. I graduated from college. I went to school in Ireland and came back.
00:02:40
Robert Fine
Oh.
00:02:41
kathleen
I went to um ah New York City, ah worked in political PR. I worked for the BBC, British Broadcasting, for a long time.
00:02:54
kathleen
I then worked for various Olympic committees, took a year off, cleaned houses, studied French, and played a very, very pathetic rendition of a, of, or took lessons in the violin. i was really bad. They used to bang on my door to tell me to stop.
00:03:12
kathleen
And,
00:03:12
Robert Fine
but So let let me stop you there for one second. So what part of the country did you grow up in?
00:03:17
kathleen
ah outside of Philadelphia, my dad was from New York city. My mom was from a very poor, farming community in Iowa. So we had, um one of seven kids and we um lived outside of Philadelphia. For the most part, I lived in Iowa for a while and um other places, but settled there eventually. And um and again, grew up in a huge family, which changes everything.
00:03:44
kathleen
um We're incredibly close and
00:03:48
Robert Fine
i I grew up but just ah on the other side of the Delaware in South Jersey. Yeah.
00:03:53
kathleen
Ah, so one of my favorite places.
00:03:53
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:03:55
kathleen
We go to Cape May Point every year, but don't put that, don't let anybody know it exists because it's already, rich people have already discovered it.
00:03:56
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:04:03
kathleen
It's got to be one of the most beautiful places on earth, but Cape May Point, as opposed to Cape May.
00:04:05
Robert Fine
yeah
00:04:07
kathleen
but um And so I did a lot of things. I tried out for the U.S. luge team, thankfully didn't make it or we wouldn't be talking because I was also bad at that. ah Owned a bakery called the Two Tarts with another woman from the luge team.
00:04:21
kathleen
Um, and somehow ended up, I thought, okay, what's next? I went to California and then I have, uh, my sister was a lawyer already in California. And, uh, suddenly I just said, oh, I think I'll kind of like, not quite like legally blonde, but I think I'll go to law school.
00:04:42
kathleen
And so I did, and I did a master's degree at the same time. And, uh,
00:04:46
Robert Fine
but What kind of work were you doing at the BBC?
00:04:50
kathleen
Oh, well, you know, it was production um work.
00:04:52
Robert Fine
Okay.
00:04:53
kathleen
I was young, but I was pretty good at it. I'm the kind of person, if they had a job at Walmart, I'd be really good at it, which is, I'd call it the seeker. If someone was looking for a product that no one could find, I'd be great at it. So I was really good at production because I was always finding little ways to fix
Shift to Environmental Law
00:05:11
kathleen
things up. And I Liked working there a lot. It was very different because it was British.
00:05:17
kathleen
And I was at Rockefeller Center, which was a fabulous location, right on Fifth Avenue.
00:05:21
Robert Fine
Perry Kivolowitz- yep.
00:05:23
kathleen
um Very idyllic. um But I, you know, had another job offer to go work for um the Olympic committees. And so I started working for the Olympic committees and learned a lot about that.
00:05:40
kathleen
And ah Anyway, i found my way because I was in California to law school and didn't study, take even a single course in environmental law.
00:05:52
kathleen
ah But I graduated. I was lucky enough to become editor-in-chief of my law review, which is a big deal.
00:05:59
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:05:59
kathleen
i think I was voted in mostly because everybody hated each other and they all liked me. um lot of of very... oh
00:06:08
Robert Fine
Competitive environment.
00:06:10
kathleen
Yes, there, that's a good word. I was going to say something else. but um And so I then, that led to a clerkship with a federal judge in Washington, D.C., which was also a great honor.
00:06:22
kathleen
um And then I ended up working for, I clerked for him, and we were at the district court. We did some district and court of appeals cases. It was pretty amazing life, a really an amazing period of my life.
00:06:35
Robert Fine
and And you did, you studied kind of general law or started just kind of
00:06:35
kathleen
And
00:06:38
kathleen
Yeah, you just, I just, you know, you have to take courses and I just didn't take any in environmental law. It wasn't like, I've always been a nature person, an animal person, don't get me wrong. And an organizer at heart. I was always organizing people to do things when I was young and also had a little bit of a, you know, goody two shoes about me wanting to help people.
00:07:00
kathleen
And I think my whole family was like that. every Everyone, every member of my family is like, all the seven of us are like that. Um, So i ended up working for an environmental law firm, but then my clients were industry.
00:07:16
kathleen
And I learned a lot about how industry makes, you know, concerted efforts to do the minimum, at least at the time.
00:07:28
kathleen
They may be better now, depends on the company.
00:07:30
Robert Fine
I think it depends on the company.
00:07:31
kathleen
ah But I
00:07:32
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:07:33
kathleen
Yeah, but I couldn't take it. I had cases where I was really disgusted with what the companies were able to get away with, I must say. And um it was my job to help them do that within the law.
00:07:46
kathleen
um I had some extraordinary cases that were The law was just ambiguous enough to let them continue to do what was harming their own employees, significantly harming their own employees.
00:07:54
Robert Fine
It's,
00:07:58
kathleen
But it wasn't reportable. It wasn't this, wasn't that. I'd had enough. So I got a job offer to go work for National Audubon. um Knew nothing about birds. And my title was Director of Migratory Birds. And I also co-managed the litigation department. And we had a lot of cases that we carried at the time.
Origins and Impact of Earth Day
00:08:17
Robert Fine
So he didn't so didn' know anything about about birding or birds and the and made director of Margaret Torrey
00:08:17
kathleen
And
00:08:22
kathleen
No, I'm still really bad at it, but my job was just to make to protect the birds, ah not... know them, although I gave gave it a valiant effort. I'm just one of those people that says, where, where, where, when you're looking around for a bird, it's, I never can quite see them, although some of the bigger ones I can, um you can't miss.
00:08:41
kathleen
um And now I have a bird feeder for the first time in my life, one with a camera that shows you what the bird is and tells you what it is. So now I know a few birds, but I loved working there, ended up at being recruited by Dennis Hayes, the guy who started Earth Day.
00:08:57
Robert Fine
Okay.
00:08:58
kathleen
And it took him six months to hire me. And then I ended up here about 20 years ago.
00:09:03
Robert Fine
Oh, 20 years ago. So you've been there quite a while.
00:09:06
kathleen
A long time. Yep.
00:09:08
Robert Fine
So do you want to maybe share with the audience a little bit of history about Earth Day? um I know it had its 50th anniversary just a couple years ago.
00:09:18
kathleen
Yep. It's our 55th anniversary um this year. um so Obviously, you got 150 years of industrial development, and you couldn't see across the street in L.A. during rush hour. Our rivers were on fire. is before my time, but the history is pretty dramatic about the impacts of industrial development.
00:09:42
kathleen
And so U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson ah teamed up with Dennis Hayes, who was a young guy, but an organizer, And ah they were going to do environmental teach-ins on campuses because there was a sort of general growing recognition that ah this pollution was tied to health.
00:10:04
kathleen
And before that, let me just say, before Earth Day, and this is what's always so incredible to me. Again, I had nothing to do with it. is Before Earth Day, most of the environmental world was focused on conservation, national parks,
00:10:21
kathleen
hunters and anglers that wanted to protect things to shoot or hunt, whatever. um And there wasn't any real connection with health. But Earth Day represents, that first Earth Day, um and I'll get back back to the story a little bit, really marks a bright line of when environment became about community and about human beings as opposed to national parks and species protection.
00:10:51
kathleen
Again, for hunters and anglers as opposed to endangered species. So the it was really pretty bipartisan. And Dennis and Gaylord decided that doing environmental teach-ins on campuses, which were really originally geared towards taking advantage of the unrest on campuses from the Vietnam War or from the civil rights movement, et cetera, et cetera,
00:11:17
Robert Fine
Yeah, this would have been, 71, 70, 70. i guess seventy one seventy
00:11:20
kathleen
70, no, 1970.
00:11:20
Robert Fine
seventy
00:11:21
kathleen
So in 69, they didn't even think about, the u name Earth Day did not, happen until either very, very late in 69, I think around the very end of the year, or beginning in January.
00:11:32
kathleen
And suddenly they changed it from an environmental teach-in on campuses. ah They went to ah PR firm and said, we've got to come up with a better name. And they did, Earth Day.
00:11:43
kathleen
And keep in mind, there no cell phones, no social media, no nothing. And they were using mimeograph machines and these old things where you took a real telephone and you stuck the handle of the phone into the thing. It was like an old fax machine. And they started faxing out information to campuses, but then they sent it to so community groups. And suddenly you had, and this is what also flabbergasted me.
00:12:07
kathleen
Imagine they organized it somewhere between December and April. 20 million people, that was more than 10% of the population, came out on the streets and peacefully, giant events on campuses, bigger events on Fifth Avenue in New York and Washington and San Francisco and Topeka, Kansas and you name it, Lexington, Kentucky.
00:12:30
kathleen
And suddenly you had 20 million people out there all saying the same thing. We want to protect our health. We want um our children's health to be protected. So it became about health, about the impacts of industrial development.
00:12:45
kathleen
And then And there's a famous broadcaster back then, Walter Cronkite, who was beloved by everyone.
00:12:50
Robert Fine
Yep.
00:12:54
kathleen
And i I think it's on our website, but there's a broadcast of him talking about what happened on Earth Day. And he is almost stunned by the reporting he's getting from around the country of the millions and millions of people who are out in the streets calling for a efforts to control pollution because it was becoming clear that it was killing people.
00:13:20
Robert Fine
I mean, i don't I don't know if I can think of another event before that time of that magnitude, to be honest.
00:13:26
kathleen
No, and in fact, we've looked at this over and over again. It remains the largest non-faith-based event in human history, other than voting, which brings out millions of people.
00:13:40
kathleen
But a concerted single effort of 20 million people around an issue. It was somewhere between a march, a rally, a parade, depending on where you were,
00:13:52
Robert Fine
Right. Right.
00:13:53
kathleen
But the signs were amazingly uniform, protect our health, protect the planet, very different than anything that had gone in the environmental movement. In fact, half of the environmental groups that you've heard of have their birthday after Earth Day because they didn't exist.
00:14:09
Robert Fine
right
00:14:09
kathleen
A few did, but almost none, and certainly none devoted to human health um and the environment. um And what happened was Nixon was president.
00:14:22
kathleen
ah He was generally kind of always worried and or paranoid about things, as we all know. And he happily signed ah in a quick succession over the next couple of years, almost all the major environmental laws that we still enjoy the incredible benefits of air, or water, endangered species, the toxic control, sub all the toxic laws the i mean there were dozens of them national environmental education act nixon said environmental education belongs in every classroom uh it was a honey honeymoon period yeah
00:14:56
Robert Fine
So so may i look let me yeah let let me stop for a second, just because I'm curious, because I don't know if Nixon gets enough credit for for those bills and that issues.
00:15:05
kathleen
oh yeah he doesn't he doesn't yeah
00:15:07
Robert Fine
and so And he was Republican. And what was it about his administration um that took such an invested interest you know versus more recent administrations on the Republican side when it comes to the environment?
00:15:23
kathleen
yeah That's a nice way to put it. um
Environmental Legislation and Bipartisanship
00:15:25
kathleen
the i think a couple things. he
00:15:31
kathleen
viewed it as – he didn't view it as harmless. I don't mean that. I mean, I don't think he viewed it as, ah ah well, it's not to hurt anybody, so let's just do it.
00:15:43
kathleen
I think he actually affirmatively thought it was a good idea. And we've worked with Nixon Library many times to go back and look at what he said, what he did.
00:15:55
kathleen
He didn't have to say what he said. These laws could have been signed. and But he talked about them a lot. And so working with the Nixon Library has given me an amazing view, behind-the-scenes view, because there's so much there. His schedules, what he said, phone calls.
00:16:13
kathleen
ah It's pretty darn amazing what he does. He does not get credit for that. And tragically, we would have seen even more had he not That paranoia had just taken over.
00:16:24
kathleen
And as you know, he was handily reelected, et cetera.
00:16:25
Robert Fine
Right.
00:16:28
kathleen
But again, that honeymoon period lasted beyond Nixon. For years, ah laws were passed.
00:16:38
kathleen
I think the sad thing is it began to cost industry money. And so they started fighting back and enlisting mostly Republicans in the fight against it. But as I said, it was bipartisan.
00:16:53
kathleen
um Some of these laws were defeated and they came up again. And so it wasn't like heaven on earth and nothing was just sailing through. It was a lot of hard work apparently. and ah But it got done and the rest is history. So not just for Earth Day, but for our health.
00:17:10
kathleen
Because we were having, you look back on the the Aaron Brockovich kind of stories, are there are legions of them. I mean, they had so many communities that were completely polluted and children were dying and people were getting cancer and science just hadn't caught up to it.
00:17:29
kathleen
But industry, many of them anyway, knew what was going on. And that's what they got caught eventually knowing what they were doing and having done the research themselves on the impacts of lots of different chemicals.
00:17:45
kathleen
And so, you know, it just was a confluence of many factors of more information, information. Republicans and Democrats on working together.
00:17:58
kathleen
ah And as I said, information goring in about the impacts of these chemicals and diseases. I mean, we have Superfund, which is an old law that came into effect, you know, to sort of the polluter pays principle, excuse me, to make people
00:18:10
Robert Fine
Yep. Yeah.
00:18:18
kathleen
pay for what they've done. And so it's an definitely an imperfect law and there are brownfields and Superfund sites that are alive and well, but all of these things came together, these principles.
00:18:29
kathleen
So um again, Earth Day was the mother of that movement and still remains today around the world a big ah moment in time when mayors and governments are announcing things and using it as a springboard to talk about health, public policy, et cetera.
00:18:34
Robert Fine
so, so
00:18:48
Robert Fine
Yeah. So, so April 22nd, 1970, 20 million people, um, a, a unprecedented event, both in the past and even to this day.
00:19:01
Robert Fine
How, so what did Dennis do, ah the day after, um, how did, how did they turn this into ah the movement and the recognition that, that has become?
00:19:09
kathleen
ah Well, that's a great story, actually. The first thing he did with some other people, got together, and he saw resistance among some key members in Congress.
00:19:24
kathleen
And he was really smart and anticipated pushback, along with Gaylord Nelson, who was the senator from Wisconsin. And so the groups from the outside, Dennis and others, formed something called the Dirty Dozen.
00:19:40
kathleen
And to flex their political muscle, their green muscle, they went after 12 members of Congress who were key members of Congress that they felt were standing in the way of some of the laws that were moving through Congress.
00:19:55
Robert Fine
Mm-hmm.
00:19:55
kathleen
And they defeated, i think, either seven or eight of them.
00:19:59
kathleen
And then once those members of Congress saw what was happening and that they could turn that those 20 million people or some portion of them into political activists that they all caved because there's nothing a member of Congress likes to do more than stay in office.
00:20:21
kathleen
And even back then, 50 some years ago, it wasn't any different.
Global and Local Environmental Actions
00:20:25
kathleen
So when you defeat incumbents that many, you pick off pick 12 and you defeat most of them, uh,
00:20:34
kathleen
And the Dirty Dozen is still a campaign. Every year, Dennis passed it on to another organization. Then another organization ended up at the League of Conservation Voters. I think they still run it. And it's very effective because you put all of your efforts into those members of Congress who have, for whatever reason, being paid off by you know, industry or whatever, or beholding to them or different districts have different issues.
00:21:02
kathleen
ah And it's less effective today because industry and money were so outspent, outgunned, you know, 10,000 to every dollar in political contribution.
00:21:13
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:21:14
kathleen
So the world's changed and things move much more slowly or don't move at all. They move at the local level, which is where we're extremely active, particularly now when nothing's getting done or will get done and frankly hasn't gotten done.
00:21:29
kathleen
um so But it it was the heyday of the environmental movement. And what happened was it was embraced by many countries around the world who then put together their own versions of clean air, clean water, endangered species, toxic control, pesticides,
00:21:46
kathleen
um It was an incredible movement that then went global. And so Dennis not only and Gaylord are not only the founders of this movement, building exercise that happens every year, but they're also the progenitors of most of the environmental laws in the world.
00:22:06
kathleen
That's quite a legacy. And Dennis, by the way, is still our emeritus chair.
00:22:11
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:22:13
kathleen
And not only is he a great boss, he's one of the few bosses I've ever had who never yelled at me, maybe once. um But ah he's probably the smartest, one of the if not the smartest, almost the smartest person I've ever met in my life.
00:22:28
Robert Fine
Wow. but's so i' and like And I'm sure you've met quite a number of people.
00:22:33
kathleen
Yeah. it's He's amazing.
00:22:36
Robert Fine
So maybe let's, um let's fast forward then. And i mean, 50 years of Earth Days. um I remember it very well myself growing up um and during my college days and ah participating. and And when I moved to to DC and in my 20s, participating on the Earth Day events on the mall.
00:22:59
kathleen
wow
00:23:00
Robert Fine
um What has...
00:23:04
Robert Fine
I guess, where has Earth Day gone? And and you said it's it's kind of, you've had to kind of go from a ah global campaign focus to becoming more local. So maybe maybe just share the last 10, 15 years of the of the transformation of the organization.
00:23:20
kathleen
Well, so they moved to local. So there are two formulas kind of, or or strategies we have. One is you got to grow the movement. If you don't, and we're the big tent, it's not always a fun place to be.
00:23:34
kathleen
Let me tell you, we have everybody under the sun wanting to participate in Earth Day. And some of them are really out there in terms of what they want.
00:23:40
Robert Fine
Mm-hmm.
00:23:43
kathleen
And by that, I mean, they want to they're They're from the right, left, and center, far right, far right, far right. They still do Earth Day. They don't want filthy communities. say If they thought about it, they wouldn't want pollution running through their neighborhood.
00:23:57
kathleen
um So our goal is to make, and our mission is to diversify and mobilize the environmental movement worldwide. And by diversify, I mean everybody.
00:24:09
kathleen
So whether it's farmers, ranchers, first responders, nurses, students, teachers, governors, mayors, um dry cleaners, we love them all if they're doing Earth Day, if they're changing their practices or working on cutting their footprint, pollution put footprint, greenhouse gas footprint, whatever it is, we embrace them because they're trying. And it's a big world.
00:24:36
kathleen
So we have about a billion plus people doing Earth Day every year. And by that, I mean, they're either learning about it in schools or they're volunteering. We can't keep track, and nobody could, of all the Earth Day events around the world in every country. We're in 192, 193 countries. people are doing Earth Day.
00:24:56
kathleen
everywhere. India does ah Earth Day, not even on Earth Day, a few days later, because they're either out of school, it's too hot, whatever. But that's like, when you think about it's over 300 million kids. So it's not hard to reach a billion people.
00:25:11
kathleen
It's many more than that. And the press, everybody needs an Earth Day story. So what makes it really unique is I think we're one of the few organizations in the world that are in the movement building business.
00:25:25
kathleen
By that I mean, it's getting everybody to care, not just about wildlife, which is really important to me personally. And I've had lots of incredible experiences around the world with wildlife.
00:25:39
kathleen
But I care much more about the health and safety of our children and the people on the planet. And so Earth Day is really about educating people to take action themselves. bye And we work with governments. We're working on climate education worldwide, not just because of the science of climate that we want everybody to know. That takes like 10 minutes. you know You burn fossil fuels. There's kind of an umbrella up there, heats up the place, changes the weather.
00:26:08
kathleen
You're done. And yes, it's a lot deeper than that. But we're focused on solutions that and particularly on jobs and building a green economy that's available to everybody. We've been through how many economic and agricultural revolutions in our in the last 300 years?
00:26:28
kathleen
And the one that people um and and poor people and marginalized people and countries get left out of them. This doesn't have to be this way with the green revolution because energy is local.
00:26:40
kathleen
So if you can change your energy in a rural environment, village in India or Botswana, you're participating in the green economy and people can get jobs and be more productive. And so our whole mission around climate education and around movement building is to create not just a healthier planet, but to make sure people can participate in this revolution. The trains left the station.
00:27:08
kathleen
whatever, our current administration could do what they want. They cannot stop it. And it's principally because there's so much money to be made and it's healthier And once you build the infrastructure, it's free. It never ends. Sun, wind, geothermal, whatever.
00:27:26
kathleen
So I find it kind of fascinating that people are, you know, it's people love the status quo. I like the status quo. I hate it when websites are changed. I'm like, oh my God, why did they change the website?
00:27:40
kathleen
It's people like what's familiar
00:27:41
Robert Fine
Or why'd they change why they chase their logo?
00:27:44
kathleen
Why they change anything? It just really upsets me because I have to go navigate it and figure it out and I'm just like everybody else. We like the status quo. We don't like being hit with new issues and new ways of talking. And we don't like people telling us what to do.
00:27:59
kathleen
But on this particular issue, on the environment, there's a boatload of money to be made. And it's trillions of dollars are being invested in renewable energy, batteries, other technology, infrastructure.
00:28:11
kathleen
And if you think business is going to stop, they're not. And so what we're trying to do is figure out how people, can play an active role in what happens.
00:28:24
kathleen
So you have all these carbon renewal people like affectionately call it the vacuum cleaner in the sky idea, where you're going to pull the CO2 out and put it in rocks.
00:28:33
Robert Fine
Yes. Yep.
00:28:34
kathleen
And then I was talking to some geophysicist who said, oh, well, if you do that, we're going to fly off our wobble, you know, and we're just going to blow off into space. And there are just so many things that people are working on, some good, some bad.
00:28:47
kathleen
But people are trying principally because they want to make money. And that's not a bad thing. um You know, I'm not sure.
00:28:55
Robert Fine
No, I, I, I think you can most, no, no, you can, there, there's no, um,
00:28:56
kathleen
so Sorry, go ahead.
00:29:01
Robert Fine
there's no reason you can't make money and protect the environment at the same time. And.
00:29:06
kathleen
yeah absolutely. And, and why a lot of people can't make money as opposed to a handful of people, because, you know, I, I'm the least mechanical person in the world. My life changed when television introduced two channel changers. It's kind of beyond me. And, um, I'm really bad at it and I'm really smart, but I'm happy to be bad at some of these things. And so, uh,
00:29:33
kathleen
You know, there is some resistance, again, because people, they hate change. Everybody hates radical change and they hate even small changes.
00:29:44
kathleen
ah And so, I mean, we all do. We hate the fact that suddenly... Ice cream is the same price, but it's in it you get half as much. I mean, it's not like we're dumb and we don't notice change. We do.
00:29:57
kathleen
And some things make us really resist and other things we just like shrug our shoulders. But for environment, what parent is going to want their kids to be exposed to plastics and toxics and a filthy community where people don't pick up their trash and air pollution? And I've got stories coming out my ears, family stories.
00:30:19
kathleen
um And this is not just about certain demographics. It's about all of us because poor people, marginalized people, people that can easily be taken advantage of for whatever reason are constantly at risk.
00:30:36
kathleen
But this new economy belongs to everybody for one reason. I'll say it again. It's because energy is everywhere. It's local. Every time you send energy down a ah transit line, it half of the energy falls off into space.
00:30:54
kathleen
it's It's not a perfect system for delivering energy. it doesn't go through a tube and deliver the same amount of energy that was correct, you know, connected and created. So everybody has an opportunity to play a role.
00:31:04
Robert Fine
Well,
00:31:06
kathleen
And once you develop clean energy, which cuts down on deaths, missed school days, cancer, whatever, um,
00:31:17
kathleen
We should all want that. And if you explain it to people that way, then the question is, are they going to be less resistant to the lies that they're fed ah by the oil industry or by the plastics industry or whatever?
00:31:32
kathleen
Because you can...
00:31:33
Robert Fine
Well, let's talk about this for for a minute, because you know when you start diving deep into you know each particular environmental issue and and the nuances, it's not ah it's not black and white.
00:31:34
kathleen
yeah
00:31:48
Robert Fine
and And there's a lot of ah gray and there's a lot of conflicting um and contradictory ah ideas and
Public Perception and Climate Change
00:31:57
Robert Fine
solutions. So when it comes to renewable energy and we want to wean off of fossil fuels,
00:32:02
Robert Fine
from from your opinion, where should we be going to do that transition in a in a timely and reasonable manner?
00:32:03
kathleen
Thank you.
00:32:13
Robert Fine
do we are are we Have we fooled ourselves by not by cutting out nuclear energy? um i don't know where you where you sit on wind turbines and And that seems to have you know both positive and negative effects when it comes to the environment. um you know I don't know if you and I will see nuclear fusion in our lifetime or not, um but it's a you know there're it's definitely complicated. you have to keep the You have to keep the lights on while at the same time trying to figure out yeah what's the cleaner way to keep those lights on.
00:32:52
kathleen
Well, I think, you know, you brought up the fundamental question, right? So think about the sci-fi movie that you walk out of where the aliens are coming and the world unites to fight the alien.
00:33:07
kathleen
And the people come from the villages of Africa and New York City and Japan and everybody at the end of the movie's cheering for the solution because we had an enemy that we all could relate to and were afraid of.
00:33:22
kathleen
Right. You've seen those movies. I'm always inspired and feel good about humanity when I go to one of those movies where everyone's cheering as the aliens are defeated. And we have an interesting situation and you brought up some like super loaded words.
00:33:39
kathleen
Right. So. Let's assume for the sake of conversation that 90% of the planet don't view climate change as existential, right? They move it as a slow-moving train and we'll figure it out. And I totally get it.
00:33:53
kathleen
I don't, when my electricity goes out and I live in Bethesda, Maryland, right? I swear to God, at least twice a year, I lose my electricity because of a squirrel or whatever, ah wind, trees, somebody didn't cut their whatever and I really lose it.
00:34:14
kathleen
I'm so upset because either my plants are going to die in the winter because I'm too hot or whatever. I get it. um And we sometimes I can't believe how many times we lose our electricity. And I live in a really developed area right next to D.C.,
00:34:29
kathleen
like one of the capitals, if not the capital of the free world, whatever. um But I'm constantly losing power and we're in this little community and they come to us last and I can't go on and on about how unhappy I am, but I really understand what it would be like to live without electricity in my own little way, not like India where 300 million people don't have any at all or in any other place on the planet.
00:34:52
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:34:54
kathleen
I don't get it from that perspective. my I'm inconvenienced and really mad because I can't do what I want to do, but I am mad. I don't have this like, oh, well, think of people somewhere else that don't have any at all.
00:35:06
kathleen
No, no, no, no. I go off the deep end and I get it. On the other hand, if you believe scientists, We are getting to a point where we will, our kids are going to really suffer, right? And that's also elusive for most of us because we don't get it.
00:35:26
kathleen
But if you interview people who've had a hurricane come through and it's flat in North Carolina and they go down and they interview people and they've never seen this in a hundred years and they ask them a question, do you think this is related to climate change?
00:35:33
Robert Fine
yeah
00:35:37
kathleen
They say, no. It's just another weather event. We just got unlucky. Uniformly, uniformly, whether it was Staten Island when it was mowed down by that hurricane 15 years ago or whatever it was, or in North Carolina this year or whatever, 90% of the people are not going to connect the dots.
00:35:56
kathleen
They're not, it's just not what they
00:35:57
Robert Fine
but you really believe You really believe the number is that high that 90%
00:36:02
kathleen
Oh, my gosh. Yes. Well, if you believe the polls, again, they're not my polls, but when they interview people, they categorically, well, they might vacillate or say maybe, but most of them say ah they're not emphatic or upset and they're not going to go beat down their legislators' doors so that it never happens again.
00:36:23
kathleen
They are not. And so it's incumbent on industry and NGOs and our leaders to make the best choices for all of us.
00:36:38
kathleen
And so you can make short-term calculations because you want to stay in office or because it's too expensive, or you can make long-term calculations and super invest whether it's popular or not, or you can come down somewhere in the middle, reserve your job and your popularity rating and make sure industry and the stuff's cooking along.
00:36:58
kathleen
And so I've given up for the most part, and this is kind of radical coming from an environmentalist, on convincing the average person that they should be super excited about a green economy and or worried about climate change. And instead, I've developed this faith in ah combination, but mostly in business And a little bit with in governments that are forward thinking.
00:37:33
kathleen
Right. I do not believe that ah right now in the world, because there's so much. ill will, their wars, ill will, bad leaders, I mean, psychotic leaders. They're just extraordinary number of people who are don't care about the future.
00:37:55
kathleen
They only care about themselves and or their friends.
00:37:59
Robert Fine
yes yeah
00:37:59
kathleen
And it's it's been illustrated. it it's just It's phenomenal. It's not just the United States, although we are leading the pack on that. the greed and selfishness and lack of planning, whatever.
Renewable Energy and Economic Potential
00:38:12
kathleen
But to answer your question, I'm sorry, to answer your question, yeah, it's a balancing act.
00:38:12
Robert Fine
It makes it hard when... No, no, no, go ahead.
00:38:18
kathleen
However, i do think that, ah let's take the oil industry and some of my friends, good friends work there. Good, good, good friends work there.
00:38:29
kathleen
That it's their job, whether it's, you know, a Middle East country or an American company, oil company, to keep pumping it out.
00:38:41
kathleen
And however, ah I do see, think, and if you look at the investment in renewables, and we're already, I don't have the numbers in front of me, unfortunately, but we're pretty close to 40% of the world's, of the major country's world energy.
00:39:00
kathleen
being 100% renewable. And nobody would have thought that.
00:39:03
Robert Fine
That high?
00:39:04
kathleen
Yeah. Depending on the country. depends Some countries are 80%, 90%. France is what? 90% nuclear? 85% nuclear? I'd have to check.
00:39:12
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:39:13
kathleen
Denmark, the northern, you know, they're there I wish I had the list in front of me. But, and i easy you can find it online in two seconds, but it's incredible what's happening in the United States. And wind, solar, geothermal, whatever, nuclear, are all
00:39:31
kathleen
increasingly going to topple but on pure economic terms, on pure, on pure economic terms, they will topple the oil industry because it's not cost effective.
00:39:43
kathleen
You know, you can open up ANWR, you can open up really sensitive natural areas to oil exploration.
00:39:44
Robert Fine
Okay.
00:39:49
kathleen
I don't think the oil companies are going to be bidding on them, or if they do, it'll be very infrequent.
00:39:55
Robert Fine
Well, that's a very, very positive view. I'm i'm glad to hear it I don't do, is this another generation? Is this another 20, 25 years before we maybe get to 75, 80% renewable?
00:40:10
kathleen
Yeah. I mean, it could be, you know, I mean, nobody shoot me if I say natural gas is better than oil, coal, right?
00:40:17
Robert Fine
so So let's, so like in turn,
00:40:19
kathleen
But for nuclear, I mean, Dennis, for example, Hayes is... has lived through too many bad things with nuclear. But, and honestly, if you read some of the stories, it's one thing to have France running it, which is a highly organized, disciplined culture around their nuclear energy. And it's another thing to put it in a country where they don't have laws, regulations.
00:40:43
kathleen
And we've seen this over and over again, where a truck in Mexico that was delivering nuclear medical waste, medical waste, was hijacked, if you will. The guy was having lunch and someone stole his truck and unpacked the nuclear stuff and they all died. three The three people stole the truck.
00:41:02
kathleen
This kind of stuff can't happen if we're going to go nuclear. It's got to be insanely regulated and controlled by people who have the legal rights
00:41:06
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:41:13
kathleen
police, you know, the scientific community watching this like a hawk because it doesn't take much to kill a lot of people.
00:41:22
Robert Fine
So let let let's take let's take energy off the table for for the time being.
00:41:22
kathleen
And so anyway.
00:41:27
Robert Fine
since if if if you're If the feel is is that it's inevitable because it's it's better for business and it's a better um ah financial outcome for the businesses involved, that is fantastic.
00:41:39
Robert Fine
And and hopefully it'll accelerate it. But it it sounds like it's going to it it will take care of itself just from the business aspect viewpoints.
00:41:47
kathleen
Yeah, and the parenthetical here is the big parenthetical, shouldn't be a parenthetical, it should be the main part of the sentence, which is it may take care of itself, but what kind of world are we going to be living in if it takes 30 years?
00:42:02
Robert Fine
Well, yes.
00:42:02
kathleen
And so that that's the cost-benefit analysis that I'm saying that no leaders make because they're too interested in what's happening in their polls of the day and or they're paid off by
00:42:02
Robert Fine
yeah
00:42:15
kathleen
all you know by oil or gas companies and the political structure of the country allows this massive payoff in terms of political donations. So I am bullish totally on renewables and where it's going and yes, it's going to happen.
The Plastic Crisis
00:42:29
kathleen
I can't answer the question if it's going to be too late.
00:42:32
Robert Fine
Okay, but I, so i want I want to put that to the side. So what I want to ask you next is, what is, what is the environmental issue that you're most concerned about today that needs people to be focusing on and worrying about and pushing for change tomorrow?
00:42:50
kathleen
Okay, this is so easy for me because i i am one of those people who will get up in front of a room full of super crazy, emphatically terrified of climate change.
00:43:03
kathleen
And I'll say plastics is as bad as climate change because there is an end in sight. But we've got a lot of problems. And you can go on our website. We put out a bunch of reports, but we're not the only ones.
00:43:14
kathleen
Thousands of scientists are putting out reports about how plastics is going to kill us. It's in our brains. It's in the placenta. It's in every, in our bloodstream.
00:43:25
kathleen
If you take the cleanest water on the planet, you got 240,000, depending how big the bottle is, micrograms of plastic in it. It's an Italian study came out and showed that people with a lot of plastics in their plaque, it gets stuck in your plaque. Your body can't get rid of plastic micrograms. It can't get rid of it.
00:43:42
kathleen
It's not like other stuff that can be processed by your liver, et cetera, and be expelled. Plastic cannot. And I believe plastics will turn out to be a thousand times worse than tobacco.
00:43:55
kathleen
And I believe we're already there because plastics is not, it's not virgin plastic. It's not oil, right? Plastics is made out of sometimes dozens of chemicals.
00:44:07
kathleen
And in addition to that, when plastic breaks down in the atmosphere, a dump, whatever, it absorbs and acts as a magnet, a real magnet for heavy metals, the worst heavy metals on the planet, which then go into the fish, go into the water, and then we eat them.
00:44:25
kathleen
And so we are mass, our bodies are massively
00:44:26
Robert Fine
Yep.
00:44:29
kathleen
full of micrograms of plastic. And all of those assets that the oil companies have, if you look at where they're projecting in five years, 10 years, when they see oil as a stranded asset, where are they going to put it?
00:44:43
kathleen
Plastic. And let me just say, plastic is an incredibly useful item, but it is as bad as climate change because it takes way over a thousand years for it to actually degrade.
00:44:56
kathleen
And in the meantime, we, you, me, and what's worse, my kids, and we have young people in our office who got tested for plastics, their body load, because they've had plastics in their life since they were infants, is much higher than mine.
00:45:13
kathleen
And that means in their veins, their brains, everywhere. Look it up. It's astonishingly bad.
00:45:19
Robert Fine
Oh, I think i I completely agree. I haven't done the research. i'm I'm curious, though, because i'm I'm starting to wonder, you know, is it microplastic?
00:45:29
Robert Fine
know, is this the cause for an increased incidence of colon cancer in so many younger people?
00:45:34
kathleen
It absolutely is connected. and And honestly, the studies are not being done by the environmental community. They're being done by people who are connected to these industries and who are trying to figure out what their product is doing because they don't want to be regulated.
00:45:52
kathleen
And plastic is so useful. I've gotten rid of most of it. mike But I'm wearing plastic. I just realized I'm looking at my coat. It's not made out of but ah you know wo or wood or, you know, cotton.
00:46:08
kathleen
I'm wearing plastic and my skin is absorbing it. Every single minute. And when you microwave stuff in plastic, you might as well have just eaten the plastic because it's just pushing micrograms.
00:46:17
Robert Fine
Mm-hmm.
00:46:20
kathleen
And for another example, ah today there was a story, if if you've got a baby, you need an organic mattress because the other ones are full of PFAS, which are part of this whole plastic syndrome, or plastics, and your baby's creating heat and absorbing it at that young age. This wasn't true 20 years ago.
00:46:40
kathleen
So our infants are coming out of the womb full of plastic. Some pediatricians are recommending that boys store sperm samples because of infertility.
00:46:52
kathleen
People are seeing massive endocrine disruption in people who live around dumps. And that could be, doesn't have to be poverty people, that you could be in Rockville and live near a dump and you're exposed to the plastics because they're breaking down in mass quantities and hitting the air and you're breathing them in and absorbing it.
00:47:12
kathleen
You can go on dozens of medical and and other websites and watch how your body, like literally diagrams of how you inhale it. It gets stuck in your lungs.
00:47:24
kathleen
One study that freaked me out was all the people who died of heart attacks. Their plaque was 50% plastic, which made it hard and and unstable, both at the same time. It made it these particles kind of all glommed together, and then they became unstable, unlike plaque where you can take a statin and the plaque gets solid and doesn't break off as often, et cetera. I know a lot about this. m But it's not just us. it's There are probably tens of thousands of scientists right now, but for getting all their stuff cut, that were doing research on the impacts of plastics on human health.
00:48:02
kathleen
And again, I got a son. He wants kids. He's in his early twenty s I'm advising him to go check it out and figure it out and do that because I don't want ah an entire generation of men, multiple generations, being impacted by plastics and possibly infertile and all these other issues that are going on.
00:48:26
Robert Fine
is it Is this a problem that you that ah RFK recognizes?
00:48:31
kathleen
You know, I don't know. I've known him forever. I've met him but many, many times. I know his family, whatever. I don't get it for the life of me. um You know, he's got to have had some personal, really personal experience with this to be so wrong about all this stuff.
00:48:50
kathleen
On the other hand, well, and then to tell people that he's going to like create... you know, Atlas, we'll call it Fit Nation, where everybody's suddenly going to get up and exercise and eat vegetables.
00:49:04
kathleen
And it's so unrealistic and so just doesn't understand human beings or what makes us tick. And so ah it would be one, but I think he'd be shut down by the energy department and everybody else in EPA. They've all stopped studying it.
00:49:22
kathleen
And so good luck with that. But yeah, sure. I think I'll, You know, i think it's a good idea.
00:49:28
Robert Fine
and And is there is there is there any ah congressional caucus or any any members of Congress concerned about this area?
00:49:37
kathleen
Yeah, there, there, there, there've been hearings on the Hill. I can't really name who on the committees right now. It all switches around, but yeah, there's concern. And again, studies are pouring out of not just universities and hospitals, but ah many, many places. Even the animal pet food industry is worrying about,
00:49:59
kathleen
the fact that they line their cans of dog food and their plastics in the dog food.
00:50:02
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:50:04
kathleen
We put out a study called pets versus plastic, not because we believe, because the reason we put it out is because people really, really care about their animals, really care.
00:50:15
kathleen
And the studies aren't good that, you know, 25 years ago, a golden retriever lived to be 18, now lives to be nine years old. And the general consensus is and least at least in part, the plastics.
00:50:29
kathleen
It's shortening people, the dog's lives. It's lining their pet food cans. it's I understand it's convenient and simple, just like drilling for oil can be expensive but profitable.
00:50:43
kathleen
But in the case of plastics, we need to double down and commit to getting the definitive answer of how It's impacting us and how to eliminate it.
00:50:54
kathleen
And the idea that you would be inconvenienced with paper straws, which by the way, you're putting in your mouth and sucking on and you want to go back to plastic where you know you're swallowing it and not caring at all because you're slightly inconvenienced. Let's just get a better paper straw for God's sakes, instead of taking, putting plastic straws back in national parks and at the Kennedy Center and There are signs all over the place now that say, welcome back, plastic straws or whatever. I've seen them. There's one from the Kennedy Center that's hilarious.
00:51:26
kathleen
And like, why? Why? When you can eliminate landfills and have biodegradable paper and it's not going to kill you to do it, but plastics could.
00:51:29
Robert Fine
so
00:51:37
Robert Fine
so but So what do we need to do to get, I orderly i don't even, I'm trying to think through, do you, is it, do you educate?
00:51:47
kathleen
We need a whistle.
00:51:47
Robert Fine
Hmm.
00:51:48
kathleen
I'll tell you what we need. We need some whistleblowers. We need people from the industry who know that this is happening. Just like tobacco, they knew what was happening. If they're out there, come forward because we know that somebody is studying the impacts of this.
00:52:02
kathleen
And there's enough, again, we didn't write write this. This is my opinion based on incredible research that we've done and compilation of other people's works, not our own, but other people's. It's not like we're making this stuff up.
00:52:16
kathleen
Really legit people who have a lot to lose by coming out against various forms of plastic and telling us what's happening. And so the studies are so scary.
00:52:30
kathleen
You know, I just really, I worry about it. i I worry about it. I worry about my health in relation to plastics because I really don't. don't want to die early because I'm full of plastics.
00:52:42
kathleen
And it's just mounting. My kids, as I said, it's like double, tripled my load because I didn't have it when I was growing up. We stick those pacifiers made out of plastic in our kid's mouth. We put them on plastic sheets.
00:52:56
kathleen
We put them on plastic mattresses, on beds that are cribs that have plastic around the edges. All their toys are plastic, plastic, plastic, plastic. So when you test them, They have two, three, four times as much plastic in their body as I do.
00:53:12
Robert Fine
And is it our during the for
00:53:12
kathleen
And it's not, you cannot eliminate it from your body.
00:53:15
kathleen
So it just accumulates.
00:53:16
Robert Fine
for for the for the testing, is it testing for ah particular molecules or ah elements in your body versus ah micro physical micro pieces of plastic?
00:53:30
Robert Fine
So, I mean, what's leaching?
00:53:31
kathleen
Well, so yeah, there's some, so we did one, yeah, so we did one on PFAS, which are, you know, the, everybody's enemy.
00:53:32
Robert Fine
what's leeachching
00:53:38
kathleen
um I've said the word PFAS so long, I can't remember what it stands for, I'll look it up in a second. But, um and we found heavy loads in young people, which is one ah chemical composition that is on the chopping blocks. Everybody, Europe eliminated PFAS a long time ago.
00:53:57
kathleen
We're in the process of trying to do that depending on the state and the product. and
00:54:02
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:54:02
kathleen
um But most of it's kind of, I'll call it gross as in volume analysis of plaque because the causation effect is really difficult to prove, right?
00:54:15
kathleen
It's you, what causes lung cancer if you smoke cigarettes?
00:54:16
Robert Fine
yeah
00:54:20
kathleen
It took them years to agree that tobacco was the reason as opposed to say some other thing. And, you know, we have a couple of scientists on our board of directors and one of them is incredibly smart ah and is involved in cancer research.
00:54:38
kathleen
And he said, we can't test two chemicals at the same time to figure out if the combination of the chemicals is killing people, we can only do it one at a time.
00:54:51
kathleen
And so you've got something like plastics, which has 10, 20, 30 different kinds of other kinds of chemicals in them. Most of which, almost all of which are not regulated.
00:55:02
kathleen
No, 90% of which are not regulated by EPA, let alone the combination of
Local Initiatives and Community Involvement
00:55:07
kathleen
the chemicals. None of them are regulated by EPA. So you could put 12 different chemicals together to make a plastic container that all of which have limits that EPA set for some of those individual chemicals, not all of which, some of which have them.
00:55:22
kathleen
You have no idea of the impact on all 10 or 12 of those chemicals from the product. You have none. You cannot figure it out.
00:55:33
kathleen
So what you have to do is study it one at a time, which is completely useless in my view. If you cannot, so I'm hoping, and I'm not a giant fan of AI, um for many reasons in terms of surveillance and all that stuff, um you know, the, the, it's just not good enough and it's so unfair and it's everywhere um and it impacts what people write and it's, it's just as huge problems and it needs to, we need to figure that out.
00:56:00
kathleen
I am a huge fan of AI and medical because it's, it can commute, compute multiple impacts that regular people and scientists as smart as they are can't do.
00:56:14
kathleen
So I am hoping that we're going to turn the power of AI against plastics that will then be able to give us some definitive, um, notions, ideas, and facts eventually that this stuff ah needs to be taken off the market and we need to come up with alternatives.
00:56:32
kathleen
And by the way, invention is, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And I'm absolutely sure just like we did with solar, that we can find a new product other than plastic, but we are up against an industry that doesn't know what to do with all that oil.
00:56:47
kathleen
And so if you look at some of them, their growth, not their profits, but their growth industry is all around plastics. They're planning on making a lot of plastics with those stranded assets.
00:56:59
kathleen
And that's really disturbing. Again, for my kids and their grandkids or whatever, my kids have kids, it's just not okay. And again, ah I'm not saying
00:57:08
Robert Fine
Yeah.
00:57:12
kathleen
Any of this isn't useful. Plastics is an incredibly useful product. But on the other hand, even the AMA, even my dentist said, which was funny because I'm the first one who told him five years ago about plastics because it's nothing but plastics in a dentist's office.
00:57:27
kathleen
He's now got religion and he's moving away. He's getting rid of as much plastic as he can in the dental office. because he's terrified of it. You put, insert a plastic tube in your blood, which is hot, and you're melting the plastic.
00:57:42
kathleen
So it's not hard to understand, but this is a massive industry with huge implications.
00:57:42
Robert Fine
yeah
00:57:48
kathleen
We just have to start on it now. And again, it takes a thousand years for plastics to fall apart. So it will be around in
00:57:57
Robert Fine
So is this is this an issue that your Earth Day is trying to educate at the local level next week on on the on on this day?
00:58:06
kathleen
Yeah. Well, we, so we've we've gotten and our theme in 2018 2017 was around plastics and we were, we sort of cornered the market a little bit um because nobody else was looking at it on health and plastics in 2018.
00:58:20
Robert Fine
Thank you.
00:58:21
kathleen
And we're advised by by the way, it wasn't our brilliance. We talked to a lot of people. And so then we ran it again for two years. Our theme for the next two years, including this one is our power, our planet, because again,
00:58:35
kathleen
we deeply believe that with enough education and um small P political, not partisan, but small P political influence, um we will see ah the next generation of renewables being employed, if not by our own backward federal government at the moment, and but by um local initiatives. So for Earth Day,
00:59:04
kathleen
I'll go back to the plastics a second. For Earth Day, we're really focused on the commitments that mayors and governors around the world are making on renewable energy. And by the way, if you look at the distribution, which I did last night, there's an amazing map where if you click on a village, a town, a rural area in the United States, I don't have it in front of me, but I can give you the website.
00:59:26
Robert Fine
Mm-hmm.
00:59:26
kathleen
It literally will talk. it it Then this calculator pops up. And it shows you, it's very cool, the amount of money that's been invested the community in renewable energy. And I'll give you an example.
00:59:38
kathleen
In Dalton, Georgia, um we have a committee of renewable energy people who are super smart. One of them is a senior VP of a big renewable energy company. I was talking to her the other day and she said, we're in a town called Dalton, Georgia, which used to be a rug making company.
00:59:59
kathleen
And we built our first solar plant there. They make solar panels and other solar equipment. It is the only air conditioned factory in a town that's still trying to make carpet.
01:00:15
kathleen
We're the only air conditioned one. It's state of the art. It's clean. We employ a lot of people. It's awesome. I said, great. Why don't we do a program with the what are the workers there with you, the VP, ah EVP of this company and the mayor?
01:00:31
kathleen
And let's do a program because we do these things called Earth Day Live, which get a lot of traffic where we interview people. And let's do one around that. And I said, they all got really excited. So we're doing that.
01:00:43
kathleen
And then I said, whose district is it?
01:00:48
kathleen
Can you imagine?
01:00:48
Robert Fine
Well, hey, maybe that that's one way to turn a person around.
01:00:53
kathleen
Uh, good luck with that.
01:00:54
Robert Fine
Maybe. Yeah.
01:00:55
kathleen
Yeah. So honestly, if ignorance is your flag that you fly, then you're not going to pull it down just because something good is going to happen. You're going to stick to it. So we're going ahead with the mayor and the workers who love working there. It's clean.
01:01:13
kathleen
It's air conditioned in a town that's really having a difficult time. And it's got great people living in Dalton, Georgia.
01:01:19
Robert Fine
and and they're And they're manufacturing.
01:01:21
kathleen
And they're manufacturing solar.
01:01:22
Robert Fine
I mean, it it hits all the right buttons right now.
01:01:25
kathleen
Exactly. And I found this out just by randomly talking to one of our committee members and about where she was working and the new plants that they're building, et cetera. And I had to laugh, you know, you know, I had to laugh. I had to laugh.
01:01:41
kathleen
There's this great place where everyone loves loves to work. It's healthy. It's clean. It's making solar panels. It's bringing jobs. and it's air conditioned, which I told you I'm a real baby when it's hot and when my electricity goes out.
01:01:54
kathleen
Um, and, and then it's in somebody's district who roundly rejects everything to do with everything related to health, welfare, green, whatever.
01:02:06
kathleen
It's kind of funny, but not really. So we'll do the program without her. Cause I can't trust really what she'd say. And, um, It'll get a lot of attention.
01:02:18
Robert Fine
So in terms of, ah you know, as as much reach as I can help ah this interview get and an audience, what would you like the person listening to this interview, you know, over the next few days to do on Tuesday the twenty second
01:02:36
kathleen
You know, there are lots of things. They can organize ah community event. They can organize or call their mayors. They can look up the stuff on our website, which is really, really good.
01:02:48
kathleen
And they'll have a lot of facts and walk into the mayor's office or the economic, you know, advisor's office. Every city has one. Every city wants to prosper and say, hey, what are you doing?
01:03:02
kathleen
But we're just as happy if people take action and clean up. But here's the thing with cleanups and Earth Day has been doing cleanups since whenever, right? is you clean it up, I do them all the time, and they're dirty the next day.
01:03:14
kathleen
So what we are asking people who do cleanups, and we have thousands of cleanups on our website, you can go to our map, which has 12, 13,000 events, and we just, people just keep adding them, there'll there'll be half a million events going on, and we just can't capture it.
01:03:30
kathleen
And say to yourself, like, when you're out there cleaning up, why is this happening? What can I do? What's the next step? And Earth Day is always about Setting your pathway down the road because it's good for yourself. It's good for your kids. It's good for your property values if you don't have trash all over your neighborhood.
01:03:50
kathleen
and And why should you, as opposed to the mayor or the municipal government, whatever, allow this to go on? And it's so take the next step. So again, i don't care if you do a cleanup, plant a tree or whatever, or talk to your mayor.
01:04:06
kathleen
But if you're doing a cleanup or you see something going on, say something. Because mayors and local governments respond to their constituents in a way ah president the president United States does not.
Challenges and Optimism in Environmentalism
01:04:19
kathleen
And you have a lot bigger opportunity on Earth Day to make your voice heard or all year round. If you see something that you think isn't fair and can be fixed, and certainly pollution is created by somebody, it doesn't just fall to the earth.
01:04:36
kathleen
It is created by somebody. And that somebody needs to pay for the pollution. And that would be my best advice is look around. You know, I'll leave you with this last thing, which is When I took this job, but I looked up, I don't know why, what the word environment means.
01:04:56
kathleen
And it means, this is the definition, what surrounds you. And that has driven my work at Earth Day, going back to your very first question at the beginning of this hour. was local versus federal or multilateral or UN or whatever, and why Earth Day focuses so much on communities.
01:05:16
kathleen
And it's because there's more power at the local level to deal with some of these things, not the giant things like climate change, ah but also because people care about where they live. No one wants to live in a bad situation or near a dump or near ah an oil container or a leaking oil container.
01:05:38
kathleen
And so our focus has always been local, local, local.
01:05:43
Robert Fine
I think that makes lot of sense. Nobody wants it in their backyard. That's that's for sure.
01:05:47
kathleen
That's right.
01:05:47
Robert Fine
um i'm go to you know it's a I'm going to wrap it up here. there There's so many areas. I mean, we didn't talk about deforestation. We didn't talk about ocean acidification. We didn't talk about water scarcity. we didn't talk about overfishing.
01:06:02
Robert Fine
there's There's so many areas um of concern ah and that require detailed conversation, but we'll we'll have to save it for another time. But I'm going to leave you with a a radical idea.
01:06:12
kathleen
Love to.
01:06:15
Robert Fine
don't maybe Maybe you've thought of it, maybe you haven't, but you know Mars Day, co-opt it, get Musk involved. you know it's a you know are we goingnna Are we going to do the same thing up on Mars? Is he concerned about that at all? you know Does that bring more attention to the issues on hand here? I don't know, but that would be an interesting one.
01:06:41
kathleen
Well, I don't know. I can't remember. Mars, does Mars have gravity? I can't remember how much. So maybe this stuff will just float off into space. I'm not really sure about their gravity situation on Mars. I'll have to look it up. But I do think, um you know, we gave an award to Elon. I've known him, met him, been places with him.
01:07:04
kathleen
And it's, um Elon I knew, a long time ago, ah was not like this. And I do think, uh, we gave him a big award for Tesla and for solar city, um for his solar company, but he's in the solar business and he's in the EV business.
01:07:29
kathleen
And, um, yes, he's in the Mars business, but that's a personal thing. And it's probably in part, what's driving his connection to this whole thing is because he wants,
01:07:39
kathleen
the money, which is probably a trillion dollars to go to Mars, if not himself, a spaceship. ah But, um you know, people change and become different people over our lives. We are all very different than we were as kids.
01:07:58
kathleen
ah But maybe I'll try that if I run into him again.
01:08:03
Robert Fine
Kathleen, that thank you so much for your time. It's it's been a great conversation. i and'd love to have you back again. And ah I wish you a happy 55th Earth Day on Tuesday. um And and i and i'm I want to bring more focus on many the issues we discussed. And I think microplastics is a
01:08:28
Robert Fine
might might kill us all, you know within the next 50, 75 years, if we if we don't start taking it very seriously.
01:08:35
kathleen
Yeah, I'd be happy to. And again, there's tons of our two big studies are babies versus plastic and pets versus plastic. And then we're about to release a new one called people versus plastic. So, um and they're all, you know, again, peer reviewed studies where nobody's got a dog in the fight. They just want to know the truth.
01:08:55
kathleen
So they're worth looking at. Again, it's not our research. It's But it's a collection, i think, that's really valuable for people. And once they click the first time, they're probably not going to be very happy with what they find.
01:09:09
Robert Fine
Kathleen? Yeah, no, thank you. and And, well, working in the environment, it's a tough industry and it's it's hard to, successes are far and few between, but it's it's definitely a worthwhile endeavor, that's for sure.
01:09:09
kathleen
But thank you.
01:09:25
kathleen
Yeah, I think they call us irrational optimists sometimes for a good reason, but we are optimists. That's what drives us.
01:09:34
Robert Fine
Thank you again.