Enviro Activists Think Green, Look Local

Imagine this: a completely electrified municipal vehicular fleet – all 600 cars and trucks; replacement of hugely polluting oil burners with high efficiency heat pumps in many of the poor homes that most need low cost and healthier energy; and the green day when composting kitchen scraps will be as routine and revenue-producing as recycling.

Those and other hopeful projects – funding for which will materialize if already submitted grants come through – may well be in New Haven’s future according to Steve Winter, the city’s inaugural Director of Climate and Sustainability.

Winter cited these potentially imminent initiatives in a kind of future forecasting and review of what he termed is a necessary all-government approach to climate change over which the former Ward 21 alder has been presiding since he took the ​“climate czar” job in December.

Winter made the remarks Monday evening as part of a panel discussion billed as ​“Local Responses to Climate Change” convened at the Eckhart Center at Albert Magnus College on upper Prospect Street. 

The other panelists included Executive Director Lee Osorio of bike-and-pedestrian-promoting New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation; Program Director of the New Haven Climate Movement Chris Schweitzer; and Molly Johnson, a graduate student at the Yale School of the Environment

“This year has been a flowering of the eco spirit” at Albertus, said Edward Dunar, a religion professor and director of the center, who moderated the panel.

He said the school’s local efforts include inaugurating a bike share program this year (with more kids riding than ever); a campaign to get students to refrain from using disposable coffee mugs; a student initiative to increase the school’s overall recycling rate; and launching an outdoor club that focuses on ecological issues.

All these, Dunar said, are a reflection of Albertus having been the first college in the state to sign on to Laudato Si Action Platform, an international initiative spearheaded by Pope Francis whose aim, said Dunar, is ​“care of the earth inseparable from healthy community and care of those at the margins.”

Before an in-person audience of about 25 and live-streamed to many more, the panel covered a wide range of issues emphasizing, of course, the high urgency of it all but also landing on an optimistic prospect.

They underlined that personal and local efforts are no less crucial than government and global, and must go hand-in-hand; that the most crucial fronts on which to campaign are, to use Winter’s phrase, ​“decarbonizing our heating” and housing and greening of the transportation system. 

Here are some highlights, triggered by Dunar’s questions and those of the audience in person and online:

Steve Winter: ​“We really do need an all-government approach,” he said. But being on the inside, as it were, he has a new view in part because of all the increasing wave of funding and grant opportunities that cross his desk – many of which the city is applying for – so that, not quite half a year in the new post, Winter lands in an optimistic place. ​“We’ve applied for a recycling education grant with the [city] health department; with public works an analysis of fleet electrification; we’ve put in a grant for composting infrastructure with West Haven. A quarter of our household waste is food scraps, so there is a real tremendous collective action opportunity.”

Winter glanced out the window of the Behan Center, where the gathering unfolded, at Albertus’s solar canopies, which are arrayed over cars in the adjacent Winchester Avenue parking lots, and said, ​“It’d be exciting if the city could do that too. 

“I’m also excited about the Strong School,” an adaptive reuse plan, which the city and neighbors worked out with affordable housing developer Penrose. The plan unfolding there is to convert the 1916 Fair Haven venerable pile of bricks into an all electric, high efficiency residential building, complete with electric vehicle charging stations.

Finally, Winter emphasized ​“decarbonizing our heating, moving from oil and gas to high efficiency electric heat pumps.” A grant to study that, with Yale University, and how such a change would effect air quality is also in the works. And Winter was excited, in his quiet way, also about the recent purchase by the city of six all-electric Chevy Bolts. He said the cost, with increasingly available federal subsidies, was about $20,000. More subsidies for vehicles and for high efficiency residential heating pumps and appliances are also in the near horizon, and he urged the activists in his audience to support proposed legislation, Connecticut Senate Bill 979, that would put a kind of energy efficiency label or grade on all rental housing so people will know literally what they are getting into.

Lee Osorio: An alumna of Albertus, Osorio has played a part in launching the college’s bike share program. Her organization, the New Haven Coalition for Active Transportation, she said is all about educating more people on some basic lessons: The fabulous cardiovascular and environmental pluses that happen when ​“going from using a vehicle to using your body as the source of energy.”

While New Haven is a cycling-friendly city, in that regard not all neighborhoods are equal. How do we help economically struggling families to get bikes? She asked. How do we get them to all neighborhoods and how do we get more spaces made available on public buses for bikes, so you don’t have to wait (for the next bus or the next, and perhaps be late for work)? Fewer cars, she concluded, less parking, more trees, and ​“mapping out more routes to produce a green footprint.”

Molly Johnson: A former Urban Resources Initiative forester and current graduate student in environmental studies at Yale, Johnson brought, in part, a Catholic perspective to local initiatives to combat effects of climate change. She framed it as ​“an imbalance of relationships.” That is, the imbalance of greenhouse gases affect different communities in a highly imbalanced way, with poor communities – to say nothing of God’s other creatures, plants and animals – suffering from the effects they generally did not help to create.

Johnson averred that local action to right the imbalances have strategic advantages over federal, state, global efforts (not that the latter should not also be vigorously pursued). First, ​“local municipalities have the legal authorities to make land use decisions. Second, there are more uncertainties at the state and federal level and working local enables an activist to be more steadfast.” Third, out of control carbon emissions, for example, while global, affect specific places. ​“We need to find where they are and restore relationships.”

Chris Schweitzer: Perhaps the most internationally-experienced of the speakers – he also works on environmental issues with the New Haven/Leon (Nicaragua) Sister City Project – Schweitzer’s voice was also the most urgent: ​“The U.S. is a wealthy country and we started this fire. It’s blazing everywhere. Now we’re spending $200 million for Long Wharf [to put in seawalls and pumps and shore protection projects in New Haven, destined for Long Wharf and the train station], but who’s doing that for Nicaragua or Bangladesh?” he asked.

Locally, ​“I want people in Fair Haven and the Hill to be [similarly] protected. But, really, how do you justify spending money locally without dealing with the people (around the world) who didn’t cause the problem?” he asked rhetorically. Climate change in Nicaragua, for example, is ​“undermining all our anti-poverty programs. We are still working with villages trying to recover from 1998 climate disasters.”

Schweitzer said his group is working locally with the city Board of Education to raise the issue into higher profile in the schools. ​“They need to be engaged in climate change [education] to raise (future) leaders who understand that it’s a central issue (of our time).” There’s good stuff going on here, but there’s so much more incredible work to do, he added.

Toward the end of the hour plus discussion, an audience member, Huan Ngo – who is a former Yale science researcher and current science teacher at Career High School – posed a tough question: ​“There’s a lot of climate activism here [on the panel and in New Haven!] and it usually occurs when there’s a passion. But how do we come up with the optimal [and coordinated] plan that balances climate mitigation and adaptation?”

To that there was no single answer from the panel.

Instead, with so many fronts to work on simultaneously, Dunar concluded by asking each panelist, in a kind of lightning round, what one thing would they advise to do next?

Johnson: ​“Adopt a tree. You only have to water it once a week for two years, and it’s a way to mitigate carbon emissions and relate to the neighborhood.”

Winter: ​“I’ll say housing. Make a plan for de-carbonizing if you own a home. This is the best time ever because the cost of heat pumps has come down tremendously and next year there will be [additionally] rebates linked to income [to purchase such appliances.]”

Osorio: ​“Please get outdoors. NCAT offers free cycling for everyone. We’ll come to you. Every single action we do matters.”

Schweitzer: ​“Two things: Our culture really stinks at ​‘right relationship’. Focus on building [green] housing.” The way it’s been done up to now ​“is a big waste of energy. And two: transportation. Cars are disaster. Think of choices where you can walk; try to downsize and live without a car; there are so many options we don’t think about. Focusing on transportation and buildings would be the biggest bang for the buck.”

The next Eckhart Center event on the environment occurs April 27, at 5.30, with a lecture on the Dominican Sisters’ response to climate change.