Our Partners at Yale Climate Connections produced this wonderful video highlighting the activities of Elders Climate Action! We are grateful for the support and actions of our partners striving for a better world for all of us.
In addition, link to a short Interview with Grady McGonagill on Climate Connections. Grady is a Member of the ECA Leadership Team and Massachusetts Chapter Founder & Leader.
My mother instilled in me at an early age that it is important to contribute oneself in life. So I was a Brownie and a Girl Scout and a volunteer throughout my life.
As I got older, I didn’t want to simply take action for the sake of taking action. Incremental change didn’t appeal to me. It needed to be a grand scale difference, a highly leveraged difference. I say this rather tongue in cheek because the sound of it makes me embarrassed. I do not think of myself as an arrogant person, but for whatever reason, I always felt that any investment of my time and energy should be pivotal, should change the tide. So as a young twenty something I was ending hunger. In my thirties I was transforming education. In my 40’s and 50’s I was raising money to cure cancer.
Enter my 60’s and the birth of my first grandchild. At that moment I realized I had to do something about climate change. The thought of my legacy all of a sudden became relevant. I couldn’t imagine my grandchildren not being able to play outdoors because it’s too hot or the air is too polluted. I couldn’t imagine them not enjoying the gushing waterfalls of Yosemite or the lush tropical gardens of Hawaii. I couldn’t imagine their world not having all the species of birds or the presence of the simple wildlife that I’d taken for granted my entire life.
I received an email last winter from Grady McGonagill, inviting me to join him and others for a meeting of ECA. My friend, Rajesh Kasturirangan, had talked to me about it earlier. I was out of the country at that time, so I wrote back to Grady, that once I am back, I would love to join them.
I have been part of our South Asia Center for many years and for last couple of years, we decided to raise awareness about climate justice amongst the South Asian community in the Greater Boston area, so the mission of ECA was in sync with what we have been doing for some time. South Asia is one of the most adversely affected regions of the world due to climate change. For instance, it has been reported that 80% of the ground water has been depleted there.
So I joined ECA in the spring and attended my first meeting at Judy Weiss’s house in Brookline. I found everyone very friendly, pleasant and deeply concerned about the state of affairs and what world we were going to leave behind for our children and grandchildren. I felt a serious commitment by the group to climate justice.
Posted on in GRAND Voices
What are you doing to lessen the effects of climate change?
BY PAUL SEVERANCE
Elders Climate Action was formed a year and a half ago to bring the voices of elders to bear on what scientists agree is the greatest threat to life on Earth in human history: climate change. We came together sharing two convictions:
nexusmedianews.com, By Laura A. Shepard
With age comes wisdom. Ask any politician. They listen closely to what older Americans think and say for a simple reason: older people vote.
There’s an even simpler reason why politicians (and all of us) should listen to the elders of our communities: they’ve seen and know a lot. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that a growing number of seniors are taking up a cause that’s the critical challenge of our age: climate change.
While efforts to lower global emissions often send people into partisan corners of the political boxing ring, one group is showing it’s possible to transcend boundaries and unite around this common goal.
“We’re facing a lot of challenges as a country, and as a world, and I had this sense that older folks could be making more of a contribution,” said Paul Severance, a founder of Elders Climate Action. Read the full Article Here
Few things strike fear into the hearts of politicians like a disgruntled grandparent entering a voting booth. Seniors wield immense political power in the United States, a fact made plain by their voting record. In the 2014 midterm elections, a year of historically low voter turnout, nearly 59 percent of adults aged 65 and older pulled the lever on Election Day. Just 23 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds bothered to do the same. It’s numbers like these that have made Social Security and Medicare the third rail of American politics.
So, what happens when America’s seniors find out what climate change means for their grandkids?
Recently, dozens of retirees descended on Capitol Hill to advocate for climate action. Organized by the Conscious Elders Network, the Grandparents Climate Action Day brought together seniors from around the country. Following a day of training, during which renowned NASA climatologist James Hansen spoke to those assembled, the gray-haired activists headed for the Hill. They urged their representatives to support the Clean Power Plan and they advocated for pricing carbon emissions using systems like cap and dividend. Read the full Article Here
