breathe something we do 23,000 times a
day and we don’t even think about it at
least I didn’t think about it until I
finally be was able to overcome my
overwhelming anxiety about global
climate change thinking about one breath
at a time
let me explain with each breath we take
in a half liter of air and adults do
this 16 times a minute and sometimes we
do it a little bit more rapidly when
we’re exercising or stressed speaking in
front of large crowds but children my
friend dr. Paul Lewis is a pediatrician
and a Multnomah County Health Officer
and children he explained to me are more
like hummingbirds and they breathe more
rapidly and taken more air proportionate
to their body their breath rate is forty
four times a minute or 63,000 times a
day and the human lung is a fairly
simple apparatus it’s designed to take
in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide and
we pretty much evolved over two to three
hundred years in a very clean air
environment which meant that we didn’t
really have to deal with much more than
pollen and animal dander dust and so we
didn’t really build up many mechanisms
of defense we have a few nose hairs we
create mucus and we have cough reflex
but then about 300 years ago we started
burning coal and other fossil fuels and
our lungs like our climate were really
ill-equipped to adapt to the rapid
increase in air pollution this cost and
so now that half liter of air in the
average American city like Portland
Oregon that half liter of air can
contain up to 50 million ultrafine per
tick
let’s and these are so tiny they’re so
small that we inhale them really deeply
and they break through our lungs and
they glow into our bloodstream where
they’re carried with the toxic chemicals
associated on to with them to our organs
like our brain in our heart and the
World Health Organization says 9 out of
10 people across the globe breathe
polluted air and this leads up to 7
million deaths or 12% of the global
death toll climate scientists actually
also have more information about this
kind of pollution these particulate the
soot is actually what they call black
carbon and they say that it’s the second
leading cause of global warming and it’s
second to carbon dioxide but unlike
carbon dioxide that stays in the
atmosphere for centuries this kind of
black carbon particulates actually only
stays in our air for days or weeks and
they calculate that actually if we had
global reductions in this black carbon
we could gain against we could gain 1/2
of a of a degree against our global
warming I want to put a finer point on
this that basically all those scary how
statistics if we focus on this black
carbon we could have less death and gain
against the climate and for me as as a
activist and a mother what I realized
was it by focusing on these small
particles that are really dangerous to
my children I could finally make some
meaningful contribution to the climate
change but this isn’t a talk about
climate or air I actually here to tell
my story about how an over-thinker
became a doer how I was able to finally
address a big problem like climate
change by addressing an everyday thing
that I did but I didn’t usually think
too much about which brings me to school
lunches as I said I’m an over-thinker I
was practically raised to be one by
argumentative academics whose political
discourse was as regular as dinner at
six o’clock every night and then sent
off to the finest liberal arts college I
have the tendency to so over processed
that I couldn’t even make my daughter’s
school lunch
everyday without considering the wide
implications of over packaged food toxic
chemicals the methane and carbon
emissions associated with food
production not to mention the social
stigmas associated with subsidized food
in our public school cafeterias and then
at the end of each day I’d open up my
daughter’s lunchbox to find untouched
food and realized with all my
overthinking that I actually was failing
in the fundamental responsibilities of
their as their mother to actually feed
them so I got them off to school one day
and in the morning and I grabbed my
computer and I turned to the internet
because I’d heard about this Farm to
School Lunch Program and I thought
that’s not it perfect I could fix this I
could find a system-wide problem to fix
my daily dilemma but that day I actually
came across a study that talked about
industrial air pollution in America’s
schools and I discovered that the air
quality around my daughter’s schools was
ranked in the bottom two percent in the
nation my kids weren’t just not eating
their lunch at school they were
breathing really dirty air so I’ll tell
you in this minute I did not think that
I was going to become the leader of a
grassroots movement to reform air
emissions regulations in Oregon in fact
even as I found myself becoming that I
didn’t call myself a leader and I didn’t
call myself an expert I called myself an
accidental activist because this was
really an unlikely fit I didn’t have a
degree in environmental science or law
or even community organizing in fact
that was probably my strength because
this was something I could oversimplify
not overthink our kids should breathe
clean not dirty air but you don’t become
an activist because you discover a
problem you become an activist because
you do something against that problem so
I took a couple deep breaths
and I thought like Thoreau said don’t
have to do everything I have to do
something and what I figured was my
friends and fellow parents and my
neighbors they just need to have this
information the same from information I
had just discovered and so I thought I’m
good at sharing information so I started
sending emails out and I wrote some
letters to local paper and I wrote a
petition and I actually took that and
stood on the playground and I went to
the outside the co-op in our
neighborhood and in three months we had
over 4,000 signatures to our state
demanding clean air now I could have
picked I could have chosen really
differently in those first moments I
could have been overwhelmed by the
complexity of a problem like air
pollution and I certainly could have
been angry at the people that and
agencies and institutions I thought
should be dealing with this but I’ll say
a zillion years ago I worked at Nike and
I had the honor to actually be featured
in an ad campaign a poster and that the
ad that I was in the the the copy that
went with that poster said there are
clubs you can’t belong to neighborhoods
you can’t live in schools you can’t get
into but the roads are always open just
do it
and this really resonated with me in
this moment because I could have thought
about all the reasons why I shouldn’t
take this on I certainly wasn’t the
person to do it let’s just start with
the Clean Air Act I’ve come to learn
that the Clean Air Act is the single
most complex environmental regulations
we have and those regulators that I was
so mad at for not doing their job they
weren’t doing it not doing their job
because they were incompetent or they
didn’t want to they were strangled and
by budget shortfalls at our state that
didn’t give them the resources to do the
job that they should be doing and then
finally this is 2009 this was deep in
the deep recession these corporate
companies these corporate manufacturers
industrial manufacturers
we’re receiving good citizen accolades
from the governor for providing the
family wage jobs that our state
desperately needed but I didn’t focus on
all the reasons that I shouldn’t do this
or couldn’t do this I focused on the one
reason I had two heavy metals in the air
could cause irreparable damage to my
children just by doing something they do
sixty three thousand times a day and I
couldn’t stop them from breathing so I
had to make sure that the air that they
breathe was clean so I didn’t wait
around for the regulator’s and I didn’t
wait around for elected officials I
called the company and I met him the
environmental manager one day for coffee
one morning and two years later he and I
got to stand over a document a landmark
agreement that committed the company to
seventeen pollution reducing reduction
projects that cost the company
out-of-pocket five million dollars and
sometime during that those two years I
realized I had found my thing maybe it
found me but I had found that thing that
was a small thing that I could work on
in my backyard that we could fix part of
a bigger problem and it did become that
thing that I was able to understand that
we could start a non-profit so that we’d
have the capacity to help other
communities and have the capacity to
deal with the diesel pollution and the
black carbon impacting our climate but
I’d be lying if I told you today that I
had some sort of secret to success
because I will say to me success isn’t
about discrete victories in advocacy
success honestly as I define it is about
being able to keep showing up every day
and doing the work so I have learned a
few things that have helped me sustain
that and I’d like to share three of them
with you today the first is your reason
why
it’s finding that fire as I said I
explained a whole bunch of reasons why
there is no reason I should’ve been
working in air pollution problems and
yet in many ways this was the most
obvious thing to do because I called
myself an accidental activist but the
reality is it’s no accident for a mother
to protect the health and well-being of
her children and then air as a lifelong
runner my husband and I air was
fundamental to one of the things that we
love to do but finally the real seed of
this work for me wasn’t planted that day
at my computer in the kitchen it was
almost 10 years before in a totally
different setting in a hospital waiting
room as my husband underwent the surgery
to remove the left lobe of his lung with
the tumor attached to it and doctors
couldn’t explain to us why a young man
healthy runner nonsmoker where this came
from but he and I speculated that
possibly this was related to the
environment he grew up in because he
grew up in an area in Southeast Texas
Southwest Louisiana called cancer alley
and as an adolescent he ran hundreds of
miles a week and we speculated at some
point he inhaled something he probably
shouldn’t have
so my fire my passion comes from looking
far into the future I don’t want to be
thinking that my kids are gonna be
facing personal health crisis that I
could have helped prevent by taking
action today my dad had this habit when
he encountered some you didn’t speak his
native language which is English that he
would talk a lot louder cuz maybe they’d
understand him better I think a lot of
advocates do that too and I’m not saying
there’s not a space at times to raise
our voices but honestly if we’re not
speaking the same language it doesn’t
matter how loud and we certainly won’t
be speaking the same language about the
solutions I had to learn that when my
daughters with one gulp of air could be
taking in over 200 differently
classified toxic pollutants some of them
are in a bucket called criteria
pollutants summer hazardous air
pollutants
and then there isn’t a whole alphabet
soup of the agencies and the laws that
govern them there is the EPA DEQ OHA
there’s the CAA there are new shops
there are AC DPS there’s tidal thighs
knacks haps
it’s a Tower of Babel but you’ve got to
be curious you’ve got to be interested
enough to do your homework and learn
that language and there’s another
language that’s really important to
learn and it’s more of the emotional
language I said sat in countless
meetings with the decision makers that I
want to make have make different
decisions and you have to learn their
emotional language you have to learn the
language around the individual nuances
that motivate one person also up to the
bigger ones the political currency the
agency that moves big systems because in
effect if you don’t understand how
decision makers make decisions it’s
going to be very difficult for you to
get them to make the ones you want them
to make and before I conclude I gotta
address this one criticism because
you’re gonna get it people who are
invested in the system that you want to
change are not just going to not agree
with your ideas they’re going to try and
discredit you women in the environmental
movement have been dismissed as
hysterical housewives as long as there
have been women in the environmental
movement Rachel Carson carcinogenic
pesticides Lois Gibbs protecting her
neighbors at Love Canal from the toxic
waste site they were built over to Mary
pivot oh the sky is falling air
pollution in Portland Oregon but
oftentimes the criticism that’s the
hardest to stomach actually comes from
the people that you believe you should
be allied with and I learned this lesson
really early in my work that five
million dollar agreement a good neighbor
agreement that I signed with the company
in my neighborhood I was labeled to sell
out to industry and a couple years ago
u.s. Forest Service released a moss
study that put
Portland Oregon’s industrial air
pollution problem into in the national
news and as the news story built in our
town and my name and face got a little
bit more ubiquitous than most people
wanted I was labeled as or accused of
being then in this only for the fame and
glory don’t get me wrong we have got to
be able to listen to criticism and
criticism is really valuable you’ve got
to be able to listen and take the value
out of it but you cannot let it drive
you
you can’t let feed those bears without
risking them killing you because there
are always going to be critics because
there’s always going to be a better way
to do something as again advocacy to me
is about progress not victories but the
way that I’ve handled it and the way
that I always come back to it is to go
back to my number one go back to my
reason to my fire and if I can go back
there and I can say that the work that
I’m doing today is moving forward moving
in the right direction for the right
reasons then I’m not gonna let anybody
else’s perfection be the enemy of my
good be overwhelmed get angry or do
something the first two really are just
reactions the last one is the decision I
am concerned about our republic I’m
concerned that we’re on the brink but I
really believe that if each of us just
found that one small thing we can bring
all the other big things back into
alignment it’s like taking on global
warming one breath at a time thank you you
day and we don’t even think about it at
least I didn’t think about it until I
finally be was able to overcome my
overwhelming anxiety about global
climate change thinking about one breath
at a time
let me explain with each breath we take
in a half liter of air and adults do
this 16 times a minute and sometimes we
do it a little bit more rapidly when
we’re exercising or stressed speaking in
front of large crowds but children my
friend dr. Paul Lewis is a pediatrician
and a Multnomah County Health Officer
and children he explained to me are more
like hummingbirds and they breathe more
rapidly and taken more air proportionate
to their body their breath rate is forty
four times a minute or 63,000 times a
day and the human lung is a fairly
simple apparatus it’s designed to take
in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide and
we pretty much evolved over two to three
hundred years in a very clean air
environment which meant that we didn’t
really have to deal with much more than
pollen and animal dander dust and so we
didn’t really build up many mechanisms
of defense we have a few nose hairs we
create mucus and we have cough reflex
but then about 300 years ago we started
burning coal and other fossil fuels and
our lungs like our climate were really
ill-equipped to adapt to the rapid
increase in air pollution this cost and
so now that half liter of air in the
average American city like Portland
Oregon that half liter of air can
contain up to 50 million ultrafine per
tick
let’s and these are so tiny they’re so
small that we inhale them really deeply
and they break through our lungs and
they glow into our bloodstream where
they’re carried with the toxic chemicals
associated on to with them to our organs
like our brain in our heart and the
World Health Organization says 9 out of
10 people across the globe breathe
polluted air and this leads up to 7
million deaths or 12% of the global
death toll climate scientists actually
also have more information about this
kind of pollution these particulate the
soot is actually what they call black
carbon and they say that it’s the second
leading cause of global warming and it’s
second to carbon dioxide but unlike
carbon dioxide that stays in the
atmosphere for centuries this kind of
black carbon particulates actually only
stays in our air for days or weeks and
they calculate that actually if we had
global reductions in this black carbon
we could gain against we could gain 1/2
of a of a degree against our global
warming I want to put a finer point on
this that basically all those scary how
statistics if we focus on this black
carbon we could have less death and gain
against the climate and for me as as a
activist and a mother what I realized
was it by focusing on these small
particles that are really dangerous to
my children I could finally make some
meaningful contribution to the climate
change but this isn’t a talk about
climate or air I actually here to tell
my story about how an over-thinker
became a doer how I was able to finally
address a big problem like climate
change by addressing an everyday thing
that I did but I didn’t usually think
too much about which brings me to school
lunches as I said I’m an over-thinker I
was practically raised to be one by
argumentative academics whose political
discourse was as regular as dinner at
six o’clock every night and then sent
off to the finest liberal arts college I
have the tendency to so over processed
that I couldn’t even make my daughter’s
school lunch
everyday without considering the wide
implications of over packaged food toxic
chemicals the methane and carbon
emissions associated with food
production not to mention the social
stigmas associated with subsidized food
in our public school cafeterias and then
at the end of each day I’d open up my
daughter’s lunchbox to find untouched
food and realized with all my
overthinking that I actually was failing
in the fundamental responsibilities of
their as their mother to actually feed
them so I got them off to school one day
and in the morning and I grabbed my
computer and I turned to the internet
because I’d heard about this Farm to
School Lunch Program and I thought
that’s not it perfect I could fix this I
could find a system-wide problem to fix
my daily dilemma but that day I actually
came across a study that talked about
industrial air pollution in America’s
schools and I discovered that the air
quality around my daughter’s schools was
ranked in the bottom two percent in the
nation my kids weren’t just not eating
their lunch at school they were
breathing really dirty air so I’ll tell
you in this minute I did not think that
I was going to become the leader of a
grassroots movement to reform air
emissions regulations in Oregon in fact
even as I found myself becoming that I
didn’t call myself a leader and I didn’t
call myself an expert I called myself an
accidental activist because this was
really an unlikely fit I didn’t have a
degree in environmental science or law
or even community organizing in fact
that was probably my strength because
this was something I could oversimplify
not overthink our kids should breathe
clean not dirty air but you don’t become
an activist because you discover a
problem you become an activist because
you do something against that problem so
I took a couple deep breaths
and I thought like Thoreau said don’t
have to do everything I have to do
something and what I figured was my
friends and fellow parents and my
neighbors they just need to have this
information the same from information I
had just discovered and so I thought I’m
good at sharing information so I started
sending emails out and I wrote some
letters to local paper and I wrote a
petition and I actually took that and
stood on the playground and I went to
the outside the co-op in our
neighborhood and in three months we had
over 4,000 signatures to our state
demanding clean air now I could have
picked I could have chosen really
differently in those first moments I
could have been overwhelmed by the
complexity of a problem like air
pollution and I certainly could have
been angry at the people that and
agencies and institutions I thought
should be dealing with this but I’ll say
a zillion years ago I worked at Nike and
I had the honor to actually be featured
in an ad campaign a poster and that the
ad that I was in the the the copy that
went with that poster said there are
clubs you can’t belong to neighborhoods
you can’t live in schools you can’t get
into but the roads are always open just
do it
and this really resonated with me in
this moment because I could have thought
about all the reasons why I shouldn’t
take this on I certainly wasn’t the
person to do it let’s just start with
the Clean Air Act I’ve come to learn
that the Clean Air Act is the single
most complex environmental regulations
we have and those regulators that I was
so mad at for not doing their job they
weren’t doing it not doing their job
because they were incompetent or they
didn’t want to they were strangled and
by budget shortfalls at our state that
didn’t give them the resources to do the
job that they should be doing and then
finally this is 2009 this was deep in
the deep recession these corporate
companies these corporate manufacturers
industrial manufacturers
we’re receiving good citizen accolades
from the governor for providing the
family wage jobs that our state
desperately needed but I didn’t focus on
all the reasons that I shouldn’t do this
or couldn’t do this I focused on the one
reason I had two heavy metals in the air
could cause irreparable damage to my
children just by doing something they do
sixty three thousand times a day and I
couldn’t stop them from breathing so I
had to make sure that the air that they
breathe was clean so I didn’t wait
around for the regulator’s and I didn’t
wait around for elected officials I
called the company and I met him the
environmental manager one day for coffee
one morning and two years later he and I
got to stand over a document a landmark
agreement that committed the company to
seventeen pollution reducing reduction
projects that cost the company
out-of-pocket five million dollars and
sometime during that those two years I
realized I had found my thing maybe it
found me but I had found that thing that
was a small thing that I could work on
in my backyard that we could fix part of
a bigger problem and it did become that
thing that I was able to understand that
we could start a non-profit so that we’d
have the capacity to help other
communities and have the capacity to
deal with the diesel pollution and the
black carbon impacting our climate but
I’d be lying if I told you today that I
had some sort of secret to success
because I will say to me success isn’t
about discrete victories in advocacy
success honestly as I define it is about
being able to keep showing up every day
and doing the work so I have learned a
few things that have helped me sustain
that and I’d like to share three of them
with you today the first is your reason
why
it’s finding that fire as I said I
explained a whole bunch of reasons why
there is no reason I should’ve been
working in air pollution problems and
yet in many ways this was the most
obvious thing to do because I called
myself an accidental activist but the
reality is it’s no accident for a mother
to protect the health and well-being of
her children and then air as a lifelong
runner my husband and I air was
fundamental to one of the things that we
love to do but finally the real seed of
this work for me wasn’t planted that day
at my computer in the kitchen it was
almost 10 years before in a totally
different setting in a hospital waiting
room as my husband underwent the surgery
to remove the left lobe of his lung with
the tumor attached to it and doctors
couldn’t explain to us why a young man
healthy runner nonsmoker where this came
from but he and I speculated that
possibly this was related to the
environment he grew up in because he
grew up in an area in Southeast Texas
Southwest Louisiana called cancer alley
and as an adolescent he ran hundreds of
miles a week and we speculated at some
point he inhaled something he probably
shouldn’t have
so my fire my passion comes from looking
far into the future I don’t want to be
thinking that my kids are gonna be
facing personal health crisis that I
could have helped prevent by taking
action today my dad had this habit when
he encountered some you didn’t speak his
native language which is English that he
would talk a lot louder cuz maybe they’d
understand him better I think a lot of
advocates do that too and I’m not saying
there’s not a space at times to raise
our voices but honestly if we’re not
speaking the same language it doesn’t
matter how loud and we certainly won’t
be speaking the same language about the
solutions I had to learn that when my
daughters with one gulp of air could be
taking in over 200 differently
classified toxic pollutants some of them
are in a bucket called criteria
pollutants summer hazardous air
pollutants
and then there isn’t a whole alphabet
soup of the agencies and the laws that
govern them there is the EPA DEQ OHA
there’s the CAA there are new shops
there are AC DPS there’s tidal thighs
knacks haps
it’s a Tower of Babel but you’ve got to
be curious you’ve got to be interested
enough to do your homework and learn
that language and there’s another
language that’s really important to
learn and it’s more of the emotional
language I said sat in countless
meetings with the decision makers that I
want to make have make different
decisions and you have to learn their
emotional language you have to learn the
language around the individual nuances
that motivate one person also up to the
bigger ones the political currency the
agency that moves big systems because in
effect if you don’t understand how
decision makers make decisions it’s
going to be very difficult for you to
get them to make the ones you want them
to make and before I conclude I gotta
address this one criticism because
you’re gonna get it people who are
invested in the system that you want to
change are not just going to not agree
with your ideas they’re going to try and
discredit you women in the environmental
movement have been dismissed as
hysterical housewives as long as there
have been women in the environmental
movement Rachel Carson carcinogenic
pesticides Lois Gibbs protecting her
neighbors at Love Canal from the toxic
waste site they were built over to Mary
pivot oh the sky is falling air
pollution in Portland Oregon but
oftentimes the criticism that’s the
hardest to stomach actually comes from
the people that you believe you should
be allied with and I learned this lesson
really early in my work that five
million dollar agreement a good neighbor
agreement that I signed with the company
in my neighborhood I was labeled to sell
out to industry and a couple years ago
u.s. Forest Service released a moss
study that put
Portland Oregon’s industrial air
pollution problem into in the national
news and as the news story built in our
town and my name and face got a little
bit more ubiquitous than most people
wanted I was labeled as or accused of
being then in this only for the fame and
glory don’t get me wrong we have got to
be able to listen to criticism and
criticism is really valuable you’ve got
to be able to listen and take the value
out of it but you cannot let it drive
you
you can’t let feed those bears without
risking them killing you because there
are always going to be critics because
there’s always going to be a better way
to do something as again advocacy to me
is about progress not victories but the
way that I’ve handled it and the way
that I always come back to it is to go
back to my number one go back to my
reason to my fire and if I can go back
there and I can say that the work that
I’m doing today is moving forward moving
in the right direction for the right
reasons then I’m not gonna let anybody
else’s perfection be the enemy of my
good be overwhelmed get angry or do
something the first two really are just
reactions the last one is the decision I
am concerned about our republic I’m
concerned that we’re on the brink but I
really believe that if each of us just
found that one small thing we can bring
all the other big things back into
alignment it’s like taking on global
warming one breath at a time thank you you
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