MAY DAY ISSUE
Featuring Environmental Committee actions and goals for the month of May, environmental art and news, and an exclusive interview with Lake Worth Beach vice-mayor
HISTORY OF MAY DAY & IMPACT ON PLANET
May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, commemorates the historic and ongoing struggle of the labor movement for workers’ rights, particularly the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886 which led to the eight-hour workday. May Day underscores the intersectionality between labor rights and environmental justice. Many labor movements, including DSA, advocate for sustainable practices, fair wages for workers in green industries, and the transition to a more environmentally-friendly economy. Additionally, labor movements recognize and oppose the exploitation of both workers and natural resources in colonized countries by imperial powers. The day serves as a reminder that addressing climate change requires collaboration and solidarity among workers globally.
ENVIRONMENTAL COMMITTEE ACTIONS
🌱 Compost Initiative: A community outreach program that will encourage the use of compost bins and divert waste from landfills. We’ll contact the Solid Waste Authority about composting and alternatives to incineration. Also, we plan to reach out to local groups like the Sierra Club to see what their efforts in protesting around this issue have been. Workshop with Westgate Community Farms being set up, sign-up to come soon! 🍃🪱
🌱 Code Pink Collaboration: Our Earth Day celebration last month in collaboration with Code Pink of South Florida was a huge success! We had great discussions about one of the biggest drivers of climate change — imperialism. On Thursday, May 2nd at 3pm, Code Pink in collaboration with South Florida Working Group to Shut Down Elbit, Food Not Bombs, and other local groups continue their third week of actions at Real-Time Laboratories in Boca Raton (Elbit), which has been providing weaponry to fuel the ongoing genocide against the people of Palestine. #ShutElbitDown 🍉🇵🇸
🌱 Book Club: If you are interested in joining our book club, please reach out on the Palm Beach DSA Slack #Environment channel! Some ideas for what to read next include Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and It’s Not That Radical by Mikaela Loach. We’re hoping to meet bi-weekly at a coffee shop to discuss a few chapters at a time. If you have other ideas for books to read or would like to submit a book review for feature in our next newsletter, we’d love to hear from you! 📚🐛
🌱 Greening of “The Story of a Forest”: Come out to our greening of our very own Suki DeJong’s award-winning documentary film. We’ll watch and discuss the film and meet with the director, Suki! Date and location TBD. Keep an eye on our Slack channel and Palm Beach DSA social media for more information to come soon. You can also check out Pam Blue’s review of the film in our April issue here. 🎬🍿
🌱 Upcoming Meeting Dates: 5/12 | 5/26 | 6/9
We meet every other Sunday on Zoom at 12PM ET.
ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS
INTERNATIONAL
VIA NPR NEWS- With a deadline looming, countries race for a global agreement to cut plastic waste
Negotiators from 170 countries have gathered to discuss a treaty that aims to limit plastic waste. Environmentalists say that the treaty will not go far enough in cutting down plastic because it will not address cutting back global plastic production.
Critics say American negotiators haven't been willing to push for a global cap on plastic production, and are instead throwing their weight behind measures like recycling that are favored by the country's fossil fuel and petrochemical industries…A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department said in a statement to NPR that so-called downstream measures like recycling and waste management on their own won't solve the problem of plastic pollution, and that the country is looking for ways to reduce demand for new plastic.
“The outcome of these talks is of critical importance to countries and communities around the world, and it is vital to expose and confront the role of corporations whose agendas are fundamentally in conflict with the global public interest,” Delphine Lévi Alvarès, global petrochemical campaign manager at the Center for International Environmental Law, said in a statement.
NATIONAL
VIA THE GUARDIAN- Revealed: Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes
Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.
A 2017 lawsuit by environmental groups has forced the EPA to update its two-decade-old pollution standards for slaughterhouses and animal rendering facilities, and the new rule is expected by September 2025. The agency has said that it is leaning towards the weakest option on the table, which critics say will enable huge amounts of nitrates, phosphorus and other contaminants to keep pouring into waterways.
“The cumulative effects of exposure to these industrial toxins could pose a long-term threat to the cranes’ food sources, reproductive success and resilience as a species,” said George Cunningham, a retired aquatic ecologist and Missouri River expert at Sierra Club Nebraska. “Poor environmental regulation is down to the stranglehold industrial agriculture has on politics – at every level. It’s about political capture.”
LOCAL
VIA NBC NEWS- Climate change could virtually disappear in Florida — at least according to state law
Florida is on the verge of repealing what’s left of a 16-year-old law that puts climate change as a priority when making energy policy decisions.
A bill waiting to be signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis would strip the term “climate change” from much of state law and reverse a policy then-Gov. Charlie Crist championed as he built a reputation for being a rare Republican fighting to promote green energy over fossil fuels.
“We're protecting consumers, we're protecting consumer pricing, we're protecting them with great reliability and we're protecting to make sure we don't have a lack of energy security in our state. That's where we're moving as far as our policies,” said Republican Rep. Bobby Payne.
INTERVIEW: LAKE WORTH VICE-MAYOR DR. CHRISTOPHER MCVOY
Conducted by: Nehemie and Priscilla, Co-Chairs of Environmental Committee, Palm Beach DSA
Dr. Christopher McVoy, or as he’ll insist you call him simply — Chris, is a “world-renowned Ecohydrologist, Everglades expert, author, elected official and empiricist trained in systems analysis and simulation modeling, [...] noted educator and advocate for science-based environmental science.” Chris currently serves as the City Commissioner for District 2 of Lake Worth Beach, as well as Vice Mayor.
Check out our interview, conducted by our Co-Chairs Nehemie and Priscilla, below!
Priscilla: Can you tell us about local initiatives that tackle climate change in Lake Worth?
Chris: The main things I would say that we've dealt with is I did manage to get a resolution put in, I believe it was February or so of last year, committing us to, and I can't remember whether it was carbon neutral or zero emissions. I think it was zero emissions on our energy generation, on our electric generation to get to 60% reduction down to zero by 2035 and to get to zero by 2045. And we passed it unanimously.
So that was good. We actually are, we'll probably exceed the target for 2035 that our emissions would be [by] a little bit. There's some of—in all this stuff, there's accounting error issues, not errors, but issues. Some people will count nuclear plant power as zero emissions, some won't. It depends on how you think about it, whether you think about it as full cradle to grave accounting, in which case nuclear power certainly isn't zero emissions, but neither is anything else for the most part. But it is pretty low emissions during the course of the lifetime of the power plant.
So if you count that in and the utility scale solar that we've agreed to, we will meet—we'll do better than meet it by 2035. I think it's gonna be a lot harder to meet it by 2045 to get all the rest of the way, but we've got a good start. So that's probably our biggest initiative.
There are other initiatives that help in that direction that we've done. Some of those are to re-encourage rooftop solar that was stopped for several years and to encourage at least looking into a demand response program, which is an idea that a lot of utilities use that says you can sign up as a user that usually you get paid a little bit or some other benefit and you agree to let the utility scale back some of your usage during peak period. So your biggest usage residential and we're mostly residential, biggest usage is AC. So when things are really cranking and power is most expensive, we might say, scale it back for an hour or something or other, which helps some in terms of reducing usage—it also helps in managing the load on the system.
Those are probably the biggest things that we've done in terms of climate change.
Other things that are in progress are, we have a mobility plan—we've hired WGI, an engineering firm, to help develop a mobility plan for the city and part of the idea of that is to shift some of the mobility away from personal vehicles, personal gas cars, personal cars into other modes of transportation and to make it friendlier for those on the thought that both saves people money potentially and reduces emissions.
We should do more on buildings and haven't really done that much on that yet. That would be an area of for further work, I would say.
Nehemie: What would you say is causing a rightward shift in local politics?
Chris: I can't—I don't know that I have any insights at the county level—at the city level, the shift to the right has only just happened and we're not fully out of the woods, we still have a runoff for mayor. I don't think whoever wins on that one—I don't think that will change it very much one way or the other. But we have not met yet with Commissioner Stokes out and Commissioner Mimi May in.
I suspect that it will be harder to get strong environmental things through. I don't think it'll be impossible because it's kind of like one of those things that depending on how it's presented, it's kind of hard to be against it unless it has a direct economic impact on somebody that’s going to say no. It will be more challenging in the sense that—I suspect, and it's just a suspicion, that maybe hopefully I'll be proven wrong—the more that I propose things, the more that they will not do well, because I will be part of the minority. So we'll have to figure out, is there some better way to get things proposed? Or maybe I'm wrong and that there won't be any sort of, “Well, if it's coming from McVoy, we aren't going to do it or vote for it.” But I expect to see some of that. I certainly ran into that when I was in the minority in the past.
Priscilla: How has your work with conservation of the Everglades influenced the way you tackle your local climate ambitions?
Chris: That's an interesting question. Yes, I have been very active in the past on Everglades issues. I came to Florida hired by the Environmental Defense Fund out of Manhattan and was sent and parked at the Water Management District, South Florida Water Management District to be a science advocate for Everglades restoration back in about ‘95. And eventually switched over and was employed by the Water Management District, but was able to still keep quite a bit of science advocacy through either the research that I did or the interaction and contacts that I had in the advocacy and decision-making community.
Also, eventually published a book, a lead author on a book of trying to quantify as much as possible, original conditions of the Everglades—so that if you're seeking to restore, you have a target of what it was like since we've altered it so much. You kind of need to know where you're headed if you're going to try to restore, if the commitment is to restore to something like original conditions—that book provides a lot of that basis for that. Now that, it's a very sexy title, coming to a movie theater near you soon, Landscapes and Hydrology of the Pre-Drainage Everglades. Yeah, rolls right off the tongue—without too much trouble I could reach for it because I was just, Grimm and I were out in the Everglades taking some students from UCLA out last weekend and we took them out by airboat with some of the Miccosukee folks and then gave them a presentation and a little bit of hands-on models. So the book’s around here, not too far away, but as far as how that relates to what I do with climate change at the city level, I'd say they're pretty independent. I don't see a lot of connection between them.
I've been interested in climate change as an environmental scientist probably since high school or, if not high school, then early college and was lucky to have an advisor as an undergraduate—a biology professor, ecology professor, systems ecologist who had a very big scale systems approach to thinking about human ecosystem interactions and problems and one of his big interests certainly was energy policy and climate change.
So I've been interested in that for a long time, independent of the Everglades interest and they're different scale problems, but they're both important. I think the climate change one is much more important. I see that as a very critical issue for society worldwide to deal with. And with definitely an urgency to it. Everglades also, but the impacts are not as worldwide.
Priscilla: How did you become interested in environmental science? And what prepared you to merge that interest with governance?
Chris: Couple of different things there, the interest in science and in the environment certainly came probably largely out of my upbringing growing up. My father was a physicist. My mother, I still have my mother's copy of Wetlands, the kind of main tome on wetland science and her copy of Wetlands, even though she was an English major in college, her copy of Wetlands is very annotated—more so than mine. And my parents both were founding members of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association. That was after I was out of home and off in college and things, but we did a lot of things outdoors. There was definitely an appreciation for the outdoors and for natural environments and a lot of, it just was very natural to be interested in protecting the environment in one or another way. So that led to science, that led to biology.
I was very lucky as an undergraduate at Cornell to have a fellow student say when I was sort of thrashing around wondering what to do, I had a wide range. I was thinking of linguistics. I was thinking of urban planning. I was thinking of urban planning plus biology. And this person directed me to Charlie Hall—the systems ecologist, and I just loved his class and what he was doing and got involved in undergraduate research with him. That definitely cemented my interest in tying science to environmental problem solving.
And other things led me to an interest in tropical agriculture, and that led to a project in Costa Rica. And that led to soil science at the University of Florida in Gainesville, although the field work was mostly done or all done in Costa Rica. And I got interested in flow processes. How do things move through the environment? How do they move through porous media like soils, whether it's water or contaminants carried in the water? And that kind of deepened a portion of the environmental interest.
And then I went on and did more of that as a PhD [student] back at Cornell. So that, and my major advisor for the PhD program was influential at a national level on groundwater contamination. He was not infrequent in testifying before Congress on issues of groundwater contamination and prevention of that. And that was sort of some of the context for my cell physics involvement.
The good governance course was an excellent, I guess semester long roughly course that a former county commissioner, Katy Sorensen from Miami-Dade County, she put it together and you had to apply for the program. It was non-partisan. So she took candidates from either party. But as she pointed out, it's not reform school. You had to have convinced her that you were pretty serious about good governance to even get in. And then she exposed us to all sorts of different aspects from housing issues to environmental issues to financial issues to transportation, a very wide range of things in Saturday meetings and I think a few non-Saturday ones. And the level of the course was first-rate. And the people that she exposed us all to were doing really interesting things in government in South Florida or elsewhere. And I found it very helpful and really thought it was a good experience and helpful in thinking about how to govern better.
Priscilla and Nehemie: That Good Government Initiative with Katy Sorensen is now defunct. What happened there?
Chris: It was, and it was unfortunate. She had done it for several years at that point. I don't know, maybe five, six years. And she said she had kind of run out of potential candidates that she thought would get something out of it in South Florida. And I think she was getting to where she wanted to spend more time with grandkids. But I was very sad that the course came to [an end], I think we were in the last one that she did and if not the last, then second to last. And I thought it was everybody should have that — everybody who's serious about governing should have that experience or something like it.
Nehemie: What hurdles did you overcome in your educational journey as well as in your political career? Did your background in science help or hurt your work in politics at all?
Chris: I guess I would say I was very fortunate in having excellent professors in all three cases, undergraduate, master's and PhD. And even when sometimes I wasn't totally convinced that I could do this, they were—and they didn't say a lot, but they were strong in supporting [me]. And that certainly made a big difference in getting over the hump.
I think intellectual curiosity, just being fascinated with—how do things work? What makes stuff work the way it does was a big driving force for the educational process of just being curious to learn more. That's always been a strong thing that came probably from my parents, largely. So I don't know what exactly they [obstacles] were. I mean, there were hurdles—there were funding hurdles and various things, but we managed to get through them one or another way, on the education [front].
Hurdles in political career—I think the biggest hurdles are that the world of science and the world of politics, at least local politics, which is the one that I know the most about—they're so different. In science—a short example, when I first ran, there was a crew of people in Lake Worth that had asked me to run and supported me in running because it wasn't something that I had ever thought of doing. I did not have any [political aspirations], I'd never thought of running for office — it never occurred to me. But I'd been involved in helping out with a couple of campaigns by then and people were looking for somebody to run for a seat and ask whether I would consider it. And I wasn't smart enough to say no, so there I was.
And they were very supportive, but I remember being at some, I don't know, maybe a neighborhood association debate or something and somebody asked a question and I said, “I don't know,” with a crowd full of people there. Because as a scientist, that's how we're trained that if you don't know something, you don't just make it up out of whole cloth or come up with something so that you sound knowledgeable because you got a whole room full of science colleagues that will tell you and they're not shy of calling you out that if you're BSing, BSing happens in science, I'm sure, but it's not by any means encouraged. So there's nothing dishonorable about saying you don't know if you're a scientist, in fact, it's more the other way. And they pointed out that that's all very fine in science, but if you're running for office, people are looking for you to lead your community. And the last [thing] they want to hear is, “I don't know.”
So they suggested, well, you can say, “I don't have the answer to that right now. I will get back to you on that. I will get you some information.” Something that indicates that at least you've heard of it and at least you have some idea, which it, I mean, it makes sense, it made sense when it was explained to me, but it was not instinctive to try to react in a sense where you're trying to show that you know, and that you have leadership. And especially when you're new to it, there's a lot of things that go into running a city and there's lots of things to know that you don't know at the beginning. At this point, most things I've heard of, so I have some idea and I've been involved with, so it's not quite the same problem.
But the other part I would say is — in a sense, I found at least, I don't know about other people, but I found that — being a scientist, it certainly helps in having technical knowledge. It helps in being able to detect stuff that sounds a little fishy. If somebody's giving you a technical presentation, if you have some science background, you're probably more likely to sniff out when you're getting a line from a vendor or a staff person or something. So the technical background helps in that sometimes and it gives credibility sometimes.
But what it maybe doesn't help with is the role of, for lack of a better word, storytelling, [which] is very important in the political world of, “can you relate X issue to somebody's grandmother or something?” or some personal thing that's more likely to get either the public, if you're trying to persuade them, or a fellow commissioner on board. Whereas in science, we're not used to making a story around it, we're used to just focusing on the facts of something or other. And that's where scientists aren't always the best politicians unless they somehow learn to do some of that or they have a natural talent for it coming in.
I think there are a lot of people who are very enthusiastic about having scientists involved in politics because there's a sense that an awful lot of political decisions are made without a very solid basis and being a scientist, you tend to want [that to be'] more solid — you want data, you want facts, you want to understand the issues.
So there's enthusiasm for it, but our typical science training isn't necessarily [enough], you need to add more training onto it to make it most effective and that would be my thoughts on that.
Priscilla: From your perspective as an environmental scientist, what issues do we need to tackle politically regarding climate change both at the local and global scale? What are some solutions?
Chris: I tend to be convinced that doing something about climate change, source reduction, reducing our emissions as quickly, as drastically as possible, I see that as kind of an overarching issue that if we don't do that, we are in for such troubles in all sorts of other areas.
If we think we have an immigration challenge now as different parts of the world lose food security because of climate change, those people aren't going to just roll over and say, “Well, it's too bad, I guess I'm going to die.” They're going to try to do something. They're going to try to do something either for themselves [or] for their families. And migration is certainly going to be a part of that. And it's going to be pretty hard to argue with — especially when the most developed countries have been the major sources of the problem. It's going to be hard to argue, “Well, you shouldn't let people in.” So that's just immigration.
But financially, the amount of money that climate change is costing governments is huge and it only keeps getting bigger. So I see that as the biggest issue of any of them— reduction of carbon emissions is the biggest anywhere.
Once you get away from that, I would say in Florida, a very big issue is land use, that we have huge development pressure. And we at one time had very good development laws—land use laws. They don't seem to be helping a whole lot. So if one likes the Florida panther, trying to look out [and provide] protection for [their] habitat, that's basically the big problem—there is development, land development, that's destroying habitat. And once it's gone to houses, it's gone or something else.
Adaptation to rising sea levels is a big deal. Right now in Lake Worth, we're spending a lot of money on the coastal housing to somewhat stopgap measures to help try to reduce flooding because—people, they complain and they feel like the city is responsible for protecting them from flooding. But we haven't really thought that through. At some point, is the city responsible for building a dike? And is the dike going to go all the way around the city because the water is going to come in in Lantana or West Palm if we can build a dike along our city, along the intercoastal?
Those are big issues that we have to think about. How are we going to deal equitably with sea level rise? Forget the other parts of climate change, although intensity of rainfall storms is a big deal, and there's certainly indications that you get more intense storms and intense storms gives you worse flooding problems. The total amount may not be that different, but because it comes quickly, you get more flooding because you just can't get the water off fast enough.
So land use, climate change, energy sources, renewable energy, those would be big ones for me.
Plastics is another big one. Microplastics showing up in the ocean and through the food chain seems to be [a] pretty big problem. And almost all of it is land-based origin of the plastics that are then falling apart into little pieces that then work their way up the food chain.
Chris is considering running for re-election as City Commissioner for Lake Worth Beach. You can find out more about him and his work in sustainable environmental efforts here.
ENVIRONMENTAL ART
Wild Geese
By: Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.