Dominique Browning with Gloria Steinem and others at a February climate talk at the women’s movement icon’s home in New York City.

In February, Dominique Browning, Moms Clean Air Force’s Co-Founder and Director, gathered with about 15 other women in New York City at Gloria Steinem’s “magical house” for a “climate talking circle.” Today, as the world mourns the loss of the storied women’s rights movement leader who died at 92, Dominque told People magazine about the once-in-a-lifetime experience. 

“She had the power of her life and her experience and her wisdom, but also she still had huge curiosity,” Dominique recalls. People notes that the intimate gathering—a salon of sorts—harkened back to Gloria Steinem’s history of organizing women like this.

“That was deeply meaningful to me because she got it, that all of our work on environmental issues is connected to everybody’s work on justice,” Dominique says, adding that at the talking circle, Gloria “listened very, very closely; it wasn’t about her holding forth, but you could tell she was steering, quietly steering, the conversation into building a sort of sense of communion with everybody.”

Dominique recalls that were no “side conversations” that day. The group sprawled out in chairs, on cushions—Gloria herself in a big, comfy armchair—and they all talked.

Dominique says she had idolized Gloria since the early 1970s, when she was in high school. Her feminist monthly, Ms., was the “only and the first magazine” Dominique read. “I just felt connected to a community of women who wanted more and who wanted to do more and be more and believed in that possibility,” says Dominique. These feelings from her youth were with her in Gloria’s apartment in February. 

“I was shocked when I saw the news [of her death] because she still seemed vibrant and strong spirited, and she wasn’t somebody who seemed to be fighting her old age. She really embraced who she was, where she was, and where she had come to,” says Dominique. 

On that special day in February, after being at Gloria’s Upper East Side brownstone, Dominique tells People, she made a stop on her way home to pick up a pair of aviator glasses, Gloria’s signature. She tells People, “I’m wearing them right now, and they’re all smeared with tears.” 

Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.

This article is part of our series The Climate Questionnaire, where we talk with authors, writers, filmmakers, podcasters, and other content creators about their work illustrating the human impacts of air pollution and global warming.

“I was having a strange high-risk pregnancy: gestating policy ideas and babies,” writes Leah C. Stokes, associate professor of environmental politics at UC Santa Barbara, in her new book The Carbon Wave, which came out on September 1. In it, she tells the story of how she birthed twin baby girls and helped shepherd the Inflation Reduction Act, once-in-a-generation legislation that invested $369 billion in cutting climate pollution, into law at the same time. It was a tumultuous span of months where “there were weeks when it looked like my future children might die, and the policy seemed destined to pass. And other weeks when I was sure the babies would live, and the policy would crumble.”

The book weaves personal narrative with stories from her legislative partners, policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House and DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, plus other activists. It’s a deeply resonant tale of a new paradigm—the carbon wave—which measures what you can change with persistent advocacy alongside other people. Although many of the clean energy policies included in the Inflation Reduction Act were undone by Congress last year, the law set in motion a clean energy revolution that cannot be fully unraveled. Plus, there are the twins.

Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.

Leah, who writes the newsletter Notes From the Electric Era and hosts the podcast A Matter of Degrees with climate leader Katharine Wilkinson, recently shared with us her perspective on advocacy, systems-level change, and hope for the future.

Do you consider your work on the Inflation Reduction Act your greatest climate achievement? If yes, why?

Yes, of course. This story shows that by changing policy, we can reach far beyond our own small footprints and transform much larger systems. To make that law a reality, I had to work alongside thousands of other people. But our shared victory drove more than 500 new factories across this country making solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. It helped put solar on people’s roofs. It helped communities get off coal. There’s a story in the book about a coal plant in Ohio, more than a century old, that is now shutting down and being replaced by solar and batteries, in part because of the Inflation Reduction Act. That is amazing.

What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

I hope the book inspires people to believe they are more powerful than they might think. For decades we’ve been told the answer to climate change is shrinking our carbon footprints—an idea the fossil fuel industry itself popularized, with BP spending millions advertising it. But it’s easy to fixate on the small changes in our daily lives and forget the systems and structures around us that we also have influence over. Those structures make far more of a difference when it comes to pollution.

I want people to believe they could electrify a school in their neighborhood, organize in their community to get a bike lane, or get themselves a heat pump or an electric vehicle. I want people to think about how much more powerful they can be if they join with others to create even bigger change.

What’s one thing you think everyone should know about climate advocacy?

That they are capable of changing the fossil-fuel-based energy system around us—and that waves form at every level. You can organize locally, where decisions about our schools and communities touch us most closely, or push your state lawmakers to fund school electrification. That’s how change happens.

Do you call yourself an environmentalist?

Yes. I feel deeply connected to our planet and to all living beings on it. In some ways, I feel like the earth itself has put me up to my activism. That’s a very grounded place to work from: when there’s so much noise in the human sphere—the politics, the opinions, the drama—you can connect back to your deepest ancestry with the ocean and the forests. When I ground my work there, I have much more certainty that what I’m doing is right, especially watching the boreal forest burn. That gives me deep clarity that climate activism is the most important thing I can be doing with my time right now.

Who are your favorite climate writers?

Rebecca Solnit, without question, including her newest book, The Beginning Comes After the End. My personal favorite from her is The Faraway Nearby, where she explores how we can make distant things feel close to our everyday lives. I think that is the real work climate writing can do.

What’s your current state of mind when it comes to the climate crisis?

The fires in Canada’s boreal forest this summer were heartbreaking for me. It’s a vast ecosystem, more than five times the size of Texas, and a place I love. But I also know we have the solutions we need today (heat pumps, electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries), and they are the cheapest, cleanest resources too. If we all do our part to replace the infrastructure in our homes, neighborhoods, communities, and states as fast as possible, we can get this done.

What does hope for the future mean to you?

I work every day for a livable planet, for my daughters, my nieces and nephews, my neighbors, and for the birds and trees and all living beings. Motherhood has connected me more deeply to all life. My daughters already show so much curiosity and care for the world around them, and I have hope because they will grow up knowing the people around them did all they could to protect it. As the saying goes: activism is the antidote to despair. So action gives me hope.

Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.

Students returning to schools across America are entering very different classrooms. In some, the climate crisis will be downplayed or even no longer taught. In others, climate will be front and center, and school environmental clubs are booming. What your child is taught depends largely on where you live.

School districts from Texas to New Mexico to Idaho may not have outright bans on teaching students climate science, but subtle and intentional tweaks in curriculum and guidelines have resulted in removing references to human-caused climate change. The Prager University Foundation, known as PragerU, a nonprofit advocacy group that creates content promoting conservative points on a wide range of topics, has succeeded in getting some of its controversial educational videos, which question climate change and even criticize renewable energy, approved for public school use in Arizona, Florida, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.

Even schools teaching accurate climate science are not immune to missteps. School groups, including parent-teacher organizations and associations, can be so eager to help students take positive environmental actions that they wind up overdoing it.

Take school recycling initiatives. Well-intentioned schools have been embracing recycling programs linked to fundraising for impossible-to-recycle items, usually random plastics. They outsource to companies and set up bins and congratulate the kids who bring in items for a job well done. Unfortunately, these aren’t items that can be recycled, and they usually wind up in landfills. This school-sanctioned greenwashing, almost universally unintentional and based on not understanding the fundamentals of recycling, means students in schools still educating about the climate crisis are, essentially, going back to school with oil and gas propaganda.

“A lot of teachers, shockingly, know very little,” says Uli Nagel, Co-founder and Director of the Cooler Communities Climate Education Program at the Harold Grinspoon Charitable Foundation. “It would be fascinating to let people know about greenwashing in schools and actually alert teachers to this is a real thing, this is not.”

What to do?

If you live in a place that has abandoned climate education, you can join forces with other families who want it reinstated and push the administration and the Board of Education alike to teach science. And for parents and students interested in learning about climate but not venturing into group activities that hurt rather than help the environment, there’s help. A number of climate organizations, including Cooler Communities Climate Education Program, provide (mostly free) trusted and vetted curriculum, ready-to-use learning resources, lab activities, and videos. This Is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute, is one example; they provide strategic frameworks, early childhood materials, and K-12 climate action roadmaps.

“We’re trying to steer action in the schools toward things that matter and are nonpartisan, but also actually they’re for real,” says Uli. In Massachusetts, where Uli is based, the organization offers curriculum as well as grants to support classroom teaching on climate, for example. “And we host and help put on events around what the kids learn. We support the schools in letting the kids become the teachers of their communities. They choose things like sustainable fashion or pollinator gardens.”

Help comes in many forms

Beyond grants and lesson frameworks, climate education organizations are offering innovative ways to work climate into classrooms. Cooler Communities Climate Education Program, for example, has a book program called Energy Detectives. Currently, they have three books on a variety of topics (energy efficiency, solar, different people doing different things like food waste reduction) in Spanish as well as English. And there are more to come. Future topics are likely to include methane reduction and regeneration, but not recycling. It’s just too complicated.

The organization is mostly restricted to sending books to New England and places in New Jersey. “We can’t blanket the country just yet because we don’t have the funding. But any teacher, within those parameters, can order the books for free for every student to take home,” she says.

To get the word out about these free books, the organization sends invitations to teachers and mails books to principals. “People love the books. A lot of kids don’t even have that opportunity to own books.”

This seems to be the key to getting Energy Detectives out far and wide. “West Virginia just ordered a huge amount of books compared to the number of kids. A lot of people don’t have resources.” She dreams of getting books—and their curriculum—into states that aren’t already over-resourced. “Kansas, maybe Missouri, Minnesota. Those are the places where I would love to go.”

In the meantime, she’s working to share as much trustworthy information as the organization can afford to schools in need. Which, this school year, appears to be a whole lot.

Tell Congress: The Climate Clock Is Ticking. Act Now for Our Kids’ Future.

My Climate Job is our series about careers in fields that fight climate disruption or are impacted by the climate crisis.

Christopher Morris has spent much of his career photographing what humans do to one another. As a contract photographer for Time, he traveled the world documenting war and political unrest. After the Gulf War, he photographed burning oil fields in the Middle East. Seeing firsthand what war can do to the land helped change the way he sees the natural world.

Decades later, Christopher began documenting a different kind of devastation much closer to home. Back in Florida, where he grew up, he photographed hurricanes and the people affected by them. The emotional strain of capturing photos of survivors standing among the remains of their homes and communities was so intense that Christopher now focuses his camera on the land itself.

Tell Congress: Support Mental Wellness Resources for Communities Facing Weather Disasters

He photographs what’s currently happening to the landscape: wetlands disappearing beneath development, century-old trees cut down for construction, flooding, and storm damage. This work includes a long-term project documenting climate change in Florida, part of a larger effort photographing its impact across the United States.

We spoke with him about his work—what it means to document climate disaster in the place he calls home and why he believes photography can help people see human connections to the land in a new light.

What do you do day-to-day as an environmental photographer?

I document daily. If I don’t have my real camera, I carry my phone and I document with that. If it’s really important, I mark things and geotag, and if it’s really good, I’ll go back and photograph. The environment and what I see is a never-ending struggle.

They’re always digging up the street somewhere. I’ve got this oak forest, and all of a sudden, some cranes have come in, and they bulldoze them down. Now you’ve got 100-year-old trees lying on their side. I photograph it. I’m basically a visual anthropologist, and I’ll be till I die.

Did photographing war change your connection to our environment?

It breaks me, especially the tragedy of it, but I see how we flaunt our ugliness, especially toward nature and animals. I can’t kill ants, mosquitos, spiders. And it happened to me in war. When I used to get pinned down, and I’m talking where you’re hugging earth because somebody’s trying to kill you, your sensitivity becomes so focused because you realize you’re going to die here. And all you’re focusing on is a blade of grass and maybe a dandelion, and you see an ant crawling by or a butterfly fly by or a bird sitting above you, staring at you down there on the ground. You enter their world. You enter into your own mortality, and you feel like one with the land.

How has the focus of your work changed over time?

[At first] it’s the act of getting out of your car with a camera, and you’ve got somebody in their yard that’s just survived a hurricane. They’ve just survived, but they’ve lost everything. And you show up with the camera. To take their picture?

I reached the limit. So that’s where I fell into the land. I realized it was a struggle between man and his desire to be so close to nature that we smother it with concrete. And nature comes back every year.

What’s it like to photograph a hurricane?

I covered Katrina. I covered 15 hurricanes. I have to follow the eye and try to get close and park. There are places you have to position yourself with the vehicle, and you monitor how the winds change, but the thing is the storm surge. The water comes through. It’s like being in the Colorado River with all your house belongings and you’re trying to get the cat.

People don’t realize—you think you can ride out the storm surge. You don’t ride out a storm surge. It’s not like what you think it is. Once the water penetrates the house, you’ve got like 30 seconds, maybe a minute, to get up into the attic. And if you get up into the attic, you better have a battery-operated chainsaw to get yourself out of the attic, because it comes in fast.

Is it challenging to be recognized for documenting disasters?

I don’t mind winning awards if it’s for beauty or fashion, or even politics, but when it comes to disasters—other people’s misery? You almost don’t even want your name on it.

You’re there to visualize it, you’re not there to profit off it, off other people’s misery. You’re conveying a message.

What are you looking for when you photograph the impacts of climate change?

I want people to take away and understand that we share the planet. We share the planet with the oceans. We share the planet with the forest. And in that ecosystem is all that other life.

I’m trying to use symbolism and to pay attention. You’re walking down the street, and you look in the gutter and there’s a dead fish. It’s just a skeleton, and it’s covered in dirt and dust, and there’s a spray paint of a construction marker there. And you just stare at that fish, and you’re just like, “Well, how did he get there?”

It just makes you focus in on it. I just want people to look at the work and pay attention.

Tell Congress: Support Mental Wellness Resources for Communities Facing Weather Disasters

While families across the country endured global-warming-fueled record-breaking heat waves, deadly flooding, and dangerous wildfire smoke, the Trump-Zeldin EPA’s attacks on public health and environmental protections nevertheless continued unabated this summer. Read on for a summary of some of EPA’s most corrupt and harmful decisions from the last three months, each one a shocking step backward for clean air and climate stability.

Tell Congress: Hold Zeldin Accountable for Corrupting EPA’s Mission

• Weakening protections from heavy-duty truck exhaust. In July, EPA released a proposal to weaken tailpipe pollution standards for new heavy-duty diesel vehicles, like school buses and many kinds of delivery trucks. The inevitable result? More toxic exhaust that can cause asthma attacks, heart attacks, strokes, and preventable premature deaths. That’s why 14 Moms spoke out against this proposal at a public hearing in July and thousands more submitted written comments.
• Eroding protections for new pollution sources. Also in July, EPA proposed changes to the New Source Review (NSR) program that could allow polluters to get permits for new so-called “minor” pollution sources without even notifying local communities. This proposed rule would take away one of the only opportunities communities have to learn about polluters like data centers and petrochemical facilities before they are built and to ask important questions about how those facilities will affect the air our families breathe. Thirteen Moms testified against the proposed changes in a public hearing and nearly 7,000 more submitted written comments.
• Stacking the deck against chemical safety. Individuals who work for corporate interests, including Tesla and petrochemical giant Lyondell Chemical, now make up the majority of the Trump-Zeldin EPA’s panel of outside chemical advisers—a group of experts who are supposed to offer unbiased advice on chemical risk evaluations. The appointments are yet another example of this EPA’s insistence on compromising scientific independence and putting polluters’ interests over people’s health and safety.
• Scrubbing cancer risk estimates from national air pollution data. EPA has shared public-facing data on the cancer risks of air pollution for nearly two decades. Until now. In August, the agency did not include cancer risk in its latest air pollution data update, making it much more difficult for communities to access the public health information they need to call for better protections.

Find our comprehensive list of this administration’s attacks on clean air, climate, and toxic chemical protections here.

Tell Congress: Hold Zeldin Accountable for Corrupting EPA’s Mission