How can we stop burning fossil fuels for transportation and electricity, burning that creates pollution? We need community engagement.
If we are to stop pollution, we must inform and empower everyone to identify pollution as a source of their pain. I announce here a coordinated effort to expand our movement for clean air, health, life, and the planet that will focus on broad community engagement and empowering local leaders.
In our North Shore and Cape Ann communities, we face an invisible threat of air pollution that causes disease and premature death while it despoils our environment and contributes to global warming. Every breath brings the potential for disease and death.
Like sailors approaching a hidden danger, we need a lighthouse, a warning system for air pollution so that we can mitigate the harm to ourselves, our natural environment, and the climate and so that we can act together to reduce air pollution by stopping it at the source.
Mary Harris Jones, the famous labor organizer, told a group of young miners who’d rented a church for their union meeting:
“Boys, you pray for the dead. You fight like hell for the living.”
Then Mother Jones snatched from the priest’s lap the hat, full of money that they’d paid to use the church hall, and led the miners out of the church into the fields.
If there were a contemporary incarnation of Mother Jones, it would be Pat Gozemba.