Despite increasingly dire reports about climate change—rising global temperatures, melting ice sheets, wildfires, intense storms—Gina McCarthy says she intends to keep fighting against it.
A January 13, 2020, Boston Globe column profiled McCarthy, professor of the practice of public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who is beginning a new role as president and chief executive officer of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
A longtime champion of public health and the environment, McCarthy has earned a reputation as a relentless advocate who speaks plainly on the dangers of climate change, according to the column. McCarthy joined the national stage in 2013, when President Obama appointed her as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. For the past two years, she has served as director of the Harvard Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard Chan School, where she worked to increase public awareness about the health impacts of climate change. As NRDC president, McCarthy looks forward to mobilizing the public to take strong action on climate health, she said in the Globe article.
“The environment has had tremendous improvement,” she said. “But it didn’t improve by people saying, ‘We can’t do it.’ It improved by saying, ‘OK, we’ve got to do it.’ That’s my attitude. I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to claim defeat.”
Read the Boston Globe article: Fighting the Fight Against Climate Change