Mark Swartz: There’s so much to say about climate change and children. Moms Clean Air Force is about more than just air quality, right?

Karin Stein: As an organization, we fight for clean air, because air is water and nature writ large; it means fighting for healthy ecosystems and healthy people. We focus on air because it touches all the rest. When people talk about mercury in water, it’s coming from air pollution emitted from coal plants that settles into our creeks and lakes. It then gets deposited in the fatty tissue of fish, which then gets eaten, and if a pregnant person eats the fish, that mercury keeps concentrating further in their fatty tissue. The next thing you know, it’s in the fatty brain tissue of an unborn child at much higher concentrations than when it first left the smokestack of the coal plant. Mercury in children’s brains can lead to serious developmental issues, including impaired motor function, learning impairments and behavioral problems.

Swartz: What is the relationship between Moms Clean Air Force and ?

Stein: EcoMadres is Moms Clean Air Force. It’s a branch that connects culturally and linguistically with a diversity of Latino communities.

Swartz: Have you always lived in Iowa?

Stein: I think of myself as a South American child, a Central American teenager and a North American adult. I was born in Colombia. I grew up in the remote eastern savannas of Colombia with no electricity and lots of wild animals. I had a pet anteater and monkey. As a teenager I lived in Costa Rica and continue to be involved with a rainforest conservation foundation there.

In 1980, I got a scholarship to come to Grinnell College and thought, “Okay, I’ll jump on a plane, get a four-year degree and go back.” But then life happens, and before you know it, 40 years have gone by. I live on the edge of a state park, Rock Creek State Park, and everything else around us is farmland. I have spent most of my life in rural areas around the Americas. This gives me a very strong sense of how various environments have changed as a result of the climate crisis.

Swartz: What did you study?

Stein: I have an undergraduate degree in biology and a master’s degree in horticulture.

Swartz: And you’re also a professional musician. How does that fit into the picture?

Stein: After grad school I was a researcher, but once my first child was born, I turned my musical hobby into my profession. Moms Clean Air Force recognizes that humans are multifaceted and that there are various ways in which we connect. They’ve encouraged me to use music in my community engagement work for Moms, because, as a Latin American, I understand how centrally important music is to our cultural identity. Music is a trust-building language, especially among Latinos. So it’s a tool. It’s not the main tool I use in my work for Moms, but it’s a tool, and we need to use all the tools we can.

Swartz: So, you come to rural Iowa with a different perspective on the natural world from your neighbors, but you’ve probably learned a lot from Iowans about how they view the soil and the planet and the natural world. What kind of conversations do you have?

Stein: Iowa has a really interesting mix of people. My husband and I talk a lot to the family farmers who are still there, but they are an endangered lifestyle, encroached upon by big corporate farming operations. Family farmers tend to be interested in doing what’s right for the soil, the water, even the climate.  You don’t hear those concerns expressed by farming corporations.

Swartz: Some people might be surprised that Iowa has air quality issues.

Stein: All it takes is one source of pollution and you have a problem. In northwest Iowa, we have some of the highest asthma and cancer rates in the country. Iowa also has six of the most polluting coal plants in the whole country. I’m involved in a coalition that’s asking MidAmerican Energy, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, to close its remaining coal plants by 2030, because their plants are hurting Iowans, especially people of color. Another thing I’d like to mention is that in rural areas, proper air quality monitoring is often overlooked.

Swartz: I’d love to hear about a family that you’ve worked with.

Stein: I’ll tell you about two on diagonally opposite ends of Iowa. There is a woman in southeast Iowa, in the region near Muscatine. She has two boys. One of them, and this is where I start really choking up, the younger one, who is now eight, was born asthmatic. Because of bad air quality in his neighborhood and his school, he’s never played outdoors in the winter. Ever. There are a lot of children who cannot play outside during a good portion of the year because of poor air quality.

And then let’s travel to northwest Iowa, where I just recently met Indigenous leaders. There’s a big Winnebago settlement near one of the two coal plants owned by MidAmerican Energy. And it was simply heart wrenching to hear their testimony about the extremely high cancer and asthma rates in that community. And it boils down to insufficient safeguards on emissions and insisting on continuing to use technologies that we don’t have to use anymore, because we have better options now.

Swartz: It must be gratifying to help them tell their stories to policymakers. 

Stein: Some of my proudest moments have been getting very shy immigrants to understand that legislators are not the police, and that the stories of their children are important, because legislators cannot know everything.

Swartz: When you’re talking about small lungs and brains, they’re resilient, but they’re very vulnerable.

ł§łŮ±đľ±˛Ô:ĚýChildren are developing organisms with fast metabolisms, breathing faster than adults and inhaling dirty air closer to the ground, at the level of exhaust pipes. We know that particulate matter inhaled by mothers enters the bloodstream, enters the child’s, the fetus’s organism, and can create heart, brain and lung damage before the child is born.

Extreme heat can do that too: it can lead to premature births and many other complications. And those most affected are always the people who can least afford it, the people who least contribute to our climate crisis, who can least afford to protect themselves from the climate crisis.

Anything we can do for our children while they’re developing — in terms of keeping them healthy now and in terms of slowing down the climate crisis — I can’t think of a more important job, frankly, as a mom and as a world citizen.

Every Tuesday evening, Hannah Choi jumps online to join two-dozen high school students for lessons in advocacy.

They are all interns with BIPOC [biracial, indigenous, people of color] , a program created by the nonprofit , which organizes the weekly training workshops. It’s here where Choi and her peers learn to strategize to advance the environmental and social change they want to see.

“Overall, it has inspired me to become more politically active in my community, and more aware of what’s going on, that I can make change with my actions,” she said.

Jim Driscoll is president of the non-profit and a veteran climate activist who began the internship program in 2021 and serves as its coordinator. “As a first step we decided to hire a group of interns from local high schools to educate them about the climate crisis and to help build our relationships within and across our BIPOC priority communities,” he said.

The Climate Emergency Fund, a national organization, and various Maryland faith-based and environmental groups have contributed $75,000 to train and pay the 150 interns who have engaged in the program.

Interns partner for change

During the Tuesday meetings students are introduced to leaders of non-profits, immigrant, labor and environmental groups, and encouraged to partner with them. They are also taught the basics of lobbying, and how to write letters to local and state officials, testify at hearings, and take their message into social media and the street as part of non-violent protests organized by the interns and their partners.

Choi, a senior at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, was among the first interns, and has grown with the program. Over three years she has advocated at rallies for the Green New Deal, called for electric buses at the Montgomery County Board of Education, and helped coordinate support for rent stabilization and social housing in the county.

Shortly after Watkins Mill High School sophomore Tracy Espinoza joined a year ago, she testified before the Montgomery County Council on the rental bill with a story about a friend’s struggle for affordable housing.

“She constantly had to move around. It was hard for her, to build up a new life every single time she moved,” Espinoza told council members.

Choi says going door-to-door in Gaithersburg alongside volunteers with the non-profit Everyday Canvassing, she heard similar tales.

“There were people who said that the rent prices had doubled, that they couldn’t keep up with them and [feared] they would be homeless,” she said. “And, just hearing those stories continuously, a mother and a veteran, they made me aware of how important the issues we are fighting for [are].”

Youth take seat at the table

Twenty organizations signed on to an intern-initiated letter on rent control. The students claimed victory when the Montgomery County Council voted to cap rents at 6% in 2023.

“The interns were a very popular addition to the campaign and made a significant contribution to its success,” Driscoll said. “This BIPOC internship has also helped move the local climate movement from relatively isolated, political weakness to greater connection with the BIPOC, youth and labor communities in a diverse coalition committed to social housing, an important climate objective.”

Choi has taken her new activism to the Maryland General Assembly, where twice this session she has served as page. It’s where she met Del. Vaughn Stewart (D-Montgomery), sponsor of , a bill that would create a pilot program for mixed-income social housing, which Choi stepped up to support.

“I think that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it done, where someone is serving as page, and then simultaneously, they take their page hat off and put on their advocacy hat to testify,” Stewart said. “People were impressed that she was there. It made a big difference.”

The bill subsequently crossed over to the Senate with bipartisan support.

Junee Kim, like Espinosa, is a sophomore at Watkins Mill, in Gaithersburg. She credits the internship with broadening her network to include other student groups like , whose constituency is youth under 35. Kim started the first YPP high school chapter at Watkins Mill, and was elected president of the larger organization, and its outreach and campaign chair, with Espinoza at her side as vice president and policy director.

“We generally focus on policing, restorative justice in high schools [and the] school-to-prison pipeline.” Kim said. “I testified [before] the Montgomery County Board of Education to fund restorative justice coaches in every high school, [and am] currently advocating [for] a restorative justice survey for the school system.”

Advocacy strengthens democracy, sense of self

Kim, Choi and Espinoza are first generation Americans, daughters of immigrants. Kim says the internship has turned her from a retiring, soft-spoken person into a young woman who is unafraid to speak her mind, and comfortable listening to views unlike her own. “This has made me so much more confident,” she said.

Choi says the process has made her more open minded. “I think that we all need to step back and try listening from other perspectives, try any opportunity to become as informed as you can be, just because that’s really important in our democracy,” she said.

Espinoza adds that young people are also in a fight for their future, that action today has consequences. “Being part of this really taught me how to advocate for myself, how to standup for myself, how to find my voice and the importance of using my voice,” she said. “I learned I love getting involved with public policy. I found my passion within government. And that is something I hope to continue as long as I can and hope to pursue it.”

At a recent Tuesday meeting interns were busy planning their next action, a protest rally scheduled for April 23, at the Montgomery County Public Schools Board of Education in Rockville. There they will argue their case for the school system to recommit to purchasing only electric school buses.

“Recent developments have seen MCPS revert to purchasing diesel buses, which pose significant health risks and contribute to climate and environmental harms,” an internship says.

This was originally published in .