Former EPA Head Delivers Assembly On Environment
Gina McCarthy, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President Obama’s administration, visited Exeter on Tuesday as this year’s Bragdon Fellow to deliver an assembly on environmentalism and public health. In her question and answer section, McCarthy spoke of the importance of federal investment in clean energy sources. Her spirited hand-gestures and emphasis on the need for immediate and united efforts to combat climate change captivated the audience and drew frequent applause and a standing ovation. Others, however, critiqued her delivery for being too vague and unnecessarily divisive.
If you think that’s all going to deteriorate because one president decides to write a tweet or speak in the White House about everything going away, you’re wrong.
McCarthy began her speech by criticizing the Trump administration for its lack of environmental awareness and leadership. “I figure you may be pretty interested and, in some ways, concerned about what is both happening in Washington, D.C., as well as what is not happening in Washington, D.C,” she said, receiving her first round of snaps from the audience.
“The administrator [of the EPA] is not really embracing the initiative of the agency and understanding how necessary and important the work is that his agency does, and as a result things aren’t being enforced, and everything that the Obama administration wanted to do was apparently misguided because now it’s being undone,” she continued. “Am I ticked off? Absolutely. Am I giving up? Absolutely no way.”
Throughout her speech, McCarthy reflected on the progress her agency had made during Obama’s presidency, organizing national and international efforts for environmental action. “If you think that’s all going to deteriorate because one president decides to write a tweet or speak in the White House about everything going away, you’re wrong. It’s happening, it’s moving forward, and we are actually going to be a part of that as long as you remember to stay active,” she said, rallying the audience.
Later that afternoon, almost fifty audience members joined McCarthy to ask questions and engage in further dialogue about climate change. She addressed the lack of public awareness, the dire consequences of excessive food waste and overconsumption, while attendees discussed the Academy’s own initiatives to become more environmentally sustainable.
Pete Bragdon ‘54, the son of former Academy instructor Henry Bragdon, for whom the Bragdon Fund is named, expressed his admiration for McCarthy. “The key to a great teacher is passion, warmth, love and excitement, and Gina has it. I was impressed with her and with the audience,” he remarked.
His wife Dottie offered similar praise, saying, “Henry would be very proud that the school brings in brilliant speakers like Gina McCarthy once a year.”
Not everyone was equally enthralled. Lower Nosa Lawani found McCarthy’s speech to be a simple crowd-pleaser. “There was no substance. It was just anti-Trump lip service to the audience. She got her claps, she got her snaps, but she said very few things that I could act upon or learn from. She should have addressed concrete issues, not just phrases that are either anti-administration or broadly pro-environment,” he said.
Senior Molly Canfield agreed that the assembly did not achieve a great deal of specificity. “I thought that it was very similar to a campaign speech,” she said. She nonetheless appreciated McCarthy’s animated and encouraging rhetoric because it “gave me more hope than I’ve had since November 8, 2016.”
Dottie Bragdon and lower Elizabeth Kostina agreed that although bipartisan efforts were crucial, the impact of the Trump administration’s environmental policies could not be undermined or overlooked in contemporary discussions of climate change. “I respect the opinion that the assembly might have been too political, but it can’t be denied that when Obama was president, we didn’t have this issue,” Kostina said. “Most countries are signed on the Paris Climate Agreement, but the United States withdrew. What does that say about our country as a whole? It reflects poorly on the people making the decisions.”
Bragdon sympathized with McCarthy’s frustration. “Of course she was political. She was the head of the EPA, and now she’s watching it be ripped up. Trump thinks you can’t have a good economy without polluting, but they’re not on opposite poles. McCarthy is for clean air and a good economy,” she said.
Kostina believed McCarthy’s use of more generic terms served her cause in uniting the assembly audience and allowed her to refrain from polarizing certain sides of the political spectrum.
“Giving an action plan is a hard thing to do. You cannot pinpoint a certain thing that people should act on because it’s likely to change, and people have different mindsets on how to do things,” she said. “This needs to be a collaboration, and if one person came up with the idea, it wouldn’t be collaborative.”