Topic: The American Climate Corps and the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal

Historian Neil Maher will discuss President Biden’s American Climate Corps (ACC) by comparing and contrasting it with Franklin Roosevelt’s original Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from the Great Depression era.  While both federal programs put Americans to work on a host of environmental problems, for the ACC to succeed it must avoid some of the pitfalls of the original CCC.  Maher will outline how the ACC can be more inclusive and responsive than its 1930s counterpart, and will then moderate an audience discussion regarding how Irvington might create its own local climate corps that could involve residents, students, and others interested in slowing climate change and making our village more resilient to it.

Neil Maher received his Ph.D. in history from New York University in 2001 and is currently a professor of history in the Federated History Department, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. environmental and political history, urban environmental history, and environmental justice. He is the author, most recently, of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), which received the Eugene M. Emme best book award from the American Astronautical Society and was selected as a Bloomberg View Must-Read, a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and a Smithsonian Best Book on the Apollo program. His first book, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2007), won the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best monograph in conservation history.

An Irvington resident, Amy is a healthy living educator with a genetic predisposition to toxicity. She’s also mom to three young kids who share the same trait. Determined to make the world less toxic, Amy reached millions of parents and caregivers with her “buy better” advocacy campaigns. She blogs about the chemical world we live in on Amy Ziff’s NoTox Life, and prior to founding MADE SAFE, taught classes on living a nontoxic life and co-founded the Veritey Shop, a site comprised of safe, nontoxic products. Amy is changing the world for the healthier one product at a time, one person at a time, one home at a time.

Amy has a Masters in Journalism and Communications and has been a successful internet entrepreneur. She was on the founding team of Site59 where she pioneered the first luxury business line for travel on the web. When Site59 was acquired by Travelocity, she ran a national sales team and then founded an award-winning media program, blog, and travel seal that garnered millions of dollars of “earned media” annually, and also founded the company’s award-winning cause marketing program. Amy went on to co-found and become creative director of Jetsetter, the first online flash-sale for high-end travel.

Amy Larkin lived in Tarrytown before moving to Cortland Manor. She is an award-winning  entrepreneur, activist, and  producer who has been at the forefront of the environmental movement for decades.  Her 2013 book, Environmental Debt: The Hidden Costs of a Changing Global Economy revealed the links between our environmental and financial crises -  both causes and solutions.   From 2014-16, she served as Vice Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

In 2019, Amy co-founded PR3:  The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse, a public-private partnership forging systemic solutions that dramatically reduce plastic production and consumption.  When globally deployed, the move away from single use packaging can reduce the manufacturing of plastic packaging by 90% and cut associated emissions by 80%. (Packaging uses ~40% of all plastic production).  ­Reuse is a solution commensurate with the gravity of both the plastic and climate crises. 

While Greenpeace Solutions Director, Amy led the collaboration with the Consumer Goods Forum, a consortium of 400 multinationals to eliminate HFCs.  The industry’s commitment directly led to HFCs’ inclusion in the Montreal Protocol in 2016, anticipated to save .5°C degree of global warming. This work won the prestigious 2011 Roy Award from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Amy has spoken around the world on Climate Change and its relationship to Money, Culture, and Spirituality, including at the 92nd St. Y’s 2019 Yom Kippur Kol Nidre service.  She wrote regularly for The Guardian from 2012-2015.  

Topic: Climate Solutions:  It takes a village...and a lot of courage.

There is no replacement for courage...Right now, we are looking on with a mix of disbelief and ennui as extreme weather engulfs us. In some cases, we are trying to take what appear to be reasonable steps, mostly in order to protect our precarious perch in the world's economy. The trouble is, the time for "reasonable" has passed. We have somehow forgotten that if there is no nature, there is no business. We are in a global environmental emergency, but we are behaving as if incremental improvements to "business as usual" will do. 

This courage must be expressed with and within our local villages and our global village.  

I'll share my current work with PR3:  The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse drafting standards to create reusable packaging systems, a significant plastic and climate solution. We are working with multinationals, entrepreneurs, packaging producers, environmental justice activists, scientists, urban planners, and numerous government departments in cities, nations, and the Global Plastic Treaty currently being negotiated.  This diverse village of brave souls and institutions is going to lead the world away from single-use packaging to serve people, planet and profit.