[ Seminar
Series - Schedule | Archive of 2000-2001
Seminars | Archive of 1999-2000
Seminars | Archive of 1998-1999
Seminars
"Climate Protection from the Grassroots:
Massachusetts’ Prodigal Case"A Teleconference Seminar Session
Led byDr. Michael L. Charney
Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN)
Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Green Building Coalition
Publisher, the Cambridge Climate CalendarBiographical Background
[ Background Material for Seminar Session ]
Michael L. Charney is a psychiatrist, political activist, organizer and uncertified environmentalist, working to grow the climate protection movement in Massachusetts. Betting on the "Civil Society" solution - citizen action for greenhouse emissions reductions – Charney co-founded and co-chairs the Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN). The purpose of this group is to incite environmental learning and activism in metro-Boston and beyond. As part of this effort Dr. Charney publishes the e-weekly Cambridge Climate Calendar (CCC) [since 5/00] (To write for subcription to the e-weekly Calendar, click here; for more information on the Cambridge Climate Coalition, click here). In addition, in order to promote the construction of green, high performance buildings Dr. Charney co-founded and co-chairs the Green Building Coalition for green building incentive legislation in Massachusetts.MCAN now has autonomous climate groups in 13 Massachusetts cities and towns, and representation from MassPIRG, Clean Water Action and Mass Energy. It sponsors lectures and conferences on climate change and solutions, and speaker training . It supports and critiques legislation, provides testimony at regulatory hearings, works for fuel efficient transportation, protests SUV’s, and helps network and stimulate diverse climate activism at the local and state level.
Dr. Charney’s activism began as a draft exempt student opposing the Vietnam War, graduating Yale College in 1968. As a Nader Raider for occupational safety and health, Charney drafted a "Health Bill of Rights for Workers" (UAW newletter, 1970),
which contributed to the writing and passage of OSHA. Smitten by the 1970 National Student Strike, he founded and coordinated the100 member O.M. Collective which wrote The Organizer’s Manual (Bantam Books 1971), an all-purpose and anti-war grassroots organizing text. In 1971 he started the New Haven Occupational Health Project to assist Southern Connecticut AFL-CIO in using OSHA.
Dr Charney evaded political controversy for the next decade, graduating Yale Medical School (1972), completing internship at Cambridge Hospital (1973), adult and child psychiatry residency training at Massachusetts Mental Health Center (1978), and the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute (1982). He opened private practice in 1978. In the early 1980’s he again juggled his career, joining Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and initiating a variety of nuclear freeze advocacy projects. In 1984, with two 64K Kaypro II computers between them, law professor Richard Daynard of Northeastern and Dr. Charney devised a farfetched and long to be scoffed stratagem, the Tobacco Products Liability Project to stimulate and organize a tobacco plaintiffs’ bar, medical experts and victims, to pursue personal injury, third party and class action law suits against the tobacco industry as a public health intervention.
In 1990 through 1994, in response to epidemic youth violence, Dr Charney created The Games Project/Chess Makes Kids Smart! training five hundred youth workers, college students, teachers, librarians and volunteers to teach chess to Boston kids. The Project established 60 neighborhood chess programs, distributed 3000 chess sets and enlisted architects locally and nationally to design and construct giant chess sets. For the 1992 American Institute of Architects convention, the Boston Society of Architects and the Games Project made and mounted the Giant Boston Architectural Chess Set shaped as old versus new landmark Boston buildings. Dr Charney then ran a two-week outdoor Chess Festival on Copley Square in Boston’s Back Bay. (Architecture, 11/92, photo).
During the mid 1990’s Dr Charney closed his practice and retooled in psychopharmacology and medicine for in-patient psychiatric employment. This led to several years work and travel between Alaska, Vermont and Massachusetts. For several months in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta he reported for The Tundra Drums newspaper, and while in Bethel gained a transforming appreciation for life’s struggle between vast earth and vaster sky. On resettling in Boston and resuming private practice, he began earnest environmental and climate self-education with a necessarily quixotic intent for climate activism. He first learned of global warming in 1988, but for years avoided and mulled depressed by it, a threat too pervasive to contemplate, a problem so massive, vested, complex and subtle, how could it be solved given the difficulty banishing mere cigarettes?
In 1998 upon reading The Heat is On, he contacted Ross Gelbspan across the Charles and Muddy Rivers in Brookline, and enlisted as apprentice to Ross’s ad hoc policy group which drafted the "World Energy Modernization Plan" (River Street Design, 12 pp, 1998).
Interestingly, far-off international debate, US Senatorial resistance, Kyoto weakness and daunting IPCC research, left a large empty niche at the bottom. The 1999 Tufts Climate Initiative conference, "Climate Change and Civil Society" featured ICLEI’s Cities for Climate Protection campaign. It showed how to put climate action in citizen hands.
Charney began publishing the Cambridge Climate Calendar, and reconstituted a lapsed environmental group as Cambridge Climate Action (CCA). It then prodded creation of a taskforce to draft a climate action plan. In May 2000, CCA sponsored "Climate Protection: What You & U.S. Cities Can Do." Marc Breslow and Charney began Massachusetts Climate Action Network in the closing hour. In a related initiative Dr Charney drew attention to New York State’s new Green Building Tax Credit Act, and with the BSA’s Committee on the Environment, the Green Roundtable and others founded the Green Building Coalition which combines the Environmental League of Massachusetts, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, architects and MCAN together in support of green building incentive legislation.
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