Hi! It has been a long time since I have blogged. I have been busy. If you follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, you know I have been out there talking about climate change, its health effects, environmental issues, and workplace bullying (can’t forget that). So, this is why I decided to blog about what I have been doing. I have been working at the intersection of climate and environmental injustice. Working with many climate and environmental groups, I tend to think we are all at the same party. One group works against fracking and cracking, particularly working against a proposed cracking plant in Belmont County, Ohio. I have been fighting for fracking chemical transparency since 2012. Having a cracking plant by the Ohio River increases the potential contamination of the drinking water of 5 million people. Sierra Club is one group. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/climate-energy/dirty-energy Another group I currently invest my time with works to educate on the health and environmental affects of plastics. Knowing the Ohio legislation, local governments are not allowed to ban or tax plastic bags. however, as individuals, we can stop our use of plastic bags, even with COVID 19, by packing our bags ourselves at the grocery store. We can refuse plastic straws at restaurants. I also now use shampoo bars, not shampoo out of a bottle. We use bar soap but I still have so much farther to go to reduce our carbon and chemical footprint. A2Z Plastics is a great group and will have another program beginning September 17, 2020. You can sign up through Halt the Harm.https://halttheharm.net/services/webinar-series/ One group I also invest in works to highlight a new green economic deal for Appalachia from the federal level. Four states of non-profit environmental groups are working together to guide a platform to green industries to replace the damage done by the extractive industries of coal, oil, gas, and fracking. I hope to see most of their platform adopted to help raise Appalachia out of the arsenic and mercury of coal dust. ReImageAppalachia is future thinking. https://reimagineappalachia.org Every group I invest my time with works to better the environment, moving toward green industry, away from coal, oil, gas, and fracking. All of these groups educate the public on climate change, clean air, plastics, and the environmental injustices seen. All of them need to work together and support each other, even if they are not working in the same areas. They are all supporting a future.