Let us row together – by Melissa Ludtke

Memory is a fun thing. With what it stores and what it sends away.

Like my indelible memory, which was saved by an April afternoon about a decade ago.

Nothing important happened. At least it seemed that day.

But today I can still repeat these 15 minutes in a meticulously crispy detail.

There we were two mothers, one of them, Zeyneb Magavi, who sits on the bed over me. You and I were part of a bigger meeting, but after we both found a quieter place to speak after each of us voluntarily wrote a story for our local newspaper. Our story is the action that we, as Mom climate activists, will soon draw attention to the warning of neighbors to the gas near their houses.

The leaks spit methane from below our streets, where gas pipes are buried.

Okay, let's stop: Think of methane As a carbon dioxide on steroids, a gas that overlaps our atmosphere, Sickert-Malmal, bursting old, rusted, cracked and broken gas pipes that are buried under our streets. It kills trees with the accident to be near a leak. It is also harmful to our health, along with the earth. (Yes, methane also licks fracking sites, but we leave it for another day.)

As we sit together, Zeyneb is the only spit for ideas at such a quick pace that my brain is taxed to keep them. But try it because I am the one who writes the first draft of our history, and I don't know much. I only know what Zeyneb taught me in object carriers.

Mapping MA cities and cities of gas leaks was co -founded by Audrey Schulman, a writer from Heet (Home Energy Efficiency Team) in response to listening to Gaslecks. After activists convinced the legislature of the state, she mapped her to adopt a law according to which the state supply companies could make the location and the description of all gas leaks public. Your user -friendly information cards are based on the data of the supply companies. For a valuable timeline from Heet's activities from then to the present, they go Here.

Another film that Zeyneb had shared with us.

share

On this special spring afternoon Zeyneb and I were at the front of a mothers in Cambridge [MOF] meet With our grass root gang of mothers who decorate our gas leaks. Mothers and allies in Boston had already held a birthday party for a 30-year leak, an opportunity to The Boston Globe A story considered worthy.

The gas suppliers noticed.

Now it was the turn of the Cambridge Moms!

In our plan we let sidewalks go through the city to mark the place from EVERYONE Gasleck in our city with colorful and informative posters that nobody could miss. (According to Cambridge, other MOF cities and cities in the east of MA took similar attention to attention, while nationwide MOF-Mütter sent postcards to government legislators and city councils who informed them that the time came to stop these gas leaks too in time to stop gas.

Sure enough, the residents noticed and followed our most important instructions: Call your gas utility and demand that your gas leak are set.

Telephone calls were cast in supply companies. Mothers who fought against climate change had their attention.

This served as an invaluable lesson for me: A mother who knew nothing about gas leaks could only learn for a month or two, then act with others who shared their climate problems, and together we had to draw attention to a problem that well -paid lobbyists did their best to ensure that legislators ignored.

We have created dynamics for changes.

Without pressure, the supply companies would not change their winning status quo.

Only we – – The people they serve – could force it to do so.

Sounds familiar?

I thought it could be.

Our campaign waved a guide to show up a woman who has the vision, persistence and temperament to get ahead and take us.

This Zeyneb emerged as this guide.

What she has achieved is wonderful.

The woman who was sitting with me on April afternoon is now advising the World Bank in this innovative energy source – networked geothermal energy. (She travels around the world to share this technology, and this morning she told me that four nations should write suggestions for networked geothermal projects for networked geothermal projects in order to operate more than 10,000 buildings, whereby more is expected.)

Zeyneb has a place at this table, as it does with many others because it is largely responsible for imagining the breakthroughs that made this a practical option for supply companies – and then convincing the supply companies.

A persistent demonstration project from Massachusetts that Zeyneb used is the first US examination of this technology that carries out great benefits in a neighborhood. This quarter of Framingham (36 buildings – 24 residential companies and five businesses) was partially selected because it was an “environmental righteous” advertising with a minority population of 57% and an average household income of $ 20,400. How to install its heat -powered thermal network, the utility, the Eversource, which drilled 90 holes deep into the earth, from which it draws geothermal energy into its kilometer loop from plastic lines that are buried 5 to 10 feet underground.

What is his This pilot is widespread Heet and his lessons already record a new course by giving the gas supplier industry an economically viable way to avert methangas and maintain jobs.

What makes Zeyneb a successful leader is not only their brain performance – although this is huge – together with their immense vision, but their recognition of the essential structure of trust relationships with those that are powerful opponents.

In the early days, the antagonists Zeyneb and the other MOF mothers who fought against climate change and the gas industry and the executives of the gas supply who wanted to be left alone were to do things that they had always done. It worked for them. Why change?

After the effective protest campaigns of MOFS protested protest campaigns, their social media, which are aimed at gas protection managers, and local media stories about the damage caused by gas leaks, Zeyneb was of the opinion that the time was to apply for a meeting with executives.

Her first meeting occurred in December 2016.

The story that I share now begins with this meeting, but my story is much shortened from space. I hope you are fascinated enough to take the time – it is not long – to hear how Zeyneb describes her unlikely journey from MOF activist to the Executive Director of Heet, from the Kennedy School of Government Student (then) to the Advisor of the World Bank.

In her Tedx Boston talk from November 2022, she takes a certain way for us.

I contact a August 2024 Story About Zeyneb, written by my friend Doug hit the Christian Science Monitor (CSM). It will bring us forward.

First let's set the scene. This story opens three MOFM mothers (one of them Zeyneb) sits in an office with gas -utility executives. [When these executives agreed to this meeting, the utility company asked its president if he wanted to have bodyguards there with him. He’d declined.]

“Zeyneb Magavi and each of the other mothers said Mr. [Bill] Ackley [Eversource’s gas utility president]: “I have three children,” said Ms. Magavi. “I'm worried about climate change. And I'm worried about your future. “

When the women were finished, there was a break. Mr. Ackley broke the silence. “I also have three children. I'm worried about climate change. And I'm also worried about your future. “

“That was our small part of the similarities that we started to grow,” recalls Ms. Magavi.

Mr. Ackley agrees. “They came to this first meeting that went over with their hands. It was about respect, ”he is amazed.

“It was the beginning of an unlikely partnership that finally became a bold idea: To Use heat from the surface – instead of natural gas – to cool and heat houses and buildings. “

In October 2017, at a one-day conference on the executives of Gas Utility (from the three large MA utilities) with basic root climate activists came together to exchange ideas.

“We had people in the room who were arrested against gas pipelines and people who build gas pipelines,” says Ms. Magavi. Finally, they jointly agreed to state regulations to accelerate the repair of the greatest leaks, which would significantly reduce methane emissions.

At home, Zeyyneb decreased everything she could read about how we can solve problems of our antiquated gas system. Then she encountered geothermal energy. In itself, knocking into the heat of the earth is not a new idea. People have done it since the days of the Greeks and Romans, which Zeyneb realized that “nobody had asked a supply company to do it for an entire quarter of customers.”

So she called Bill Ackley.

(Back to the CSM story, the moment when Zeyneb Ackley tells about her idea to heat and cool geothermal energy.)

“I think our relationship is at a point where I can make another suggestion,” she told the pension manager. “But you have to take a deep breath.”

Mrs Ms. Magavis Pitch heard. “I think she was shocked that I didn't run away,” he says. “I was really fascinated. I see this as a big player if we can make it affordable. “

And she develops her, also when networked geothermal energy in the USA and the world.

“On December 3, 2024, [MA] Governor Maura Healey signed laws that enabled gas suppliers to go beyond pilot projects by giving them permission to provide geothermal heating and cooling as an alternative to gas in their service areas. Seven other states have recently passed similar laws, and countries in Central Asia could soon build up similar projects.

“It strikes all over the country, roots all over the world,” Magavi recently said during a lecture. “We have a unique opportunity to change an industry, to build a better energy system and a more sustainable world.” [Boston Globe, Jan. 7, 2025]

Your current idea:

The sea: The ocean absorbs an enormous amount of heat from our burning fossil fuels. Therefore, the obvious question (to her) is why these heat does not heat up and cool down on our coastal cities.

“At the moment we calculate how many large industrial heat pumps we have to put under the docks in the port of Boston in order to restore them to a temperature that likes lobster, and how much Boston can we heat up with it?” Zeyneb thought about a writer.

I will be here. I hope to see each other on the way.

Tucson Book Festival; 3 appearances, 15 to 16 March