7 minute read
From Wheatley to the White House
UMass Boston Prepared Gina McCarthy ’76 for National Climate Leadership
BY DEWAYNE LEHMAN
Regina “Gina” McCarthy ’76—former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama, and appointed by President Joe Biden as the first White House national climate advisor—will have you believe that she wasn’t inclined to apply herself academically before college and lacked a sense of direction.
McCarthy, always frank and somewhat self-deprecating when she describes her rise to top environmental positions in two presidential administrations, said the pivotal moment of her life was her decision to attend UMass Boston, although she had also been accepted to Boston College. She believed the university, with a downtown campus at the time, presented a more serious academic program and learning environment, discipline she needed for a college education.
When the semester started in September 1972, she chose to major in social anthropology because it was, as she said, a subject she didn’t know anything about. The decision ultimately helped to frame her intellectual approach to dealing with environmental issues and impacts during the course of her highly successful career. (And, she also met her husband that first week, while waiting for their class lists in the main administration building, the old Boston Gas building, and ended up in a French class with him.)
“Within the first week at UMass Boston, I realized what I had sort of been missing,” McCarthy said. “It was a different way of learning
House
(This photo) In December 2020, then appointee for National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy speaks as President-elect Joe Biden (right) and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris listen in the background.
(Left) McCarthy, former head of the EPA under President Barack Obama, now serves as senior White House advisor on climate change to President Joe Biden, coordinating climate change policy throughout the government.
for me. It was challenging my thinking. . . . Anthropology got me hooked on people perceiving their world differently and interacting with the world differently. It stopped me from being judgmental and challenged me to bridge gaps.”
In 1974, McCarthy made the transition to the Columbia Point campus along with the rest of the university and graduated from UMass Boston in 1976. She then earned a master’s in environmental health engineering and planning and policy at Tufts University in 1981. She went on to work in community health and on local health boards, including in the town of Canton, where she saw many of the recurring health issues such as asthma and lead poisoning related to pollution and other environmental issues.
Her early success led to positions of increasing responsibility at the state level, where she worked for five Massachusetts governors (four Republicans), before taking the top environmental job in Connecticut. From there she moved to the Obama Administration as an undersecretary for the environment during his first term and, at the beginning of his second term, she received Senate confirmation to be administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
(Left) McCarthy smiles during her nomination by President Barack Obama to run the Environmental Protection Agency.
(Below) McCarthy (center) is flanked by David Cash, dean of the John W. McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies (left) and Emily Reichert, executive director and CEO, Greentown Labs, (right) at “Clean Energy Is Today’s Moon Shot,” a discussion of John F. Kennedy’s vision for innovation and environmentalism and the challenges and opportunities of climate change in October 2017.
“To me it was an opportunity to have a really fun engagement across the U.S., to really learn the country and to understand what people cared about and were concerned about,” she said. “I ended up wanting to have a real engagement with people across the country, and I think for the most part we’ve succeeded in doing that, I’ve succeeded in connecting with people.”
While her Obama years were focused mostly on air quality and pollution issues, her new position of White House national climate advisor provides McCarthy with a much broader canvas to work with. It’s not just about the science of climate change, she said, but also about all the other intersectional factors and impacts.
McCarthy delivered a similar message at an event on campus in 2017, stating that climate change needs to be treated as a public health challenge, a fight for clean air and safe water not in the distant future, but now. pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a broader recovery of the middle class through good-paying, union jobs, particularly for those most affected by inequities.
Today, at a time when the country is struggling to overcome economic, pandemic, and social justice issues, the challenges are somewhat different.
“Charting the future, you have to think about more than one thing at a time—communities affected, jobs, transportation,” McCarthy said. “Today we have millions of people out of work, so the last thing you want to do is tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, do you want to talk about climate change?’”
McCarthy’s vision, and task, in the Biden Administration is to make her work on the environment and clean energy central to the recovery of the American economy and from the coronavirus “I think President Biden has been really clear, and I totally agree with him, that part of the challenge the U.S. has is really to expand the middle class again,” McCarthy said. “We have lost a lot of the middle class to lower and lower poverty levels, and you cannot rebuild a country without lifting its people up into the middle class.”
Decades ago, she said, the science was evolving without foreseeable solutions. Today, we have a lot of solutions, but the challenge is how to implement them as “people want change but maybe not so much, not so fast.” McCarthy is focused on President Biden’s objectives to return to a leadership role in the international climate discussion, in clean energy, a clean infrastructure, job growth, and environmental
Gina McCarthy, then head of the EPA (right,) with Pat Megonigal, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center deputy director, during a tour of the Global Change Research Wetland in Edgewater, MD, in July 2013.
justice, with a commitment to invest 40 percent of clean energy funds in the socioeconomic communities most impacted.
“I couldn’t actually be more excited about the fact that these issues are visible now, and they’re on the federal radar screen in a big way,” McCarthy said. “I’m just hoping that this enthusiasm to recognize that we have had systemic racism and that the time is now to stop it, I just hope it doesn’t wane, because it’s a long journey forward. If we don’t do it now, I don’t know when we do.”
To that end, McCarthy has high regard for college student activism and its role in motivating change.
“I think young people today are what has changed the dynamic in a way that is going to allow us to make big progress on climate. . . . I think they’ve changed everything,” she said. “I think they are obnoxiously demanding, and I don’t want them to stop or weaken their demands at all. Do I think they’re always realistic? No. But do I think they should push for it? Yes.”
Describing herself as having always been “edgy” in her professional pursuits, she reiterates her commencement message to the 50th graduating class in 2015 to use their UMass Boston education to push forward beyond their comfort zones.
“I know this sounds goofy, and people think I make this up,” McCarthy said, “but everything that I learned at UMass Boston made me think in ways that allowed me to be unafraid to explore—kind of wanting to know where the differences came from, listening before I decide the answer, and that makes you good at governing.”
