Harriet Shugarman

Harriet Shugarman, the Executive Director of Climate Mama and advocate for Education Policy around Climate for New York State, lives in the Upper West Side. She originally got involved in the climate crisis in 1990 when she worked at the United Nations and participated in the first Earth Summit. She talks about the Climate Reality training with Al Gore in 2007 being a catalyst for her involvement in the climate crisis. In 2009, she founded Climate Mama, and in 2020 she published How to Talk to Your Kids About Climate Change, Turning Angst into Action. 

Harriet Shugarman 

She/her 

Executive Director of Climate Mama and Advocate for Education Policy around Climate for New York State 

Upper West Side 

Q&A 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What originally drew you to the climate sphere? 

I worked early on at the United Nations so I was involved with the first Earth Summit, and out of that came the COPs and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And my work then on climate seemed like: “This is something that's happening many generations from now. It doesn't impact me,” even though, even in the early ’90s, the climate crisis was directly impacting people. I had very young children at the time, and I then did one of the first Climate Reality trainings with Al Gore the year that he started the Climate Reality Project. And then it became something that felt real and present. 

What scares you the most about climate change? 

We're not moving fast enough, and we're passing planetary tipping points. Our lives seem long as human beings, but  the planetary scale of things is so much longer. So the reality that  put the planet in overdrive and thrown her out of balance, that’s scary. To me,  the climate crisis should be a unifying thing for all of us in this country and around the world, rather than something that divides us. Also, it’s something that impacts all of us – yet, it impacts us differently. It worries me that there's so much misinformation about the realities we're facing. 

What is Climate Mama and can you talk about your experience? 

I had become a mom and I was like, wow, this is impacting me, it will impact my children's lives, and people aren't talking about it. And I went online and tried to find more information as a parent about how to talk to my kids about what I needed to know, and I couldn't find anything. After my first [Climate Reality] training in 2007, the message I came away with was, what are you going to do in your community? And so I set up Climate Mama, and it was one of the first online resources for parents around the climate crisis.

What has been your experience introducing your kids to the climate crisis?

My kids are out of college now and working, and neither of them are directly in the environmental space, but they're knowledgeable about it. They understand it. They're working on it in different ways. There are many ways that you can be involved in this work. My kids tell me they were just brought up with climate change as part of what they understand. So I feel I've done a good job that way, and I have hopefully helped equip them to understand the realities, and they're not afraid to face them. 

Can you talk about your work on education policy? 

I'm working with a group of New Yorkers as part of the Climate Resilience Education Task Force (CRETF), and we're working with New York State Department of Education, and many partner organizations, to try to make preK through 12 cross curricular climate education available to everyone across the state. I worked on this in New Jersey, and have watched how that successfully came into play. And we in New York, you know, we're part of the tri state. We say we're leaders on climate. And yet, this is an area where both Connecticut and New Jersey are moving forward and we in New York aren't there yet.

While the urgency of the climate crisis is more and more evident, and we're feeling it directly here in New York, we need our children to understand what is happening, why it’s happening and what can be done to slow it down. Clearly climate education must be age appropriate, and our children can begin learning about it at the earliest of age. There already is much curriculum that's out there, we need to help educate our teachers so they can educate our children so that at every age,  it just becomes part of what you learn. It's part of your social studies, math, phys ed…

I'm a professor, and I get a lot of young people who are beginning college, who have never been taught about the climate crisis. They're angry and they're upset and they're worried. Yet, if they had information about climate change as part of their curriculum through their K-12 education they  wouldn't already be in college and say, “Why am I just learning this now? How am I going to be able to work on the climate crisis?” I'm working on a project called The Ecopsychepedia, which is  an open resource for anyone that has short, easy to read entries on the connection between mental health and the climate crisis.

What do you love most about your job? 

I love the people that I get to work with, and I love how excited and passionate and giving people are of their time and their energy, even as they look with eyes wide open at the climate crisis which is unfolding on our watch. I love being with people who can help me remember to take time, to slow down and to find happiness and joy and things to laugh about, even when what we're working on is so difficult. I love seeing that we're making a difference. 

Are there certain resources or challenges that New York has to offer?

New York is a wonderful place, and there are so many people doing this work  in their day jobs, and in their volunteer time. People are bringing climate change to life through art and culture, people working on public gardens, by helping NYC compost (now the law in all 5 boroughs!). Parents are advocating for change, marching in the streets, bringing their kids to rallies   and even just this morning at Governor (Kathy) Hochul’s office here in New York City, demanding that the Governor pass some of the climate bills she has passed this past legislative session, including congestion pricing that would directly fund our transit system.  I lived through Superstorm Sandy (in 2012), and we need to do more to shore up Manhattan. We're on an island. We need to do more. We're doing it, but we're doing it too slowly. 

Who are your mentors and inspirations in the field?

One of my mentors is Osprey Orielle Lake, and she runs an organization called Women's Earth and Climate Action Network that showcases and lifts up the voices of indigenous people from around the world. To me, seeing those people that have such limited resources and in places with no support – if they can do what they're doing, my gosh, how can we not do more? Ellery Spikes, a young New Yorker who just graduated high school this year, watching how poised she and other youth from our CRETF youth steering committee  have been talking to legislators and presenting their cases specifically about the climate crisis – I’m so inspired - so it's not just the Greta Thunbergs of the world. Al Gore is one of my heroes too. His work has been why and how I'm doing what I'm doing. 

What advice would you give to people looking to break into the climate field?

There are so many organizations and groups of people working on climate here in New York abd around the country. So whatever you're passionate about, if it's music, theater, finance, law or education, you will find an affiliate group or company in that area that's working on climate. Just reach out to them. Other people are worried about it, and many people want things to happen, but they just think nobody else is talking about it, or nobody else has those feelings. And the research shows us that many, many people care about what's happening. So I think as communities, whether it's at work or at school or with your own family, you actually just need to make talking about climate change part of the conversation and not be afraid of that. And it doesn't have to be just all sadness and doom and gloom, because we need to get beyond that and move to doing more.