Deborah has long been a supporter of protection for the
environment. In California, when she ran for Congress against Bill
Thomas in the 21st Congressional District,
she defended the Federal Endangered Species Act in Congressional
candidate debates. As a lawyer, she worked with a team of environmental
attorneys to prevent a cement plant near Mojave from polluting the air
by burning tires. Both in California, and later when she returned to
her childhood home in Maryland, Deborah was an active member of the
Sierra Club, becoming less active when the local Club came out in
support of a version of the Inner Purple Line, which would, if built,
be destructive of a local hiker- biker trail and linear park. She
advocates
improving public transportation, is a great fan of the Metro system,
and she encourages incentives to get people out of their cars by
advocating car pooling. She favors the preservation of green space,
both large areas of park land, and smaller, stretches of wildness
within urban areas.
Deborah believes that we live on a planet with a fragile
environment, and we must protect it. Although politicians are generally
reluctant to talk about it, Deborah believes that we must address the
issue of the effect of world wide population growth on the Earth's
environment. She believes that we must engage in a global effort to
educate the world's citizens about the dangers of overpopulation, and
about what people can do in their own lives with regard to this issue.
Birth control information and devices must be widely available,
throughout the world. We must respect the cultural and historical
reasons that people in some parts of the world choose to have large
families. But at the same time, we need to stress the advantages of
keeping families small.
To some extent, a natural education process regarding the issue of
population growth has already occurred in most of the "developed"
world. As a society shifts from an agrarian to an urban one, people
realize that an extra child, once an extra hand to harvest the crops,
becomes an extra mouth to feed, and extra body to house. But in many
Third world countries, this shift has not yet occurred, or is in the
process of occurring. As we, the richest nation, do what we can to
help the poor nations lift themselves out of poverty, we must also
share with the Third world countries what we have learned from the
mistakes we have made. One of our mistakes has been that for a long
time, we ignored the detrimental effects of population growth, and
another is that in our zeal to achieve the "better" more urban and
comfortable life style, we have allowed corporate polluters and real
estate developers to squander our limited and precious environment.
These forces continue in our own nation, and we must be vigilant in our
efforts to protect our fragile environment from these destructive
forces.
Deborah drew the frogs on this page to illustrate her love and
concern for the Earth's fragile environment. Watch this page for her
notes and
comments about environmental issues.
Montgomery
County Sierra Club Group
the Greater Bethesda Chevy Chase
Coalition.