Matt Petersen's blog

An Opportunity to Act

Submitted by Matt Petersen on July 23, 2007 - 5:15am

Matt Petersen is President of Global Green USA and appears in The 11th Hour.

I was stirred to respond to Hurricane Katrina and Rita, in the days after watching the horrors unfold on August 29, 2005 in New Orleans on CNN. I thought what could we do? These events were in part made worse by human action and inaction - global warming had caused the sea levels to rise making storm surge worse, and rising sea temperature likely fueled the intensity of the storm, but neglect of the levees, and the human condition made bare by the storm: poverty, classism, racism, and much more, also contributed.

The hurricanes exposed inaction - inaction by our government. We decided we could adopt a nonprofit, then decided to try to adopt a neighborhood, green thousands of homes and a handful of schools, and take other measures to help make the Gulf Coast a shining example of the solutions to global warming and a response to its ravages. I wrote this article with Leonardo DiCaprio a month after the storm, it ran in major papers around the world.

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