Highlights - Maya van Rossum - Author of “The Green Amendment: The People's Fight for a Clean, Safe, and Healthy Environment”

"So the first thing I learned is that you need to live what you believe. Whether it's environmental justice, social justice, environmental protection, do whatever you can, live your best life to try to advance that good objective goal and belief. We can all do better in our own personal lives. And that's really important. I think the other thing that I learned, my parents did it in a different way than I do it, but they did it every day - when they saw, just like when I see injustice, no matter how large or how small, they spoke up, and they did something about it. When, you know, it came to my opa, he stood up against the Nazis and did not allow them to take his sons to have to work in service to the Nazi movement. And so did my Tante Truus. My great aunt is recognized with saving on the order of 10,000 children, Jewish children, from the Nazis. With my mom, she had so many beliefs in the importance of living a good life. And so she always carried that forward. Even if it was seeing somebody behaving inappropriately in the supermarket, butting in line, or being unkind to the check register person unnecessarily, my mom was always the first to speak up and say, "Hey, don't do that!" And so I just learned from them by watching them, by being supported by them, that again, you live what you believe and when you see injustice in the world, you do what you can to address it, whether it's large or whether it's small."