December 2025 – Sustainable Tucson

January 6, 2026 • 6:00

Join us on Zoom, Tuesday, January 6, at 6:00 pm for our Sustainability Spotlight, “The Environment in 2026: At the State Capital and Beyond.” We expect that the coming year will bring challenges to many important aspects of local and state life, especially looking at environment, health, and related concerns. The program will look ahead at what can be expected in coming months from state (and some national) legislative and administrative actions, with a focus on what will have particular impact on Tucson and Southern AZ – and what we can do.

Our panel now includes State Senator Priya Sundareshan (LD 18), Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, and Kirsten Engel, Chief, Environmental Protection Unit of the AZ Attorney General’s Office. They will preview the policies, places, and programs that Arizonans will need to protect and promote. Their complementary perspectives will give us a full picture of what we can and should do – as individuals and as an organization – to support an agenda of environmental protection and justice as we work for a sustainable future.

Following our guests’ comments, we expect a lively question & answer session, with a shared conversation on how to maintain and restore momentum on this work.

Tuesday, December 9, 6:00-7:15 pm

Join us at our December Sustainability Spotlight for a warm-up discussion on Sustainable Tucson’s emerging plans for a City-County “Infrastructure Investment Summit” in March 2026. Our guest is Dr. Edward Maibach, Distinguished Emeritus Professor at George Mason University (GMU) and the Founding Director of GMU’s Center for Climate Change Communication—a “think-and-do tank” focused on illuminating public engagement in climate change and strategies for enhancing it.

This evening is the first in a series of community conversations on investing in people and infrastructure – a creative initiative to rethink our economy by putting people and sustainability first. Ed’s opening comments will be followed by brief remarks from Matt McDonnell, Julie Hendricks, and Jessica Janecek, who will offer futher insights, leading into further discussion with each other and the audience as a whole.

Ed is a Member of the National Academy of Medicine, a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and serves on the Global Climate and Health Alliance board of directors. In 2024, he and his center were honored by the National Center for Science Education with a Friend of the Planet Award.

For a preview of Ed’s thinking, see a chapter he co-authored in the 2023 Annual Review of Earth: “Harnessing the Power of Science and Communication and Behavior Science to Enhance Society’s Response to Climate Change.

“There is nothing that physically and technologically limits us from doing it all with renewables. There are only cynical or specious arguments that say we can’t. The biggest barriers remaining have the same origin: inertia or the stubborn insistence on the current way of doing things.”
Dr. Saul Griffith, Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future (October 2021)