For Immediate Release
Contact: Fred Balzac, 518-588-7275, fredbalzac@aol.com; Dr. Curt Gervich, SUNY Plattsburgh Dept. of Environmental Science, 540-818-1896 (cell), 518-564-4030 (office), cgerv001@plattsburgh.edu
Public Forum at SUNY Plattsburgh with Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins to Focus on the “Green” Green New Deal
The Nov. 21 forum, which will feature a student panel & candidate Q&A with the audience, is an outgrowth of an innovative PSU class, “Environmental Politics and the 2020 Presidential Campaign”
PLATTSBURGH, NY—Environmentally focused SUNY Plattsburgh students who signed up for the Fall 2019 course titled “Environmental Politics and the 2020 Presidential Campaign” likely never imagined that an actual presidential candidate would be coming to class one day, but that’s precisely what will happen when the innovative evening course meets on Thurs., November 21.
Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins will sit in on the class and talk with the students and their professor, Dr. Curt Gervich, about Hawkins’s version of the Green New Deal, the climate crisis and other environmental issues. Immediately following the abbreviated class session, the discus-sion will gravitate to a public forum at 7 pm in 200 Yokum Hall open to community members and other SUNY Plattsburgh students, faculty and staff. There, Hawkins will deliver an in-depth presentation on what he calls the “real” Green New Deal—differentiating it from what many of the Democratic presidential candidates are currently calling for—while tackling other pressing environmental, socio-economic and foreign-policy issues facing the nation and the planet.
Hawkins is a resident of Syracuse whose three runs for Governor of New York in 2010, 2014 and 2018 put and kept the Green Party on the state ballot. A co-founder of the Green Party in the United States, he helped write the national Green Party platform plank in 2000 that was the origin of the Green New Deal and, in fact, Howie was the first U.S. candidate to run on a fully developed Green New Deal, in 2010—combining an Economic Bill of Rights with a call for going to 100% clean, renewable energy (i.e., no fossil fuels) by 2030.
Admission to the public forum is free, and all are welcome. To learn more about the event, please contact Fred Balzac—himself a student in the “Environmental Politics” class—at 518-588-7275 and/or fredbalzac@aol.com or Dr. Gervich at 540-818-1896 (cell), 518-564-4030 (office), cgerv001@plattsburgh.edu.
Media availability: A press conference with Howie Hawkins is planned for Thu., 11/21, tentatively at 11 am (location TBD); please save the date, details to follow. Howie has some availability for advance phone interviews—contact Fred Balzac at 518-588-7275 or fredbalzac@aol.com for help scheduling one. All North Country media outlets are invited to cover the 11/21 public forum at 7 pm in Yokum 200 on the campus of SUNY Plattsburgh.
