On the Environment

From Picture Main Street to the Form-Based Code, for the Sciarra administration, “sustainability” and “environmentalism” have come to mean deregulation and destruction. City Hall has shown a single-minded pursuit of growth at all costs, reflecting the same old attitudes that landed us in this climate crisis in the first place.

My administration would focus on true sustainability, which involves the hard daily work of preserving and nurturing what we have so that nature can flourish and our need to take from it finds balance. Northampton should be—needs to be—a progressive beacon for the nation, a model not of “scalable investment” but of how we start to turn back the damage we’ve done to this planet and live in equilibrium with our surroundings. I would look constantly for opportunities to nourish our landscape rather than removing critical heat sinks, shade, and drainage every time a tree is in the way of a developer maximizing their footprint and profit.

Northampton’s trees are a critical part of our ecosystem—and a major tourist attraction—yet anyone who has ever petitioned City Hall to try to save one knows that protections are rarely enforced (or nonexistent), even during nesting season. There are hard-won environmental regulations on the books, but without a mayoral administration interested in enforcing them, these protections disappear like a 50-foot maple into a mulching machine. In fact, Northampton has unfurled a strategy of scaling back regulations that required construction projects to limit their community footprints and environmental impacts. Since 2022, well-crafted, nature-conscious, community-minded requirements have been stripped from dozens of lots around the city to make way for high-impact, high-density housing complexes under the guise of “sustainability.”

If we have learned anything in the face of the existential threat of global warming, it is that we are not separate from nature but a part of it, and we must make sure that we are protecting our forests, our animals, our migratory birds, our wetlands, our farmlands, our trees, and the bugs and buds in own yards and gardens. My administration would understand that you can’t replace a hundred-year-old tree with a sapling. That we’re not going to bulldoze and build our way out of a climate crisis. That trying to reshape our surroundings by brute force will only weaken them to the point of collapse.

Let’s plant more flowers and fewer puff pieces in the newspaper. If elected, I would use the full force of my office and every tool available to protect this planet and prevent pollution. The people of Northampton have the hearts and drive to be a part of the solution. It’s time for a mayor of Northampton who is not part of the problem.