To the Editor:

Princetonians should be proud to accept responsibility for doing as a municipality what the federal government has spurned: the Paris Accord of 2015. “Climate Mayors,” including our Mayor Liz Lempert, are now 187 mayors representing 52 million Americans. They have all stated a commitment to “adopt, honor, and uphold the commitments to the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement.”

This group is spearheaded by Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles. The governors of California, Washington, and New York have initiated a separate but parallel group, all of them aiming to hold global warming to not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius annually and to reduce carbon emissions annually as well.

At least nine states have joined with these cities to resist the follies at the top of the federal heap. These states include Massachusetts, California, Oregon, New York, Colorado, Washington, Connecticut, Virginia, and Rhode Island as, night by night, more officials choose to oppose by bathing their capital buildings in green, as Paris did on the first night of this massive failure for the planet.

We ask Princetonians to follow Mayor Lempert’s lead and commitment to slowing the speed of disastrous climate change and global warming. As the noted anthropologist Jane Goodall has recently said, we must have time to invent solutions to the problems we have haplessly made since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We live in what has been called “the Anthropocene Epoch”: as homo sapiens we have the power to destroy ourselves and everything else on our globe; as Elizabeth Kolbert has written in The Sixth Extinction (2014), no living creature before us has ever had that power. To the fullest extent possible, Princetonians must heed the strictures of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, and many other comparable groups in the U.S.

We have great confidence in Mayor Lempert, Princeton Council, and Sustainable Princeton to lead us all in understanding what we must do next, and all the time.

Sophie Glovier,

Drakes Corner Road 

Heidi Fictenbaum,

Carnahan Place 

Daniel A. Harris,

Dodds Lane 

Grace L. Sinden,

Ridgeview Circle

Matthew Wasserman,

Meadowbrook Drive