Let's Row Together

She's my inspiration in those moments when I wonder if people can push up against immensely powerful forces and change the world. Zeyneb Magavi shows we can.

Memory is a funny thing. With what it stores and what it sends away.

Like my indelible memory still stored of an April afternoon from about a decade ago.

Nothing momentous happened. Or so it seemed that day.

But today I can still replay those 15 minutes in minutely crisp detail.

There we were, two moms, one of them, Zeyneb Magavi, sitting cross-legged across from me on the bed. She and I had been part of a larger meeting, but after the two of us left to find a quieter place to talk after each of us volunteered to write a story for our local newspaper. Our story would be about the action that we, as mom climate activists, would soon take to alert neighbors to the gas leaking near their homes.

The leaks were spewing methane from below our streets where gas pipes are buried.

Okay, let’s pause: Think of methane¹ as carbon dioxide on steroids, a gas that is super-heating our atmosphere, seeping – sometimes bursting – out of old, rusty, cracked and broken gas pipes buried under our roads. It kills trees with the misfortune of being near a leak. It’s harmful to our health, too, along with the Earth’s. (Yes, methane leaks at fracking sites, too, but we’ll leave that for another day.)

As we sit together, Zeyneb is the one spewing ideas at such a rapid pace that my brain is taxed trying to retain them. But try I must since I’m the one writing our story’s first draft and gas leaks isn’t something I know much about. All I know is what Zeyneb had taught me in slides she’d shown the MOF moms about Cambridge’s gas leaks and the harm they cause.

Mapping MA cities’ and towns’ gas leaks was done by Audrey Schulman, a novelist who co-founded HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team)as her response to hearing about gas leaks. She mapped them after activists convinced the MA state legislature to pass a law requiring the state utilities to make public the location and description of all of their gas leaks. Her easy-to-use informational maps are based on the utilities’ data. For a valuable timeline of HEET’s activities from then to now, go here.

A slide shared with us by Audrey Schulman, then Executive Director of HEET

On this particular spring afternoon, Zeyneb and I were at a Cambridge Mothers Out Front [MOF] meeting² with our grass-roots gang of moms strategizing our Gas Leaks Decorating Campaign. Already, moms and allies in Boston had thrown a birthday party for a 30-year-old-gas leak, an occasion that The Boston Globe deemed worthy of a story.

The gas utilities noticed.

Now it was the Cambridge moms’ turn!

Our plan had us walking sidewalks throughout the city to mark the location of EVERY gas leak in our city with a colorful and informative posters nobody could miss. (After Cambridge, other MOF cities and towns in Eastern MA took similar attention-grabbing actions, while statewide MOF moms sent postcards to state legislators and city councilors telling them the time had come to stop these gas leaks — and, in time, also to stop gas.

Sure enough, the residents noticed and followed our key instruction: Call your gas utility and demand that your gas leak be fixed.

Phone calls poured into utilities. Moms fighting climate change had their attention.

This served as an invaluable lesson for me: a mom who knew nothing about gas leaks only a month or two earlier could learn, then act with others who shared her climate concerns, and together we drew needed attention to an issue that well-paid lobbyists did their best to make sure legislators ignored.

In doing this, we created momentum for change.

Without pressure, the utilities were not going to change their profit-making status quo.

Only we – the people they serve – could force them to do so.

Sound familiar?

I thought it might.

YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

Our action beckoned a leader to emerge, a woman who has the vision, persistence, and temperament to push ahead and bring us with her.

That Zeyneb emerged as that leader is magnificent.

What she’s achieved is miraculous.

The woman who sat crosslegged with me on that April afternoon now advises the World Bank on this an innovative energy source — networked geothermal. (She travels the world to share this technology and this morning she told me that there are World Bank networked geothermal projects initiated in four nations for up to 10,000 buildings, with more expected to follow.)

Zeyneb has a seat at this table, as she does at many others, because she is largely responsible for envisioning the breakthroughs that made this a viable option for utility companies to employ – and then convincing utilities to do it.

An ongoing Massachusetts’ demonstration project that Zeyneb championed³ is the first U.S. trial of this technology that a major utility is doing in a neighborhood. This Framingham neighborhood (36 buildings – 24 residential and five commercial) was selected, in part, due to it being an “environmental justice” community with a 57% minority population and an average household income of $20,400. To install its heat-pump-driven thermal network, the utility, Eversource, drilled 90 holes deep into the Earth from which it draws geothermal energy into its mile-long loop of plastic piping buried 5 to 10 feet underground.

What is being learned from this pilot is being shared widely by HEET, and its lessons are already charting a new course by giving the gas utility industry an economically viable way to transition off methane gas while preserving jobs.

What makes Zeyneb a successful leader is not only her brainpower — though that is huge – along with her immense vision, but her recognition of the essentialness of building relationships of trust with those who are powerful adversaries.

In the early days, the antagonists were Zeyneb and the other MOF moms fighting climate change and the gas industry and the gas utility executives who wanted to be left alone to do things as they’d always done. It was working for them. Why change?

But after MOF’s effective gas leaks protest campaigns, their social media bursts aimed at gas utility leaders, and local media stories about the harm being done by gas leaks, Zeyneb felt the time was right to request a meeting with utility executives.

In December 2016, their first meeting happened.

The story I’m sharing now starts with that meeting but my telling is much abridged due to space. So, I hope you are intrigued enough to take time – it’s not long – to hear Zeyneb describe her unlikely journey from MOF activist to the executive director of HEET, from Harvard School of Public Health student (then) to World Bank advisor.

In her November 2022 TEDX Boston talk, she takes us some of the way.

I’m turning to an August 2024 story about Zeyneb, written by my friend, Doug Struck, for the Christian Science Monitor (CSM). It will carry us forward.

First, let’s set the scene; this story opens as three MOF moms (one of them Zeyneb) are seated in an office with gas utility executives. [When these executives agreed to this meeting, the utility company asked its president if he wanted to have bodyguards there with him. He’d declined.]

“Zeyneb Magavi and each of the other mothers calmly explained their passion to Mr. [Bill] Ackley [Eversource’s gas utility president]: “I have three kids,” Ms. Magavi said. “I’m worried about climate change. And I’m worried about their future.”

When the women finished, there was a pause. Mr. Ackley broke the silence. “I have three kids, too. I’m worried about climate change. And I am also worried about their future.”

“That was our little sliver of common ground that we started to grow,” recalls Ms. Magavi.

Mr. Ackley agrees. “They came into that first meeting reaching across with their hands. It was about respect,” he marvels.

“It was the start of an unlikely partnership that eventually became an audacious idea: to use heat from underground – instead of natural gas – to both cool and heat homes and buildings.”

In October 2017, at a day-long conference at MIT, gas utility executives (from the 3 major MA utilities] came together with grass-roots climate activists to share ideas.

“We had people in the room who have been arrested protesting gas pipelines and people who are constructing gas pipelines,” Ms. Magavi recounts. Eventually they agreed to jointly back state regulations to speed repair of the biggest leaks, which would significantly cut the methane emissions.

Back home, Zeyneb was absorbing all she could read about how to solve problems posed by our antiquated gas system. That’s when she came upon geothermal energy. In itself, tapping into the Earth’s heat isn’t a new idea; people have done it since the times of the Greeks and Romans What Zeyneb realized is that “no one had asked a utility to do it for a whole neighborhood of customers.”

So, she telephoned Bill Ackley.

(Returning to the CSM story, at the moment that Zeyneb tells Ackley about her idea of networking geothermal energy to heat and cool buildings.)

“I think our relationship is at a point where I can make another proposal to you,” she told the utility chief. “But you gotta take a deep breath.”

Mr. Akley listened to Ms. Magavi’s pitch. “I think she was shocked I was not running away,” he says. “I was really intrigued. I see this as being a huge game changer if we can make it affordable.”

Watch Out! Zeyneb Has More IDEAS

And she’s developing them, even as networked geothermal spreads across the U.S. and the world.

“On Dec. 3, 2024, [MA] Governor Maura Healey signed legislation allowing gas utilities to move beyond pilot projects by granting them permission to provide geothermal heating and cooling as an alternative to gas throughout their service areas. Seven other states have recently passed similar legislation, and countries across central Asia could soon build similar projects.

“It’s taking root across the country, across the world,” Magavi said at a recent talk. “We have a once in many lifetimes opportunity to transform an industry, to build a better energy system and a more sustainable world.” [Boston Globe, Jan. 7, 2025]

Her current idea:

THE SEA: The ocean absorbs a tremendous amount of heat from our burning of fossil fuels, so the obvious question (to her) is why not use this heat to warm and cool our coastal cities.

“Right now we’re calculating how many large industrial heat pumps we’d have to put under the docks in Boston Harbor to restore it to a temperature the lobsters like, and how much of Boston could we heat with that?” Zeyneb mused to one writer.

A bit … and I mean just a bit about Locker Room Talk and my forthcoming events

Here is where I’ll be. Hope I’ll see you along the way.

Tucson Book Festival; 3 appearances, March 15-16

1. Humans (human activities) emit roughly 400 million metric tons of methane a year: as much as two-thirds of all methane entering our atmosphere.

2. Two moms founded Mothers Out Front in 2013 to bring mothers (and allies) together to take actions to protect all children from the climate crisis that impacts their health today and a livable climate for them tomorrow.

3. Zeyneb joined HEET in 2016 and is now its executive director.