Hope, But Demand Justice

Pat Hynes, formally known as H. Patricia Hynes, is a retired environmental engineer who worked as a Superfund engineer for EPA New England and as a professor of Environmental Health on multi-racial and low-income issues of the urban environment, including lead poisoning, asthma, and the indoor environmentin public housing, community gardens, and urban agriculture; environmental justice; and feminism at Boston University School of Public Health.For her Superfund work and her writing, teaching, and community-based research projects at Boston University, she haswon national, regional, and local awards from US EPA, American Public Health Association, Boston University School of Public Health, Massachusetts Commission of Conservation Commissions, Boston Natural Areas Network, and her alma maters Chestnut Hill College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.She is the author and editor of seven books, including The Recurring Silent Spring, nominated for the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. She won the 1996 National Arbor Day Foundation Book Award for A Patch of Eden, her book on community gardens in inner cities.Pat writes and speaks on the health effects of war and militarism on society and, in particular, on women. She also writes about climate justice, renewable energy, and hazards of nuclear weapons. As former director from 2010 to 2020 and then board member of Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in western Massachusetts, she is committed to building the Traprock Center as a collaborative educational and project-based center in peace and justice leadership for activists, educators, and students.She has written many articles on nuclear power and nuclear weapons, climate change, war and militarism, peace and the effects of war on women and the environment published nationally and internationally in journals, books, newspapers, and online.Pat Hynes conducted an investigation in 2014 of the ongoing legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam and created the Vietnam Peace Village Project to support scholarships for third- and fourth-generation Agent Orange victims and also 10,000 Trees for Vietnam: an Environmental Justice Collaboration to support tree planting in areas de-forested by Agent Orange.Since 2018, she has sustained a partnership with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, WILPF, Sierra Leone branch that includes providing children's books on peace, social justice, and environment for their use in schools and computer supplies for WILPF Sierra Leone's new office to help launch their countrywide work; a Sports for Peace initiative with youth; a COVID-19 education effort; and the Respect for Girls program. With WILPF US, she is co-developing a framework for Feminist Foreign Policy.

The refusal of Randy Kehler and his wife, Betsy Corner, since 1977 to pay taxes for military expenditures resulted in the 1989 ederal seizure and eventual legal forfeiture of their house in Colrain, Massachusetts, detailed in the 1997 Academy-Award-nominated documentary, Act of Conscience.In the 1980s, Kehler served as executive director of the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. He served twenty-two months in jail in the 1960s for refusing induction into the United States war in Vietnam.He is a co-founder of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice.