In 2022, feeling hopeless about the climate crisis and the Trump administration, Donna McNamara saw Bill McKibben on MSNBC talking about Third Act and knew immediately she had to join this new organization. The first Third Act rallies Donna participated in were in Washington, D.C., one against the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the other known as the “3-21-23 Day of Action” protest against the four largest banks financing fossil fuel projects. She has happy memories of being a chant leader in front of hundreds of participants at the bank protest.
The 65-year old resident of Upper Marlboro was born in Dayton, Ohio, to a military family, and grew up in various parts of the U.S. and abroad, including California, Germany, and Springfield, Virginia. Though her family was Catholic, as an adult she found that the Episcopal Church suited her better.
With a mother who became extremely anxious about thunderstorms and snowstorms, Donna was drawn to study meteorology at the University of Virginia. After college she joined the Air Force, met her husband in Arkansas, spent time in Guam, and then completed a master’s degree in meteorology, sponsored by the Air Force, at the University of Maryland.
The Air Force assigned Donna the meteorology subspecialty of atmospheric chemistry for her degree; at the time, the world was focused on understanding how chlorofluorocarbons (used in refrigerators, air conditioners, and aerosol cans) were destroying the ozone layer. She said, “During the 1980s, ozone depletion and its causes brought concern and action across the world, culminating in the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which phased out these dangerous chemicals.”
Industry tried to fight this change and there was partisan pushback, but the world came together to ban the harmful chemicals, and President Reagan signed the treaty. Donna contrasts the way nations came together to ban chlorofluorocarbons with the difficulty in getting nations to take meaningful action to deal with the climate emergency. (The Climate Solutions podcast Audiomentary: Ozone: How to Solve an Environmental Crisis ties the ozone crisis to the current climate crisis, offering lessons learned.)
After completing 10 years with the Air Force in 1991, Donna worked as a contractor at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, as a scientific programmer in the division studying ozone.
In 1996, Donna went on to work as a contractor for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) in Suitland, as a programmer. In 2001, she became a federal employee with NESDIS, overseeing operational product generation from environmental satellites. Donna worked on fire and other land surface products, as well as products that monitored the earth’s ozone layer. In 2011, she began leading a team that distributes data and products from environmental satellites to national and state government agencies and commercial weather information companies as well as international weather forecasting organizations.
In January of this year, Donna went into semiretirement, reducing her hours by half, which has given her more time to volunteer with Third Act on democracy and climate efforts.
For many decades, Donna focused on individual actions like recycling and conservation to try to solve the problem of climate change. When she learned that fossil fuel companies promoted the concept of individual carbon footprint to divert attention away from their responsibilities, Donna became more motivated to take part in communal actions to hold those responsible for climate change accountable. (For more on Big Oil’s deceptive practices, see this University of California-Davis blog post, Big Oil Distracts from Their Carbon Footprint by Tricking You to Focus on Yours.)
Donna is proud of her three children, who all have careers that serve the public and who are climate supporters, and she’s grateful for her very supportive husband. In her spare time, Donna loves to visit and hike through nature’s beauty. Her favorite Third Act slogan is “No Time To Waste,” as we are in such a critical phase to stop fossil fuel extraction to save our beautiful, nurturing planet.