By: Karin Stein, Iowa Field Organizer, Moms Clean Air Force
Date: August 21, 2025
About: Environmental Protection Agency Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194
To: Environmental Protection Agency
My name is Karin Stein. I am Iowa Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force. Today, I’d like to speak from the heart, because I love this planet deeply and I love the three amazing human beings I brought into it. Being a mother is what matters most to me, even now that my daughters are adults.
I have an advanced degree in plant science, but I chose to become a professional musician and have been so for 25 years. I describe myself as a South American girl, a Central American teenager, and a North American adult, because I was born and raised in Colombia, spent my teenage years in Costa Rica, and received a college scholarship to study in Iowa, which has been my primary place of residence since college.
Because I am a farmer’s daughter and grew up in remote areas of Colombia and Costa Rica, I have had the opportunity to observe small and large changes in the natural environment all over the Americas, continuously, for 63 years. The changes I have seen in my life are severe and devastating.
When I was little, the scientific community was beginning to sound the alarm to the public about human-induced climate change, but I grew up not yet seeing all the extreme floods or droughts, the fires, the displaced people, or the pollution levels which my daughters now have to see daily, either directly or in the news.
Nowadays, I see not only increasingly destructive and frequent storms in Iowa that cost billions of dollars in damage, but I see devastating droughts in my original homeland in eastern Colombia that are threatening the livelihoods of my family members there, and I see changed rain patterns—attributed by scientists to climate change-- that have led to a significant reduction in biodiversity in the region in Costa Rica where my siblings and I continue to farm and protect the rainforest against increasing odds.
My three daughters are in their early thirties, and they have all but decided against bringing children into this world, in large part because of their concern about increasingly frequent climate disasters. In their short years, my daughters have known several friends whose family farms and lives were broken by historic floods along the Missouri or Mississippi or their tributaries. They expect the next derecho storm to happen not once every ten or fifteen years, but now every 3 or 4 years.
I strongly oppose EPA’s proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding and climate pollution limits for tailpipes. I will likely not have biological grandchildren, but that doesn’t make me less of a grandmother to any current or future children born on Earth. For my children and yours, please protect the Endangerment Finding.
Thank you.