Rep. Chellie Pingree, Maine Women of the Year honoree, fights for the environment

Yahoo

27-02-2025

Chellie Pingree is one of USA TODAY's Women of the Year, a recognition of women who have made a significant impact in their communities and across the country. The program launched in 2022 as a continuation of Women of the Century, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Meet this year's honorees at womenoftheyear.usatoday.com.
PORTLAND, Maine — In 2002, then state senator Chellie Pingree lost the race to represent Maine in the U.S. Senate to incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and thought her career was nearly over.
'There was that moment of not having any money, having lost my election, didn't have a job," she said, recalling feeling like it was a "crisis point. I really didn't know where I would go."
Twenty-two years later, she has just been re-elected to her ninth term in the United States House of Representatives representing Maine's First District, which covers the southern, coastal part of the state.
Pingree, who is the ranking member on the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of Appropriation, focuses much of her work on agriculture and the environment. Last session, she introduced over a dozen bills addressing issues facing coastal communities to agricultural concerns like food waste, as well as launched her 'Slow Fashion Caucus' to curb the fashion industry's carbon emissions.
'In Maine, we care deeply about our environment,' she said. With a district largely along the seacoast, her constituents are particularly affected by rising tides and storms. Maine is also home to many natural resource-based industries like fishing, farming and logging, all of which have been impacted by climate change.
The past couple years, she's fought back against budget cuts made by the Republican-controlled House to the Environmental Protection Agency, succeeding in limiting the severity, and brought her Republican colleagues to Maine to encourage the creation of bipartisan legislation on agriculture.
The fight isn't close to over; Pingree said she is 'tremendously worried' about Congress' ability to address climate change in Donald Trump's second term as president. He has promised to 'drill, drill, drill' and has seemed uninterested in investing in renewable energy.
But she's not about to give up either, on climate change action or other priorities.
'If I was a doctor, you wouldn't be able to say, 'Just send me the patients who are going to be healthy, because I don't want anybody who's sick,'' she said. 'Politics is really the same way. You can't say, 'I only want to serve when I'm in the majority.''
In recognition of her leadership in environmental and agricultural issues and her long history of serving the people of Maine, Chellie Pingree is Maine's USA TODAY Women of the Year honoree.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I got my start in elected office in a very tiny town. My hometown, North Haven, is only just over 400 people. I started out going to town meetings, seeing how openly people were willing to argue with each other to support the things that they thought were important, and how many people in town ran for office.
I continued to be inspired by Maine's many small towns, or people who stand up every day to run for a local office. Sometimes these are the hardest jobs, because if there's a controversy, it's a local controversy. It's your next-door neighbor, it's the person you see at the grocery store. Especially in our sort of fractured political environment in Washington, I think there are good lessons to be learned. If you have a dispute in your small town, you just don't pack up and move away. Generally, you duke it out, and you try to work it out.
That's the amazing thing about this kind of work is those moments can be very different. I've had some proud moments on the House floor where I have out argued a colleague, a climate change denier who didn't know what they were talking about, and I could tell in the end that I made a much better argument than them and maybe even won the amendment.
I've also had a handful of opportunities where I've gotten to pin the medals on a military vet. You're talking to somebody who served in World War II, or the Vietnam War, or other times who never received the recognition that they deserved. That's a teary moment.
Courage is absolutely about speaking up for what you think is right. The courage to say what you believe, to know that you're going to take criticism for it — you never have everybody always agreeing with you, but you have to have a moral compass.
It's the very simple question about, what's the right thing here? What's the right thing to do?
Things can be tough in this job. You can win elections; you can lose elections. You can make a mistake. But being able to sort of recenter yourself and be around the people that you care about or that you know will ground you in the things that are normal in life really helps.
I have a feeling I'm about to approach it.
I think in politics, the lowest moments are often when you really face those big questions of, is our democracy going off the rails? When you see those things falling apart at times, you have to remind yourself that we're there to try to make sure that we fix our problems and that we become a better nation.
Barring disease or accidental death, you're going to live a long life. I had children young, so there were many times when I thought I missed the opportunity to have a career. I came to realize you get many stages of your life, and you get many opportunities. It's never too late to try anything. Absolutely enjoy what you're doing when you're doing it, and recognize that in three years, you might be doing something totally different again. So don't worry about it. Don't panic.
The other thing I always tell people, if you ever have a break, like if you get laid off from your job or take a break from your work, as long as you're financially stable and you can get by, just enjoy that period, because you're going to be working most of your life. It's very rare that you have a few months where you can slow down.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Chellie Pingree, Maine Women of Year honoree, fights for environment