Hazel Chandler has lived climate change. She won't stop fighting it until the bitter end

This is part of a monthly series highlighting Arizona’s climate leaders and answering readers’ climate-related questions. The stories, which appear in print and online the first Sunday of the month, aim to help to connect and inspire Arizonans who care about protecting a livable climate and may be struggling to find hope in that effort lately. You can nominate an Arizona climate leader for a story or ask a question by filling out the form at https://forms.gle/QCCxBPSHGy1bUJQ99.

In the 1950s, American industry was booming. After years of rationing during World War II, consumer demand for larger houses and all the exciting new electronics and homewares to furnish them with was insatiable. Domestic factories had been spared damage in the global conflict. So as the soldiers returned home, the factories fired all the way up and pumped out products at record rates.

Hazel Chandler, most recently of Phoenix, was a preteen living in northeastern Oregon at the time. Born the same month the war officially ended, she witnessed how this manufacturing surge also pumped its byproducts directly into America’s water and air. The contamination of essential natural resources triggered not only a swelling middle class but a new wave of health conditions, including her own lifelong battle with respiratory illness.

Backlash to this in the 1960s, as Chandler entered adulthood and relocated to San Diego with her first husband, brought the United States into its environmental activism era. No longer, it seemed, would Americans accept air that burned the lungs and rivers so polluted they caught on fire for the thrill of fast fashion and disposable gadgets. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring” chronicled both the harms of widespread pesticide use and this cultural shift.

In 1969, Chandler was nursing her first-born and already immersed in the fight for cleaner air in the San Diego basin when a friend handed her a different publication.

“What it said, basically, was that there’s this thing called global warming and if we don’t do something to totally change it by 2050 or 2100, our planet would be unlivable,” she told The Arizona Republic.

The next year, 1970, saw the birth of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the passage of the Clean Air Act and the first Earth Day celebration — all under the guidance of Republican President Richard Nixon. Two years later, the Clean Water Act passed.

Chandler was there for it all. While working at a preschool nursery and toting around her own toddler, she helped put together informational booths for the first Earth Day so others could learn about the environmental cause.

“We spread it over, I think, a full week, so people had a lot of opportunities to experience some different ideas,” she said. “I had already been organizing around air pollution and pollution causes in general for three years before that. But that was the start of my climate change work.”

In the 1980s, thanks in part to events like these, the general public started becoming aware of the science on how burning fossil fuels for energy was causing changes in the atmosphere that led to increased temperatures and more chaotic storms. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before Congress about this evidence and the risks it entailed. Republican George H.W. Bush listened, and became the first American president to acknowledge the reality of climate change and take steps toward government-led solutions.

After that, Chandler said, the cover-up started.

“There were several articles in the newspapers about this global warming,” she said. “I think that’s when fossil fuel companies really decided they had to do a major cover-up or they were going to be out of business.”

And that’s when her lifelong commitment to working on behalf of the environment got a lot more complicated.

“I should have realized then that it was an interrelated problem,” she told The Republic in a somber, reflective tone. “It wasn’t just fossil fuel companies. It was the lack of action that was being taken by big businesses as well as individuals. Although individuals can only do very little, we could maybe have done more with the way we purchase things that would have made a difference.”

More from the series: Finding friendship and purpose in a common climate enemy: Ojas Sanghi leads the way

The clarity of America’s anti-pollution mission, she explained, started slipping in the 1990s as companies seeking to muddy the science and secure their profits introduced misinformation and climate doubt into the conversation.

“Some of the legislation got rolled back during the ’90s and early 2000s and we lost some ground then,” she said. “Then as we moved into the first Trump term, it felt like every resolution and everything I have worked on all my life was suddenly thrown in the toilet and flushed away. Pollution controls disappearing, regulations disappearing.”

“It’s more than I can take watching what’s happening now. All of these things we worked so hard on are just being destroyed,” she continued. “Trump is doing more faster this time for sure. During his first administration, there still were some blocks because he did not have both the House and the Senate. Now it’s really hard to do anything to stop him.”

Nevertheless, at nearly 80 years old and now facing down a terminal cancer diagnosis that she can’t help but feel is related to breathing so much polluted air, Chandler is still doing everything she can. She testified last month at the EPA’s hearing on the Trump administration’s attempted repeal of the 2009 endangerment finding, which classified climate pollution as a risk to human health and authorized the federal government to regulate it.

“It took so much effort to get the EPA endangerment finding enacted in the first place,” she said. “There’s no words. It’s appalling. And there’s something different now. It doesn’t feel like they’re going to listen to the public.”

This hopelessness adds a harsh tinge to the closing chapter of a lifetime spent successfully advocating for a protected environment. But as she spends her final days in hospice watching hummingbirds flit around in the cleaner, cooler air of Prescott from her daughter’s porch, the legacy Chandler leaves may well outlast any one law or administration.

Many in Arizona are likely to remember Chandler, in her bright red Moms Clean Air Force shirt, as a staple at activism events ever since she moved to the Phoenix area in 1977 — back when, she recalled, its suburban roads were mostly dirt and it was still cool enough for children to play outside on summer evenings. The more recent image of her pulling an oven mitt out of her purse before grabbing the scalding-hot metal railing to descend the stairs into the Arizona Capitol’s protest space at Wesley Bowlin Memorial Plaza will be a treasured memory for those who joined her there.

More: Trump plan to deregulate climate pollution could make Arizona hotter, drier and more fiery

The changes she brought during the 1980s, while raising her own children, to child care and health care licensing as an employee of the Arizona Department of Health Services endure. Her work with Phoenix Children’s Hospital to improve air quality helped bring Maricopa County into compliance in the 2000s. And her post-retirement engagement with the Union of Concerned Scientists, Moms Clean Air Force and Elders Climate Action, which her daughter Jen Chandler now runs, set in stone some cultural foundations for science and the environment that will be difficult to erode.

Reader climate Q&A series: Reader Q&A: Has climate change really made wildfires and storms worse and more frequent?

In writing, Hazel Chandler’s passionate activism and personal health struggle has been chronicled by People Magazine. Her commitment to future generations as a “climate grannie” has been covered by The 19th News.

Within the past month, Arizona leaders have also recognized her contributions to public and environmental health in the form of a commendation from Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and a proclamation from Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego declaring Sept. 1, 2025, as “Hazel Chandler Day.”

After decades of fighting a nonstop war for basic access to a healthful existence only to have one’s own life cut short by excessive pollution, most people would probably celebrate a day named in their honor by resting and reflecting on a job well done, especially considering all the corporate and political forces working against her.

Not Hazel.

“I think the thing that is so important is that the clock is ticking,” Chandler told The Republic, drawing from vanishing energy reserves to finish out the long interview. “We can’t hand the kids a totally destroyed world. We have to stand up, we have to get in line, we have to talk to everyone we know and we have to insist that we take our own steps to help. I started working on this 60 years ago. And I will be working on it until my last breath, whenever that is.”

Joan Meiners is the climate news and storytelling reporter at The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Her award-winning work has also appeared in Discover Magazine, National Geographic, ProPublica and the Washington Post Magazine. Before becoming a journalist, she completed a doctorate in ecology with a focus on native bees. Follow Joan on Twitter at @beecycles, on Bluesky @joanmeiners.bsky.social or email her at joan.meiners@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Climate activist Hazel Chandler has been fighting most of her life