March 2020 | Rolling Stone | 61
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AT 8 A.M. ON A FRIGID JANUARY
morning, Maya Rockeymoore
Cummings, 49-year-old widow of
legendary Rep. Elijah Cummings,
stands on a busy street corner in
Baltimore, enthusiastically waving at passing cars
next to a campaign sign with her name on it. “I’m
not riding in on my husband’s coattails,” she says.
“I’m running hard and I’m running to win.”
Just weeks after the congressman passed away
in October, Maya underwent a preventive double
mastectomy. She took only three weeks to recover
before fully immersing herself in the race for her
husband’s seat — which has no fewer than 32 other
contenders in the primary. “That month was mind-
numbingly painful and surreal,” she says. “But
never did I say I’m gonna toss it all in.”
Cummings, a Ph.D. in political science and the
former chair of the state Democratic Party in Mary-
land, says she inherited a passion for social jus-
tice from her parents, who grew up in a small West
Texas town in the Jim Crow South, the third gener-
ation out of slavery. “The thought of anyone filling
Elijah’s shoes is daunting,” she says. But “we are at a
critical time. Trump has unleashed a Pandora’s box
of hate that covers immigrants, religious minorities,
people of color. And I just believe our country is
better than that.” LAURA BASSETTMaya
Rockeymoore
Cummings
A candidate sets aside her grief
to take her fight to CongressKATHARINE
HAYHOE
An evangelical scientist with a mission to spread the word
on the climate crisis and find solutions for the road aheadAS AN AT-
mospheric
scientist,
Katharine
Hayhoe
understands the realities of
climate change more deeply
than most. As an evangelical
Christian atmospheric
scientist, she understands
her religious brethren — and
their propensity to doubt
man-made climate change —
probably better than anyone.
So she’s made it her mission
to help them see the light.
For her, science and faith
have never been at odds: “I
grew up with the idea that sci-
ence was the coolest thing you
could study. Every summer
my dad would have a project
for us: wildflowers, bird calls,
learning about fractals.”
The Toronto-born daugh-
ter of missionaries and the
wife of a pastor in Lubbock,
Texas, Hayhoe has had a life-
long master class in the art
of evangelizing. But she’s not
so much trying to convert
people on climate change as
show them that they already
care. “They just haven’t con-
nected the dots,” she says.
She’s found the skepticism
usually isn’t rooted in theolo-
gy, but politics. “I’ve literally
had people say, ‘I agree with
everything you say, but if I
agree with you, then I would
agree with Al Gore. I could
never agree with Al Gore,’ ”
she says. Which is why she is
not only director of the Cli-
mate Center at Texas Tech
University, but also a mem-ber of its poli-sci department.
“It’s become so politicized by
those who control the power
and wealth in this world.”
She’s been inundated with
so much hate mail she con-
cealed her email address on-
line, but the hate just shifted
to social media, where she
blocks as many as 100 peo-
ple a day. It hasn’t slowed
her down. No speaking en-mark 2006 study of Cali-
fornia that compared two
futures: one in which the
state weened itself off of fossil
fuels and one where it didn’t,
“really bringing it down to
the nitty- gritty,” she says, on
water supply, agriculture,
air quality. It prompted the
state to pass the nation’s first
cap on greenhouse-gas emis-
sions. “Hope comes from
acting,” she says. “So I’m act-
ing myself.” PHOEBE NEIDLROCKEYMOORE-CUMMINGS BY Jared Soaresgagement is too small: liv-
ing rooms, Rotary Clubs, tiny
Baptist colleges. She does
about 80 percent of her talks
online to lower her carbon
footprint. “She gets a lot of
credit for being a wonder-
ful communicator,” says Kate
Marvel, a climate scien tist
with NASA’s Goddard Insti-
tute for Space Studies. “But
she’s also a brilliant scientist.”
Hayhoe was a lead author
on the past three National Cli-mate Assessments and spe-
cializes in translating climate
projections into actionable in-
formation on the local level,
whether it’s for a city water
board or a group of farmers.
“The finer scale you go to,
the more you’re able to talk
about visible, tangible solu-
tions, and the easier it is to
bypass the politicized rheto-
ric,” she says. She led a land-