Greg Smith, Subject Matter Expert, Community Engagement & Mobilization
Greg Smith serves as our liaison with grassroots organizations such as Sustainable Hyattsville, Neighbors of the Northwest Branch, and Community Research. He conducts community action research on policies related to the public health and population wellbeing at the municipal and state level. Greg has worked on a range of environmental issues since the mid-1980s, mostly on the local and state levels, mostly in grassroots research, education, organizing, and advocacy, mostly in Maryland and the Washington region, but also for a few years in North Carolina. That work has often entailed working with others to fight damaging projects and policies – landfills, incinerators, interstate highways, developments in floodplains, fast food drive-throughs, etc., and policies or legislation that promote them or ignore their impacts – while creating or maintaining space for better alternatives – zero waste, sane land use, more and better public transit and bicycle and pedestrian access, and planning and permitting decisions that take climate change, public health, and economic, social, and
environmental justice and resiliency, food equity, and other critical factors into account.
Since 2018, Greg has been engaged in grassroots campaigns to stop damaging projects and policies related to planning, zoning, and land use in Prince George’s County. One of those campaigns has been Sustainable Hyattsville’s eight year effort to protect and ecologically restore degraded land that is in floodplain of the Anacostia River, adjacent to existing county and city parks, and within walking distance of communities that have high percentages of immigrants and of low- to lower middle- income residents. Sustainable Hyattsville has challenged the developer’s applications for land use approvals and environmental permits, held the developer accountable for violating environmental laws, educated the public and public decision makers about climate change, centered public health and green space equity, and promoted a vision of restoring that land to serve the community, protect local streams, and enhance climate resilience.
In the fall of 2024, Greg activated and coordinated a successful campaign to stop legislation that would have eliminated the last remaining land use review required for data centers in Prince George’s County. He is now helping to coordinate and support efforts to stop the construction of an approved hyperscale data center in the midst of an already over-burdened community, and to ensure that the County conducts a robust, transparent study of data centers’ impacts and enacts policies that: protect public health and the environment; protect residents and local businesses from rising energy costs driven by data centers’ voracious energy demands; and promote a diverse, sustainable local economy.
Most recently, from 2023 to 2025, Greg helped to coordinate and lift up a successful grassroots campaign to stop the construction of a high-volume McDonald’s drive- through next to one of the most dangerous intersections in Prince George’s County, in the midst of : intense urban heat island; an area that the County classifies as “food swamp”; and an over-burdened, under-served community that matches many of the socio-economic, environmental, and health criteria that typify environmental justice communities.
In addition to or as part of his environmental work, Greg has coordinated campaigns to enhance public access to electronic records by amending Maryland’s Public Information Act, protect key Maryland’s Public Ethics Law provisions that apply to zoning and land use decisions in Prince George’s County, and expose developers’ efforts to sway Prince George’s County’s 2022 elections through a deep-pocketed SuperPAC.
