Making Places and People Bloom

[This article appeared in the May 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

In 1997, Majora Carter, a native of the South Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point, moved back in with her parents to save money after graduating with a Master of Fine Arts from New York University. That’s when she learned about plans by Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration to build a waste transfer station in her community, which already suffered from severe pollution produced by nearby plants. Angry and determined, Carter organized local environmental justice groups to win the fight against the transfer station and install new public green spaces in Hunts Point.

In 2001, Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a sustainable green economy in the South Bronx through education and green jobs training. Her work won her a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2005. She has been called the “Rosa Parks of the green jobs movement.” Carter spoke with Sojourners assistant editor Jeannie Choi about what it takes to eradicate environmental injustice and why the time for a green economy is now.


Jeannie Choi: How do you get people—from community members affected by environmental injustice to investors and politicians—interested in building the green economy?


Majora Carter: People have to see their self-interest in supporting whatever it is that we’re putting out there. When I found out that the city and state planned to build a huge waste facility on our waterfront, I was really alarmed; but many people in the neighborhood weren’t because they were so used to living this way. It wasn’t until I helped make the connection between the waste facilities that were located in the community and the neighborhood’s high childhood asthma rates that people became angry. They saw their self-interest tied up with the environmental injustice in their community, and that’s when they felt the rage that I was feeling.


What other physical effects has pollution had on those living in your neighborhood?
A big clue in public health is asthma rates going up because of the intense nature of the pollution. Diabetes and obesity are also connected because communities like the South Bronx bear a lot of truck traffic. Kids are then unable to play in the streets, which means their health is at risk due to obesity and diabetes. Also, we don’t have the same access to healthy and affordable produce that wealthier places have, and so you have this “food desert.” The last of them, which I think is more onerous, are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are a byproduct of burning fossil fuels. They have been known to cause learning disabilities in young developing minds. And where are they located in high concentrations? In places like the South Bronx.

Kids living in poor communities, who are already suffering from overcrowded schools, have learning disabilities and struggle in school, and are much better candidates to go to jail rather than on to higher education.


What were the key strategies to your 2001 victory against the city’s planned waste transfer site?
Even though this happened in the South Bronx, it was going to have citywide ramifications, so we had public interest lawyers and other environmental justice groups all working together to help create a sustainable solid waste management plan that relied on borough-wide self-sufficiency.

We worked awfully close with the city because we weren’t saying that waste transfer systems should not be in anybody’s backyard. We were saying that everybody needs to handle their own waste, but that’s not the way wealthy white neighborhoods in the city were operating. So we asked ourselves, how do you create legislation that lets each borough clean up after itself?

Recently, legislation was signed that reopened waste facilities around the city so everybody handles their own waste. But there are still politicians in some of the wealthiest parts of the city who run campaigns on closing the waste facilities in their communities. To them I say, you guys produce it, why do you think somebody else should take care of it? But that’s the nature, unfortunately, of this incredibly ridiculous, hyper-consumerist culture that we live in. People want, and they don’t want to take care of it.


What are the biggest fallacies about the green economy in the mainstream media?
That poor people don’t care about the environment. That green can and should cost more, or that green always costs more. And that you can’t alleviate poverty and support the environment at the same time.
But if you look at grassroots projects that invest in poor people—like the program that I pioneered at Sustainable South Bronx called B.E.S.T. (Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training)—you can see that the same people who are written off by most segments of society can blossom in remarkable ways.
B.E.S.T. is one of the first green jobs training programs in the country, and gives folks on the fringes, like single moms, or ex-convicts, the tools of operating within the environmental restoration field, such as wetland restoration, cleaning contaminated land, urban forestry management, and green roof installation.


Tell me about a B.E.S.T. student who stood out to you.
One of my favorite stories is of a young man who came through our program, a really sweet guy who had deep dimples and liked to quote Martin Luther King Jr., the Quran, and the Bible. Once the mass media started to take notice of our work, we had a huge profile in USA Today, and I’m looking at this article and the first paragraph mentions that this young man spent 10 years locked up for armed robbery. And I thought, you’ve gotta be joking! It didn’t even occur to me that somebody that gentle, kind, and loving had that in his background.

That’s when it hit me: His transformation had everything to do with the work he was doing. Horticultural infrastructure development, urban forestry management—all those things provided him with this beautiful outlet to nurture. Studies show without a shadow of a doubt that horticultural therapy works, that when you expose people even to small clusters of nature, even in a very urban area, crime rates go down because people want to be near it.


You’re also an advocate of grassroots organizations being at the table when decisions are made by people in power. What green economy initiatives do you want the Obama administration to take up?
Very simply, I think that the Environ­mental Protection Agency needs to regain its moral authority as the environmental stewards of this country and really push for things like the national grid so that we can actually have renewable energy. One major national problem is that there is no integrated transmission system for energy distribution around the country. In order for the renewable energy economy to really flourish, we’ve got to be able to connect the places in the country that have sources of renewable energy, like the sunny Southwest and the windy Midwest, with places that need renewable energy. If the federal government developed that grid system, we would see more businesses flourish by using renewable clean wind and solar energy.


This past summer you left Sustainable South Bronx to start an environmental consulting firm, the Majora Carter Group. What is the vision for this company?
I realized that the work was not particular to the South Bronx, but rested on the universal idea that when you apply care and resources to even the most challenged situations, beautiful things will grow. So I started the Majora Carter Group to work with municipalities, business leaders, and universities from all around the country as stakeholders.

Our first client is Elizabeth City State University, which is part of the historically black college network, in northeastern North Carolina—an incredibly poor, predominantly rural and black region. The major economic generators down there are mega-hog farms. Unfortunately, the owners bury the excrement in these lined pits, which often leak and then contaminate the area. Elizabeth City State Uni­versity is excited about the possibility of transforming that 21-county region, and so we’re working with them to develop a green economic development plan.


Do faith and spirituality inform your work?
Oh yeah! We are asking our clients to honor other people, to see them with dignity, and to treat them that way. The foundation of what we do is very spiritual in nature. We want people to be authentic. We want people to see each other in love because when you think about it, oppression is as bad for the oppressor as it is for the op­pressed. We have commodified pain in some way, and we don’t want to see the suffering of others. I’m asking folks not just to see the suffering of others but to understand that they could be a part of alleviating it. That is a deeply spiritual endeavor.


What keeps you going?
Understanding that people’s lives have been changed. I know that our work is having an impact and I know that at some point people are going to realize that this is how we need to roll.
My friend Van Jones often says, “Little green fairies are not going to come out of the sky and install solar panels or urban forestry. People are going to do that.” And we need to look at the people. There’s room for everybody.

The Green Industrial Revolution

[This article appeared in the May 2009 issue of Sojourners magazine.]

Throughout Pittsburgh are signs of a city that once pulsed with wealth and prosperity as the steel industry boomed in the early 1900s, only to suffer decline with the fall of American steel in the 1970s. Abandoned factories along the waterfront and boarded-up stone chapels stand like ruins, reminding residents of what once was. Today, the city has more than 14,000 vacant lots, scattered mostly in low-income neighborhoods such as Hazelwood and Larimer.

Amid the urban plight, however, a startup called GTECH—Growth Through Energy and Community Health—is giving Pittsburgh new hope. Founded by three graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University in partnership with Steel City Biofuels, GTECH hopes to revolutionize vacant-land management in an unconventional, earth-friendly way: by planting sunflowers in Pittsburgh’s empty lots.
“Sunflowers improve soil quality and produce seeds that can be turned into biofuel,” says Andrew Butcher, co-founder and CEO of GTECH. “This biofuel can be sold to help offset the cost of vacant land, which is often a prohibitive factor in managing vacant space.” After two years of existence, the organization has planted sunflowers in four Pitts­burgh neighborhoods and has started a job-training program to teach low-income locals how to tend and cultivate the fields.

But GTECH’s strategy is more than just a business model—it’s a vision for a green economy to replace the steel economy of the past. “This is an ideal mechanism to create a platform for green job opportunities,” says Butcher. “The heart of this project is the convergence between multiple sectors in the green economy: renewable energy, agriculture, and waste management environmental services.”

This is music to Charlotte Brody’s ears. As the program director at Green For All, an Oakland, California-based nonprofit intent on building a nationwide green-collar economy, Brody considers GTECH an example of the future of industry. “This is one of those little programs that I think suggests the possibility of what we can do,” Brody says. “I’m pretty fond of what’s going on in Pittsburgh.”

THE MAINSTREAM ENVIRONMENTAL movement in the United States has been a predominantly white, middle-class endeavor, focused on wilderness preservation and governmental regulation. But there has also been a movement against “environmental racism” led by African-American, Latino, Native American, and Asian poor and working-class people.

For example, in 1979, African-American residents of East Houston, Texas, represented by attorney Linda Mc­Keever Bullard, sued Southwestern Waste Management Corp. for “environmental discrimination” for designating black neighborhoods as industrial waste sites. Their victory became a landmark example of low-income minorities fighting against the placement of hazardous facilities in their neighborhoods. Similarly, in 1982, the predominantly African-American community of Warren County, North Carolina, protested a toxic landfill in their neighborhood by blocking trucks carrying chemical waste to a local dump site.

Stepping into this stream of environmental advocacy are the efforts of Van Jones, Green For All’s founder and the newly appointed special adviser for green jobs, enterprise, and innovation on the White House Council on Environmental Qua­lity. A Yale Law graduate from Jack­son, Tennessee, Jones founded Green For All in September 2007 to build an environmental movement that includes poor people suffering from environmental racism.

“Unless everyone is included at the decision-making table,” Jones says in his book, The Green Collar Economy, “even the best-intentioned proposals miss chances to do good—and may unwittingly even do harm.”

An example of the law of unintended consequences is the 1980 Superfund law. Superfund legislation was passed by Congress in response to organizing pressure leveraged by a 25-year-old middle-class white woman, Lois Gibbs, who found that her children’s public school was built atop a chemical waste dump in Niagara Falls, New York. The Superfund law taxed petroleum and chemical industries to create a fund for cleaning up hazardous waste sites all over the nation. Unfortunately, a result of all the attention on these hazardous sites was that corporations sought to make them less visible by moving them into poor communities of color.

This kind of racist environmental injustice demands our attention, says Kristin Rothballer, managing director of Green For All. “When I was growing up in the ’80s, everyone talked about saving the whales and saving the trees. But what about saving the kids living in West Oakland who are suffering from asthma because of all the pollution in the community?” Rothballer says, pointing out that even today, the people who most benefit from mainstream environmentalism’s successes are the rich. “Who can afford to buy hybrid cars and organic produce?” asks Rothballer. “There’s been a premium price on things that are green, which has locked a lot of lower-income people out of being able to benefit from the amazing, innovative steps forward that we have taken. In many ways, Green For All is a response to this injustice.”

By working hand-in-hand with government and local communities, Green For All hopes to create a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty by creating a green-collar workforce of men and women trained with skills such as installing solar panels, tending community gardens, and weatherizing buildings. The idea is not new, but to the folks at Green For All, now is the time to take it to a new level. They see it as the most economically viable option out there—and the approach that makes the most sense.

“We have to both change the way people interact with the environment and change the way people interact with each other and the economy at the same time,” says Green For All’s Brody. “And we get the joy of being able to say, ‘We can solve two problems at the same time.’ In fact, they’re the same solution and can’t be solved unless they’re solved together.”

SO HOW DOES a nonprofit organization create an entirely new industry? The effort is three-pronged. First, Green For All works at the federal level, advocating policies that would put Americans to work retrofitting and repowering the country.

One of the earliest successes for Green For All was the passage of the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which authorized $125 million per year to create an energy efficiency and renewable energy worker training program. This pilot program trains workers for green jobs in a range of industries, such as retrofitting buildings for energy conservation and sustainability. The legislation became Title X of the Energy Independence and Security Act, which Congress passed and President Bush signed in late 2007, but the funds were not appropriated until 2009, when it was increased to $500 million in President Obama’s economic stimulus package. It is now up to the Department of Labor to administer the monies in consultation with the Department of Energy. Green For All is working to ensure that communities across the nation are accessing the funds to help the poor.

“We want to create a much better set of evaluation tools to make sure that the people who need these jobs are at the table helping to create the plans that are going to work for their community,” Brody insists. “That’s why we’re gearing up to be conduits between the legislative language and what people need for that language to make a difference in their communities.”

The organization’s second objective, then, is to work alongside local municipalities and businesses to create examples of how a green economy can be built through a joint effort of green business enterprise and government-funded training programs for low-income community members with high barriers to employment due to a criminal record, illiteracy, or a lack of basic job-readiness skills.

Vien Truong, senior policy associate at Green For All, believes that joining federal regulations with local business strategies will create the market to support a green economy built upon the labor of trained green-collar workers. “When the market is honed to meet the demands for renewable energy, that’s how we’re making an impact on the local level,” Truong says.

A notable example is the Oakland Green Jobs Corps. Developed by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland-based nonprofit founded by Van Jones in 1996, the Corps is a training program for young adults that provides “soft skills” such as job readiness, financial management, and environmental awareness, as well as vocational “hard skills” in key sectors such as renewable energy, energy efficiency, and green construction. During the three-month training period, trainees earn $9 an hour for 20 hours a week, after which the trainees are placed in six-month paid internships with local businesses that pay a living wage. The program was launched in October 2008 with 20 trainees, and Green For All hopes it will be duplicated in other cities.

“What we are trying to do is create really good examples of the kind of programs we can create at the federal level, so that cities and counties can be gearing up to take advantage of these federal opportunities,” Brody says. By supporting programs such as the Oakland Green Jobs Corps, and ex­trap­olating salient principles that can be shared with other like-minded organizations in other parts of the country, Green For All hopes to be­come a networking agent that links practitioners with one another, lifts up best practices, and leverages successes to build a comprehensive national move­ment.

“Part of our philosophy is that we don’t have all the answers at Green For All,” says policy associate Stacy Ho. “So what we’re trying to do is give technical assistance to build communities of practice and link practitioners together. They are the ones who know what works. If they talk to each other, then they are able to arrive at better solutions.”

To facilitate these conversations, Green For All’s third objective is to partner with five “green-collar cities”—Atlanta, Pitts­­burgh, Philadelphia, Seat­­tle, and Newark, New Jersey—and work closely with local leaders and grassroots organizations to support programs on a micro level that demonstrate the efficacy of green job training programs. One example is Newark’s program to weatherize 30 homes of senior citizens, which lowered energy costs and emissions for the seniors while simultaneously creating green jobs. Another is Pittsburgh’s GTECH sunflower project.

“We will travel to these communities and meet with major decision-makers at the local level to spread our vision and message,” says Rothballer. “We work closely with these cities to figure out what it really takes to build strong training programs and strong capacities in the communities to hire people out of these programs and retrofit a city.”

With the passage of President Obama’s economic recovery bill and Van Jones’ March appointment to the president’s Council on Environmental Qua­lity, Green For All faces an un­precedented opportunity to integrate its strategies into America’s future economic growth. Its current main objective is to get local communities involved in accessing and spending recovery dollars toward building a green economy.
In a conference call hosted by Green For All about the president’s recovery bill, Jones urged listeners to go directly to city hall, city council meetings, and mayors’ offices to ask what funds will be available and to propose green projects that require funding. “It’s time for us to go from hope to change, from inspiration to integration,” Jones said. “We have to capture these dollars and use them to put people to work. This could be a huge opportunity for our movement.”

While Green For All is not religiously affiliated, the staff believes there is a special opportunity for faith communities to utilize the funds of the recovery act. “Faith-based organizations are able to directly influence their membership toward helping address the needs of the communities,” says Ho. More important than logistical strength, however, is the faith-based community’s calling to honor the inherent connection between faith, justice, and creation care—a connection similar to that which inspires Green For All.

“As we seize this moment to really shift our world, what drives us is a desire to restore community,” says Rothballer. “When we think about what it means to take care of people and the planet, the heart and soul of our movement is about how we commune with each other.”