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Does the key to solving America's poverty and crime issues lie in creating more sustainable, environmentally friendly communities? During today's OnPoint, Majora Carter, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx discusses the program she created in a low-income New York City community to raise awareness about sustainability. Carter explains the role green collar jobs and sustainability can play in reducing unemployment rates, crime, and health issues around the country. She also gives her thoughts on what Congress should be doing to spur the green collar job market.
Monica Trauzzi: Welcome to OnPoint. I'm Monica Trauzzi. Joining me today is Majora Carter, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx. Majora thanks for coming on the show.
Majora Carter: Thanks for having me.
Monica Trauzzi: When someone thinks of the South Bronx they may think of poverty and crime as being two of the major issues in that area. You created Sustainable South Bronx focusing on environmental aspects and sustainability. What's the link that you saw between poverty and sustainability and what inspired you to create this program?
Majora Carter: We believe that the crime of poverty can actually be alleviated by using the environment as the powerful instrument that it is to counteract some of those things. Like for example, the fact that greening communities, planting trees, creating greenways and other green open space has been known to have an incredibly calming affect on a community. Stress levels are reduced. High crime rates go down and, of course, they increase anyone's sense of pride of place when their surroundings look really beautiful. And we're also really interested in using the environment as an economic driver in order to create more jobs for our community, clean tech jobs, more jobs in landscaping, or any other kind of green collar workforce that would actually allow people to participate in more traditional economic ventures rather than having to revert to more of the underground economy that actually does tend to subsume many folks within poor communities and poor communities of color because there often are many job opportunities there.
Monica Trauzzi: How did you get to this point? How did you get inspired on this idea?
Majora Carter: Ran away from home to go to college because my neighborhood really was the poster child for urban blight and it was not the kind of place that a smart kid wanted to stay, or at least that's what I was often told, that I would have the education to move out of a place like this. Of course, as the universe would have it, I guess I was meant to go back home when I started grad school and couldn't really afford to live any place other than my parents house. And at the same time the city was planning on building a huge waste facility in the South Bronx and I found out at the same time that we already handled a huge amount of the city's waste handling infrastructure. And that was one of the reasons why our public health impacts were so dire, from an asthma rate that was one of the country's highest to diabetes to obesity, all related to the physical as well is the environmental creation and layout of a community. And we realized that we absolutely had to be reactive against continuing onslaughts of waste facilities and other kinds of environmental and noxious facilities in our community. But we also need to be proactive and create the kind of programs and projects that would allow folks to be participants in the burgeoning greening of our community and hopefully our country.
Monica Trauzzi: All right, and let's talk about some of the projects that you're working on specifically. I guess the Greenway is the most well-known plan. How are you hoping to transform the South Bronx? What's it going to look like if you have your way?
Majora Carter: If I have my druthers it will become a more clean, green, healthy place period and that absolutely has to do with changing the physical layout of it. The South Bronx is actually blessed with being a waterfront community, not something that many of us even knew, because what we tended to see was industry that went right up to it and the waterfront was not like this warm, welcoming place. I started the first waterfront park the community has had, turned it out of an old, nasty, illegal garbage dump. And that sort of started the whole idea of the waterfront transformation of our community. They wrote a $1.25 million federal transportation grant which designed the South Bronx Greenway, a series of waterfront esplanades, on-street bike paths, lots of tree-lined streets, and would also provide opportunities for recreation as well as local economic development projects. And we've received about $20 million for first-phase projects, to start those, and that's going to start in the spring of 2008.
Monica Trauzzi: How do people in the South Bronx and communities like it respond to this idea? Do they see the need for sustainable development or is it something that you need to sort of talk to them about and convince them that this is something that's important to them as well?
Majora Carter: Well, like everybody, we will react to things that impact us the most, talking to folks in a poor community of color where they're worried about making ends meet and getting their kids into a decent school if there are any at all in the neighborhood. But you're not going to talk to them about hugging trees or polar bears, you're just not. I mean they'll look at you like you're an idiot, with good reason. But what you can talk to them about is how the environment in their own community is having an impact on them. Like the high asthma rate in our neighborhoods is what was fueling the asthma epidemic in our community. Once folks realized that it was related to the buildings that were right down their street then they started advocating with us for better standards and regulations so that we wouldn't constantly have to deal with that. Unemployment is also a huge problem in our community. Whereas New York City unemployment is around six to nine percent, depending on where you are, ours is consistent at more than 25 percent. You talk to people about jobs and then you talk to them about how we can be creating a green economy to help move people out of poverty. We run a program called Project BEST, which stands for Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training Program, and what it does is train people in the field of ecological restoration jobs and anything from landscaping to cleaning up contaminated land. You know, we taught them how to groom trees, to do something called crime prevention through environmental design, so that you actually allow streetlight to come under to illuminate areas that were before completely underneath darkness. Things like that, and also getting people jobs. We run a green roof installation program, so we've actually been able to take people that have gone through our program, train them to put on roofs. And I just got a call before we got here that we're probably about to go into contract for another green roof installation. We just did two a couple of weeks ago.
Monica Trauzzi: So then is someone like Al Gore the right face for global warming as he just won the Nobel Peace Prize, so he is emerging as the face of this issue.
Majora Carter: Right.
Monica Trauzzi: Is he the right person to reach out to the average American?
Majora Carter: I think we need a lot of faces reaching out to various aspects of America. I mean there is no one, but I do think that traditional environmental movement sort of does leave a bit of a disconnect between folks that just kind of want a decent place to live, who are struggling with a lot of stuff right now and who really just want to see the benefits of the environment, whatever they are, play back to them in a way that's not going to break their bank account. Like why is organic food so expensive? How come like some of the biggest bills for poor people right now is heating or cooling their homes? People see and understand that. We also have to learn how to speak that language so that people, everybody from many different income classes, from different races, from everywhere all over this country and certainly in the world, like understand that everybody needs to have some kind of role in mitigating climate change and improving the environment and knowing full well that it also needs to support them as well. My partner and I, Van Jones, are working with a group called Green for All and the whole idea of it is to get legislation funding actually could remove a quarter of a million people out of poverty through the creation of the green economy to move people out of poverty.
Monica Trauzzi: You started Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 and this was long before this sort of big push on global warming occurred. So how has the discussion changed since you first started? How has the support level changed?
Majora Carter: The funny thing is we've been talking about the projects that we're doing will mitigate global warming if we did them on a large scale. We've been talking about that before anybody was really talking about it because we recognized early on that we were point sources for greenhouse gases. So we figured if you deal with that everybody is going to benefit. So actually I've got to tell you, on some level I'm thrilled that everybody's talking about it. The problem that I have with it is that low-income communities and low-income communities of color are being sort of left out of that debate. I think primarily because it really has taken on -- being green or being sustainable or being environmental, you know, is seen as something that is sort of a niche kind of elite item. It's not something that's for the masses. It really, really isn't. So the problem that we're seeing right now, and one that could be alleviated, is that if we all recognize that everyone has got to be a part of the solution to mitigate climate change right now and that it's going to involve training people, in other words to do building retrofits in our community or, excuse me, in our country. Whether it's to build a kind of clean tech ventures and make those kind of investments so that people can get jobs as they're doing this work and also everyone is playing a role, whether they're both the direct recipient of that, like if they're putting solar panels on their house or they're making them so they can actually have a job. So that we are advocating more on better policies that support a baseline quality of life improvement for everybody.
Monica Trauzzi: This idea of green-collar jobs is also getting a lot of play even in Congress. There was a recent hearing in the Senate about what green-collar jobs will mean for the overall job market and it's still split. There are some people who say this is going to be a really good thing and others say it's going to cripple the job market. So why do you think that there's still such a disparity on this issue?
Majora Carter: And lack of understanding, no ifs, ands, or butts about it. I mean I think people are like looking right now at short terms. Like no one is saying it's not going to cost more to start, but what we're not looking at are the savings at both in public health costs that you continue to have in environmentally challenged communities. Poor people don't pay for their own medical costs, everybody else does. So that's going to be one cost that goes down. Incarceration, we just discovered -- Colombia University did a study last year that realized -- people understand that proximity to pollution actually creates -- gives kids learning disabilities, which once if you don't do well in school your chances are you're a more better candidate for the correction system than you are for higher education. That's a huge drain on public resources. There are counties all over this country that actually make more money because of all the prisons in their community rather than property taxes or anything like that. We need to figure out ways to create opportunities that allow people to be more engaged in meaningful ways that support everyone's quality of life. And it's got to start -- it's got to come from the top, it's got to come from the bottom, and we've got to learn to meet the middle.
Monica Trauzzi: So what should Congress be doing to facilitate creation and implication of projects like yours?
Majora Carter: The first green jobs bill was a really good step in the right direction. I was actually pretty happy with the amount of support that it got. There really needs to be a marshal plan that is really talking about creating the kind of workforce, the green workforce development that we need to have in this country. So that's going to come with funding. It's going to come with incentives. It's going to come with regulations. One of the things that I've been learning from like colleagues in Europe is that businesses there are given -- there are much more stringent environmental regulations than we ever have to deal with here for pretty much anything that they do. What does the government do? They don't just say you have to do that. They also give them incentives to make sure that they do. And so we're not coupling those two things, then of course we're going to continue to use the dirty economy. And things will go a long business as usual. And we will not -- I mean we're not a leader in this country. We're not a leader in any kind of green movement. We'd like to say that we are, but we're not. And it would be a crying shame if we can't decide that we're going to actually do that, make the investment in the same way that we made in Europe, you know, back after World War II, you know, for our own people.
Monica Trauzzi: All right. I want to get this last question in. Presidential candidate John Edwards has outlined a green collar jobs initiative. And I wanted to get your take on whether there's a specific presidential candidate for the '08 elections that you think would be able to do this job in sort of greening the economy?
Majora Carter: I think absolutely any of them would be able to do it, as long as they were willing to recognize that there's been leadership on the ground that's been working on this for a while and that they would be open to hearing about how they can best practice what they've all been preaching at this point.
Monica Trauzzi: All right. We'll end it right there. Thanks for coming on the show.
Majora Carter: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Monica Trauzzi: This is OnPoint. I'm Monica Trauzzi. Thanks for watching.
[End of Audio]
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