Making Cities Sustainable

A low-income single mom takes her child to a high-cost emergency room for an asthma attack late at night. She is less productive at work the next day, and might get fired if it happens too often. She and her child are more likely to suffer from obesity and diabetes because trucks, poor air quality, and lack of local parks discourage healthy physical activity. Locating sewage treatment plants, power plants, coal mines, intensive truck traffic for hauling products and waste in her community may be expedient, but now she and her child are paying for that expediency in ways that the folks who benefit from those decisions do not.

Asthma, obesity, diabetes, poor real estate values, unemployment, inequality, even prison. Not the words you might connect with sustainability, but they are the costs of our free-market.

The South Bronx is what we call an "environmental justice community."

Environmental justice means no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less benefits than others. Race and class tell you where to find good stuff (like parks and trees) and the bad stuff (like power plants and waste facilities). We are the canaries in the coal mine, and have felt the problems for some time. Antiquated zoning and land use regulations are used to justify polluting facilities in politically vulnerable communities. We are regional sacrifice zones created to support our hyper-consumption society, and point sources for greenhouse gases but they are coming everyone's way.

Columbia University says proximity to fossil fuel exhaust sources, like power plants and trucking, causes learning disabilities in children. Statistically speaking, poor kids who do poorly in school, have a better chance at prison than higher education. What are we telling our kids?

Training people for green-collar jobs that improve the environment, provide meaningful employment, and a better quality of life help solve several problems at once.

The billions of tax dollars and private sector investment that exacerbate pollution-borne health conditions keep the revolving door of unhealthy communities and incarceration spinning.

Why aren't we trying to build monuments to hope and possibility, rather than tributes to our collective failures?

Comments

[Beatitudes]

One of the prime pillars of a great city, how the people learn to make it sustainable, are public libraries. When you forget this necessary component, we are lost.
Lyn LeJeune
The Beatitudes Network - Rebuilding the Public Libraries of New Orleans at www.beatitudesinneworleans.blogspot.com

[SeanGardner]

This is a truly beautiful post!

I first got excited about making our cities more sustainable (and environmentally equitable) from the books by environmental justice pioneer and prolific author Robert Bullard.

Bullard's bestselling books include:

- "Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World"
- "The Quest For Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution"
- "Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity"
- "Dumping in Dixie"

All four of these books will give you and idea of what Ms. Carter beautifully conveyed in her post above.

Also, you can contact the influential ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE RESOURCE CENTER (http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/) which is run by Robert Bullard himself. He has an award-winning directory (that anyone can request and receive) called "The People of Color Environmental Groups: 2000 Directory", which will give you an idea where action-oriented visionaries (like Majora Carter) are all across this country.

Great post Ms. Carter. I look forward to seeing more from you!

[lamarguerite]

Great post Majora! Thank you. You are addressing issues that are very dear to me.

I recently wrote an article for Groovy Green where I mention the film Toxic Bust. According to the documentary, the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco is one of the four hot spots for cancers of all sorts. The poor people who live there are the victims of a physical environment that's loaded with toxic chemicals from years ago. And nothing is done about it.

Another telling feature of environmental injustice is the relative absence of trees in low income cities. Trees are part of our environmental capital. It is well known that trees can benefit a place in many ways: better air quality, aesthetics, lower crime rate, increased property values, etc.

Last, you talk about the single mom and her plight with her asthmatic child. My heart goes out to those lower income single mom. And I find most of the environmental recommendations a joke in that respect. Going back to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it is hard for someone who is emotionally and economically stressed to pay attention to green concerns. Not even mentioning the impossibility to spend the upfront money necessary for things like solar installations, house weatherizing, CFLs, etc.

Right now, green and all the attached benefits that come with it, are a privilege of the rich. That's why I applaud such efforts as Van Jones's plan for green collar jobs.

marguerite manteau-rao
green blogger
http://lamarguerite.wordpress.com
'It's All About Green Psychology'

[mattnifique]

The freshest thing I've heard frpm the BX since BDP!Hold it down Majora!

[Phidippides]

Oh, what a teasing taste of the work that Ms. Carter has been doing and continues to do. She spoke eloquently at the recent Bioneers conference, and if a vid of that is available, it's worth finding. Here is a vid from the TEDs conference of a year ago. It is powerful, and reminds us that we have a great opportunity to address social justice while working to preserve our environment. Highly recommended: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/53

[Jimmyboyo]

Great post

[Mykel]

I, for one, would LOVE to see concerned Americans like Majora Carter file a class action lawsuit outlawing the worst polluter of them all, the private automobile, on the grounds that, as with second-hand smoke, it causes suffering and death to untold millions of others. Even hybrids and all-electric cars would still pollute, while the roads they require cost hundreds of billions in public money that could otherwise be spent on social services like free health care, mass transit, quality public education, libraries, parks and emergency personnel.

In the meantime, God speed to heroes like Majora Carter.

[RogerARTcom]

.
Hello... Majora Carter,

Ck out Low Income, Greenhouses, that FLOAT

... Earth Ball Homes at...

http://www.EarthBall.org

A new way to Eat and Live on OUR Earth
.

[snakespeak]

The cities must become sustainable, otherwise the future is not sustainable. If everyone does not have a right to a clean environment, all the other rights are meaningless. Rectifying this injustice is worthy of the same level of effort as a war on terror because these conditions are an extreme form of terror.

[Think4myself]

Thanks you! We need more posts like yours. I am really interested in sustainable housing, for the poor, yes, but also for middle classers - and I'm not just talkin' about checking for a green label on a product here.

Wouldn't it be awesome if modern day housing 'projects' turned into green oases, if people could have a hand in planning for where they were gonna live, if we could educate the population about improving the quality of community life instead of always striving for bigger, better and more.

Does the Bronx still have naturally occuring dirt (clay and sand) ? I wonder if cob housing could work in a city? Imagine a person actually being able to help build their own house, and their roof was a yard. Pretty radical stuff to suggest nature in the city like that.

[Nommo]

Hi Majora, great work you are doing in the Boogie Down ol' stomping grounds Bronx! On Point!, as they say...