Feature
Green the Ghetto
That's the message and the mission of Majora Carter, whose grassroots environmental activism has brought new hope to one of the poorest congressional districts in the country—and an important voice to policy debates.
By Susan Piperato
Forthright and passionate, wry and eloquent, Majora Carter has the stage at the 2006 TED conference, an annual by-invitation-only “big ideas” gathering of thinkers and doers. (Stewart Brand, Richard Branson, and Bill Clinton have all given TED talks.) Al Gore, also a speaker that year, is in the audience, sitting up front. Carter’s topic is environmental justice: “For those of you who may not be familiar with the term, it goes like this: No community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators of where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities.... Economic degradation begets environmental degradation which begets social degradation.”
Carter, 41, is leading a turnaround for one such low-income community—the South Bronx, where she grew up—which has long been famous for its crime and decay, but also for being the place where New York City does its dirty work: It is the dumping ground for 25 percent of New York City’s waste, the site of four power plants, a sewage sludge plant, and a food distribution center that brings thousands of trucks through the area daily. Carter’s mission: “environmental justice through innovative, economically sustainable projects.”
Many know Carter as the host of Robert Redford’s The Green, a weekly three-hour TV program on the Sundance Channel. In her community, however, she is the woman who went back home temporarily as a 20-something grad student and not only stayed but discovered her calling and founded the nonprofit organization Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx) in 2001. A few years later, she won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for her work.
Carter helps support SSBx through her speaking engagements, appearing casually hip in jeans, dangly silver earrings that complement her long dreadlocks, and a black T-shirt worn tight against her trim torso bearing the fluorescent green words “Green the Ghetto.” She talks to audiences around the world about environmental and economic inequities and the importance of using grassroots activism to address them. Emphasizing her points with her hands, looking audience members straight in the eye, and smiling and showing raw emotion in equal measure, Carter has won wide admiration as a communicator. (Commentator Guy Kawasaki, who once served as Apple’s Chief Evangelist, has said she tops even the legendary presenter Apple CEO Steve Jobs.)
It was before one of these appearances—for an audience of some 75 members of the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater in Beacon, N.Y., last September, including her middle school science teacher who stood up to tell Carter she was beloved—that she spoke to Yoga+. It was a warm, sunny autumn morning, and Carter sat on an antique stone wall beneath a golden-leafed tree at the University Settlement campus hall, waiting to address Clearwater’s membership.
Carter recalls the South Bronx of her childhood as a “concrete jungle” largely given over to garbage dumps, prisons, and violent crime, an area that smelled bad and was devoid of greenery and covered over in asphalt. “I remember assuming that ‘an environment’ was very different from what I saw around me every day,” she recalls, even though her Southern-born parents frequently reminisced about growing up along “the crick” or creek. As a young girl, Carter says she believed the environment only existed at the homes of her aunts and uncles in Connecticut or New Jersey “because they had places that actually had trees and backyards and grass. I couldn’t for the life of me reconcile that there was an environment [where I lived], even if it was abused, or that the city was an ecosystem as well.”
Awakening of an Environmentalist
Carter escaped the South Bronx, first to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, from which she graduated in 1984, and then on to Wesleyan University, where she completed a degree in film studies in 1988. As the environmental justice movement was just taking shape at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C. in 1991, Carter was living her life, “bouncing around New York City,” working in the film industry. A few years later, in order to complete an MFA in English and creative writing at New York University and get through a divorce, she left her film production job and moved back to her parents’ house in Hunts Point—“literally just a cheap place to rest my head at night.” She had every intention of “trying to get the hell out of there again,” she told Yoga+, smiling and shaking her head as she reminisced about her transition to activism. Each morning, she would leave to go downtown to NYU or to visit friends, and she’d return as late as possible. “I felt so disconnected from the neighborhood even though I lived in it.”
The turning point came when she joined Writers Corps, a part-time writing program for NYU teaching fellows, and learned from another member about an arts-based community center in the South Bronx “doing these remarkable programs in poetry, spoken word, the whole shebang. It was only two blocks from my house, and I had passed it every single day without knowing it was there,” Carter recalls. “I went in and was just amazed. They were supporting arts and culture, supporting people thinking differently about their own physical space. I thought that was kind of cool, being from the South Bronx, where people tended to think, ‘We can’t really engage in cultural endeavors,’ so I got involved with them, started volunteering, started the South Bronx Film and Video Festival, did public art projects. I thought, this is what I’m going to do for a while. Then I got it: Okay, this is my way of giving back to the neighborhood. I can do community development this way, and I love what I’m doing.”
Not in My Backyard
One day members of the arts group got word “totally by accident” that New York City and New York State were planning to close down Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island and, “without any real environmental review,” says Carter, “just create a couple of smaller Fresh Kills in the boroughs. The first place they looked, of course, was the South Bronx.” Carter suddenly found her life and work becoming politicized and her artistic goals taking a backseat. “I began to realize that if we’re not actively meeting the environmental needs of our community, then all the art in the world isn’t gonna help,” she told Grist, the online environmental magazine.
“It was going to be a huge facility that would have brought 48 percent of the city’s waste to the neighborhood,” says Carter. “It was clear no one intended for us, the people in the neighborhood, to know about this. Then I realized, if they’re planning on doing this, well, I wonder what’s here already? There were these odd smells in the neighborhood sometimes that would just crop up, you know?”
Carter discovered the likely reason for the secrecy around the landfill plans: When New York City had built a sewage sludge pelletizing plant in the South Bronx six years previously, a huge battle had taken place. Now the city wanted the plant to begin processing “up to 70 percent of the City’s sewage sludge with this really complicated chemical procedure that released dioxins and other pollutants into the environment. And there were lots of other waste facilities that started opening up in the neighborhood at the same time,” she says.
Asthma, which most people in the community assumed was hereditary, was becoming “a big issue,” she recalls. “And I thought, wait, they want to put more [waste facilities] here? For me, becoming politicized was about looking at how land is used in various neighborhoods based on expediency. Usually expediency is determined by how powerful or how powerless the people in those areas are. The South Bronx, the poorest congressional district in New York, is about 99 percent people of color. The government was just, like, yeah, we’ve always done this, and now we’re going to put more here. And that’s what started me doing this work.”
Carter calls “fighting against that facility…the most important thing I could have done at the time,” but rallying the community to fight was not easy. “It’s still hard,” she admits. “We are the kind of community that has been beaten down so much that our expectations are not very high to begin with: The feeling is, this is where you end up if you’re poor, if nobody cares about you; it’s a worthless place to be. So people didn’t think they could do anything to stop it. In fact, what I heard often was, ‘Well, this is the South Bronx—of course this happens here.’”
Despite the community’s attitude of “total resignation,” Carter saw reason to hope. When people were given enough information to “recognize the links between all the facilities in this industrial area and their health—in particular, their children’s health—they began to say, ‘That can’t happen.’ That was a powerful place to be, to see that happening. It took us years to fight, but we did, and we won.”
A Project to See and Touch
During the fight against the waste facility, Carter realized, as she likes to say, “that to reach and inspire my community on these issues, we needed to do more than just block the bad stuff.” In 1998, Carter found an opportunity for doing so when she met a New York City Parks Department coordinator in charge of seed money for groups doing Bronx River restoration projects who offered her a $10,000 initiative to develop waterfront property. It was an offer she described in her TED talk as “really well meaning but a bit naive”—who could even reach the river? “The waterfront was blocked by industrial facilities,” she recalls. “Consequently, I didn’t really know where to use the money.”
Then one morning while she was out jogging, her new puppy, Xena, who she’d found one rainy night tied to a post near her home and named after TV’s warrior princess, pulled her into an abandoned lot that she assumed at first to be “just another illegal dump.” It turned out to be a section of an abandoned Robert Moses–era bridge project. “There were weeds, piles of garbage, tires, and other stuff I won’t mention here. But she kept dragging me through all this and, lo and behold, at the end of this lot was the river,” Carter reports on the SSBx website. “It was beautiful in the early morning light, it was inspiring; and I knew that this forgotten little street end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving.”
Armed with the seed grant, Carter “leveraged it 300 times” and raised $3.2 million to establish the area’s first new park in 60 years: Hunts Point Riverside Park is “two acres of open space, really gorgeous, beautifully designed,” she says. The park’s groundbreaking took place in August 2004; it opened in May 2007. “To try to mobilize people around the development of parks when we didn’t have any was incredibly difficult,” Carter admits. “We’d ask people, ‘What would you like to see in your neighborhood?’ and they didn’t really have an answer. They’d never been asked that question before. Because [the parks] just weren’t there for people to be a part of or to appreciate. It was as if having parks was almost too far in the future for them.”
Like her new dog—who now, at age 10, weighs a healthy 80 pounds—the Hunts Point waterfront revitalization is “an idea that got bigger than I had imagined,” she says. Since then, the city has opened Barretto Point Park , and several more are in the planning stages. And on October 7, 2006, Carter married James Burling Chase, a filmmaker and SSBx’s director of communications—in a ceremony at Hunts Point Riverside Park.
Although Carter acknowledges her agency’s having “lost a couple” battles, she is proud of SSBx’s numerous and diverse accomplishments. Following the successful defeat of the plan to build the huge waste facility, SSBx has been working to ensure that New York City’s garbage is distributed equitably throughout the five boroughs and to make garbage export less polluting by replacing long-haul diesel trucks with barge and rail export options. “Seeing is believing,” Carter says. “When people understand the relationship between the truck traffic in front of their houses and their children’s asthma, and now see less of that in their community because our agency and others made sure that the trucks’ routes don’t jeopardize kids as they walk down the street, that’s been helpful.”
Creating Green Jobs
Carter is unabashed in her enthusiasm for what is perhaps her personal favorite SSBx project—the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program, an ecological restoration workforce that provides jobs to local residents. Begun in 2003, it got support from a private donor through the Clinton Global Initiative. The program exemplifies one of Carter’s core beliefs: “We can’t fight this battle at the expense of jobs,” she told the New York Times. “We need to work; we also need to breathe—our goal is to find a way of doing both.”
These highly trained workers are also “Greenway ambassadors,” as Carter calls them. In their uniforms, doing outdoor work, they serve as SSBx’s liaisons to the community and, in turn, the South Bronx community’s representatives to the outside world. “We were really concerned about building all these parks and planting street trees and not having any way to maintain them,” she explains. “Unless you’re in a natural environment, where nature takes care of itself, you need maintenance. Parks aren’t just amenities for us; they’re integral to life. So we figured we would show the value of having people from the community do this work, people who go through our ecological restoration job training program and know the difference between weeds and native grasses, and understand the science behind taking care of the urban forest and the structural park system.
“Now we’ve got these young men out in the community showing that caring for living things that aren’t human is an important thing to do, and they’ve got fans in the community,” she continues. “People call me up all the time, saying, ‘Those young men were on my street today—they’re so handsome in their uniforms,’ or ‘They told me all about my tree.’”
Green: It's the New Black
In 2005, Carter founded the South Bronx Green & Cool Roofs Demonstration Project, which offers cool and green roof design and installation and serves as a foundation for promoting the awareness and practice of green roofing. Rooftops are planted with baby sedum and wildflowers to retain storm water and provide insulation and energy savings and improve the environment. The American Banknote Building in Hunts Point, where SSBx has its offices, serves as a demonstration model. Last fall, Carter’s own brownstone home in the South Bronx became the first home in the Bronx to feature such a roof.
But perhaps Carter’s crowning achievement is her writing of a successful $1.25 million proposal to conduct a feasibility study for the design of the South Bronx Greenway Project. This community-led plan for 1.5 miles of waterfront greenway, 8.5 miles of green streets, and 12 acres of new waterfront open space includes a landscaped, multi-use, bike-and-pedestrian pathway running along the Bronx River waterfront, with on-street connections like Hunts Point Riverside Park, as well as a connection point to Randall’s Island sports complex. The plan, which now has $30 million in secured funding, will also provide economic development opportunities. Carter is hoping to include a food market at Hunts Point Riverside Park like Granville Island Public Market in Vancouver.
Keeping a Life, Too
Right now, Carter is involved in fighting the construction of another prison in the South Bronx, as well as co-leading the fight of the Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance, a grassroots campaign, to decommission the poorly planned 1.25-mile Sheridan Expressway, built by Robert Moses in 1963 as one of four expressways that bisects the Bronx and has contributed to the area’s blight. The coalition’s plan is to replace the roadway with affordable housing and economic development as well as create parklands with river access.
Both fights are being funded in part with the revenues from Carter’s speaking engagements, which are becoming all the more frequent as her celebrity grows. Her personal time keeps diminishing. As with all subjects, she is nothing less than forthright in acknowledging that her calling as an activist can take its toll on her health and spirit.
“Saving the world isn’t [supposed to be] easy, I know that,” she says. “I feel great about what I’m doing; I don’t feel so great about what I’m doing to myself. I used to take time to work out, which was incredibly helpful. And yoga was the only thing that made my other workouts remotely palatable. Now I’m trying to learn how to meditate. I’m up to five minutes a day. It’s really, really hard. You can feel your thoughts in your head. ‘Go away, I’m meditating, I’m listening to my breath. I’m counting one and two, and that’s all I’m going to do.’ I can do five minutes of that now, which makes me really happy. But sometimes I just say a centering prayer, Om Nama Shivaya—“I honor the God within me”—and call it a day. If I’m honoring the God within me, then I’m honoring the God within you, and I’m also taking care in this little bit of time that I’m giving myself, and it isn’t taking me away from the world-saving thing.”
Carter appreciates the validation of being a MacArthur winner. “The ‘genius’ thing has opened up all kinds of media opportunities,” she says. And she now has the clout to say what’s on her mind publicly, knowing she has listeners. At the close of her TED talk, for instance, Carter chided Al Gore for having given her the brush-off earlier in the conference. When she had attempted to talk to him about a strategy for including environmental justice activists, she told the TED crowd, he suggested a grants program. “I don’t think he understood: I wasn’t asking him for funding—I was making him an offer. Grassroots groups are needed at the table, during the decision making,” she said, ending her speech with the plea: “Don’t waste me.” It won her a standing ovation, with immediate applause from Gore himself, who later invited her to join the board of the Alliance for Climate Protection, a global-warming group he helped found.
Yet Carter also remains wary of her growing celebrity. “I’m still just a squirrel trying to get a nut and help people remember the plight of environmentally disenfranchised communities after I leave the stage,” she says. “I’m just there because the universe said, ‘Okay, it’s going to be Majora Carter.’ I’m an ordinary introvert who’s been called into an extraordinary situation. I know that I’m in a particular position that a lot of people will never get to be in. I have to represent their needs because I know them. So I am them. Period.”+
Susan Piperato writes about sustainability and culture from New York’s Hudson Valley, where she lives with her two children.
To learn more, go to http://www.ssbx.org or www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/53.
Yoga+ magazine