Keynote Recap: Majora Carter

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Welcoming remarks from AASHE Executive Director, Paul Rowland

I want to particularly welcome the international participants. On the wall, there are flags that represent all of the countries from which you travelled. I'd also like to acknowledge the student summit participants and volunteers that participated in community service projects. And I'd like to recognize everyone for making the effort and finding the resources to get here. I'd also like to thank our sponsors who make the conference possible and reduce the registration cost of the conference.

My joy in seeing you all tonight is tempered by the recognition that we've lost to great sustainability leaders. Ray Anderson who has been an AASHE keynote twice. For nearly two decades, he was a leading advocate of the business case for sustainability. He didn't just see it as a business proposition, though. It was personal in that he saw it's importance for his family, his employees and his community.

Two weeks ago, we lost another world sustainability leader, Wangari Maathai. It is impossible to capture all that she meant not just to Africa but to all the world. She brilliantly wove together the many strains of sustainability. She showed that women's rights, environmental justice, human rights and peace were all connected. (He reads a quote from her most recent book and talks about the importance of reflection to our work.)

As an educator, I've spent some time thinking about what the purpose of education is and it's become clear to me that the fundamental thing is that we be more thoughtful. As agents of education, we have the opportunity to be thoughtful people. But, we can't just be thoughtful hermits. Thoughtfulness needs to be coupled with action. And I can't talk about taking action without acknowledging the young people around the world that have been taking action this year - from the Arab spring to the Occupy Wall St. These actions provoke thought and exploration. Let's not forget that interplay between actions and thoughtfulness.

I am thrilled to be here with you tonight. Let's begin.

Keynote by Majora Carter

(Majora is introduced by Sheri Tonn, conference co-chair, former AASHE board chair and a dean at Pacific Lutheran University. See Majora's speaker bio.)

It is deeply humbling to be here with you today because I know I'm standing in for the late great Wangaari Mathai. I'm not particularly spiritual, but I know that when people transition they become our ancestors and they are there to guide us. Both Ray and Wangari really did light the way for us to be better to each other. There work really was about peace. How do you start at the community level and make things so people can be their absolute best selves?

Just to let you know, I'm from South Bronx in NYC. It is now known as an environmental and economic trainwreck. It was a former walk-towork community with factories. It used to be known as "little pittsburgh" because of how much steel work was done there. These former manufacturing facilities became places where waste industries and power plants and energy industries.

Our community has a lot of people that won't graduate from high school, or go to the institutions you go to. But, those same people are huge wellsprings of knowledge if given the opportunity. We knew that these plants were having an intense impact on our lives and quality of life. We had asthma, diabetes and obesity epidemics. The landuse patterns absolutely have an impact on our quality of life.

Columbia University did a study that conclusively linked fossil fuel emissions with early childhood learning development. And, children from communities that do poorly in school statistically end up incarcerated at much higher rates. So, we see a direct pipeline from our environmental landuse through to the prison system.

We got mobilized because the city wanted to add insult to injury by building a huge waste plant on the waterfront of our community. So, what we did was we wanted to change it from fighting against bad land use and figure out what there could be on our waterfront that we could fight for. She shows a picture of a lot from 1998. They got a little grant and cleaned it up and started with a small area transforming it. We worked through clean-ups and trying to get our local officials to pay attention and grew that little seed grant into this. She shows a picture of a gorgeous park that was made possible by a $1 million grant they ultimately one from the city. It has become a vibrant space for the community. People come to it and spend time there and experience nature - and I even got married there.

It allowed us to see that so much of what we thought about our community, we dismissed that with this one little park. With that, we then started to think, what else can we do? About air quality? About connecting people together through parks in a greenway? So, I wrote a proposal that brought in 2.6 million to build a coastal greenway that connected up with another greenway. It has pedestrian infrastructure, storm water management and economic development. We $15 million from the stimulus package for the project and as far as I'm aware it is the only community initiated transportation project funded by the stimulus package.

But, when I first started my organization in the South Bronx, people couldn't understand what this "green job"thing was. And why should you link poverty alleviation and environmental change? But we knew that we need to combine the two - so we started one of the first green jobs training programs in the country. We looked at the fact that we were doing infrastructure projects on our waterfront and wanted to make sure those jobs were done by people in our community. So we got people training in wetland restoration and habitat creation. And many of the people we were training were people who had significant obstacles to employment. We had to teach people things beyond the technical job - life skills that many take for granted. And, we had to show people who had never felt like they could contribute to something that they could contribute something valuable.

We also wanted to make sure that people didn't think this was a treehugger thing - not that we don't like trees but because we knew it needed to be about economic development. It needed to make money. So we started a green roofing company. A green roof holds storm water, cleans the water and the air and lowers the ambient air temperature in the city and utility bills for our buildings. And these kinds of jobs are the kinds of jobs that cannot be outsourced. (She shows a beautiful picture of the green roof on her house and the installation of it.) There are many things you can do on a green roof, from growing food to providing habitat for wildlife. It's not that a green roof will get rid of the need for water treatment plants, but they do reduce the cost of running those plants. These are the types of things that can support the municipalities by lowering their costs, providing economic development

I have a little confession to make. That is that I have something in common with the Tea Party. I want a smaller government. I want a smaller government by providing jobs to the people with generational poverty, the most expensive citizens when it comes to government services. The people that are fighting our wars, going in and out of prison, on welfare, using drugs. There are so many reasons why work in green infrastructure is perfect for these kinds of citizens. And it saves money, taxpayer dollars, and lives in the process. These kind of local solutions that allow dollars to circulate in a local economy is what does allow communities to contribute to their own communities uplift. It's what I like to call "home(town) security".

(She transitions to talking about people with similar projects around the country.)

Andy Lipkis
Open Charter School Demonstration Project
Los Angeles, CA

He found out that school district was about to spend millions on new facilities with a huge percentage of the cost going to pavement and air conditioning systems. He knew that if they reduced the asphalt and invested in green space, they could reduce their air conditioning load. It saved money. (She shows a picture of tree-filled landscape near a school.)

Brenda Palms-Barber
Sweet Beginnings
Chicago, IL

She was trying to figure out how to get jobs for ex-offenders. If you think about how much it costs to keep someone in jail ($60k) it is more than a Harvard education! And the recidivism rate is 65%. So, she created a business training them in how to care for bees and create value-added products that are now sold at Whole Foods and by mail-order. The recidivism rate in her program is 4%.

Judy Bonds
Coal River Mountain Watch
West Virginia

Judy was a coal miner's daughter. You'd think she would have believed in coal being king forever, but she understood that this wasn't her father's coal mining. They are blowing up a whole mountain for a couple dozen jobs. Those mountains never, ever grow back. Her idea then was to build wind farms on the mountains. Unfortunately, Judy's was another one of the lives we lost this year. She was a victim of the environment she was living in. She died of lung cancer earlier this year. But, Judy's dream is going to live on, because her dream was a business plan and it's going to happen.

So, the question here is about land use. How do we use land? And I've been thinking a lot about real estate, and how we can use it to create a better environment. (She shows a picture of a juvenile detention center that she grew up near.) Since it opened, people have been trying to close it down. It was notorious. My dad was a janitor there and I remember him saying that he wished our house was bigger because the kids there were just being broken down, not rehabilitated. It's been a huge presence in our community. Last year, they closed it down finally.

I've been walking by it and thinking I'd really like to do something with that site. And what I'd really like to do is turn it into a mixed-use affordable housing complex with retail and housing and office space. I thought "that's crazy" but then I realized that there are only two kinds of real estate development in poor communities. There's a kind that looks to exploit gentrification and then there's the kind that assumes that a community is going to be poor forever and so you'll see lots of applications for liquor joints and strip clubs. And, I started thinking, what are some of the unintended consequences of integration. We may have had racially segregated communities before integration, but we had economically integrated ones. It wasn't uncommon for a poor family to live next to a doctor. But, the moment houses started getting torched in the 60s, anyone with any economic resources left. The only reason my family stayed was because we couldn't sell our house for anything. So, let's bring a new kind of development to poor communities.

(She shows a map of the community with overlays of population density and thoroughfares and retail space. There isn't much retail within the south bronx which is sort of cut off by a highway.)

Right now, there isn't much retail in the South Bronx, but we want to change that. Because there are so few shops (grocery, shoe shop, etc) I realized that even I spend very little money in our community. We want it to be mixed income and inclusionary. We also want to revitalize the manufacturing area. We want to do urban farming and green furniture manufacturing. We want to create a lot of public space that everyone benefits from. A farmers market is coming soon. We also want to include vocational training - like a "fab lab". We had some community members realize that there were lots of pallettes coming through our community that were just going to the landfill and so they started making really nice furniture out of it. We want to bring people to areas that are currently so vacant that bad things happen there. By activating those areas, we can discourage that kind of activity. We know that this development will raise the bar for everything around it. And it will spread. I want this to spread everywhere - not just in the Bronx but all across the country!

(She reads a quote from MLK Jr's Letter from a Birmingham jail about there not being time for patience and talks about urgency.)

So many of our bad environmental management decisions are due to our ability to disregard the impacts on poor communities. If we located all of our conventional agricultural and manufacturing in wealthy communities, we would have had a clean and green economy a long time ago. But it comes back to land use. How do we use our land? It has this ripple effect that touches everything.

It's always about the economy. We're here in PA and I have to mention that we have farmers in this state that have farmed their land for 7 generations who are signing drilling rights for natural gas franking because they need the money!

And I want to give a shout-out to the students and folks that are planning a peaceful protest about the oil tar sands for when Obama comes to town.

It's always about the economy and our education contributes to that. Our education system has failed a huge portion of our population. Our land use and job creation needs to create accessible jobs, not as a cost, but as a benefit. We are leading when we are building a green economy, not when we are leading in incarceration rates. And your institutions have a role to play in this. By participating in the communities they are working in - not in some kind of go out in the community volunteer thing - but by putting poor people to work making our communities better. That is your job. Those are your marching orders. And I want to help you go there.

This is not an impossible task for us. This is a hopeful time. I look forward to hearing more from you. Thank you so much.

(Standing ovation)

Questions & Answers

I would like to know what you think are the most effective financing models you are finding?

That was a huge question for me too with this South Bronx project. The wonderful thing is there are people looking to develop public private partnerships. But also, businesses are interested because they see this as the future.

As you make the South Bronx more desirable, how do you avoid the original residents getting displaced?

You get them jobs! We have to get the people living there now up to speed to do the jobs for the industries we attract.

What is your model of change? How do you se change happening?

I see change happening when people who have been shut out of discussions start seeing themselves as part of it. People who are economically disemplowered act that way in every other part of their lives. The deficits extend to how they think about their health. People will operate out of their own self interest, and I see no problem trying to figure out how to work with that.

Have you seen any potential for improving air quality by requiring diesel trucks in your area to achieve a better standard than the average?

There are waste management companies out there that are operating independently that see the value in that. Maybe they see regulations coming down the line. An example of that is some companies in Washington state that are recycling everything, including running everything on biodiesel. Clearly, some have done the cost benefit analysis and have seen that it does save them money. And i would like to see more of that happening in communities that have not been protected by standards. But I'm really inspired by what people are doing because of the cost benefit analysis.

We are a university town, but 50% of the kids in our community are on the federal school lunch program and in some areas it's up to 80%. I'd like us to do something about it. Do you know of a good model for that?

I know of some models, and could go on about it, but it isn't rocket science. It's developing those partnerships and doing that cost benefit analsysis to measure what it is actually costing you to be disengaged from the community. Contact me at http://www.majoracartergroup.com.

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