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Majora Carter , founder of Sustainable South Bronx, on the rebirth of a community through environmental and economic justice.

Robert Owens Scott: Tell me about the South Bronx community that you were born into.
Majora Carter: I was born during a time when America's cities were moving into the suburbs and our industry was going overseas. I grew up with landlords torching their own buildings just to collect insurance money, because they figured that was an easier way to make the buildings profitable. The South Bronx became the poster child for urban blight. I spent most of my formative years trying to run away, figuratively and literally, from the South Bronx. I only came back home when I was in graduate school because I was utterly broke and had no way of doing my studies and supporting myself.

ROS: What happened when you came back?
MC: I learned something that I didn't know growing up: my community was not this dirty place because people didn't care. It was designed to be that way. It was politically expedient to put noxious and polluting facilities in my community because it was a poor community of color. I got politicized when I realized that the city and state were complicit in wanting to invite a private company to build a huge waste facility on our waterfront. It would have brought 40 percent of the city's municipal waste here, even though we were already handling close to 40 percent of the city's municipal waste in a square mile radius. We advocated against that huge waste facility and we eventually won. Now we're working with the city to create a more equitable solid waste management plan.

ROS: Was there a moment when you thought, "We can really make a difference here."?
MC: My dog took me walking one day and pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal garbage dump in the neighborhood. It turns out that it dead-ended at the Bronx River. That little moment helped me spearhead the first waterfront park our neighborhood had in more than 60 years. It was the beginning of our community, I think, seeing ourselves in a different way. We could mobilize all the folks in our community to think not just about what we needed to fight against, but what we wanted to fight for, which was dignity in economic development as well as environmental development in our community.

ROS: We hear the word sustainability a lot. What does it mean to you?
MC: For me, sustainability is the bare minimum that people need in order to live a healthy, happy, productive life. Not as consumers, but as human beings. America is such a disposable society. Whether it's processed foods or one-timeuse- only cutlery, or the water bottles that are so prevalent today, it's about how you can throw stuff away. How many of us get a flat screen, when our old TV isn't even broken? We even see people being thought of as disposable. In upstate New York, for example,more than 60 percent of their revenues come from prisons.

That's happening all over the country. ROS: Do you see a connection between sustainability and environmental justice?
MC: Absolutely. Manhattan is often touted as this incredibly green area, but Manhattan doesn't handle any of its own waste. It doesn't handle any of its own power generation. That's being handled in three other communities in New York City that are almost exclusively poor and of color. And that's not sustainable. What we are creating is this two-tiered system where the gap between rich and poor is getting wider by the second. If we plant a couple of more trees, the world isn't going to be a better place. It's also about economic sustainability. That's something that I think we're missing, and not just in New York City.

ROS: How does your work tie environmental and economic sustainability together?
MC: We believe that you can both alleviate poverty and remediate the environment through the development of a green economy. We train folks in the fields of ecological restoration—we train them to safely clean up contaminated land for productive reuse, in green roof installation, and in wetland restoration.We're alleviating poverty, taking people off welfare rolls, allowing them to see the true beauty in themselves as real, productive members of society, and providing badly needed environmental remediation. It's the kind of planning we need to see more of in cities around this country.

ROS: Can cities be sustainable?
MC: Yes, they can be, but only if they're interested in sustaining the most vulnerable members of society. If you start writing people off as not being important, they will feel it and act accordingly. That's a dangerous position for us to get into, considering how much more crowded our world is going to get.

ROS: And so how do we begin to turn that around?
MC: Use people as the resources that they are, remind them that they are valuable just as they are. You give them jobs. If you use the green economy to lift people out of poverty, it means that you make those folks agents of change in their own lives, in the environment, and in the economy.

Majora Carter is the founder of Sustainable South Bronx and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow.

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