The Greening Of The Hood

I saw this woman on the front of Yoga+ magazine and decided to grab a copy. The story is interesting enough to share ...

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.”

You can read the entire article here ...