Changing the Color of Green in the South Bronx
Jul 9th, 2008 by Jervey
The New Republic has an awesome video on environmentalism in the South Bronx. From writer-reporter Dayo Olopade:
This video marks the first of a TNR TV series that will take an issues approach to contemporary environmentalism. This episode deals with matters of class and race in the green movement, with particular focus on the South Bronx–incorporating the precepts of civil rights and social justice into a vision of a greener America.
I have been interested in this topic since attending the PowerShift student environmental conference held at the University of Maryland this October, where I met several black and Latino high school students that had traveled from the Bronx at the behest of environmental activist Majora Carter and her allies. When the entire conference gathered for a keynote speech, one Bronx native described her group as “the chocolate chip in the vanilla ice cream”–and it was not hard to see why. These young people knew–perhaps more intimately than the students lounging on the lush campus green–what environmental degradation looks like. The “environmentalists” at the conference spoke for them, but looked nothing like them.
[Full article here.]