A Parks & People Reflection on NRPA's Congress 2008
I’d heard Majora Carter’s name before – a community leader from the South Bronx who was known for tying environmental and social justice issues together in brilliant ways. It was the sketchiest of profiles, but it was enough to make me very excited about getting to hear her speak, in my hometown, at the 2008 National Recreation & Park Association Congress & Exposition in downtown Baltimore. I rode my bike 20 minutes south from Hampden, locked it to a pole in front of the Convention Center, and found my way to the right room. The halls had been crowded, but the room itself wasn’t very full yet. I grabbed some coffee and grapes and sat near the front. My boss, Jackie Carrera of the Parks & People Foundation, arrived shortly after – she had been invited to introduce Majora.
I recognized Majora the moment I saw her from pictures I’d seen, and from the poise and presence she radiated. Jackie introduced her old friend as one of her heroes, adding that “after this is over, she’ll be one of yours too.”
Majora started by playing to her audience, saying that her work is about helping people see the value of what we do. I heard a murmur of assent behind me when she pointed out that parks budgets are the first to be cut in a crisis. From there she tied the economic to the political, stating that our previous economic boom had been “built on the backs of the powerless” and that we need to give people “choices and options, not handouts and pity.” I felt like I was listening to a particularly gifted politician, but one whose words belied more substance than most political oration.
Abruptly, the presentation changed from political to deeply personal (“this is going to be non-linear,” Majora had warned), as she talked about the center of blight in which she had grown up (in which the “popular perception” was that if you were from the South Bronx “you had to be a pimp, pusher or prostitute”). She showed photographs of her parents, dressed classily and shot in black and white, and of herself as a young girl, playing with a toy phone, then contrasted these images with shots of the rubble on which she and her friends had played, and of her brother, who had returned from the military only to be gunned down at home. Effortlessly, she expanded this complex snapshot out to encompass the socio-political context of the South Bronx after decades of white flight, redlining, arson and callously destructive highways had torn it asunder. Looking at a slide of a highway like a “gash” though a once stable neighborhood, I was reminded forcefully of the Highway to Nowhere in West Baltimore, an abandoned expressway project that also devastated the predominantly black neighborhoods through which it cut, and the ramifications of which are still being felt over thirty years later.
Into the powerful tapestry she had woven for us, Majora began to introduce the environmental context, explaining how the South Bronx had become a “regional sacrifice zone”, absorbing 40% of New York City’s waste into its dumping grounds and suffering from the presence of a wall of sewage and waste treatment plants along its waterfront. She defined Environmental Justice, the idea that no community should endure disproportionate environmental burdens, especially without enjoying environmental benefits like those provided by parks and trees, and connected the issues faced on this front by the South Bronx to those faced by poor white communities in Appalachia which have been plagued by negative health effects stemming from the evisceration of their mountains for coal. She listed illnesses very familiar to her audience of parks professionals, such as asthma and diabetes, then added poverty and prison to the list of diseases exacerbated by poor environmental health. A definitive study from Columbia University, she explained, had linked proximity to fossil fuel emissions to learning difficulties in young minds, putting children living near environmental hazards at a severe disadvantage.
During a pause in the presentation, I reflected on what we’d heard so far. Majora’s way of convincingly linking issues that might otherwise seem tenuously related had in it the interconnected holism of ecology. Her quick jumps from one topic to another, going back to explain herself only afterwards, jolted one into really listening, perhaps forging new pathways in the minds of her listeners in the process.
And then the presentation stopped being background and started in on the real story, the one we had all come to hear – how this woman had fought and won battles for her community’s health. A walk with her dog through an illegal dump had uncovered a secret route to the water. Community cleanups led to small grants led to a three million dollar city appropriation for her neighborhood’s first waterfront park in 60 years, which was dedicated in 2005. For the first time in the presentation, we saw black and white faces together, smiling. We saw Majora’s wedding, held in the park with her dog, Xena, as a flower girl. The slides were so green that it seemed like we’d transitioned from black and white to color for the first time, even though it had actually happened much earlier in the presentation.
“I began to wonder,” Majora commented understatedly, “what else are we missing?” She talked about interconnected greenways (not dissimilar to the One Park concept for Baltimore), about heading off displacement of the poor via planning and empowerment, about green jobs and an amazing program in her neighborhood that linked “environmental remediation and poverty alleviation” by certifying locals to do skilled and in-demand work like tree maintenance, work that had previously been contracted out to companies based elsewhere. She cited a famous study from the University of Illinois on the social benefits of trees and complemented it with a story of a young “social scientist” from her jobs program who had used Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design principles to improve the safety of one corner in his neighborhood by trimming up some trees to improve visibility, and leaving others low to create comfortable, shaded seating areas for older residents (thus providing “eyes on the street” a phrase coined by Jane Jacobs, “the patron saint of urban planning”). I was tickled and inspired when she showed a slide of a green line painted down the sidewalk to lead people to parks, and I was fascinated as she went into depth about other youth/jobs focused environmental programs that had sprung up in the South Bronx, including green roofing and computer modeling to turn junk into useful items. She also mentioned the importance of green jobs for things like managing stormwater and mitigating the effects of the urban heat island. I wondered which ideas would be more familiar to the majority of the audience – the social or the environmental ones? Parks, of course, embody the meeting point of these two values.
Abruptly, the presentation went from feel-good inspiration to hard reality with a single statistic. We were given a pop-quiz: the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s _____? A few people in the crowd called out guesses – waste, emissions? The answer was “incarcerated.” Majora reminded us of the link between proximity to pollution and learning disabilities, and spoke about the desperate need for businesses that provide jobs which support their communities. We viewed juxtaposed images, one of a woman working in a recycling plant (caption: “gives my mom a job”) and one of hands gripping the bars of a jail cell (caption: “makes me afraid”). Her anger was clear as she spoke about the rates of unemployment and poverty in the South Bronx, and when she joked that perhaps the 2,000 new prison beds being added to her neighborhood were part of PlaNYC’s “affordable housing strategy.” Pollution. Poverty. Policy. Parks. Employment. In Majora’s world the connections couldn’t be clearer, and she laid them forth to us in such a compelling manner as to be completely undeniable. How could more people not be talking about this? How could this matrix of urban problems and opportunities not be on the forefront of every discussion of our nation’s future?
Majora wrapped up by providing some information about her new business endeavor, and by broadening her scope once more with statements like “what America needs is a Green New Deal” and “Environmental Justice is Civil Rights in the 21st century.” She left us with a question that would have sounded noble but vague before her speech, but seemed completely precise and specific in light of it – “Aren’t we tried of seeing tributes to our collective failures when we should be seeing monuments to our possibilities?”
I want to thank NRPA for providing those of us who were lucky enough to be in that room with the opportunity to hear this amazing woman speak. I only wish that everyone at the conference and, even more, everyone in Baltimore City and in every city struggling for its soul, could have heard it too.
-- Abby Cocke, Community Greening Organizer, Parks & People Foundation
