Majora Carter

Recently, during my regular Wednesday dash to class, I committed a grievous sin: I littered. The offending article was only a soda can, but as an eco-aware Generation Y’er (we drive Priuses!), I felt as though I had failed to fulfill the Platonic ideal of the Socially-Conscious Student. I needed to get the guilt off of my chest, and Majora Carter seemed like the person to talk to.

Carter, 38, is the founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx (SSBX). The organization works to promote environmental sustainability in the urban, low-income, and predominantly black neighborhoods of the South Bronx. If anyone would hear my eco-confession, I was sure it would be her. But when I asked her how to make college kids who can barely see past next week concentrate on the future, her answer was surprising: “I don’t really care if people think or feel compelled to work with my community because it’s a moral issue – low-income people of color shouldn’t be marginalized – I could care less why they do it. I really don’t.”

That candor is typical of Carter, who fits the stereotype of the perpetually “concerned” collegiate eco-activist about as well as Dennis Hastert fits into a Speedo. Born and raised in the Hunts Point area of the Bronx, once the poorest congressional district in the nation, she knows firsthand the effects that environmental burdens can have on poor communities. (The area also has one of the highest asthma rates in the nation.) “These are folks who have been promised everything,” she recounts. “Presidents would come and visit us and tell us how much better our lives were going to be. They believed absolutely nothing.” She changed that by appealing to residents’ concerns for their own health, and by encouraging them to dream: “Just because it is the South Bronx, and it’s got this stigma that’s attached to it, it doesn’t mean that it has to stay the same South Bronx that you have known for your whole lives.”

Despite her northeastern upbringing (raised in Hunts Point, educated at Wesleyan), Carter argues that this message translates to any area – red or blue, rural or urban. “You’ve got to appeal to peoples’ pocketbooks. You have to, on some level, create economic reasons why you should be thinking this way. For us, the hard part is making sure that we come up with economic reasons as to why no community should have to deal with [environmental burdens], period.” It’s a strategy that has worked for red-state progressives like Montana’s Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer, whose strong environmental appeal to traditionally conservative outdoorsmen was critical to his 2004 election.

Carter’s passion for sustainability began when she moved back home while earning her master’s degree. Her undergraduate experience had thrown the poor conditions of her own community into sharp relief, and a 1994 controversy over Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s decision to build a landfill in the South Bronx moved her to take action. “You can’t look at a place like Hunts Point or the South Bronx and not know that there’s something wrong. But I didn’t fully try to analyze it, I have to admit, until [the landfill]. It was the advocacy against the waste facility that forced us to actually mobilize the community.” She mobilized, and successfully diverted the landfill, just the first in a string of successes that SSBX has brought to the Bronx.

Rather than becoming complacent, Carter continues to fight for communities that make effective use (and re-use) of natural resources instead of just using them up and throwing them away…like, say, an empty soda can. Sustainability, she says, is the art of taking the future into account. She likens it to the famous Native American proverb: “You don’t do anything in your world that will impact anyone else’s world seven generations down the line. Every action you have can have either a positive or negative impact down the line.” With that mindset, she has advocated for eco-conscious measures like the replacement of traditional asphalt roofs with vegetated “green roofs” that help improve surrounding air quality and energy efficiency within the building while preventing excess storm water from running untreated into our rivers. Sustainable planning and building can also provide long-term, cost-effective forms of economic development that don’t require seizing public property for private use, as the Supreme Court ruled could be done in this year’s controversial case Kelo v. City of New London.

These are lofty goals, but Carter is now being acknowledged for her very concrete progress: She was recently awarded a prestigious “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation for “profoundly transforming the quality of life for South Bronx residents.” (The annual award, which comes with a $500,000 prize, is granted to a diverse group of physicists, artists, architects, professors, poets, etc.) As for being an officially certified “genius,” Carter has taken it in stride. “It’s really difficult to take it all in, quite frankly. The nice thing is that is provides an extra platform from which to speak about the issues that are truly important to me.”

So how do you know if sustainability can sustain your passion? (In Ms. Carter’s honor, this column uses 100% recycled puns.) First, there’s no need to switch your major. In college, Carter’s main interest in the environment was scouting film locations. “I was a total loser flake, completely,” she says with a laugh. “I certainly threw myself into [the visual arts], but everything else was just a way to get me one step closer to graduation.” (That B.A. from Wesleyan? It’s in Film Studies.) The key to sustainability is that it’s a lifestyle, not a profession: “There’s a Hippocratic Oath that doctors take, and there’s actually one for urban planners, or any kind of planners. It’s basically, ‘Do no harm.’”

Though certainly it might be more common to meet an environmental advocate with an advanced degree in soil science or a few years of experience at Greenpeace, Majora proves that unstoppable passion and a willingness to look at the world from a slightly different perspective help too. (Oh, and being a genius doesn’t hurt.) Now, go out there and Get A Job…but first, pick up that can.

Daniel Munz is a senior at Yale. Send him questions, suggestions and love letters at Daniel.a.munz@gmail.com.

Related Stories

• Tapping For Tuition: Penn State Student Dances to Fund His Education
• Richard Cordray Talks Student Lending, For-Profit Colleges with Campus Progress
• Five Minutes With: Tar Sands Arrestee
• Former Campus Progress Intern Vying for School Board Seat
• Five Minutes With Tree-Occupying Coal Activist Catherine-Ann MacDougal