Majora Carter

Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base.

Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.

Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.

One thing I noticed working in the Bronx is that leaders come in the craziest places. They don't always show up at community board meetings. Sometimes it's just the guys on the corner that the boys on the block respect.

Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.

I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.

We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems, and repair ourselves. It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums, and other tributes to all of our collective failures.