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.
Interpretation
Economic growth should not come at the cost of environmental neglect and social inequality.
Majora Carter's quote highlights the critical connection between economic health and environmental sustainability, emphasizing that societal neglect, particularly among impoverished communities, leads to greater long-term costs for humanity. She argues against the notion that prioritizing growth inevitably requires harming the environment, asserting that the consequences of poverty and environmental degradation are ultimately too burdensome for society to ignore.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, this quote can illustrate the interconnectedness of poverty and environmental issues.
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.
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.
We need to revise our economic thinking to give full value to our natural resources. This revised economics will stabilize both the theory and the practice of free-market capitalism. It will provide business and public policy with a powerful new tool for economic development, profitability, and the promotion of the public good.
Sector-specific price declines, uncomfortable as they may be for producers in that sector, are generally not a problem for the economy as a whole and do not constitute deflation.
How very popular to say, 'spend more on this, expend more on that.' And of course, we all have our favorite causes; I know I do. But someone has to add up the figures. Every business has to do it, every housewife has to do it, [and] every government should do it.
The reason we should do a carbon tax is because it's the right thing to do. It's economics 101, elementary stuff.
I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.
Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor, the world over.
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