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.
Interpretation
Collective effort is necessary to improve our environment and society, moving away from failed projects.
Majora Carter emphasizes the importance of collective action and responsibility in addressing societal and environmental issues. Rather than continuing to invest in projects that symbolize our failures, she urges us to focus on repairing and improving our communities and ourselves, highlighting a shift towards more sustainable and constructive endeavors.
In practice
This quote can be used in a community meeting focused on environmental restoration efforts.
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.
A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that's revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.
If you are going down a road and don't like what's in front of you, and look behind you and don't like what you see, get off the road. Create a new path!
Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.
Thou knowest, winter tames man, woman, and beast.
It's going to be a combination Scopes trial, revolution in the streets, Woodstock Festival and People's Park, all rolled into one.
Often I have heard the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly ideal as possible in this imperfect world.
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