Author Archives: Teresa Scala

Planting the Seeds of Change in Education: Why Climate Crisis Activism through the Lens of Racial Justice is Critical to Creating and Sustaining a More Equitable Society

Transform Don’t Trash – NYC Environmental Justice Alliance: “On the ground and at the table” Photo credit Matt Davis

Abstract:  The climate crisis must now be addressed in an urgent, radical way, before the harm we do to our environment is irreversible; in 2020 we are presented with an opportunity of unprecedented scope to reset society on multiple, interlocking levels.  The pandemic and resulting societal disruption reveal in stark contrast inequities in economic opportunity, as well as access to healthcare and education, due to the continuing governmental legacy of racist policy that targets Black Americans.  In the de facto segregated New York City public school system, activism that links environmental and racial justice with the climate crisis, building on the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement, is growing.  It is a necessary connection that will unify and strengthen our collective efforts–and unite Americans–to make critical progress on both critical fronts.  Racial justice and environmental justice are inextricably linked with the worsening climate crisis. On the local level, in New York City, we can empower current and future generations of learners through education. the racism that produced segregated housing in toxic environments and neighborhoods, and subsequently in largely segregated school districts, cannot be perpetuated as we emerge from quarantine.  As we unite to address police brutality against Black Americans, the urgent call to address underlying issues of climate justice that affect health and healthcare–and the climate crisis that enables pandemics to roar across the planet–must be the focus of our individual and governmental efforts.

Key Terms:  Racism, Environmental Justice, Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, Climate Crisis

Learning where our food comes from and where our waste goes is all part of understanding the climate crisis and environmental justice.

Harvesting healthy food at Red Hook Farms

A sampling of curriculum content, particularly in the high school curriculum, though adaptable to younger students, follows.  They are envisioned to foster interdisciplinary engagement.  In schools, curriculum surrounding waste generation and processing—where does our garbage go?—recycling, composting, community gardens, greenspaces, and green market economies should be studied, inspiring future engineers, scientists, writers, artists, and architects. 

Civics/Government

  • Discussion of the question at the heart of the civil suit Juliana vs. The United States:  do the People have a constitutional right to a healthy environment?  https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/juliana-v-us
  • What duty of care do we owe one another in a society—on an individual level (such as mask-wearing) and on a national/global level? 
  • Study of the Green New Deal as it relates to NYC realities. 

https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres109/BILLS-116hres109ih.pdf

https://www.sunrisemovement.org/green-new-deal

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02012020/green-new-deal-future-2020-election-climate-change-sanders-ocasio-cortez

  • Discussion of the recently proposed companion Senate bill Environmental Justice for All Act by Senators Harris, Booker, and Duckworth:

https://www.harris.senate.gov/news/press-releases/harris-booker-duckworth-introduce-comprehensive-legislation-to-help-achieve-environmental-justice-for-all

One segment in the documentary included the slogan, “Green jobs, not jails,” a positive example of government-backed support for low-income homeowners to convert their homes to solar power, with people of color from the community participating in jobs training to install the panels.  Energy savings—and clean energy—allowed POC to purchase the panels, making them part of the clean energy movement.  

Environmental Science

  • The Harbor School

A field trip to Governors Island to explore the oyster project at the Harbor School and is an excellent example of positive, cool environmental science.  The oyster middens that used to line the Manhattan shores are testament to the once-teeming food source.  Oysters filter roughly thirty-five gallons of water a day and are quietly cleaning our harbor.  The shell recycling project (you can see it on Governors Island) exists because oyster larvae, called spats, need old oyster shells on which to attach to grow.  It is an inspired way to teach about ecosystems and water health, and a 10-minute ferry ride is a welcome breath of fresh air—when we can emerge.  https://untappedcities.com/2017/08/30/the-harbor-school-nycs-only-maritime-high-school-partners-with-billion-oyster-project-on-governors-island/

Red Hook Farms educational and volunteer programs inspire the next generation of leaders
  • Red Hook Farms is a truly inspiring effort surrounding farming, gardening, and education, involving public housing and NYC communities, not to be missed.
  • Red Hook Farms Composting Facility is “the largest community composting program in the United States run entirely on renewable resources.”

Composting is an elemental way to empower individuals to assert control over daily consumption and waste disposal.  Over 1/3 of NYC waste is compostable food waste; in landfills, it emits greenhouse gases and increases the trucking of waste.  [source https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/nyregion/nyc-compost-recycling.html]

History

  • Innumerable examples, through Jim Crow and Civil Rights struggles, to present,  beginning with this accessible and vital resource:  Reconstruction:  America After the Civil War, by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a 4-part PBS Documentary.  Part I is linked here:  https://www.pbs.org/video/reconstruction-part-1-hour-1-n0g1em/

Environmental Justice and Community engagement

Excellent and engaging curricula can be accessed through We Act, an organization that powerfully links the issues of climate justice to education and activism and provides templates for action.  We Act programming, such as Environmental Health and Justice Leadership Training (EHJLT), online learning mini-modules, and environmental and healthcare careers networking, are all part of this vibrant organization’s initiatives.

  • Climate Justice Agenda 2020

The Climate Justice Agenda 2020:  A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health published in April by the New York City Climate Alliance offers a fantastic roadmap for environmental issues facing NYC communities.  Its overarching goals are to reduce harmful greenhouse gases and localized emissions; advance a just transition towards an inclusive, regenerative economy; and cultivate healthy & resilient communities.  Educators can cull local topics most relevant to students in the neighborhoods in which their schools are housed.  Issues surrounding waste transfer stations, truck traffic, pollutants, storm water treatment, coastal resilience, and the sustaining of a green jobs economy are a few of the items on this comprehensive and exciting agenda.

Core Text:  Powers, Richard. The Overstory. W. W. Norton, 2018.

Summary:

The Overstory, by Richard Powers, will change the way you think about trees, and by extension, humanity’s place in the natural world.  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, it is a novel about a small group of exquisitely drawn characters who, through the course of the novel’s development—Roots, Trunks, Overstory, Seeds—come together over their deep personal connections to trees.  Somehow, incredibly, the trees themselves emerge as memorable, sentient beings.  The Overstory is a rare novel that transports the reader from a modern-day, urban existence to contemplate the natural world in an authentic way.  Readers will notice at a greater depth the ways in which destructive policies for consumption of natural resources—forests—deplete and devalue what is essential to delicate and interconnected ecosystems. 

It begins with a breathtaking description of the American chestnut tree, chestnuts pocketed at the turn of the last century in a romantic immigrant gesture and carried West to be planted in a new home.  American chestnuts were a prime food and wood source and one of the most populous trees in eastern North America less than a hundred years ago, before chestnut blight all but caused their extinction.  Chestnuts are male and female; only one survives the journey, a sentinel.

The characters have varied backstories, but inexorably come together to fight the clear cutting of ancient trees.  There are high stakes involved for the characters’ eco-bravery as they face the brutality arrayed against protesters.  There is suspense, treachery, love and loss, told through a style of writing perfectly adapted to the language of trees:  “Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.”  The meditative, deliberate tone of tree-in-translation seems to compel the reader to simplify, to declutter, eschew materialism to focus on visceral life forces.

The drama of the Timber Wars and the loss of forest to short-sighted profit-driven exploitation is the backdrop to an extraordinary imagining of the life of trees and the interdependence of life on the planet.  Powers seems to be saying that we need to keep ‘branching’ in our search for solutions to the climate crisis brought about by carbon emissions and the obliteration of forests, whose noble trees perform the miraculous task of sequestering carbon.  Sun, water, air, soil:  seeds.

Teaching Resources:

Suzanne Simard: How Do Trees Collaborate?  NPR-WNYC TED Radio Hour, June 26, 2020

“Suzanne Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. Her work demonstrated that these complex, symbiotic networks in our forests mimic our own neural and social networks. She has over thirty years of experience studying the forests of Canada.”

One of the characters in The Overstory is a female scientist who theorizes that trees communicate with one another.  She is humiliated and hounded from the profession for what’s seen as lunacy before finding redemption many years later with the discovery of micorrhyzal networks, through which trees care for one another, cooperate across species.  They transfer information and nutrients through a language heretofore unknown to humans, using fungal networks.  Micorrhyza literally means fungus root, Simard tells us in her TED talk; the mushrooms we see are ‘just the tip of the iceberg’; their fungal roots, mycellium, literally cover the soil in the forest floor and make possible the exchange of carbon for nutrients.  Symbiotic, cooperative relationships are, well, unearthed.  Chemical warnings of beetles, for example, help trees gather defenses.  Bonus:  the site has family-friendly activities to engage all learners.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/26/882828756/suzanne-simard-how-do-trees-collaborate

The American Chestnut Foundation provides fascinating information on the history and efforts to revive the species.  Prized for its straight, light, and rot-resistant wood; valued as a food source for animals; nuts were a cash crop for farmers—they were (and are?) sweeter than other types of chestnuts.  A lone American chestnut plays an indelible part in the life of generations of a family who document its growth through photography, capturing its long-term movement while illustrating the way that art amplifies our world.

Importantly, reviewing the site raises the question:  if a natural disaster extinguishes a species, should we try to reverse the destruction?  The chestnut blight was brought to the US from Asia, arguably the result of human travel and migration.  While Asian chestnuts had developed a resistance, American chestnuts were wiped out. 

The American Chestnut Foundation’s site bridges the not-too-distant local past and the tree’s predominance in the northeast with conservation and preservation efforts that we can witness.

https://www.acf.org/the-american-chestnut/history-american-chestnut/

Why does this famous protector of trees now want to cut some down?

By Warren Cornwall Oct. 5, 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science

Jerry Franklin is a scientist, now in his 80s, who is reconsidering his early, important work in the Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and ‘90s.  He is a seminal figure in producing the scientific research in the Forest Service report that resulted in the 1994 federal law banning clear cutting of thousands of acres of old-growth forest on federal land, the Northwest Forest Plan.  It pitted him squarely against the lumber industry (whose media efforts, focused in this case on the saving of the eco mascot native to old-growth forests, the threatened Spotted Owl, included “Save a logger, eat an owl.”).  

A hero of conservationists, his thinking has evolved, from witnessing the devastation of the Mt. Saint Helens eruption in the 1980s.  The subsequent regrowth—“it was like a supermarket” of food to support biodiversity in the forest ecosystem—led him to begin to rethink his research.  The article opens with his surveying ‘the scene of the crime’ of the targeted logging that he now supports.  “Franklin is drawing the ire of conservationists for promoting forest management techniques—including targeted logging—designed to create more of the scraggly patches of protoforest that ecologists call ‘early seral’ communities.”

The environmentalism of the characters in The Overstory can be seen as heroic–or misguided, depending on whether “scientific theory” is interpreted in the common way that “theory” is understood.  But scientific theory, including climate theory, is infinitely more weighty:  it is the overwhelming evidence of proof of theory, not a mere proposal. 

The article illustrates how science is done:  it is an evolving process that is anathema to dogmatic thinking.  Scientific theory is not immutable; reality, observed and studied, is the guide to inquiry.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/why-does-famous-protector-trees-now-want-cut-some-down

Writing Prompts:

Is Powers trying to change readers with The Overstory?   Does fiction have the power to turn readers into eco warriors? 

The sentinel nature of trees harkens to the power of bearing witness.  What are effective ways that we can bear witness to the changes in our environment caused by climate crisis? 

Are there ways in which trying to rescue species of trees, animals, and other life forms is counterproductive?

Reviewing the Science Magazine article on Jerry Franklin, who revised his thinking after a lifetime of protecting old-growth forests to theorize that targeted logging promotes biodiversity:  What is the nature of scientific inquiry and how can its processes be explained in a way that encourages further study?

Our Best Chance: Igniting Social Justice through Climate Activism

Students march in DUMBO, Brooklyn during the September 2019 New York City Climate Justice Youth Summit. (Jesse Ward/for New York Daily News)

“We live in a strange world where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building things.”—Greta Thunberg1

Death caused by the novel coronavirus is tied to climate change, as pathogens are carried to newer hosts by insects or animals, or released from the warming permafrost, to wreak havoc.  The communities hardest hit, for a number of environmental causes fueled by racism, including toxic atmosphere, inadequate healthcare, and economic inequality, are communities of color across the US and the world. 

The ground is shifting:  the national and global is connected to the local in unprecedented ways, and activism is alive and well in grassroots organizations of New York City.  Anti-racism and climate justice activism are uniting.

“I have found over and over that the proximity of death in shared calamity makes many people more urgently alive, less attached to the small things in life and more committed to the big ones, often including civil society or the common good.”– Rebecca Solnit2

In NYC, the Environmental Justice Alliance, its tag line On the Ground and at the Table, has published NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2020:  A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health in April 2020, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.  It details an essential local strategic plan to reduce greenhouse gas and local emissions; to advance a just transition from an extractive economy toward an inclusive, regenerative economy; and to cultivate healthy and resilient communities.  In clear, concrete objectives is a comprehensive action plan for policy affecting low-SES neighborhoods:  reducing waste transfer emissions, rebuilding stormwater systems, blocking big-box retail centers on the waterfront in favor of retaining the industrial infrastructure to be put in service of eco manufacturing (and the better and better-paying middle-class jobs that industrial output creates).  It is an indispensable resource for understanding issues—such as unconscionably high rates of asthma in public housing—and paving a way forward.

Amplifying one of the goals in NYC EJA, Transform, Don’t Trash is a lecture by Justin Wood from the New York Lawyers for Public Interest (NYPLI) on waste transfer and the system that NYC has had in place since the 1950s, given as part of the Climate Action Lab in the Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate Center.  Municipal garbage collection is duplicated by private carters for all NYC restaurants and businesses.  The resulting truck traffic burdens already-congested routes creating more damaging emissions.  Add to this the abysmal rate of recycling from private carters (and, as noted in the NYC EJA report, compounded by the virtually non-existent recycling available to NYCHA residents), and there is action to be taken to reach 0 Waste to Landfill and composting goals.  NYC EJA gives a shout-out to Green Feen consultants who use “Hip-Hop to teach sustainability as a lifestyle through green technology and compost education.” 

The weaknesses of the NYC schools system continue to be highlighted in the crisis, as resources are scarce and access not just to the internet, but to stable housing and food security are lacking.  An encouraging initiative is the one described by Saara Nafici in another Climate Action Lab Rethinking Food Justice in New York City who galvanizes youth from NYC’s 2nd largest housing project on the Value Added Red Hook Farms.  Joining forces to address environmental changes by empowering youth and community engagement—while creating a source for fresh, healthy food—is a great example of the types of transformation needed. 

The situation is dire.  Greta Thunberg asks, “What do we do when there is no political will?”  We begin on the ground, drawn together for common cause.  We reverse the effects of neoliberal privatization for what Solnit calls “the lifeless thing that is profit.”  Solnit writes that the times may lead us to consider universal healthcare and basic income. 

Instead of standing idly by, aghast, change is being enacted locally, a model on which to build.  It cannot supplant sane national policy on emissions, the fossil fuel industry, or support for renewal energy sources, but it will absolutely inform the policy debate as more people realize that climate chaos affects all aspects of our lives, unequally. It is a time when the critical fight to end racism and climate degradation are joined. We must all be at the table, together.  The resource that NYC EJA provides is a welcome local focus for change. 

1https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lw_qHVaJk8-QIpGv42m6bGHWo7Bg4bOG/view

2https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/what-coronavirus-can-teach-us-about-hope-rebecca-solnit?

(Yes We Can) Change the Story

A pond collects soil and water residue from oil-sands mining near Fort McMurray, Alberta. The oil sands account for 60 percent of Canada’s oil output.Credit…Ian Willms for The New York Times

This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein’s 2015 documentary based on her book subtitled “Capitalism vs. The Climate,” did not—yet.  But it has had important impact.  Klein’s overarching message hits home especially now given the world-changing pandemic disruption and activism for social justice as we face endemic racism and inequality.  The documentary does feel current as though today’s moment is our “Best chance to build a better world.”

Klein’s message is revolutionary, based on the timeless truth that humans are inveterate storytellers, are compelled to tell stories to make sense of our world.  The problem is that for the last four hundred years, the dominant cultures of the West have been telling a story based on the idea that the Earth is a machine, and humans are its master.  Through the course of the documentary, Klein shows that the economy is a machine, too, capable of being manipulated to feed perpetual growth.

Klein intimately narrates the journey from a Royal Society gathering, where an energized scientist sunnily proposes we have the ability to solve climate change by essentially putting a hose to the sky and spreading tiny particles to block a bit of the sun and therefore the heat.  Switch to a clip of Stephen Colbert interviewing this surely brilliant man, “You’ve buried the lede:  it’s sulphuric acid!”  A touch of levity, but it offers enough of a glimpse of the hubris behind the exercise.  By beginning with the Royal Society, the film places Enlightenment thinkers at its outset.  Locke and property ownership–the use of the land–forefronts the displacement and removal of indigenous peoples in North America.  The film is about the abuse of the land.

Deftly directed by Avi Lewis, the cinematography is breathtaking:  boreal forest in Alberta, prairies stretching to the horizon, and verdant tropical landscapes contrast with the savage rape of the earth and the flight of its native communities.  The scenes of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, are akin to barren moon shots.  ‘No one would ever have a reason to come here if we weren’t extracting the bitumen (thick, tar-like oil)’ one company manager says, without a trace of irony.  The tar sands site produces 60% of Canada’s oil, itself the 4th largest oil producer in the world. 

The documentary explores seven areas around the world, including Canada, the US, Greece, India, and China, where fossil fuel extraction and gold mining is a blight on the land and in communities mostly powerless to fight the exploitation.  The film’s strength is in the human narratives elicited:  a grandmother and granddaughter switching naturally to their native Cree Nation language (think about the forced assimilation schooling and denial of native languages), even if it’s to call a white bureaucrat a Moniyaw for blocking their access to see their ancestral lands.  “The land owns us,’’ says the Cree activist, not the other way around.

“Sacrifice zones” are offered as a source of profit; it’ll grow back to the way it was, they say, thirty years after the extraction, while releasing toxins to the communities downstream.  There’s a gross but real scene of a brash young oil worker—making 150k for 6 months’ work—excusing himself to blow his nose on some cash, gleeful over the scads of money he’s making.

In Beijing, a small boy is asked whether he’s ever seen a star, a blue sky, or a cloud.  No, he answers to each, though allows for ‘a little blue’ in the sky, due to the horrible air pollution. 

“Sustainability is a Marxist concept” masquerading as the redistribution of wealth, shouts one capitalist.

There’s good news:  China has since closed its last coal mine and is heavily invested in producing solar panels.  The Alberta tar sands expansion proposal collapsed in 2019 under pressure from environmentalists and indigenous groups https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/24/business/energy-environment/frontier-oil-sands-canada.html.

We can take care of the Earth and each other, creating a path to a different future where we can improve quality of life, create meaningful work, greater equality, and an end to ‘sacrifice zones.’  There’s a beautiful transition of Cree Nation singing segueing into Greek, the ethereal nature of the intonations being universal.  It is the less powerful who are compromised by unregulated capitalism and who suffer effects not of their making.  As we protest that Black Lives Matter in our unjust society, we also know the relationship of climate change is one of exploitation.  They are tied together and an epic Best Chance to make a better world is upon us.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/04/alberta-canadas-tar-sands-is-growing-but-indigenous-people-fight-back/

The New Normal: Climate Change Spurs Hudson River Fish Die-Off

Thousands of dead fish floating in the Hudson River. Image courtesy of UWS Live.
Hudson River Fish Die-Off Was Exacerbated by Climate Change, Scientist Says by Carol Tannenhauser

Did anyone notice the dead fish floating all along the Manhattan shore of the Hudson River on the 4th of July weekend?  It is another glimpse of the new normal in our rapidly-warming world:  a substantial fish die-off in the Hudson barely receives attention.  Days of dead fish for miles, almost all of one species—Atlantic menhaden, also known as bunker fish—were to be seen floating in the tide.  The cormorants and seagulls were not interested—I thought they must already have gorged themselves on these fresh-dead fish to pass them up—yet an odd sense settled in that the seabirds’ instincts told them to leave those fish be.  Every now and again, a fish could be seen swimming on its side, swimming in a tight circle, in its death throes.  It was a horrifying sight, juxtaposed with people enjoying a sunny day on the waterfront.

The official word, hastily looked up and reflected on my phone on July 3rd was that the bunker, which swim in schools, must have hit a pocket of low-oxygen water and essentially suffocated en masse.  Low oxygen is caused by climate change as the water warms, and by fertilizer runoff in the water, the resulting algae blooms consuming more of the oxygen fish need to survive.  When water warms it holds less oxygen because its molecules are more kinetic than that of colder water.  The fish die from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen.  A ‘natural occurrence,’ it’s been known to happen, but apparently never as bad as this year.  (I did see a dead eel and what I think was a striped bass as well, but the others were uniformly Atlantic menhaden.)  Some were headless, but some were completely intact, reflecting a continuing scenario—one in which it took some fish longer to succumb.

What sources to turn to for information?  New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, in contrast to the federal government, has taken an active role in reducing emissions and fighting climate change.  I would have a healthy dose of skepticism in considering anything put forth by the gutted federal EPA in the current administration, after our withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and alongside continuing, wrong-headed and confounding efforts to support the fossil fuel industry as though climate carnage was not a thing.  New York State, referred to as a “subnational actor” in the UNEP Emissions Gap Report of November 2019, is among the states whose policies adhere to Paris Agreement levels of cutting emissions, regardless of the cynical federal retreat.  Riverkeeper.org is the organization to which I turned for information in this very disturbing case of the impressive fish kill.

I first learned about Atlantic menhaden, bunker fish, in Montauk last year.  On our annual camping trip to Montauk, we saw humpback whales spouting and jumping from where we stood on the beach.  Bunker, we were told, travel in large schools and whales follow them.  Never in a quarter century of summer visiting did we see whales from the beach.  It, too, was an astounding sight, two whales jumping in graceful unison.  We joked, slightly uneasily, that these were the End Times and evidence that the world is changing.

Jonathan Watts, summarizing UN findings in the Guardian in 2018, in which the headline 2 years ago blared:  “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN” notes that in the most stringent, optimistic, best-case scenario, in which we limit ourselves to 1.5° C of climate increase, 1.5 metric tons of fish will die from ocean acidification and heating.  An additional half-degree warmer would double the die-off to 3 metric tons.  The specter of massive fish die-offs is suddenly imaginable.

At the 79th Street Boat Basin this summer, the usual sunset sight of the Clearwater Sloop docking and dispersing its groups of happy passengers is missing due to the pandemic.  People traditionally set sail on the Clearwater for a several-hour tour to learn of the Hudson River’s ecology, the restorative cleanup of toxic PCBs from the 1970s, while enjoying the beautiful vistas of the Palisades and the Hudson itself.  For those who remember the polluted years of the Hudson, it was a victory lap of sorts.  I wish more people could see the sight of those dead fish, an unnatural alarm bell.

Riverkeeper notes that the Hudson is a delicate ecosystem.  I worry that these ‘little’ signs, while explainable, are ominous.  I’ve always known seagulls to be voracious feeders; even they seemed suspicious.  Radical climate change is already upon us and we cannot become inured to the obvious.  It is time to commit to action to preserve and to protect our ecosystems, not to shirk our responsibility.  The Fourth of July scene on the Hudson must be a clarion call for the U.S. to recommit to the Paris Agreement.