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Founder of Sustainable South Bronx explains how America's inner cities can benefit from green-collar jobs. (2:36)
 

Full Interview. (10:57)
 

Tavis: Majora Carter is the founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, which has helped transform her New York City neighborhood into a model for environmental progress in inner-city America. Last year she was featured in "Newsweek's" "25 to Watch" issue and was also awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Humanitarian Service. Nice to have Majora Carter on the west coast from the boogie-down.

Majora Carter: Hello.

Tavis: How you doing?

Carter: Nice to see you again, Tavis.

Tavis: How are things in the boogie-down?

Carter: Things are - we're not totally sustainable yet, but we're getting there. We're trying.

Tavis: Tell me what has been the most challenging part and the most rewarding part about this journey to become sustainable in the South Bronx.

Carter: The most challenging has been helping folks in my community understand that they have the right to be angry and to fight for things that they want to see and dream about. And it's being in a community that really has been the poster child for urban blight. After a while, people start to believe that about themselves. And I think our challenge is trying to help folks see that we do deserve better, and that is our right and obligation as an American and as a people who have come from all we have.

Tavis: So when you're fighting that uphill battle every day, the reward is what?

Carter: The reward is when people recognize just that. That they have a voice that needs to be heard, and that it's one that they find power in, and they want to share it. It's a really amazing thing when people get there.

Tavis: When they're navigating this journey that's fraught with so many challenges when you happen to be a person of color, when you happen to be impoverished. When you're challenged by so many other things on this journey, you get them to hone in on this issue how? You get traction on this environmental issue with this community how?

Carter: We help them see how their self-interest is tied up into it. When I first started doing this work, it was because Giuliani wanted to bring this huge waste facility to our waterfront.

Tavis: That'd be Rudy Giuliani.

Carter: That would be the Rudy, yeah. So at the time I had just moved back home to the neighborhood and wasn't really all that politicized at all, but when I realized that in addition to the one that they wanted to bring, which would have brought 40 percent of the city's commercial waste, we would have also handled - we already handled so much more of the city's waste already.

Power plants were on their way, 60,000 diesel truck trips - it was a horrible, toxic brew that our kids were breathing in each and every day. And telling first, like, at first, oh, there's going to be another waste facility here did not really inspire people. What inspired them to move was them understanding the impact that all those facilities had on their children and their health.

And suddenly, then it became an issue to them. And now what's an issue to folks right now is thinking that yes, we're working on developing a cleaner environment, but we're also still incredibly poor. We're the poorest congressional district in the country, in New York City. Forty percent of us are at or below the poverty line; about 25 percent of us are unemployed.

People need jobs, and since we still do live in an area that is pretty toxic and we're point sources for the greenhouse gases that everyone wants to curb, we're trying to both alleviate poverty as well as clean up the environment by the creation of green manufacturing industries and other kinds of green industries, and also training people to do those green-collar jobs.

Tavis: I want to come back to that in just a second. Before I do talk about those green jobs, and I don't mean to be obviously naïve about the asking of this question, but why is it, for those who don't get this who are watching, perhaps, tonight, why is it that these communities in the South Bronx and around the country are like magnets for this kind of toxic brew, to use your phrase? Why these communities as opposed to other places in the country?

Carter: It's been historically politically expedient to put noxious facilities around people that they think won't fight. And if you're poor, and to top it off if you're of color, then that kind of double combination makes it more difficult for people to oppose it.

And environmental justice is the kind of environmentalism that I do, and it simply means that no community should have to bear the brunt of a lot of environmental burdens and not enjoy environmental benefits. But it's race and class right now that will overly determine where you find that.

And so our ideas - and not just mine, obviously, but the community of people that are working to advance this kind of environmental justice so that you can actually have a community that's socially, environmentally, and economically just is - you would think that it's sort of normal, but it's really not because our communities have been used as the repositories for so much waste they actually make other communities feel better, usually the more affluent ones.

Tavis: I trust you on this issue, because you do the work every day. It is so politically correct, certainly on the Democratic side - even on the Republican side, to some degree - but on the Democratic side, certainly it's the politically correct thing to do and to say, to find yourself on the right side of these kinds of environmental questions where communities of color are concerned.

So we can pretty much predict what a Clinton would say, a Hillary Clinton or a Barack Obama would say about - they know what to say about these issues, is my point. The question is whether or not these issues around communities of color have really gotten any traction in this campaign for the White House.

Carter: No. I don't think as much as it could, because we haven't really tied it to what it really could do for this country, quite frankly, and I think that's the case of what happens often in poor communities all over this country, and when it comes to any campaign. Like we're not - so much of the mentality of the financial systems is ruled by Wall Street.

They're not looking at the fact that this country, the lifeblood of it, was actually created because there were things, actually smaller industries that actually contributed to the economics of our times. And of course bigger, in many cases, is better, especially when you're trying to think about a bottom line of a city, in particular a big one like New York, but if we're really talking about developing the social fabric of this country, it's going to be a little messier.

It is going to mean that you're going to have to look neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community, and look at the economics and recognize that we are sending jobs overseas every single day, that we are destroying our middle class here. And we are letting the gap between rich and poor go wider.

What the green economy can do for us now, it actually serves to elevate people from the lowest levels of the economic ladder to the top, and it does that in a way that actually provides a leg up for everyone.

Tavis: Okay, so break down for me, then, in a way that I and the rest of us can all get this, how it is that the country can be benefitted by people who live and work in communities of color around a green environment?

Carter: Yes.

Tavis: Tell me, how would that work? Tell me how this works.

Carter: If we can think about the fact - or back it up even a little bit more. What happens in our communities now, poor communities? We have lots of toxic industries that have an impact on our kids - everything from learning disabilities, lots of public health crises that impact a whole range of folks.

Those are huge costs that the city now bears. You add that, and poverty actually leads more people into prison that we'd like to acknowledge as a country. If we actually created opportunities for people to go into more of the legal, legitimate economy as opposed to constantly being shepherded and giving more support to pick up a gun rather than a caulk gun or do some other kind of job like that, then we're also lowering those costs as well.

However, if we looked at the fact that if we invested in the green economy, if we invested in people first to do those jobs, whether it was installing solar panels, whether it was installing green roofs, whether it was becoming the horticultural engineers of the future, then those folks, you can create jobs that actually create stability in our communities, stability in our families, stability in our country that we do not have right now.

Those are jobs that cannot be outsourced, and they're being - they would be a new industry. And it is the kind of thing that actually could provide, that would be here for folks in this country, and it would benefit them ultimately.

Tavis: What does the leadership - with all due respect to your work and Van Jones and others, where's the leadership, or lack thereof, but where's the leadership coming from on this issue?

Carter: I think most of it was from the grassroots.

Tavis: From the grassroots, yeah?

Carter: Yeah, like, I got tired of seeing folks in my neighborhood suffering the way they did. Van got tired of having to go - going to funerals and representing kids going to jail after they went into the California Youth Authority jail system and having them come out and not have any opportunities. Folks in Detroit, folks all over - in Kansas City, Missouri were all feeling the same thing.

We're watching people suffer, and we recognize that there is a green wave that's going across this country, and we want to be a part of it. We don't want to be locked out of these beautiful economies, these big things that keep happening - the digital whatever - and leaving our communities behind. And they're communities, believe it or not, of all colors.

But they're almost - we all have one thing in common. It's the fact that we are pretty much poor.

Tavis: Even when you have an environmental movement that is oftentimes too White, to be blunt about it -

Carter: It's pretty White.

Tavis: That leaves us out - pretty White, yeah.

Carter: (Laughs) Oh, yeah.

Tavis: That leaves us out of it. Even when you have people of color, conversely, who don't necessarily get those three Rs - reduce, reuse, recycle - the one thing I know that everybody who is Black, brown, and poor gets is they want a job.

Carter: Hello.

Tavis: So everybody gets that. They may not get the movement, they may get the three Rs, but they get that they want a job.

Carter: Exactly.

Tavis: I raise that because I'm curious as to whether or not you think that those of us who live in communities of color really get that this is what we ought to be pushing for.

Carter: Yes, and the best spokesperson for that is a brother or sister who's gotten a job when they didn't have one in this economy before. And we run a program called BEST, which stands for Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training, and we're training folks in green-collar job skills and development. Anything from green roof installation to urban forestry management, brown field remediation.

So they're actually learning how to clean up contaminated land, but safely, so it doesn't hurt them or the people that are going to use it afterwards, and folks are getting jobs. And we've been running the program for the few years now, and 85 percent of the folks that did that work, went through our training program, have jobs right now, with 10 percent of them in college.

And most of the folks that were in our program were on public assistance. A good portion of them also were formerly incarcerated. And these are folks that I would trust - if I did have children, I'd trust them with them. These are folks that have keys to my house now.

And for me, it's a perfectly beautiful example of what you can do when you help inspire people and have them see both a personal and a financial stake in bettering the environment. That's power, and it's such a beautiful thing, to be able to give that to somebody. That's where they see the value in it.

Tavis: Well, she's giving it out every day. Her name is Majora Carter, doing some major work in the South Bronx to not just talk about white-collar jobs or blue-collar jobs, but increasingly, green-collar jobs in communities of color. Majora, thanks for your work, nice to see you.

Carter: Thank you.

Tavis: Have a safe trip back to the boogie-down.

Carter: Oh, I'm going to try.