From Grass Roots to Green Spaces

Crusade to reduce pollution in South Bronx is now a full-time cause for a would-be writer

Eight years ago, Majora Carter was finishing up a graduate degree in creative writing, with dreams of going

on to fame and fortune as an author.

Then 35,000 tons of garbage intervened.

That’s how much residential refuse New York City officials wanted to send each week to the South Bronx, Ms. Carter’s home, before it got sent to distant landfills.

Ms. Carter says the trash proposal so offended her that she had to do something to fight it. Her eyes — and in many cases, her nose — told her that the South Bronx already had more than its fair share of trash dumps and air-fouling industries. Worse still, it had some of the highest asthma rates in the country, a respiratory condition aggravated by bad air.

“They wanted to add insult to injury,” Ms. Carter says of the city’s plans. “It was just wrong.”

She started what proved to be a successful grass-roots crusade, which morphed into an environmental charity, Sustainable South Bronx. Since the group’s founding, Ms. Carter has dedicated her time to looking for ways to bring more greenery and less pollution to the area, through such efforts as turning former industrial sites into parks.

In recognition of her work, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, in Chicago, last month awarded Ms. Carter one of its coveted fellowships: $500,000 to do with as she wishes. The foundation praised Ms. Carter as a “relentless and charismatic urban strategist.”

Ms. Carter says she merely realized that her neighborhood was “sick” and needed help. “I didn’t go looking for this job,” the 38-year-old activist says. “It found me.”

Poor Neighborhoods

Sustainable South Bronx’s offices are located in a large, renovated factory building that looms over Hunts Point and Port Morris. These predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods are among the poorest in the country — 70,000 people living amid industry, wharves, and warehouses.

Ms. Carter is fond of taking visitors up to the roof of the red brick edifice, a lofty perch where, she says, “you can get the depth and breadth of what the South Bronx is and what Sustainable South Bronx is both working for and against.”

The Manhattan skyline rises majestically to the south, and eastward the East River bends lazily around the Hunts Point peninsula.

In a heavily industrialized middle ground, however, Ms. Carter points out an orange-and-white smokestack. It’s part of a 12-year-old plant that converts over half of New York City’s sewage sludge — the solids that collect at water treatment plants — into fertilizer pellets. The process, Ms. Carter says, routinely blankets the area in a putrid odor. Less prominent are 15 other waste-treatment facilities, sprinkled throughout the area, that process or prepare for shipment everything from medical waste to commercial garbage to construction debris.

To the northeast is Hunts Point Terminal Market. It’s perhaps the largest wholesale produce and meat market in the world. And it draws 20,000 exhaust-spewing diesel trucks to the neighborhood weekly. Additional exhaust comes courtesy of the many elevated expressways that bisect the Bronx.

The pollutants, says Ms. Carter, all play a part in giving the area some of the measurably worst air quality in the region.

Nearly 2 in 10 children in the South Bronx have asthma, according to a study by New York University’s School of Medicine. Researchers still are not clear on the relationship between air pollution and the onset of asthma, but dirty air is known to exacerbate the respiratory condition. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that South Bronx children are hospitalized for asthma at a rate five times higher than the rest of the country.

“It was politically expedient to put these things in low-income communities,” Ms. Carter says of the troubling vista. “Poor communities are always the path of least resistance.”

Creative-Arts Background

For the past eight years, Ms. Carter has put much of her time and energy into trying to alter the South Bronx landscape for the better. Yet even now she sometimes sounds surprised to still be living in her hometown.

The youngest of 10 children, Ms. Carter remembers witnessing firsthand the rash of arson that assaulted her neighborhood in the 1970s. Images of the burning tenements were broadcast on the nation’s nightly news, and the South Bronx became a poster child for the urban slum.

“I would have laughed in the face of anyone who told me I’d end up living back in the Bronx,” Ms. Carter says.

Education seemed a way out, and her good studentship allowed her to attend the Bronx High School of Science, a premier public school that draws the best and brightest from across the city. A burgeoning love of the arts led her to earn a degree in film from Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn.

When she returned to the South Bronx to live with her parents, Ms. Carter says she expected the move to be temporary, just until she finished graduate school and could afford a place of her own.

Then New York announced its garbage proposal in 1997.

Ms. Carter says she became “politicized” by the move. She started knocking on doors and speaking at every local meeting she could to galvanize opposition to the city’s plans, all while helping to develop an alternative plan through which New York’s trash burden would be shared more equally among the five boroughs.

Reckoning came in 2000, when the city’s final public hearing of its proposal drew more than 700 opponents to the auditorium of Ms. Carter’s old junior high school.

“That level of civic engagement doesn’t happen almost anywhere, and it certainly didn’t happen in the South Bronx,” Ms. Carter says. “It was one the proudest moments of my life.”

Imaginative Response

After the meeting, the city’s trash planner went back to the drawing board, and Ms. Carter went back to local leaders and residents — this time to learn what they did want for the area. At a series of neighborhood meetings, residents expressed an interest in parks and waterfront access. But they just couldn’t imagine those amenities in the run-down South Bronx, despite the area’s miles of shoreline.

Ms. Carter says she was skeptical, too. But then one night, while out for a walk with her dog, Xena, she ended up on an illegal dumping ground on the banks of the Bronx River, a freshwater tributary that empties into the East River.

“I looked at the river, and then looked behind me and thought, OK, everything here can be moved,” she recalls.

She wrote a proposal for a park on the site, and started hammering the city to help make it happen. The dump “moving” took time to get going, but a small park opened on the site in 1998, and the city last year approved $3-million for a major expansion.

Ms. Carter and other local activists have had similar success a little farther upriver, where a city-owned cement plant is being transformed into a 10-acre park. Now a plan to create a biking and hiking greenway through most of the area’s East River waterfront is gaining momentum — and the federal government has committed $1.25-million to study the idea.

Rep. José Serrano, a Democrat from New York whose district includes the South Bronx, has steered over $300,000 in federal funds to Sustainable South Bronx over the years. Representative Serrano calls Ms. Majora “a great leader” who successfully defends her neighborhood against “the larger corporations and government entities that seem to want to use that part of the Bronx as the dumping ground for everything toxic.”

One of Ms. Carter’s most ambitious efforts to date involves trying to expand access to the Bronx River waterfront by getting the state to demolish the just-over-a-mile-long Sheridan Expressway, an elevated highway marring a chunk of the slender river’s shore. Sustainable South Bronx has joined several other local groups in calling for the removal of highway they deem underused and poorly designed. The New York Department of Transportation, amidst consideration of a multimillion-dollar reconstruction of the highway, has recently agreed to examine the costs and impact of removing the roadway instead.

But despite such leafy success stories, Ms. Carter says she isn’t a “tree hugger.”

“I don’t have that luxury,” she says, before stressing the practical side to greenery, such as its ability to naturally filter the air and water.

“It’s not about making things pretty for the sake of making a beautiful place,” she adds. “It’s more about hope. If people are compelled to feel that their community is ugly and gross, then that impacts on them, and then they start to feel the same way about themselves.”

Formalizing Activism

Ms. Carter decided to formalize her activism in 2001 by starting Sustainable South Bronx, with grants from the Merck Family Fund, in Milton, Me., and the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and Open Society Institute, both in New York.

The New York Foundation, another early contributor, has provided the charity with more than $200,000 in general support and special-project grants.

Kevin Ryan, a program officer at the New York Foundation, says Ms. Carter has an “amazing” level of dedication to her cause. “She puts in so many hours, not only working in the community, but also coming up with innovative solutions to problems and turning environmental-justice efforts into potential economic activities.”

Since the South Bronx faces both pollution and high unemployment, Ms. Carter says she believes strongly that environmental and economic issues must go hand in hand.

“We are absolutely not saying that commercial development and sustainable development are mutually exclusive,” she says. “We have to find a way to marry them, so you can have a greenway living peacefully with an industrial section.”

Her group’s ideals are getting tested right now in the Oak Point section of South Bronx, where a developer is proposing to build a major new natural-gas power plant. Ms. Carter opposes the idea, noting that the area is already home to four power plants.

Instead, her group would like to see a “recycling industrial park” developed on the site. She applied for, and won, $84,000 in Federal Empowerment Zone money to conduct a feasibility study of the idea. Ms. Carter wants to find ways to attract businesses that “feed off each other,” in which one company’s refuse becomes another’s raw materials. And all while creating jobs and lessening the landfill burden.

“We need to change the paradigm that says you can’t make money in an environmentally friendly way,” Ms. Carter says.

‘Green Roof’ Technology

Another potential environment-friendly business is literally sprouting on the roof of Sustainable South Bronx’s building, where 1,500 square feet that was once a black-tarred expanse is now planted in strawberries, blueberries, native grasses, and wild flowers.

It’s a demonstration of “green roof” technology, installed over the summer. Square trays of soil, ranging from three to eight inches deep, hold the largely self-sufficient plantings that absorb excess storm water and act as natural insulation, cutting down on heating and cooling costs.

Ms. Carter sees the living roofs as another opportunity to get more nature into her neighborhood. Her own home’s roof is the next she would like to see bloom, and plans are in the works to start a for-profit business to hire and train people from the South Bronx to install such roofs in their neighborhoods and beyond.

Helping to create jobs and train workers is an important part of her organization’s mission. Through its “River Heroes” program, the charity hires South Bronx residents for three-month stints to help clean up the Bronx River while learning marketable skills, such as trimming trees, testing water quality, and handling hazardous materials.

“It’s all about folks in the community being part of the environmental restoration and also being part of the living-wage jobs associated with that restoration,” Ms. Carter says.

To date, 18 people have completed the program, and 14 have found employment in the ecology field.

Though she chuckles when she mentions how the MacArthur grant money puts her in a new tax bracket, Ms. Carter says she loves her own job and has no plans to leave her trim South Bronx home, located just across the street from the house she grew up in.

Apart from the money, Ms. Carter says, a real benefit of the “genius” honor, and the attention surrounding it, has been the way it has forced her to be reflective.

“We’re so connected to the work all the time, we sometimes don’t look back to see how far we’ve come,” she says. “We’ve already made significant advances in the way solid waste is going to be handled in the city for the next 20 years. Now we’ve got the state Department of Transportation seriously considering tearing down a highway because we asked them to. I’m just like, Wow! They can’t ignore our community anymore.”

ABOUT MAJORA CARTER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SUSTAINABLE SOUTH BRONX

Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in film from Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Conn., in 1988, and a master’s degree in creative writing from New York University in 1997.

Current job: Heads Sustainable South Bronx, in New York, which she founded in 2001 to improve environmental, social, and economic conditions in the South Bronx. The charity’s annual budget is $750,000, most of which comes from private foundations.

Hobbies: Camping, snorkeling, and home renovation. “One day I’d like to write a screenplay for a movie, but I don’t have the time now,” she says.

What she’s been reading: Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons, and the Search for a Room of My Own, by Patricia J. Williams.