Meeting of Minds and Mobilization: WEACT.org for Environmental Justice and NISAR, A NASA/India Collaboration

Episode Transcript

Vincent Boudreau00:15

Welcome to From City to the World. I'm your host, Vince Boudreau, the President of the City College of New York. From City to the World is a show about how the work that we're doing at City College matters to people across the city and throughout the world. We'll discuss the practical application of our research in solving real world issues like poverty and homelessness, mental health challenges, and talk about our work in relationship to the work of prominent and impactful members of our community working on similar issues.

Today we have a conversation that's going to stretch from space to the streets and the communities of our city talking about climate change and how it affects on the one hand communities, urban communities like the ones around City College, the South Bronx and Washington Heights and Harlem, but also some of the research that's taking place at CCNY, in particular in collaboration with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that brings new data and new technology to the effort to gather as much information as possible about climate change.

Let's jump right into the conversation. According to greeley.earth, climate change refers to the long-term impact of excessive greenhouse gases on temperature or weather patterns and global temperature. Now, shifts in climate change are innate, meaning that they're expected to evolve over time during the solar cycle, it's a natural phenomenon, but according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, increased human activity such as industrialization and urbanization have impacted what should be a natural cycle, had thrown it out of kilter. Over the last three years, we've seen devastating weather events that can be attributed to climate change.

And these are just some of the most prominent consequences of a process that's been going on for quite a while. Examples of that include in August 2023, Southern California experienced its first-ever tropical storm watch from Hurricane Hilary. And although that later changed to a warning, Southern California experienced flooding rains and gusty winds not typically seen in that part of the world, especially during what is considered their dry season. According to NBC News, as Tropical Storm Hillary, which was at that time a category four hurricane, crossed Southern California, a 5.1 magnitude earthquake struck northwest of Los Angeles, causing the community to experience overlapping natural disasters that they had to recover from.

Now, there have been wildfires in California and Canada, and we all remember the smoke that enshrouded New York City and other places in the northeast last summer. Desert locusts have been devouring crops in Eastern Africa and hurricanes in Nicaragua have been reported by worldvision.org. And all of these things are either unexpected phenomena or phenomenon that they're taking place more intensely with greater frequency than has been historically true.

At the college, these are issues that concern us in a number of different ways. We have a sustainability program, the Colin Powell School has a Climate Change Fellows program, and we have a Department of Earth and Atmospheric Science and a NOAA research center in our engineering school as well. We're deeply involved in this, but we also do programming around climate change. For instance, on March 2nd of this year, CCNY held an eco-literacy conference on how environmental systems function in the face of climate change. And the conference was called How Things Work. It took place in our great hall with up to 300 New York City students from middle school level to college attending. Other participants in the conference included educators, stakeholders, and climate change advocates.

As I said earlier, one of the main signals of the seriousness with which we take climate change as an area of instruction and research is that we've got a significant coterie of faculty and research centers that work in one way or another on climate change. And one of our more prominent faculty members is one of our guests today, Dr. Kyle McDonald. And he's going to talk in-depth about the work that he's doing with NASA, working out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and on other projects that help gather better and broader data necessary to figure out what's going on with climate change.

Now let me just say a little bit about Dr. McDonald. Dr. Kyle McDonald is a PhD and he holds the Terry Elks Professorship in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in our science division. Once we're done with speaking primarily with Dr. McDonald, we'll talk to Peggy Shepard who is the co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice. And she'll talk also about how climate change affects communities and about the advocacy work that they have been doing. Again, let me start by telling you about Professor McDonald. As I said, he is the Terry Elks professor of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department, City College of New York, and he's the director of CCNY's Sustainability Program in the Urban Environments. Is a graduate program that we have here. He joined CCNY in 2011 after developing a distinguished 20-year career in the science division of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California's Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

And we're going to be talking a bit about the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but this is one of the fundamental institutions around space and space research and the research we can do from space. Dr. McDonald has been a principal and a co-investigator on numerous NASA earth science investigations involving remote sensing of terrestrial ecosystems and the cryosphere. We know what terrestrial ecosystems are; that's the ground. The cryosphere refers to, the parts of the Earth that are frozen: glaciers, polar ice caps, and the like. He's a faculty affiliate at CCNY's Advanced Science Research Center, where he maintains strong collaborations with the CUNY environmental initiative that's located there. He also maintains a part-time faculty position in the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And he is a project scientist at UCLA's Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering.

His research utilizes microwave and optical infrared remote sensing data sets collected using satellite aircraft and ground-based platforms, combined with in situ, meaning on-the-site, measurements of the Earth's surface to support remote sensing-based studies of process-level functions and attributes of the ecosystems. Let me just break that down a little bit. Remote sensing refers to all different technologies we have that can develop pictures or information about what's happening from a distance. That means from a satellite, from airplanes that fly over, even from sensors that are on the ground. He's doing this remote sensing work, primarily using microwave and optical or infrared technologies to do this sensing.

His educational background is in electrical engineering, and he studies physical linkages between the scattering but also the propagation of microwaves and important ecosystem properties. His research is focused on advancing the understanding of the Earth's carbon, water, and energy cycles, all really important for climate change, vegetation physiology. In other words, what's the plant coverage in different places? Biodiversity and associated responses to the climate. All these things are influenced by shifts in the climate.

His current projects emphasize mapping and monitoring of terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, characterizing wetlands that are inundated with water, characterizing terrestrial carbon, water, and energy cycle processes, and characterizing land surface structures and climate as related to biodiversity and the monitoring of seasonal dynamics in the cryosphere. All of these are efforts to, from a distance, using technologies like microwave and infrared sensing to figure out what's happening in our land and the ice caps and our forests and our coastal ecosystems, really across the Earth.

He's been a member of numerous NASA science and instrument teams and is currently a member of NASA's NISAR and NASA's Cygnus science teams. And we'll talk a little bit more about those two very, very important projects as we go through the conversation. He's a senior member of the IEEE, which is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. He received a bachelor's of electrical engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a master's degree in numerical science from Johns Hopkins University, an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. We are extremely fortunate to have him teaching Earth and Atmospheric Sciences to students here at the City College. Dr. McDonald, after that long introduction, welcome to From City to the World. Really happy to have you here.

Kyle McDonald10:01

Thank you, Vince. I'm very pleased to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Vincent Boudreau10:06

Let's start with an easy one. You've done a lot of work with NASA. And I know a great deal of this involves generating new data about climate change. We talked about the NISAR project and some of the other stuff. Can you talk a little bit about these different projects and what they contribute to our understanding of the changing climate?

Kyle McDonald10:25

Certainly. As you mentioned, my formal education, my formal background is in electrical engineering. I'm actually trained as an electrical engineer. And as part of my graduate work back in the day, I was developing scattering models to try to understand how we could use radar remote sensing technologies to look at forest ecosystems. This was some of the early work that was done, and it eventually led to my position at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

Most of JPL is an engineering house. They employ a lot of engineers designing, building, testing, deploying instruments to study the Earth system, and,- of course, you probably know them also as the people who send rovers to Mars and satellites around Jupiter and things like that. I've worked my career within the JPL science division, which is a little bit different than the rest of JPL. It's a relatively small division within JPL. And they're staffed by a number of principal investigators, scientists that write their own proposals to develop ideas and concepts for understanding of the Earth system using NASA technologies.

And I'm in the earth science section. Also, the science division covers all those other things related to astrophysics and everything that you might think of. But my position there as an earth scientist has been basically spending a lot of time conducting experiments to advance the utility of the remote sensing technologies for understanding the Earth systems. The studies I've conducted have provided a bridge between the science and the engineering.

A particular role that I had at JPL was to do science studies that would inform the engineers on what capabilities would need to be built into the instruments in order to enlist them as effective tools for studying the Earth's environment. How well do we need to characterize measurements that we retrieve with remote sensing instruments in order to support meaningful science in understanding the effect of climate on the Earth system? For example, key parameters that control, for example, the exchange of carbon between Earth's land and the atmosphere, things like CO₂ and methane, key greenhouse gases that are present in the atmosphere. What controls the fluxes of those gases between the land and the atmosphere and regulates that exchange? And those include things like surface temperature and surface moisture content for wetlands, its inundation extent, things of this sort. And so a lot of my research has focused on looking at things like to what specificity do we need to know these parameters to understand their relationship between the land-atmosphere, carbon fluxes, and the climate drivers? What I tell folks is that I'm not a climate scientist per se, I don't study the climate directly, but I work to provide the tools that support climate research.

Vincent Boudreau13:50

In a little bit, I want to get back to the way that these tools are informing work. Dr. McDonald, I want ask you to talk a little bit about the NISAR project. This is something that is ongoing right now. It's ambitious. It will bring new levels of information to people that are interested in climate science. Could you talk about what's unique about this project and where it currently stands?

Kyle McDonald14:18

Certainly. NISAR is a joint project between NASA and the Indian Space Agency, ISRO. This project has been in development for several years, and the NASA part of this has been led at JPL. JPL builds a large number of the radar instruments that NASA flies. NISAR being an imaging radar, the NASA part of that is headed out of the Jet Propulsion Lab. The research that supported the NISAR science has been ongoing for decades. In fact, I was working on this kind of research back in my early days at JPL and actually extending back to my time as a graduate student at the University of Michigan.

NISAR, you have NASA and ISRO, which is NI, and SAR, which is synthetic aperture radar, that refers to a technology that employs an imaging radar basically to create a radar photograph of the region that's being imaged, hence the name NISAR. This is the first dual-frequency imaging radar that will be flown on a free-flying satellite. Other imaging radars, other SARs have flown on the space shuttle and on other satellites for limited periods. Multi-frequency radars flew on the shuttle for brief times. On free-flying satellites, we've had primarily single-frequency systems.

What's unique about NISAR is... Or one of the things that's unique about it is it will be a dual frequency system. It has an imaging radar on board that operates at L-band, which is a radar wavelength of about 24 centimeters, and an S-band unit that operates at 10 centimeters wavelength. The L-band system is built by NASA, the S-band system is built by the Indian Space Agency, ISRO.

Now, Microwave Radar provides a unique sensing capability relative to many other remote sensing technologies. It works day and night because radar provides its own source of illumination. And it can also penetrate clouds. The instrument is going to be placed in a sun-synchronous orbit with a twelve-day repeat cycle, so it's actually going to be covering the entire land surface about every six days at spatial resolutions of three to 10 meters. This technology is developed into what's going to provide an enormous data volume. And actually, the volume of data that's going to come from NISAR will be more than has been collected by all NASA missions to date.

Vincent Boudreau17:17

Before you go on, let just make sure I've got this. This technology can see through the clouds, can operate at night, and every six days it'll generate a comprehensive picture of the Earth's surface to a resolution of three to six meters. That-

Kyle McDonald17:39

Three to 10 meters.

Vincent Boudreau17:40

Three to 10 meters. That feels revolutionary.

Kyle McDonald17:44

Yes, it is. And it's enabled by a technical implementation of a technology that was developed at JPL, known as SweepSAR, which allows for dense sampling of the radar data along the instrument's viewing field, which gives it that combination of high spatial resolution and high temporal revisit that we observe.

Vincent Boudreau18:07

Hi temporal revisit means you get a new image over really short periods of time, like six days, correct?

Kyle McDonald18:15

Yes.

Vincent Boudreau18:16

Okay. All right.

Kyle McDonald18:21

The mission science is addressing some key parameters that we're interested in understanding in terms of the earth system. And these are studies of the cryosphere, studies of solid earth geophysics, and studies of Earth's terrestrial ecosystems, which I'm involved with. I should mention that the coverage that's being provided by the satellite, the data will be free and open, so the public and the science community will have open access to all these data sets. And it's going to be focusing on Earth's land masses. It's not designed to study the oceans, it's looking at the terrestrial surface, so Earth's ice sheets and land masses and islands, that's where the data will be acquired. In terms of the science that we're looking at, the cryosphere, it's going to be looking at the great ice sheets: Antarctica, Greenland, and also the glaciers. Solid earth geophysics, it will be looking at plate tectonics effects of earthquakes, volcanic processes, things of that sort.And what I'm involved in primarily is the ecosystems branch of the NISAR science, looking at vegetation biomass, forest structure, wetlands, ecosystems, agriculture, forest disturbance, and things of that sort.

There's also a lot of issues associated with applications, and one of those that we've gotten involved with here at City College actually relates to our second guest today, the issue of environmental and climate justice concerns. Looking at how can we bring some of these NASA observations to better serve these underrepresented communities that are affected by climate change often in disproportionate types of applications?

Vincent Boudreau20:17

If, for instance, I'm a member of WE ACT and I wanted to access data, what kind of questions could I answer using the data that the satellite will produce?

Kyle McDonald20:27

Well, this is a challenge I think for somebody from a grassroots organization, a community-based organization in general. The data will be available, but expertise will have to be harnessed in order to inform on how best to use those data sets. The sorts of things that NISAR be able to support is looking at things like flood risk, flood extent. I am thinking, of course, a lot of my work is dealing with coastal systems and looking at coastal regions, so floodings along coastlines. We have some studies going on in Florida that we want to look at the Everglades, for example. And then we're also looking at some of the work we have going on in my lab here is related to looking at the urban forests of New York City to understand the heat mitigation potential of those forests, the parklands I'm referring to. And how can they be planned for in terms of mitigating issues such as urban heat islands that's being enhanced under climate warming scenarios?

Vincent Boudreau21:30

This is too good for me to let go. I want to emphasize the fact that this information is going to be free and open to the public. Once the NISAR project is up and running, how does one tap into it? Is it a website that anyone can access, or some other way?

Kyle McDonald21:47

Yes, there's a data archive that NASA hosts an array of these archives. The one that is responsible for archiving radar data is the Alaska Satellite facility, which is at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Fairbanks, Alaska. And they have representation on the NISAR science team, and they are assembling the data systems. They're going to be using a lot from cloud infrastructure based on Amazon web service and things of that sort in order to enable general access to this huge warehouse of data that's going to be coming down.

Vincent Boudreau22:27

I want to ask you a question that, it may take you a little bit out. I've heard you saying that your main responsibility is on the technical side of getting this technology up and running, but if you think about the things that have been discovered using this technology, what's been the most impactful, surprising, interesting bit of information that came out of the deployment of this kind of sensing technology?

Kyle McDonald22:59

Well, one thing I'm very excited about in terms of having NISAR deployed is how it's going to be able to extend our understanding of the functioning and the scent of critical wetlands ecosystems. Wetlands, as you know, is a key and very critical component of Earth's terrestrial ensemble of ecosystems. And I got involved using SAR technologies to study wetlands back in the times when the Japanese were flying what became an early prototype sensor of this kind of imaging that we have, a sensor called JERS, which was also an L-band radar, but it was a very simplistic kind of a radar instrument compared to what we're flying now.

We were able to, for the first time using that technology, map the entire state of Alaska and retrieve a map of the extent of wetlands in Alaska. And to our surprise, Alaska being quite a vast area, a lot of it wasn't very well mapped in terms of ecosystem distribution. We thought we had a good idea, whatever, but once these radar technologies, which are all weather, all season day-night sorts of imaging technologies, once those came to fruition and we were able to put together some mappings up there, we found that the extent of wetlands in Alaska, for example, was quite a bit more vast than we had anticipated. Maybe 50% more of the area of Alaska was wetlands, meaning seasonally or permanently inundated vegetated systems. And similarly, we had similar discoveries in places like the Amazon, tropical wetlands environments.

One thing that's very powerful about L-band radar in particular is its ability to penetrate vegetation. You can not only sense structure of the vegetation, but you can actually see the state of the surface below the trees, for example, in a tropical rainforest and determine whether it's inundated or not. A large amount of the wetlands in the tropics are wetland forests, and NISAR will be able to peer through these trees to see how far into the forest the extent of the wetlands extends. And the Amazon being seasonally pulse-fed system experiences vast amount of flooding throughout its annual cycle with a lot of dynamics in the area inundated, which has a lot of implications for understanding fluxes of carbon ties to release of CO₂ and methane into the atmosphere and things of that sort.

Vincent Boudreau25:57

So sorry, just a pulse-fed system means that it's a system where the river swells during the rainy season and then it gets smaller during the dry season, so it fluctuates. Is that what we're talking about here?

Kyle McDonald26:10

Precisely. And in the Amazon, this process, it begins in the Andes on the western side, and it propagates, the pulse propagates. It takes a couple of months to move through the entire Amazon system. The technologies that we had with the early prototyping radars that we've used, the instrument that we used in Alaska, for example, and subsequently did not have this temporal resolution to really follow that pulse. With NISAR, we will be able to get an inundation map of the Amazon derived every six days throughout the year. We're going to be having an unprecedented level of fidelity in understanding that pulse effect that is present in places like the Amazon and in other major wetland regions around the world.

Vincent Boudreau27:01

Apart from the research you're doing with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA, you're also the director of City College's Sustainability program. And I wanted to ask you, as an educator who are preparing students for the workforce, what do you see in terms of the relationship between efforts to remediate climate change and build broader sustainability and the employment profile of our city and the nation?

Kyle McDonald27:27

Well, I see a lot of opportunity for people who are technically literate with a background grounded in science. Of course, a lot of these mitigation strategies that we have and adaptation strategies that are going to needed to come to fruition as large populations are affected by climate change, these people, they're going to need technical and science expertise to understand what is going on in terms of the changes that are occurring, make sure that strategies that are employed have long-term sustainable results so that we don't have to, for example, move people inland every five years as the sea levels rise, things like that. I see a lot of opportunity for people that have their skill sets in both engineering and science disciplines.

We do address this in our sustainability in the Urban Environments Master's program, which actually represents a cooperation of four of our divisions at City College. We have the science division, the engineering school, architecture school. And of course the Colin Powell School is involved with that. We have a multidisciplinary approach to training graduate students to deal with issues of sustainability, from architecture to engineering to social science and understanding the earth science background.

Vincent Boudreau29:02

In case that went by too fast, that is an advertisement for one of our, I think, most relevant programs at City College. It's a graduate program in urban sustainability. It takes an interdisciplinary perspective and it offers the training and the skills that'll make you, if you're thinking about this field, a really effective leader in the field of sustainability and effort to combat climate change.

We're now just really fortunate to have Ms. Peggy Shepard join this conversation to discuss the impact of climate events on communities. She's absolutely a legend in the world of training and mobilizing and inspiring members of urban communities, communities that often feel the brunt of climate change, to organize effectively against climate change and the impacts that it has on communities of color. We know that these impacts are differential impacts. The burden falls more heavily on these communities.

Let me just tell you a little bit about what she's done. She's the co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and has a long history of organizing and engaging Northern Manhattan residents in community-based planning and campaigns to address environmental protection, environmental health policy locally and also nationally. She has successfully combined grassroots organizing, environmental advocacy, and environmental health and community-based participatory research to become a national leader in advancing environmental policy and the perspectives of environmental justice in urban communities to ensure that the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment extends to everybody.

She's been named the co-chair of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council as well as the chair of the New York City Environmental Justice Advisory Board. This word environmental justice echoes through the position she's held. She was the first female chair of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council in the US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. She also serves on the executive committee of the National Black Environmental Justice Network and the board of advisors of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

And her work over the scope of her career has received broad recognition. She's won the Jane Jacobs Medal from the Rockefeller Foundation for Lifetime Achievement. She's won the 10th annual Heinz Award for the environment, the William K. Reilly Award for environmental leadership, the Knight of the National Order of Merit from the French Republic, the Damu Smith Power of One Award, the Dean's Distinguished Service Award from the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, an honorary doctorates from Smith College and Lawrence University. That is an impressive, long resume. Ms. Shepard, we're so honored to have you. Welcome to From City to the World. And I want to start by asking you to give us a background on WE ACT; how it started, what distinguishes the work. And really, how did you develop your perspective on environmental justice?

Peggy Shepard31:58

Well, thank you. It's great to be here with you. And I'm right across the street from City College.

Vincent Boudreau32:05

You certainly are.

Peggy Shepard32:10

Let me just say that I got started working in West Harlem when I ran for a Democratic district leader and was elected with the idea of forging a new political course in West Harlem since we had been so neglected by our central Harlem elected officials. And when I was organizing volunteers, some of them said to me, "Well, there's a sewage treatment plant in the Hudson River. Are you going to get this job?" And so my co-leader, Chuck Sutton, and I were like, "Jobs? North River Sewage Treatment Plant. What's that?" Well, we soon realized that for so many decades when men hadn't flushed their toilet, it went right into the Hudson River. And so the federal government developed a consent decree with the city that required a sewage treatment plant to be developed to clean up the Hudson River, and so that plant was developed.

We actually got some people hired. But then once the plant began operating, we understood that there were odors and emissions that were making people sick. All along Riverside Drive, Broadway, all the way over to basically Amsterdam Avenue, you could smell the emissions from the plant. And for those who had asthma or other respiratory illnesses, they found that they had more attacks and more challenges with breathing, and so we began an eight-year campaign of organizing about 100 people every month to come out and hold Mayor Koch accountable.

And once David Dinkins became mayor, he said, "There's a problem here, and we're going to fix it." Because Mayor Koch said, "Oh, there's no problem. You must be imagining something." One thing that we understand is the political will is absolutely critical. Mayor Koch had no political will to address this issue. David Dinkins, who had lived uptown and had experienced the sewage plant, came in and said, "Look, I know there's a problem. We're going to fix what's a brand new plant." And in a front page New York Times story, he committed $55 million to fix it and gave on the last day of his administration a $1.1 million environmental benefits fund for West Harlem activities.

But then once you look around and you begin to really see what some of these facilities are, we began to realize that we housed over 1/3rd of the largest diesel bus fleet in the country above 99th Street in communities in Northern Manhattan. Back then, there were seven depots in Manhattan and six were uptown, and so we sued the MTA for building another depot on 133rd Street across from one of the largest housing developments in the city and across from the school. And so we were not successful, but we began an 18-year campaign to get those diesel buses cleaner, so now you'll see buses that say clean air, hybrids. We're even getting some electric buses.

And that is primarily due to a research project that we worked on with the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. It was the Columbia Children's Environmental Health Center that was doing a cohort study of over 720 women in Harlem and the South Bronx. These are women of color; they were pregnant, they were not smokers. They wore backpack air monitors. And so we were able to understand the impact of diesel and find particulates on the mother, on the growing fetus, and then on the resulting child. The oldest child is now 25 years old, and the children have been followed that amount of time. The amount of data that is there is really, really incredible. And so again, strong partnerships.

We got started in 1988, but by 1991, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice decided to convene. They had already done a report called Toxic Waste and Breaks 1986 that basically demonstrated that the primary indicator of where toxic waste site is cited in this country is a community of color and secondarily a low-income community. And so they pulled together in 1991 over 1,000 people in DC at the first People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit where we developed 17 principles of environmental justice. And I really encourage all of our listeners to go online to Google 17 principles of environmental justice and see how pertinent, how relevant they are even today.

And so that was an opportunity to walk into a room and find out that there were hundreds of other people experiencing the same thing we were experiencing here in Harlem. You tend to think that, oh my God, we're the only ones. What is this about? And then you go somewhere and find out, my God, this is a general challenge around this country where our communities are hosting all of the pollution, all of the polluting facilities but getting very few of the green benefits.

And so when you think about what distinguishes WE ACT in our work from perhaps other organizations, we are strong on movement building. We believe we are part of a movement. And half of our work is to ensure that that movement has the capacity and the resources it needs so that we can speak with a powerful voice and we can really make a difference on policy in this country.

And so as a result, we are the first and only grassroots group to have a federal policy office in Washington, DC. We have about 10 staff there who have been very focused on the Build Back Better law, which rolled into the IRA, the Justice 40 plan from the Biden administration that requires 40% minimum of federal investment in clean energy will go to undisturbed communities. And then the government actually has put out a new tool called the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool that identifies environmental justice, or what they're calling undisturbed communities around this country. Those are some of the things that gave us our initial impetus. We've had a strong focus on research, community-based research, partnerships with academia, and really developing strong research and strong articles and strong papers around these issues.

Vincent Boudreau40:02

You said something earlier that triggered a memory. Early on, probably years ago when I was doing this radio show, we had some researchers on that were talking about differential health outcomes. And one of the things that we were talking about was the expression of pain of patients of color where someone would say, "I'm in pain," and they say, "Oh, you don't really feel pain." And when you talked about Mayor Koch's response to the smell and him coming in and saying, "This thing that you think you're experiencing, you're not really experiencing," how frequently is that kind of denigration of the lived experiences of people of color around environmental justice issues? How common is that in the terrain of struggle that you occupy?

Peggy Shepard40:54

Well, certainly it's very common because people are looking the other way. People who know the science, who have the research, who have the data, and government certainly has that data, they simply are not taking action because they probably don't want these facilities in their own community. And so again, one interesting thing about Mayor Koch saying that, Senator Franz Leichter was our state senator at the time, and he was very active on environment. Senator Leichter was a white man who lived on the Upper West Side. And I remember being at a meeting with the mayor and the mayor saying that, and Franz said, "Well, mayor, I smelled it too. I just came down the West Side Highway to this meeting at City Hall and I smell it." And Mayor Koch said, "Well, the next time you do, give me a call so I can come up." He didn't even want to believe the state senator who was not a person of color.

Vincent Boudreau42:02

Wow. Wow.

Peggy Shepard42:06

Yeah. Again, it's really about political will because we can make things happen. And we are making things happen right now. The Biden administration has had major announcements almost every day about some aspects of climate or carbon management. Not that I'm happy with all the carbon management technologies that they are funding, but my point is they are very, very active and they have really seized the political moment. And it's made a very big difference in the visibility in term of environmental justice and in beginning to address it. And it's even gotten to the point where the National Green groups are now in partnership with us. We have a platform called the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform that's made up of six national green groups and 12 environmental justice organizations. And work in Washington to assure that federal policy addresses a number of environmental justice concerns. It's not perfect, but it's the first time that we've all come together to really begin to have a strong voice in some of these issues.

Vincent Boudreau43:26

Traditionally, people would think about environmental activists, conservation activists as being primarily concerned with the countryside, primarily more affluent, primarily more white. And your work is different. And it's obvious why in the story you told why it's important for people on the ground to be informed and be mobilized, but if you think about your work as a movement organizer in relationship to other environmental movements, there's got to be some specific, on the one hand, I'd say challenges, on the other hand, I'd say strategies that you use to work with a primarily urban community, a community where people may not have a ton of resources and may not even have a ton of spare time. How do you think about the particular needs of your movement building work?

Peggy Shepard44:22

Well, when we left the first People of Color Summit, the mandate was to go home and build a grassroots space, and so that's what we've done. We are a membership-based organization. We work to address the issues of the most affected people. And I think that's what maybe some people don't grasp.

When you organize the people most affected by an issue, for instance, we began organizing the people who lived across the street from all these bus depots, we found out many of those people had children with asthma, so they were very interested in telling their story. They were very interested in us doing a video of them and going down to the city council and having a briefing with the city council about this. Again, the stereotype that people are so busy putting food on the table, and they are, but they also understand what is hurting their families. And when they do understand that and realize... Not just understand it, because a lot of them do, but they don't know what they can do about it. And so what I have found and learned is that just a small amount of support goes a long way.

People need support. They walk into our office so they can Xerox out something. They walk into our office to get help on, "How do I develop a meeting with somebody who's a city official or a state official? How do I address the mold and lead in my apartment?" And so once you've been able to build some trust with those organizations that you're going to be helpful. And it's certainly helpful that we have had success.

I should also mention we had the only 24-hour marine transfer station where hundreds of trucks came to tip garbage that was pulled out on a barge that used to go to the Staten Island landfill until Giuliani stopped that. And we were able to develop a campaign called Lion's Share, Not Bear's Share, and we got Mayor Bloomberg to keep that closed and to reopen because he required a marine transfer station for Borough. He opened it over on the Upper East Side. And so again, the advocacy, the organizing, that can happen. Change can happen. But it's the affected people who really have the most challenge, but also, they are the people whose stories they want to hear. And it can make a real, real difference.

The other issue I think that we find in these communities is that there's a cumulative impact. Do we know that environmental regulation and permitting permits facility by facility media by media? Suppose you've got... I think I've already mentioned the depots, the sewage treatment plant, the Marine transfer Station. We had a state Superfund site. We have all of these truck depots for delivery trucks, UPS, Verizon. And so when you see all of that and understand that each one of them has their separate permitting or separate approval because they are within the emission guidelines, but what do you think about the emissions from all four of those together? What impacts does that have on your health?

And so when we look at cumulative impact, we think about New Orleans and Cancer Alley where you have hundreds of acres of old plantations that are now oil and gas facilities with people's homes sandwiched in between these large facilities. And so when you think about miles and miles of these facilities, what is that impact on those people's health? Even though each one of those facilities might be in compliance with their permit, what's that cumulative impact? That's something that we are working on right now and are very focused on ensuring that cumulative impacts are considered in permitting and environmental review.

Vincent Boudreau48:58

That's a new consideration that has been brought to the attention of the permitting authorities. Is it something that people are receptive to?

Peggy Shepard49:05

Oh, no. This is not new. There was a federal advisory committee that I was on, I guess, in the '90s where EPA had done an interim guidance on environmental justice. The National Academy of Medicine has done a whole report on environmental justice, and that actually led to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences requiring that there be a community outreach and education core, a community outreach and translation core in every one of their research centers.

And so that's how I got very involved with the Columbia Children's Center, because I was a co-principal investigator and I coordinated the community outreach and education core. When you asked our previous speaker about communities being able to access data, the kinds of methods that we came up with, we had the researchers go to the community in public meetings to give their findings and to hear from the community what their concerns were. And of course, I made sure that those explanations and those PowerPoints could be understood by a lay audience. This can be done. Again, you publish your research in a journal and then it doesn't go anywhere. If you're not partnered with action folks who can take that and turn it into a new policy or turn it into change, those are the kinds of partnerships we really need.

Vincent Boudreau50:49

Yeah. Yeah. Let me end with this: If people in the community want to get involved with WE ACT for Environmental Justice, what's the best way for them to start joining the work that you're doing?

Peggy Shepard51:03

Absolutely. We have monthly membership meetings on the second Saturday of every month. They can certainly go to our website, www.weact.org, weact.org. And yeah, we meet every month. We have five community working groups around climate resilience, worker training, public housing issues, beauty justice. We are able to bring residents into our working groups to help direct and inform the work and policies that we're doing.

Vincent Boudreau51:43

That's wonderful. Well, to my listeners, I want to say thank you for listening to From City to the World. I want to give a special thanks to our two guests, Dr. Kyle McDonald, who is the Terry Elks professor in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences here at City College, and as I said, the director of our sustainability program. And to Ms. Peggy Shepard, who we've been listening to for the last half hour who is the co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and really one of the people who have shaped the movement for environmental justice in the United States. We're really lucky and grateful to have both of your voices and insight on this show.

From City to the World was produced by yours truly, Vince Boudreau and Angela Harden. And I will ask Angela, I'm doing it right now for everybody to hear, to put that WE ACT website, ww.weact.org, associate that with the title of this episode so people who are interested in getting involved can do that easy. Thank you for tuning in. Final thanks to both of our guests. And we will see you next month for the next edition From City to the World. Thanks, everybody.