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[Excerpt] ...I won’t be attending the conference in Copenhagen. But a few weeks ago I did attend the Breaking the Color Barrier to the Great Outdoors conference in Atlanta. A few hundred African American Environmentalist gathered to talk among other things about the role people of color can play in protecting the natural world. There I met Majora Carter, the 2005 winner of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. She received $500,000 to developed her ideas on creating sustainable urban communities. And while we didn’t talk about Copenhagen in particular Carter has a rather unique perspective how best to curb some of the social effects of Climate Change.

Carter: The McArthur Foundation dubbed me an urban revitalization strategist. Which I love, because of the work that I did around pioneering one of the first green jobs training systems in the country, really doing community based, led project development in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country that’s also one of the most environmentally challenged. And the idea was that you can do development that met both the environmental as well as economic needs of a very poor communities and give them the tools they need to enjoy it and be a part of its development.

JTP: The environmental issues that our planet faces aren’t limited to carbon emissions. Though green houses gases are indeed the primary cause of global warming it’s the institutions and practices of human behavior that create them. Carter believes that we need to develop community based initiatives that produce green jobs and allow ordinary people take an active part in the cessation carbon emitting industries. In order to make lasting change in the fight again climate change we have to rethink how we develop and live in our urban centers. And for many communities around world that’s going to mean taking a hard look at issues of social justice, how treat the urban poor as well as racial and ethnic minorities. I’m James Mills and you’re listening to The Joy Trip Project.

Carter: There are many, many challenges that are involved in doing any kind of development in urban areas. Especially those areas where you’ve had a tremendous amount of disinvestment that started at a very high level that lead to the displacement of people or the development of lost of noxious facilities in a community or manufacturing or jobs leaving a particular area. So when you couple all of that, lack of opportunities with a more degraded landscape, then you will layer in things like public health problems and crime and lack of educational attainment. When you put those things together, yes you do have a particular slew of problems that are exacerbated by the fact that people feel powerless because of all these things that have been heaped upon them. So given that you know you got the fact that you’ve got people from the outside going “Oh! That’s a poor community and the don’t know any better.” And then you also have people on the inside feeling that they don’t deserve any better. That is not an easy place to work. It’s just not. And unfortunately there’re a lot of places like that in the world...

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Originally published December 11, 2009 on The Joy Trip Project