Majora Carter, a lifelong resident of one of New York City's most polluted areas, the South Bronx, is on a mission to make her neighborhood green.
Majora Carter, 41, is a lifelong resident of New York City’s South Bronx neighborhood. But she never really saw the neighborhood’s true potential until she brought home an abandoned puppy, Xena.
One day, Carter was walking Xena around the block, past vacant lots that had become makeshift dumps full of beer cans, old tires, and other debris, when Xena tugged at her leash and led Carter down an unfamiliar alley.
Just behind the trash heap, hidden from view, was the Bronx River.
Carter had never realized such direct access to nature was available in her own neighborhood. The poverty-stricken South Bronx had long been used as a dumping ground for the rest of New York City’s trash: City officials were “trying to make my community in the South Bronx handle nearly half of the city’s municipal waste – on top of the 40% of commercial waste we already had to deal with,” says Carter. “It was an affront on many levels.”
She realized that her neighborhood was in need of a serious cleanup – so she volunteered for the job. She decided to start by transforming the riverfront into a spot her neighbors would want to visit. Carter didn’t have a background in environmental activism, but she knew how to ask for what she wanted: She spent months researching a plan, and wrote a grant proposal to solicit donations from nonprofits and public agencies. Her first success was a ten thousand dollar grant, which would go towards cleaning up the area around the river.
But in the months that followed, Carter started dreaming even bigger: In 1999, after much planning and fund-raising, Carter introduced her neighborhood to the $3 million Hunts Point Riverside Park, a public park where South Bronx residents could canoe, kayak, or simply walk along the river’s edge. Thanks to Carter’s hard work, the neighborhood’s heaps of junk and debris have been replaced with grass, flowers, and park benches.
That impressive accomplishment led Carter to found her own nonprofit agency, Sustainable South Bronx (SSB), dedicated to cleaning and greening up the inner-city New York neighborhood. Promoting environmentalism around the South Bronx is essential, says Carter, because “our health statistics and unemployment numbers are alarming. We can solve both problems at once through green-job creation, and enforcing policies that mandate a clean environment for everyone.” The South Bronx is a primarily African-American community, but “clean air shouldn’t have a ‘whites only’ sign any more than a drinking fountain should,” says Carter.
Since founding SSB in 2001, Carter’s been busy making her vision a reality. Along with the Hunts Point Riverside Park and other new parks, Carter has helped to construct the South Bronx Greenway, a series of bicycle and pedestrian pathways that run alongside the river, “connecting neighborhoods to each other and the waterfront parks we have spearheaded,” says Carter. “It’s the largest public investment in the South Bronx for something other than a jail or a sewerage or a waste facility since before World War II.”
Through SSB, Carter has also helped launch a green-collar job training and placement program, which helps unemployed South Bronx residents learn the skills necessary to obtain environmentally-friendly jobs. And it seems to be working: “85% are still employed after three years, 70% in green-collar jobs, and 10% have gone on to college,” Carter says.
The nonprofit’s other recent initiatives include a “green roof” installation business, where live plants are placed on top of urban roofs to conserve heating and cooling energy costs. Next year, SSB will launch a consulting business to advise businesses in the South Bronx on affordable and easy ways to make their companies more environmentally friendly.
Although the South Bronx still has quite a ways to go, the community is slowly but surely getting greener. These days, thanks to Carter and the work of SSB, the river running past the neighborhood isn’t a secret any longer. The park is filled with picnic benches, barbecues, and even sculptures of boats and seashells for the children to play on. Stop by on a sunny day, and you’ll see people playing Frisbee, riding bikes, and boating in the lake. In the midst of urban squalor, the park serves as a place of refuge, full of trees, gardens, and other forms of budding new life. And as far as Carter is concerned, it’s only the beginning of a new green world.