004 Majora Carter ”The Prophet of Local”

Whether she's turning a landfill into an award-winning 3 million-dollar park, or transforming a neglected streetscape into a picturesque, Parisian-cafe inspired greenspace, Majora Carter's vision and drive for sustainable, local living is potent and compelling.

 

 

Transcript

Lee Ball: Here with me today is Majora Carter. Majora is an American, urban revitalization strategist and green real estate developer. Majora Carter is probably the only person to receive an award from John Podesta's Center for American Progress, and a Liberty Medal for lifetime achievement from Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. Fast Company named her one of the 100 most creative people in business. The New York Times described her as the "Green Power Broker." The Ashoka foundation's ChangeMakers.org recently dubbed her the "Prophet of Local." Thank you Majora for taking the time to be with us today.

Majora Carter: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here, and yes, this is the amazing podcast studio I think I've ever been in.

Lee Ball: Let's just launch right into it. I've really enjoyed listen to your comments and getting to know you a little bit this afternoon. I'd love to hear about your story a little more, how you came to value sustainability, value the environment, and people.

Majora Carter: I think to start that story, I mean, it really does go back to how I grew up and the kind of neighborhood that I grew up in, which is a very low status community, urban community, in the South Bronx in New York City, which was still to this day is often known as a poster child for urban blight. Very poor community of color, we call it "low status," because there's just been issues around its social, environmental, and economic development. It's never really I think come into its own, at least not for the past 70 years or so.

Our work really has been about how do you show that you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to live in a better one. My early work really focused specifically on more of the environmental project based programs, whether they were working to transform dumps into parks, or create greenways around heavily trafficked streets, and also doing green job training and placement systems, and has since moved into real estate development. Because I realized that how communities are planned and developed is really what creates a community that people either feel connected to and place some value in not just because they own a piece of property, because they see that community itself as something that has value, that makes them feel good about being in it. In low status communities, that's often absolutely not what people that are born and raised there tend to feel about the place.

Lee Ball: So was there, when you were a little girl, was there a place that was natural? Some woods, or the river, a place that you just remember going to and spending time?

Majora Carter: I had the benefit of my parents actually taking me out of the neighborhood in order to experience nature. My parents were from the South and even when they moved up, like I had an aunt who had a blueberry farm in New Jersey, and it actually sold more blueberries than I think any other farm did at the time. When I was a little girl, or we had relatives that lived in Connecticut and they had land around their house, so I saw that but within my own community, with it being what was considered an urban ghetto, there wasn't anything like that.

I knew that it existed, but it never occurred to me that there was anything like that there. As a matter of fact, I knew that there was a river right by my house called the Bronx River, and I only knew that because I saw it on a subway map, like literally the name of it. But it was the place where industry was, where prostitutes were, and that's where truckers would go to find them there, and so if anything, my idea of the urban environment was that it was a scary place to be. Just by the nature of it being located in urban area, it wasn't worth speaking about at all.

Lee Ball: Right. I'm fascinated to ... I'm curious how people develop a sustainability ethic, and my experience, my childhood was kind of the opposite of yours. I spent a lot of time in nature, in a relatively small city with your classic kind of suburban neighborhoods, but a lot of wooded areas and wooded lots and ponds and creeks, and the ocean not too far by. I attribute my sense of having a strong sustainability ethic to maybe having a lot of logged hours in that space. So it's fascinating to me that you still ended up with a strong sustainability ethic, but it was maybe because of what you've witnessed, maybe culturally and with the environmental kind of injustice all around you.

Majora Carter: Yeah, and again my idea of nature was also heavily influenced by gosh, what was it called? Mutual of Omaha's "Wild America."

Lee Ball: Yeah, "Wild Kingdom."

Majora Carter: "Wild K