[00:00:10] Speaker A: Come gather around the fire, listeners. It's time for a story, a we act story.
The year is 1986, and we find ourselves in Riverside park, nestled along the eastern shore of the Hudson river in the historic neighborhood of Harlem. The wind is blowing from the west, and as we look out across the river to nearby New Jersey, we inhale the nauseating stench of raw sewage. We turn and find ourselves nearby the recently completed North river sewage treatment plant.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: This plant was originally slated to be built on the upper west side, but after complaints and pushback from residents there, it was moved to northern Manhattan, historically a dumping ground for the city's polluting facilities. Located across the west side highway from the largely residential neighborhood of West Harlem, the facility had open sewage tanks. The stench was unbearable, forcing residents to keep their windows closed even in the summer months. And the emissions from the facility's smokestacks were not up to code at the time.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Peggy shepherd was a democratic district leader for West Harlem and began organizing protests on MLK Day in 1988. She was among the seven protesters, known as the Sewage Seven, who blocked traffic on the west side highway during the evening rush hour. They were arrested for this act of civil disobedience, good trouble, but also generated a lot of publicity for the cause.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: They sued the city to fix the plant, and the settlement, in addition to committing $55 million to fix the facility, also provided a $1.1 million environmental health fund for the community, which led to the formation of West Harlem Environmental Action, co founded by Peggy firm, Niece Miller Travis, and the late Chuck Sutton, which we know today as we act for environmental justice.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Welcome to the holiday special of Uptown Chat, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Lonnie.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: And I'm your other co host, Jaren. In the spirit of the holiday season, this episode will walk us through an important story of how we act came to be the organization that it is today. We'll be joined by two very special guests who were pivotal in those early days of WEACt, Eric Goldstein, New York City environmental director at NRDC and one of WEAct's current board members, and also by Vernice Miller Travis, co founder of WEact and a very special guest of the show.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Already they'll each be telling a piece of their story centered around the battle against the North river sewage treatment plant.
[00:02:52] Speaker B: Now let's begin.
Thank you so much for joining us, Eric. Before we get too far in, do you mind giving us a quick introduction of yourself?
[00:03:16] Speaker C: Sure. My name is Eric Olstein. I'm an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a long term board member of we act for environmental justice.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you. So we obviously have you on the show today because you are very pivotal in making weact what it is today. And you're a part of the weact story. And so our goal today is to kind of dig into that story a little bit more and really unpack some of the pieces that get left out and bring them to light so people can really understand all the pieces that go into making a we act or a really important environmental justice group. So, with that, let's just start all the way back from the beginning and walk us through the know. Up until the point you met Peggy, those years kind of leading up to you meeting Peggy, what were you up to around that time? What did your life look like, and what kind of things were you working on?
[00:04:13] Speaker C: Well, I'm a city boy. I grew up in Brooklyn, and my parents, my mom was a public school teacher. My father worked in the garment district. They were both strong union members and had a real love for New York and all of its diversity. And so I grew up loving cities. But recognizing that there was a heck of a lot of pollution all around. Used to play ball in the streets of Brooklyn, and anytime a car would go by or a truck or a bus, there'd be huge clouds of diesel pollution where we have to stop the game. And if we would scrape the top of the hood of a car, catching a ball or something, our hands and shirt would come up covered with black rimy soot. So even at that age, I was probably ten or twelve, I said, this is pretty crazy. Whether you live in the city or suburb or rural area, you ought to be entitled to breathe clean air and drink clean water and have decent places to play. And I guess that's part of the reason why I decided I wanted to change the world. And my piece of the world was not going to be some protecting some distant wilderness, but protecting the city that I grew up in and where so many people live.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: I love that. After you kind of had this realization that you wanted to do that, you wanted to change things, you wanted to change the world, you wanted to change your community. Where did that lead you? Where did that take you?
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Well, ultimately it took me to law school. And again, I decided that my little focus area was going to be New York, and I was going to try to protect New York. And so I was fortunate enough to get a job at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nine month study. I was supposed to prepare on air pollution in New York City and how it affected public health and the economy. And that was like 40 years ago. I never finished that study. And so here I am. I'm still here at NRDC and working away. I really did finish the study, but one thing led to the next, and we created a focus at NRDC on cities. And I think we were probably one of the first national environmental groups to focus on urban areas and people living in cities and see that as not only a part of the environment, but a core of what we think of when we think of environmental quality and environmental protection.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: What did environmental law as a space look like at that time?
[00:06:41] Speaker C: Well, this was still. The 1970s was really the golden decade of environmental law. That was when Congress passed the Clean Air act and the Clean Water act and half a dozen other major federal environmental statutes. The National Environmental Policy act was passed, and that created the whole program for doing environmental reviews anytime the federal government would invest in any kind of major project, like a highway project or an airport or some other major federal investment. And the US Environmental Protection Agency itself had just been created in 1970, taking pieces of the public health service and several other parts of the interior department and all. And so it was the beginnings of the modern environmental movement. And there was a lot of optimism because there was even some bipartisanship in those days. And so the Clean Water act of 1972 passed almost unanimously, and it was a hopeful decade because government was seen as part of the solution and was attacking the biggest, baddest environmental assaults, air pollution and water pollution at the federal level.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Yeah, and you kind of alluded to this a little bit. So I'm assuming also at the same time, the activism aspect of it looked more so like, save the trees in the forest somewhere. That is not where you're playing in Brooklyn when you were a kid. So was there a transition or a shift that you saw from kind of that form of activism or thinking about environmental work that way to more of the urban spaces?
[00:08:22] Speaker C: Well, it was coming, but slowly. And of course, there was activism going on and in places outside of the national mainstream environmental groups. And Dr. Bullard was leading the charge in identifying local fights against hazardous waste facilities down south in the 1980s and all. But still in the late 70s, it was somewhat of an invisible problem. Folks had been involved in getting lead pollution out of gasoline, for example. And so there were some issues that were direct urban issues, but for a large part, this was still the focus of national groups, was on these big national laws and air, water, land protection. There were these battles going on. But many of the folks in the environmental justice world, of course, the term environmental justice wasn't even really around then. And so folks were working to protect their communities, but they weren't even necessarily using the word environment. They were having fights against undesirable environmental facilities, but they thought of it as public health protection or defending their neighborhoods from being dumping grounds from all of the sources of pollution.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: That's super helpful. I think that continuing along, you're working on these really important things at NRDC and late 70s, early 80s, we're approaching the time where things are starting to happen with folks up here in northern Manhattan. How do you first find yourself meeting and or interacting with Peggy and other folks in those early days?
[00:10:05] Speaker C: Well, the first time that we heard about the plans to locate the North river sewage plant up here in West Harlem, it was the late 1980s, and Peggy and Vernice and Chuck Sutton and a number of other folks had a famous boycott or protest when they blocked traffic on the west side highway and got a lot of publicity for that. And so that might have been the day that that sort of came into my consciousness as an issue, I think, in the public's mind, it was the protests that Peggy and Vernice and Chuck Sutton arranged that first brought visibility to the issue, even though the decision to construct the plant had already been made. And in the 1980s, they were doing this massive construction project and putting in the pilings in the Hudson river that would be the foundation for the project. And when the plant opened in 1986, there were a huge volume of complaints from residents, from the odors of sewage. And again, this was not some small little facility. This was a plant that was treating the sewage of over half a million New Yorkers. Everyone on the west side, from lower Manhattan to the very northern tip of Manhattan, all of their sewage was being sent to this plant, 170,000,000 gallons a day.
And so originally, the plant had been proposed to be fully enclosed. And then with budget cuts and energy crisis, the design of the plant was changed. And the arches that one sees now, if you go over to the plant, really served as a funnel to send the odors from the settling tanks, from the plant itself, which was on the banks of the Hudson river into the West Harlem community. And there was a roof on top in the arches. And the only time the odors from that plant would escape was when there were winds coming over the Hudson from the west, blowing all of these fumes into the West Harlem community.
So protests took place. Then Manhattan borough President David Dinkins commissioned a study that was done by Barry Commoner. Barry Commoner, a very famous environmental activist and scientist who was working at Queen's College at the time.
And he concluded that sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide odors were indeed being emitted from the plant. This is the late 1980s, and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection was still in denial mode. And they said, no, there were no odors or very intermittent and sporadic. And so Peggy and Vernice and Chuck Sutton were leading the campaign and the charge. And at some point along the way, probably in about 1990, they reached out to NRDC and asked if we could look into this situation and help. And as Peggy reminds me, it took a while for us to get back to Peggy and Vernice. We had got a relatively small team, just a couple of lawyers and folks working on New York City issues.
But ultimately, we did get back to them. We met with Peggy and Vernice and understood the problem, and we said, let's see if we can help. And so the first thing we did was seek to engage in the permit process. Every sewage plant, every major source of water pollution needs a discharge permit from the US Environmental Protection Agency or the state. And so there happened to have been an ongoing permit proceeding for this plant. It was a water permit proceeding. But we said, let's see what we could do. And so we filed papers and sought to intervene in this case and say, there are some air quality issues here that need to be addressed. We were immediately swatted out of that proceeding. And so that didn't work.
Then there was some combination of ideas that we kicked around in terms of litigation. What could we sue to stop this?
And in law school, you learn about nuisance and what a nuisance is. And a nuisance, in English is just someone who may be bothering you or whatever. But the legal term of a nuisance is interference with property rights. And so when we thought of possible legal handles, we met with Peggy and Vernice's neighbors. We understood that this was really a perfect nuisance case because some of the neighbors were saying they have to keep their windows closed even in the warmest days of July and August, because the smells are too much, or they had to keep their air conditioners on even in the winter, or they couldn't have a little cookout in their backyard. Or one person said that his brownstone was a couple of blocks from the plant, and there was no way he would be able to sell this house if he ever wanted to, because the odors were so strong. And then the Hamilton Grange daycare facility also reached out to Peggy and Vernice, and they had kids playing in the little park directly across the street from the plant. And they said, we can't go out there anymore. We can't use the plant. So with the help of a pro bono law firm, Paul Weiss, we put together a public and private nuisance case that we were preparing to file on behalf of weak, the Hamilton Grange daycare Center, and seven of the neighbors who had reached out to Peggy and Vernice, who had agreed to serve as plaintiffs in the case.
And significantly, everyone in the case said, we're not interested in money damages, because that's frequently, if you bring a nuisance case, that's what you can get. If your property is affected and if you sell your house and you can get $25,000 less, then you might be entitled to get the $25,000. They said, no, we want the one other thing we're entitled to in a nuisance case, which is abatement of the nuisance. And so everyone agreed we were going to work together to compel the city to address the odor problems.
By this time, Mayor Dinkins had been elected as mayor and took office January 1 990. So he had been the Manhattan borough president, a position of relatively less power. Now he was the mayor. And so his Dep commissioner at first conceded that there was a problem with odors and said that they would try to fix it. And the state, then again, Peggy and Vernice had been working on this for five years. By now. The state brought an administrative action to seek to get the city to make changes at the plant. And that same year, 1992, DeP and the state agreed that they would make some capital improvements in the facility. That was also the year that we filed this nuisance case. And the city, without getting too technical here, the city, as they often do, they moved to dismiss the case, and they said, well, we're negotiating with the state. We have some little arrangement with the state, and so there's no need for this case to move forward. And the court rejected that argument and denied their motion to dismiss. And so with that and the fact that Mayor Dinkins had now come into office, the city had a new willingness to address the problem, which it didn't have in the 1980s under previous administration.
And so even then, there was some reluctance among the city officials to come up with a real settlement that would have teeth to it. And what we wanted, what Peggy and Vernice and the weACT team wanted, was to ensure that whatever promises the city was making to the state for spending tens of millions of dollars to improve the settling tanks and to improve the air quality and restrict fumes from escaping from the plant. We wanted the ability to have we act, enforce that and to make sure that if this is a promise, it's an enforceable promise. And we also wanted something for the community, because one of the objectives of this kind of litigation is community empowerment. And so, again, we don't want folks just to count on lawyers to come in and try to solve the problem. And the truth is, lawyers alone could never solve these problems. Lawyers create as many problems as we solve. So we proposed the creation of a settlement fund. And again, rather than having money go to the seven individual plaintiffs or the Hamilton Grange Daycare center, the money would go to, we act to decide how it could be used throughout the community.
And this was, again, so this was 1993 and relatively early in terms of these kind of environmental, community benefit fund settlements. Nevertheless, we reached agreement for a $1.1 million settlement, which we act, then over the next couple of years, parceled out to create the first little program for green jobs in the Harlem community, for tree planting in various places along Broadway and throughout the community, to fund an initial health study and to do various kinds of environmentally progressive projects to build up and strengthen the environmental conditions on the west side of Harlem. And that was also about the time that weact then hired its first staff and made the transition from really a volunteer organization and a fledgling nonprofit to an organization that has grown today in leaps and bounds, but that could be a permanent force for environmental justice, both in northern Manhattan and ultimately in Albany. And today, as you know, one of the strongest forces for environmental justice with our office in Washington, D. C. And representing communities and environmental justice interests at the federal level. So as one looks back on it over 30 years, 35 years, it's been just an amazing growth that Peggy and vernice have a lot, deserve a huge amount of credit because they have stayed with it and demonstrated one of the most important things that any environmental advocate can do, which is to be persistent.
And so that's the story in a nutshell. There's more to tell, of course.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: Wow, there's so many things going on. Just the fact that things that I'm walking into kindergarten and all of this is going on when it comes to this concept of suing the city and holding them accountable and responsible for the harms that have been caused by putting this sewage treatment plant where it is now in this community. I'm curious.
The way you kind of described everything makes it sound very smooth, like, everything kind of went from point a to point b to point c, and here we are. But can you talk a little bit about, can you give people suing the city 101? What are some of the challenges that you faced kind of either earlier on or through the midpoint going through this process? What are some of the pushback that you got?
[00:23:25] Speaker C: Yeah, well, if I gave the impression that everything went smoothly, it's only looking back with rose colored glasses, because, of course, litigation is completely unpredictable, and it's rarely as smooth as one would like. And these kinds of environmental justice battles can't be won in the courts alone. And we would never have been successful. These cases are all political. We would never have been successful if Peggy and Vernice and the whole weact staff were not also doing all of the groundwork to stir up political activism in the West Harlem community. And the highway protest of the sewage seven in 1988 was just one of many protests. There was another protest that Peggy and Vernice and the weak team led when the facility opened, the park on the rooftop. And Governor Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, the first governor, came to open the park, and we all went there. Cecil was there, and we had a big protest. We were giving out nose clips. We all had these signs, but my sign said, the sewage still stinks. And the governor noticed it, and he came over and we had a little back and forth, and Peggy had some conversations with him. And the we act staff let the governor know that even though they were opening up a park on the roof, which was a nice facility and a benefit to the community, as Peggy said, believe me, as nice as this park is, it's not worth it. It just wasn't worth it. And we need you to fix the odors. And so there were periodic protests, and Peggy and Cecil and Vernice were very effective in continuing to keep this issue in the public eye and meetings with city council members, writing letters to the editor, organizing we act members and activists, all of that was critical, both in creating an atmosphere where the court judges are people and they read newspapers and watch the news and all of that. And for them to be able to see this issue had real world adverse impacts on people living in West Harlem. So it wasn't just some esoteric legal principle, but real lives that were being affected by that. And that is really helpful whenever you are in court. And so the controversy continued. And again, we were fortunate that Mayor Dinkins got elected.
And then, in a way, we were fortunate that the elector, I won't say we were fortunate that he didn't get reelected. But I'll say this. The settlement of the case was signed on the very last week that the mayor, Mayor Dinkins was in office, 1993. And so even though we had won this preliminary motion, this motion to dismiss, and we were having conversations with the Department of Environmental Protection to settle the case, it was only after Giuliani won the election in November and folks recognized that in six weeks, he'd be taking over. And so we then went to the mayor's staff and said, you guys want to settle this now, right? You don't want to leave this issue to Mayor Giuliani. And so in the final week that Mayor Dinkins was in, actually, Peggy and Vernice signed the court papers for the settlement. But the overall point is, it was not even. This case was the product of at least five years of civic and community activism. To me, that's the real message here. Not that we can sometimes get a good victory in the courts, but that persistent activism and engagement in the political process by people who are directly affected can make a difference. And in politics, intensity counts for a lot, and we act. Staff was very effective in, at this point, making those feelings known to the decision makers.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: I think that was the key piece there. What you talked about is, like, that key lesson of, there were multiple streams and ways for this to happen over a long period of time. It wasn't just lawyers can just come in and sue a city and say, we're right because of a legal principle, and then everyone's like, okay, signing the deal, and everyone moves on. You need the community behind you. You need activists. You need people who are going to keep fighting for their health and safety of their own home and their loved environment. And I just think that was kind of like, to me, the key takeaway there is that it's not just one group aspect. It's not just policy that needs to happen in politics. It's not just legal and law. It's not just the activism. They all have to work together in order to make these big changes.
[00:28:46] Speaker C: Very well stated.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you. So before we let you go, any final parting words, things that you would impart to listeners or just folks who are interested in environmental justice and are inspired by the wex story for how they might be involved with this kind of worker, for folks that are considering a legal career, how they might be.
[00:29:05] Speaker C: Involved, get engaged in the political process. And if you care about your future and if you care about your city, you could complain, you can talk about it, but there's no substitute for getting engaged in the process. And it's important to take from the we act story just a little bit of a sense of optimism, because as grim as things sometimes look, if you think you can fight city hall, you can. And sometimes you can even win. But if you, yeah, we're out of luck. We'll never succeed. That, too, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. But hopefully the story of weak fighting the North river plant is one that can inspire people and demonstrate that just regular residents can get together, work together, be persistent and engage in the political process and make a real difference and improve their community.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: Thank you.
Thank you so much for joining us. Bernice, we're so happy to have you back on uptown chats. It's been too long. We're so happy we made it happen again before the year is over. For folks who haven't had a chance to listen to your wonderful interview back in March, can you just quickly introduce yourself so folks know who you are?
[00:30:37] Speaker D: Sure. So I am one of the three co founders of we act, one of the two remaining. Our other co founder, Chuck Sutton. Chuck died on my birthday, February 18, in 2009. But I was, how old was I when I met Peggy and Chuck? I was 27, I think. Peggy and Chuck were running to represent West Harlem, and there was a sense that we hadn't had political leadership that really had paid attention to the dramatic changes that were happening in our community. And our community on one side is bordered by the Hudson river. One side is the upper 120s. Columbia University is in our community. Riverside Church is in our community. Jewish Theological Seminary is in our community. About, roughly now about 10,000 units of public housing are in our community. And we are the extreme west side of the greater Harlem community. And to our north is the Washington Heights community. For folks who are familiar with in the heights, that is about the neighborhood just to the north of us, very diverse parts of the community, but also rising environmental threats. And we couldn't get any elected officials except for our. At the time, he was the city clerk of New York. David Dinkins, who also lived the northern edge of the community, then became our county executive, then became the first black mayor of New York. He was the only elected official. And Congressman Ted Weiss from the Upper west side, part of Ted Weiss's district went all the way up to the Bronx and included not the population, but included the facilities, the North river sewage treatment plant, the marine transfer station and so many other things. And so Ted Weiss really supported us. But other than that, we couldn't get the time of day from folks. So it was important that Peggy and Chuck ran that they were building an independent political democratic party, which is kind of an oxymoron in New York. And I didn't believe it when people first told me that that's what they were doing. And I'm like, democratic Party politics in New York? Yeah, no thanks.
And then I met them, literally, a friend of mine that I went to college with at Barnard College, she worked on their campaign, their initial campaign, and she told me about what they were doing. And then some other friends from the Jesse Jackson campaign. Odly, we were all involved in a Jesse Jackson campaign for president, both the 84 campaign and the 88 campaign, which makes a lot of sense because almost all the progressives in New York were involved in that campaign across the state of New York in one way or another. So we were kind of orbiting around each other, but didn't really know each other well. And then some friends started to say, you live in that community, vernice, you need to join up with them. And so I eventually went to meet them in October of 1986. I had met them on the street while they were campaigning, carried some petitions for them, but then went to my first meeting of this organization in October of 1986. And at the time, I was working at the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial justice with Ben Chavis and Charles Lee, Dr. Charles Cobb. Dr. Cob was just a staple in the civil rights movement, as was Ben, to some extent, in North Carolina. And Charles and I were working on this report, toxic waste and race in the United States, or the church. The United Church of Christ called it the special project on toxic injustice. And we were looking at the relationship between the location of hazardous waste sites and the racial composition of the immediate communities where those waste sites were located. And our research showed that race was the most statistically significant indicator in where these sites were located. So that's the work that I was doing during the day, right? So I go to this meeting one night, and I had been resisting, resisting, resisting. I go to this meeting one night, and it's at the Alpha House, Alpha Phi Alpha fraternities House on Convent Avenue and 141st street.
And it's the chapter that's a part of the city college of the City University of New York. So I walk into the meeting and the room is packed, black and brown folks. And they're talking about the North river sewage treatment plan. They're not talking about democratic party stuff. They're not talking about running folks for office or supporting other candidates. They're talking about the North river sewage treatment plant and this light bulb. I don't know if you've ever taken a tour of Riverside church, which is my home church. If you go all the way up in the bell towers of the Riverside church, there are these huge bells. And when the bells know, you could hear them all over the upper west side and the west side of Harlem. So when I walked into this meeting and they were talking about the North river sewage treatment plant, it's like those bells were going off in my head, right? Not little bells, big clanging, huge bells saying, girl, these people are working on what you're working on. It might not be sewage treatment plants, but they are working on the same set of issues that you're working on. Why is the sewage treatment plant in our front yard? Why is a sewage treatment plant that's built to treat 180,000,000 gallons of raw sewage and wastewater every day, treating the raw sewage and wastewater that's produced by the entire population of the west side of Manhattan? Why is it in our community?
And it didn't take me but mere minutes to translate that, though. The work I was doing during the day was about hazardous waste sites, the construct of environmentally polluting facilities being built in the midst of where people of color live. And in our case, unlike what we were looking at in North Carolina and other places, that hazardous waste sites. Hazardous waste sites are usually in rural communities. But this sewage treatment plant is next to a community that has 100,000 people that live in immediate proximity. Right? So I joined the organization at night, which was West Harlem independent Democrats. And you have not been able to get a piece of paper between Peggy shepherd and I and Chuck two until Chuck died between then and now. Right. So that was a really long time ago, although it doesn't really feel like it was that long ago, but it's been more than 35 years. So we started organizing, or they were already organizing, but we started organizing, and I joined the effort, really organizing door to door in the community.
They started in 85, I joined them in 86. Peggy and Chuck started in 85. I joined them in 86.
And it was just an eye opening experience, but it was really amazing for me because, one, I lived in this community, right? I was born in central Harlem. I was born in Harlem Hospital. I grew up in central Harlem, Delano Village, which is now called Savoy Arms. Don't get me started on that conversation. Then I moved to the west side. I went to college at Barnett and Columbia University, Barnet College. And so then I moved over to the west side. Right. And when I finished college. I lived in the immediate neighborhood. And, in fact, I met Peggy and Chuck on the corner of the street that I lived on, on Claremont Avenue and team in place, roughly 124th street and Broadway. And I had never thought about the issues that they were working on. In fact, it was interesting to me because Riverside park is my favorite park in New York, but it's also one of my favorite parks in the country. I love that park. I've always loved that park. And my dad and I used to walk all the way from central Harlem all the way over to the extreme west side to the Hudson river, because I loved that river so much growing up, and I loved that.
And I dated somebody in high school that lived right across the street from where the sewage treatment plant is now. He lived in 145th street in Riverside Drive. And all the time, this construction is going on of this mammoth infrastructure project, right? And I didn't see it. And I was in that park all the time. All the time. And I didn't see it. And so many people passed by on the highway as it was being built on the west side highway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, and people didn't see it. And it's kind of amazing because it's so mammoth. It's so freaking huge. How could you not see it? But we didn't. And it wasn't until Peggy and Chuck got involved as district leaders that people started to call out, well, maybe this is not such a good idea to build this thing right next to where so many people live in such close proximity to a densely populated community. Maybe this is not a good idea. But by the time we got involved in that conversation, which was in 86, in a big way, it was too late, right? Once you see an infrastructure project like that being built, once they lay that foundation, the fight is over. Right? Now, that's usually when communities get involved in a fight, because they can start to see, physically, that something is coming.
Nobody asked us, right? There were no big public meetings. There was no big public hearing. Nobody said, is this something that you want in close proximity to where you all live? And that happens all over the country. And so, in an extraordinary way, the foundational issues around environmental racism and environmental justice were popping, right where I lived, right? So I was going downtown to midtown Manhattan and working on this every day. The United Church of Christ was headquartered at 105 Madison Avenue, 27th street and Madison Avenue at the time. It's now headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. But I would go downtown to work every day, and then I would come home and go to meetings with Peggy and, Chuck, it was like this. You're in a sound studio, and the sound is just reverberating all the time. Everything you say is just magnified, and it's just coming back to you, right. And swells coming back to you. That's kind of what my life was like for a number of years. In fact, until I moved here to Maryland in 1998, I would be doing civil rights work during the day. I was a civil rights advocate. I worked at NRDC. I was their first director of environmental justice. I went to work there in 1993. Before that, I worked at the center for Constitutional Rights, working on civil rights issues, voting rights issues. And so I was doing that work during the day. And then I would come home or I would go to a meeting. I never made it home. And I would meet Peggy and Chuck somewhere, and we. That was my life for all of those years, from the time that I met them until the time that I moved here, that was my life. But it also mirrored what was happening with the growth of the environmental justice movement around the country was magnified right in our own. So, you know, I would say know to the folks who are listening that of the three of us, I'm the only one that's from Harlem. I like to say that all the time. Peggy's from New Jersey and New Jersey and DC, and Chuck was from San Antonio, Texas. So let me back up and say this and say it with. To try to say it without being extremely emotional.
I love being from Harlem. I love that I was born there. I love that my father moved there from Florida after immigrating to Florida from the Bahamas. I love that my mother and my grandmother moved there from Maryland. Right? Harlem was the center of everything in the black world. Right? People came from all over the world. People in the black african diaspora came from all over the world. To be in Harlem, it was something magical about living in that community and growing up in that community, we didn't have a lot of money. We were working class. Both of my parents worked at Harlem Hospital. There were no, at least not to my knowledge, the folks who had money lived in Hamilton Heights. That was on the west side in West Harlem. I eventually would live over there. And I remember my dad and I would walk across to the west side, as I said, going to Riverside park, and I would always say to my daddy, one day, I'm going to live over here, daddy. Right? And eventually that happened. But, hell, by the time I got there, the North river sewage treatment plant got there first. Right? And it changed the dynamic of what it meant to live in what the literature of the Harlem Renaissance referred to as Sugar Hill, which was a real place with real people, right? But I loved being from that community. And my handle on twitter is harlem girl 59.
I revel, and everybody knows that. I rep it all the time, even though I haven't lived there for 25 years. But everything that I've ever done, everything that I've ever been about, everything that has ever mattered to me, is based on having grown up in that community. So the fight that we have been engaged in is a fight for our future, a fight so that young people can have the life that I had, which didn't require a lot of money, because there were so many people around you, and so much evidence of our culture and the pride in our culture and our civic institutions, our religious institutions are everything, right? We had unions, district council 37 and 1199 that were in the forefront of the civil rights movement. They were mobilizing right there in Harlem and Harlem Hospital and other institutions in Harlem. We had civic organizations, we had faith based organizations. We had extraordinary churches. Our congressman. When I was growing up, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. He was also the senior pastor at Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was on the same street that my babysitter lived on. Countless times. I would be outside playing on my babysitter street, which was 130 eigth street between Lennox and 7th Avenue, which is exactly where Abyssinian Baptist Church is closer to 7th Avenue. Countless times growing up as a child, Adam Clayton Powell would be walking up the street when he was in town, right? He would stop on the corner and get a newspaper and then walk to the church, and he would stop and talk to the kids all the, you know, not, don't bother me. I'm a big, important man. He would stop and talk to us all the time. Things like that happened all the time, right, on paydays, every other Friday at the hospital, which was a city owned hospital. Countless times when I was really little, I'd be coming out the hospital with my mother, and there'd be this crowd on the corner of 135th street on Lennox Avenue, right in front of the hospital. And I would hear this voice, right? And I would pull away from my mother and move towards the crowd, which would make her insane. Not because I was pulling away from her, but because I was pulling away from her to hear this man talk. And this man was Malcolm X, and he would be out there in front of the hospital every other Friday, which was payday, right, and recruiting, selling things, et cetera, et cetera. But that was my life growing up. Right. And so many other extraordinary things that were going on. I can't think of a better place to be from. Doesn't mean that we always had the best opportunities or the best quality of life, but we had such a vibrant community that everything that I have done in my life, everything that I am, everything that I have achieved, everything that I have accomplished, is because I grew up in that community. There's no question about that. I don't think I would be the same person if I was born someplace else and grew up someplace else. I'm sure that I would not be the same person and have chosen the same path in life. So, boy, was that a really long freaking answer to the question. But there you have it.
[00:46:39] Speaker A: I have a decent segue here, given the fact the importance of not only Harlem to you, but to the world in know, I come from Ohio, was born and raised there, but I came, when I came to New York City, I knew this was where I was going to live. I was going to live in Harlem. So I also share that kind of connection. But at the time, you have this neighborhood and this community that's very important to you and a lot of people there, that it's extremely historically relevant. It's provided a lot of rich history over the know. You talked about Adam Clayton Powell, you talk about Malcolm X, and then I think we can put weact in that space, as well as talking about being historic in terms of making change or being a part of the fabric of the community. You mentioned how we act may have not formally existed before the lawsuit that we talk about all the time, where we kind of start the history and getting that there. But what were some of the things that we act did kind of pre we act almost before the name and the formal structure came about. What did they do? How did they engage this community in the process to basically become, come we act? How did we include the community into that process?
[00:47:56] Speaker D: Well, I want to say about Chuck Sutton, that Chuck had been a campus organizer, organizing students for progressive and civil rights causes when he was in college. And in fact, one of my dearest friends that I used to work with at the center for Constitutional Rights, the honorable Margaret Carey McCray, who's now a judge in Mississippi. She was the director of the southern office of the center for Constitutional Rights, which is headquartered in Greenville, Mississippi. Margaret is from Key West, Florida, and went to law school at University of Florida at Gainesville. Yeah, undergrad. She went to University of Michigan. And Margaret met Chuck when he was organizing on her campus in Florida when she was in law school. And I was like, what was Chuck doing in Florida? Chuck was all over, right? Chuck was all over, doing a lot of stuff. And so people know Chuck, or what they think they know about Chuck is that he was a journalist. He was the co executive producer of Showtime at the Apollo. He was on the air, on the radio. His family owned inner city Broadcasting, WLIB, AM talk radio in New York, WBLS, several stations around the country. And they own the Apollo theater. And so people sort of knew Chuck as a part of the, you know, huge names in black journalism, in journalism period. But black journalism in particular. But Chuck was an organizer. Chuck did not play. And Chuck got us into more trouble, right? We're not doing this. We're not doing that. We're not supporting this one. We're not supporting that one. And because Chuck was a part of the Sutton family, people thought that Chuck was this calm, cool, collected, buttoned up guy. But who he really was was this badass, organized, right? And so he would drag Peggy and I into all kinds of things. And then when the dust up would happen, and the dust up always happened, nobody blamed Chuck. They always blamed Peggy. And, you know, we were the ones that were always starting the stuff. But it was Chuck. But he was just a wonderful person. So we did old school organizing. And to this day, and I think there's a generational divide here, meaning in the progressive community, in the environmental justice movement. There's lots of different ways to organize and mobilize people now, right? You can do a lot of things electronically. You could do a lot of things on Zoom. You could do a lot of things through social media. But we believed that you got to go and talk to people. You got to knock on their doors. You have to have an interaction with folks. You have to bring them out. You have to mobilize them. You have to have public meetings. You have to have community town halls. You have to have rallies on the street. You have to mobilize people at the subway stations when they're going to work and when they're coming home from work about what's going on in our community and how you need to get, you know, you both know Peggy and know Peggy is 5ft tall. I'm five two. Right. And Chuck was not that much taller than us. Let me just say that he was taller than us, but he was not that much taller than us. But the three of us, but especially Peggy and I. The three of us altogether, but especially Peggy and I. We knocked on every unit of public housing in our community. And there are thousands of units of public housing in our community. We went in every tenement. We knocked on every door. We went everywhere. Right. Everywhere that we thought people were who needed to be engaged in what was happening in our community, we did that. So we were old school organizers, the three of us, and we reached folks, and we motivated people, and we informed people, and we educated people, and then they educated themselves about the intentional environmental threats that we were know. That's. That's sort of what we did. Lonnie. We did old school organizing, and to this day, I believe in old school organizing. I'm also on the board of Clean Water Action, and Clean Water Action is one of the last remaining environmental organizations that do door to door mobilization around water quality issues, water access issues, but also a range of environmental issues. But I believe in old school mobilization. Now. I believe if you pair that with some of the newer technologies and strategies, you can have even more impact. But I think when we step away from having actual face to face contact with the people with whom we live and we are in struggle with that, we lose something in that process. And so that's sort of what we did. And I want to say it's a bit of a misnomer to say that we act got started after we filed a lawsuit. No, we didn't. We filed a lawsuit in 1992, but we formally started we act in 1988. But we started the organizing in our community to mobilize people in 1985 and then took it to another level in 1986. So even before we started the nonprofit, we were mobilizing and informing and educating people in our community. And though we didn't have much in the way of income, Chuck being on the radio was just golden. Right? So Peggy and I were on WliB all the time. If they would have an opening, Chuck would say, oh, let's call vernisa Pe. Right. They might have a few things that they want to say. We were on the radio all the time, and you couldn't pay for. I mean, really, we didn't have any income, but if we had, we would not have been able to pay for the dollar value of what it was to have Chuck putting us on the radio all the time. Right. And Chuck didn't do it. So he didn't cross the line because he was an employee of inner city broadcasting. He didn't go on the radio. He put Peggy and I on the radio. Right. And I loved was. I don't know of many other AM black talk radio stations. Right. All WliB did was talk about issues that were pertinent and important to the black community, to black and brown communities in New York. So it was important to have that vehicle, and it was important to have access to that. But the other important thing is that Peggy and Chuck were both professional journalists, right? So, as you probably know from working with Peggy, the communication that we would put out always was top flight, right? Always was impactful, well written, meant to really mobilize people.
So we paid attention to communication, right, because they were both communicators. I was, I think, a natural communicator. I was a researcher. I was not a journalist like the two of them, but being able to speak to people and mobilize folks around what was important and what we needed to do as a community was where we stood. So by the time we filed a lawsuit, we already had a reputation, a well earned reputation of BMP. We were thought of as rabble rousers, and we owned that, right. We were known as people who would turn over the tables. We own that, too. Just that. No more business as usual, because business as usual was killing us. Was literally killing us. And we were not going for the Okie doke. We were not supporting people because they had been in office forever. Peggy had a very decent relationship with Congressman Charles Wrangel. Vernice did not. Although I don't think he ever knew how mad I was at him all the time. But I remember growing up in a community with Adam Clayton Powell as our representative, right? He fought for us every single day. But he didn't just fight for us. He fought for black people all over America. People were always coming to Adam Clayton Powell to fight for one thing or another. And so I had this not just an image, but real practical experience of what it means to be a congressional representative and to fight for a community that's so totally disrespected. I didn't see that in what we were getting from Mr. Wrangle.
Let me say not just him, but several other black and brown elected officials who thought and said to us out loud that our work on environmental issues was so bourgeois, right? That that's what the white folks downtown work on, right? They care about the whales and the dolphins and the blah, blah. And I said, I don't give a damn about the whales and the dolphins. What are you talking about? People up here are being exposed and had the highest incidence of asthma of any community in the United States of America. What are you talking about? We are in absolute crisis. And that's what you think we're doing saving endangered species. So since that's what they charged us with, we created a whole campaign about the endangered species of black and brown people in Harlem and northern Manhattan. Let's focus on that.
And we made that a campaign that also challenged the mainstream environmental groups and the green groups. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had no idea that most of those organizations were headquartered in New York City. I had no freaking idea. None. Because they had no relationship to us. They saw that damn sewage treatment plant rising over the west side highway. They had to hold their breath every time they drove by it because it smelled so freaking bad. It never occurred to them to reach out to us and say, is there something we could do to help? We don't know what they were working on, but they weren't working on the issues that really mattered to and affected us. And it's not like the issues were secret. Right? However, it did really bother me and wrinkle me a. There is a standard of practice, it's probably a law in the United States, that when a person dies in a county, it has to be registered on their death certificate what they died from. So the New York State Department of Health and New York City Department of Health knew that there was an asthma morbidity crisis in Harlem.
Nobody ever said a word about it. Nobody ever said a bleeping word. And so one day we're holding these meetings, New York state Dec comes in because we're raising so much hell. They come and they meet the fourth Wednesday of every month. They have a public meeting that we co convene. And we would always have an agenda, right? This about the sewage treatment plan, that about the sewage treatment plan, this about the bus deposit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't care what agenda we put together. All anybody ever wanted to talk about was asthma. That's it, right? Because it was so prevalent. And so I reached out to a friend of mine, a former college classmate, who by now he had gone to the College of Physicians and surgeons at Columbia, was a doctor and an adjunct professor at the mailman School of Public Health. He was also a physician in the pulmonary medicine clinic at Harlem Hospital. And I reached out to him. His name is Dr. Jean Ford. And I said, jean, we don't know what's going on, but we need some help trying to characterize and get our hands around this asthma issue. And he said, that's interesting, vernice, that you all are wanting to get your hands around that. And I said, why? He said, because we just applied, we, meaning the pulmonary medicine clinic and the environmental health division at the School of Public Health, they had just submitted an application to the National Institutes of Environmental Health sciences to conduct a household asthma survey because of the volume of admissions they were seeing at Harlem Hospital. So they were trying to get their hands around it. And I said, well, did you have any blocks or census tracks in West Harlem that are in your focus area? And he said, no, we were looking at central Harlem. And I said, well, is there the opportunity to add some census tracks that are in West Harlem? I said, because, frankly, the problem is over here, right? Y'all are in the valley. So it makes sense that the ambient air emissions and the pollution that's being generated over here is going to migrate over to central Harlem and then sit on the community, because the community is in a valley. And so we educated them, and then we started partnering with them. And as far as I know, we are still engaged in a partnership with them.
When I reached out to Jean, that must have been like 1991, 92. So, again, before we formally or early in the days that we had started the organization, and while we were doing the organizing, we kept uncovering. It was like, layers, right? Things kept being revealed, and it's like, oh, my God, what is happening here? And so we reached out to people to try and get a grip on what was going on. So filing of the lawsuit was really important. Settling the lawsuit was significantly important, and that allowed us to hire our first staff. But up until that time, Lonnie, we had no paid staff, right? So Chuck had a full time job. Vernice had a full time job. Peggy had a full time job, and our jobs subsidized the work that we know. I like to say all the time, shout out to the center for constitutional Rights, because they made every flyer for every event that we ever did. For the time that I worked there, and we were mobilizing for, we at Chuck did the same. Peggy did the same. We organized in our dining rooms. Whenever we would have an event, my mother would usually cook the food. When we did voter mobilization, my mother would cook and make these box lunches that we would hand out to folks to keep them out on the street, mobilizing people to vote. We did everything that we could from a completely grassroots perspective.
[01:01:38] Speaker B: I really appreciate that framing and always appreciate the passion that you bring when you speak about these things, because I feel like it makes it so much more compelling for people to listen to and thinking about how urgent these issues were at the time, but are still are, but really, especially how much that still rings true for you, how much that still brings out that passion in you. And one thing I wanted to circle back really quickly, that is kind of a part of the story and part of this narrative that you're telling is this transition from the three of you kind of working and doing this organizing together to the conception of the idea we are forming this group, this organization, we act for environmental justice or West Harlem environmental action. So can you walk us through, just really briefly, that process of deciding, okay, this is a part of the political advocacy piece that they were doing to some extent, but also, this is now its own, is we act? This is West Harlem environmental action. Can you walk us through that process a little bit as well?
[01:02:44] Speaker D: So I think the last podcast we did together, I think we ended it on Peggy and I going as delegates to the first national people of color environmental leadership summit. And I served on the drafting committee of that conference that wrote the principles of environmental justice. And we were all given a charge at the end of the conference, which was to go back and mobilize and organize in our communities, some people. So an organization called Detroit is working for Environmental justice, led by Donnell Wilkins, founded by Donnell Wilkins. Donnell took that charge, and she went back and she built that organization. The indigenous environmental network was already starting to form, but really went on full blast when we came back from the conference, the Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental justice, so many organizations came back from that fully fired up that we were given a task, and we were going to meet that task. And so we felt the same way about growing our nascent organization, but to serve a bigger mission, right. That was both local in our community. It was citywide. Peggy and I are also founders of the New York City Environmental Justice alliance. So we wanted that conversation to go across the city. We also started working in our region, across region two in the northeast, to mobilize communities there. We took it very seriously. But I have to say, when we were in the negotiations around a settlement agreement for our lawsuit, Peg and I lived three doors over from each other on West 140th street between Convent and Amsterdam Avenue. And so every time we had to go to a meeting, every time we were going to the airport, whatever we were doing, we would always go together, right? We lived three doors over from each other. So we get on the subway at 145th in Broadway, and we're going downtown to meet Eric Goldstein, our attorney at the natural resources defense counsel. We're on the train, right? We're talking about a million things. We get to Eric's office. We're having a meeting with Eric. Eric says to us, well, what are you going to do with this money, right?
And he says, you probably want to plant some trees, right? He couldn't finish that sentence before. Peggy said, we ain't planting no trees. We are going to build a mini NRDC. And I looked at her and I'm like, we were on the train for like 45 minutes. You couldn't have said that to me while we were on the train. She said nothing, right? She said nothing. I mean, we're talking about a million things, but we ain't talking about this. And then she rolls that out and says that to Eric. When Eric says, so, you all are probably going to plant a lot of trees. And I looked at her and I'm like, by then, so, no, this is 92. No, this is 93. So I went to work at NRDC in July of 93. But we filed our lawsuit, right? When I came back from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, the Earth summit. So that was June of 1992. So somewhere towards the end of June, the beginning of July of 1992, we filed the lawsuit. We settled the lawsuit on December 30, 1993. So this is probably early 1994 that we are having this conversation with Eric in his office. Well, by now, I'm working at NRDC. I went to work there in July of 1993, as I said, as the first director of environmental justice at NRDC. And I swear to you, Peggy never mentioned this idea to me. Right? And then she pops up with this idea. And so I have to give Peggy full credit for thinking long term at the very, very beginning that what we need to do is to be able to mobilize resources, science, data, litigation, if necessary, public education, advocacy, research, and old school organizing. That was something that NRDC didn't do. Except for the Sierra Club, none of the big green groups believed in organizing, right? And we were never going to jettison organizing because that was core to who we were. So that's where the idea started to come from. And I said to myself, a quaint idea, right? Never going to be NRDC. She even putting that out there as a model. Right? I remember being at our event in October at the 35th anniversary gala and just looking around at all these people, right? It was so funny. Peggy and I talked the next day. She talked to a whole different group of people than I talked to. Right? And you could have been there all night and not gotten to talk to everyone who was in attendance. But there were people who were with us from the beginning. There were people that we have met since then. Right? There were people who we have met along the journey.
I give Peggy a tremendous amount of credit for thinking in 1993 that this is who we could and should be. I thought it was a bit much, right. I thought it was, like, way over the top, like, girl, bring it in a few paces, right?
Vision in. But it is on its way to doing that. Right? So we were thinking about a lot of things. We were thinking about how to continue to amplify the voices and the challenges that our communities were facing that still did not get their proper due from the state government, federal government, local government. We put that conversation in a variety of different fora. When I worked at the Ford foundation from 2000 to 2003, as the first program officer for environmental justice there, and had to step off the board so that we could be my grantee. But we had also been involved in a conversation before they started that program, with a number of other EJ leaders to advise the Ford foundation on how the foundation could really be a partner. The Ford foundation had been an intimate partner with the civil rights movement in terms of supporting the work, organizing, mobilizing, standing up of organizations, et cetera. It had been an intimate partner of the mainstream environmental movement, and really had been on the journey with them and supporting them all along the way. And we had been asking, but nobody was answering, like they sort of didn't hear and didn't see the value of the work that we were doing. And so I took those lessons with me from our own struggles, from the struggles I had seen of groups across the country to help frame what that grant making and that portfolio could look like. At the Ford foundation, we have had impact in a lot of different places. As they say, we punch way above our weight. Y'all know, you work there. It's not like it's that many people, right? It ain't that many people. You go into NRDC and you see hundreds of people, right? There are not hundreds of people that work at WEAC, but somehow we are able to do work and have impact that reverberates around the world. And I want to say that I did not have as big a vision as Peggy did at the beginning, but I was down for the cause. Whatever direction we were going in, I was going to be supportive of that direction. Right? But the thing I love the best is that we still organize at the community level. We still have monthly membership meetings. We still are driven by and stand on. What is it that people in the community are most affected by and most want to focus on. Right. That is still a core part of our work. And if we were ever to have a conversation that said, well, maybe we could jettison that, that's when you would see me lose my mind, because that, to me, is so core to the mission of who we are.
[01:10:42] Speaker B: Thank you so much for that. I feel like that puts into perspective so many of the different pieces, again, that we hear about the weak story of from where you all started to now, where we have this kind of formally recognized and really nationally and globally recognized organization, and honestly getting just a sneak peek behind the curtain of what it takes to make a we act, to make something like we act. And I think Lonnie and I are both, now that we're working here, grateful for that struggle and the work that you all did to make this a reality and that we are able to work at a place like we act because of it.
[01:11:16] Speaker D: Karen, let me just say and lift up one thing that I haven't said so far, and that is that when we settled that lawsuit and got that original $200,000 payment, we hired two staff people, Peggy shepherd and Cecil Corbin. Mark and Cecil was just special. I mean, really special.
Different sort of different approaches. His brain worked differently. He also had a different relationship to the space time continuum, I like to say. But Cecil was critical in standing up what know, we act for environmental justice and being a thought partner with Peggy about the ways that we could grow, the ways that we could move, the ways that we could show. You know, we were just blessed that he was the second person that we hired as a staff person. Right. And was with us all the way through until his untimely death. But Cecil moved in his own way, and we did the core we act work, but he also did other, you know, the energy work, the energy justice work that we did do. Now, that was Cecil's baby, right. Cecil saw that as an important piece of work that we needed to be involved in, and we needed to support and be in community with other people who were working on those issues. And Peggy will tell you, I didn't know what he was thinking about with that energy work, but it is critically important work. And I just don't want this conversation to go any further without just talking about how special he was to our evolution and our growth and development. And Peggy and I. Well, okay, let me be clear about this. Peggy and Chuck were much older than vernice. That just needs to be said.
But then I was much older than Cecil. Right? So we were always a multi generational organization. And I think that was always important. And hearing from everybody's voice and being as democratic as we could be, I.
[01:13:23] Speaker A: Think that still all brings true now, even us working here and that multi generational, the asset that that is for an organization like ours to be able to have people who have experienced very different things and come from different time periods on the way of doing. You know, we're always getting lessons from Charles about the ways to organize. And we have conversations with people, and you talk about how Cecil did things and how Peggy does things and how you approach things. And we kind of all get a chance to take all of that and kind of build what's best so we can kind of keep moving forward. And that's why we are the we act. We are today, right now.
[01:14:05] Speaker D: And I'm awfully proud of you all. I mean, really, I had such a great time at the 35th anniversary event in October, but I just kept looking around the room and just thinking that this is not where we started. And we just have to thank the universe that we were able to continue to move forward. It wasn't always easy. There were so many years when we had so little financial resource, but there was so much to do. Right. So you just had to keep stepping up to do it. And now the universe seems to be catching up with us a little bit in terms, know, providing the resources for us to keep doing this work. But I like to say that environmental justice is having a moment. And who knew that that moment was going to come through? President Joe Biden, who has turned out to be the most progressive president in my lifetime. Right. And John Kennedy. No, actually, when I was born, president, Truman was president. Or Eisenhower, I think Eisenhower. Eisenhower.
But then John Kennedy and then Jimmy Carter. Right. And Barack Obama, for God's sake, who I just never thought I would live to see such a thing. I literally never thought that. But Joe Biden has proven to be far more progressive and far more committed to environmental justice and racial justice issues as they are articulated in policy and in the direction of his administration. And so we find ourselves at the fulcrum of a lot of important conversations. And I just keep saying to folks, environmental justice is having a moment. I don't know how long the moment is going to last, but we are having a moment, and we are ready to meet this moment. Right. But the challenge for us as a community and a constituency is how do we sustain this? How do we make it more than a moment, but really a different direction that puts environmental justice at fundamental places where all kinds of policy gets built on this foundation. Housing policy, Community Reinvestment act policy, community development policy, energy policy, environmental policy writ large, civil rights policy, gender policy. Public health. Public health. Public health. Right. That is sort of core to our mission. How do we make sure that environmental justice stays central to those national conversations? But we are in those conversations. Peggy is the co chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. None of us could have imagined a White House council on Environmental justice before Joe Biden became president. So I look at this moment and I think about, how do we sustain this work so that people who come behind us will have a different space to organize, in a different space to move policy, in a different space to do, to tackle social ills and advance social justice? How do we make sure that this foundation lasts? And I think that is sort of a pivotal moment that we are at as a community, as a movement.
[01:17:07] Speaker B: I can't think of a better way, a better place for us to conclude and to wrap that up. That's such a nice snapshot of where we find ourselves now and both some of the positive and highlights of the payoffs, again, of some of the work that you all have done, but also some of the challenges that now we face and how do we keep moving this work forward? So, thank you so much for niece, we cannot thank you enough for your time and helping us walk through this story. I feel like I get the benefit of getting to time travel today. I went back in history and got to walk through and see it through your eyes, and I feel like that's really special to get to do that. So, thank you so much.
[01:17:42] Speaker A: And for the record, I don't think Bernice has anything against whales.
[01:17:45] Speaker D: I do not set the record straight. I'm so glad you said that, Lonnie, because I had a colleague at NRDC, Joel Reynolds, who led the LA office of NRDC. And Joel used to sue the United States Navy on a regular basis because they would always do these sonar exercises in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern California that would really negatively impact the migration of whales from the Arctic Circle down to Mexico. Right? And Joe was always suing the navy about the whales. The whales, the. And I'm like, joe, you know, can we talk about something other than the whales? And so my husband surprised me. My late husband surprised me and bought us a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. He was with his brother, and I was like, you bought property without me? Okay. He said, but, babe, it looks right out on the ocean, right? And you are going to love it. So, first time I go down there, I think the winter of 2009, and we take this whale watching trip, and this blue whale comes alongside of us, and, baby, you have never experienced anything like being in close proximity to a whale. And so as soon as I got home from that trip, I called Joe and I said, okay, I'm going to relieve you from the pressure that I've had you under for decades, bashing you about only working on the whales. I said, if we don't save them, right, we can't save ourselves. So it's true. I do love the whales.
[01:19:16] Speaker B: Awesome.
[01:19:17] Speaker C: Thank you for that.
[01:19:22] Speaker B: It's so incredible to hear both Eric and Vernice telling their stories. I'm so grateful that they were able to join us here on the show, and I feel like reflecting on both their stories together.
It's really incredible to hear how so many people were really starting to recognize the importance of this intersection between the environment and health and how it was showing up here in New York City specifically and in Harlem, and some of the impacts that people were really starting to put numbers to and really pay attention to in a meaningful way for the first time, and how that kind of translates to some of the work that was going on all around the country, but really kind of focally here in New York City in a way that's really connected to the work that we do now. And it's so serendipitous that all these people managed to find each other. But also from Vernice's story, that each of the people that were important pieces in this story were so active that it's no wonder that they ran into each other. So many of these points where they would have crossed paths and be at these intersections of each other's lives. And it's really humbling to hear it kind of all come together and all the important cameos in Bernice's story that just totally were unexpected to me. Right.
[01:20:37] Speaker A: Absolutely. And I think one of the things I take away from hearing the story of we act and the creation and all of that, of the momentum building, kind of, when we're listening to this story, how so many of those foundational principles that Bernice and Eric discussed can be seen in our work that we do right now, today, still, across all of the organization, right in all of the departments, there's just the mix of politics, activism, and community organizing are just so important and key to the work that we act does and how we get to the victories that we get to celebrate each year through the work that we do.
[01:21:15] Speaker B: Absolutely. I'm so glad that Vernice kind of mentioned that in kind of the end of her interview, that that was such a core piece of what they wanted to make sure was embedded in what react does and how they wanted to set themselves apart as an organization. And to see that it's still a big part of what we do today is really inspiring, honestly. And speaking of stories and telling stories, I'm also grateful that we get to end this year. We're wrapping up this year now, and I'm grateful that we get to end it on this note of storytelling, because that's really what we started this podcast for. In the beginning. We wanted to create a space to tell stories, and these are the exact kind of stories that we wanted to be able to tell on a podcast. And so I'm grateful that this is kind of where we find ourselves at the twelve month mark. Not that we're going anywhere anytime soon. This is really the only beginning. But that we got to wrap up this first year in this way is really satisfying to me. Yeah.
[01:22:07] Speaker A: And just to think about where we were a year ago when it came to even thinking about this podcast and planning it and who do we want to talk to and why do we want to do this? Why is this important to us? And I'm just thinking of all the different stories that we've heard throughout the year from people in this space working and doing things and hearing that on the ground and what's happening and how they got to where they are right now and championing environmental justice through a lot of different causes. Right. And a lot of different lenses that we got to look through this year.
[01:22:39] Speaker B: Yeah, and we got to have vernice on twice. That's a win in my book. Anytime I get to listen to vernice talk, I will happily sit and just be at peace.
[01:22:48] Speaker A: I would happily listen to the Bernice show.
[01:22:50] Speaker B: Absolutely. Let's get some funding for that. But with that, we want to thank you all for listening. As always, if you like this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show, we encourage you to reach out with your thoughts and suggestions at
[email protected] you can shoot us an email there.
[01:23:10] Speaker A: You can also check out weact on Facebook at weactfordJ. That's weactforeJ. And also on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube at weactfordJ. That's W-E-A-C-T number four, EJ. And check out our website, weact.org, for more information about environmental justice.
[01:23:29] Speaker B: And from all of us here at Weact Happy Holiday. Holidays.
