[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Lonnie.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: And I'm your other co host, Jaren.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: And today we're talking about the EJNYC report with our very special guest, Peggy Shepard, who's the executive director and co founder of Weact.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: We finally got her.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: We got her in.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Yay.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: She has such a busy schedule.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Yeah. It's amazing that we were able to get time with her because this is actually both relevant to her because she wasn't involved in the process, but also really timely because this report's supposed to come out very soon, right?
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it's supposed to drop at the end of February, but it could be anytime this spring. Yeah, we're going to talk about. So what is this report? Why should we care? And we'll find out together. But first, Jaren, can you read the weak mission statement?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: I sure can. Weak's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: You got it.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: So this EJNYC report, how did it come about? I think that's the first place we should start.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Right? That's a great question. And you know better than I because you are our expert on all things city policy. So do you want to tell us a little bit more about the EJNYC report? Yeah.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: So local law 60 of 2017 basically requires a citywide study of environmental justice be conducted. Right. It was a law that we act, was very instrumental in the past, before Jaren and I got here to get that law passed. And the results of the study are supposed to be made available to the public, which they will be, and placed on the city's website. That's, like, one of the requirements there, but it also requires the creation of an online environmental justice portal, and it's supposed to have access to mapping tools for all the different environmental justice data. So this basically came about because there was a law that said that mandated this, and there was another law as well called local law 64 that created this environmental justice advisory board.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Very cool. So we had local law 60 come out and then local law 64. So what exactly was required as part of the environmental justice Advisory board? Was it pretty clearly laid out? Who are they supposed to include? And what all was included in that bill as well?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Yeah, the board was created because we want to make sure that the report gets made right. That was kind of the catalyst of that, but also to make sure that we're getting all the right people who can have a say in the creation of this and kind of basically the direction of New York City when it comes to environmental justice. And so the advisory board is composed of environmental justice advocates. There are academics, public health experts, researchers. They're supposed to work with the city on developing this comprehensive, citywide environmental justice plan that's going to be based on the information from the report. So their main deliverable is this plan. We need to have a plan for environmental justice for New York City. And we're going to use this report that's going to have a lot of different data and, you know, a little bit more about what's actually in the report or what's going to be in the report, and to use that information to create a plan for the New York City.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: It's exciting to hear that they took into account who needed to be in the room, because I can imagine something like this. The city is required, according to this bill, to create this report. And they get a couple of city agency workers together, knock this thing out, and we just get what we know. But to have folks around the city who really do this work of environmental justice, including Peggy, who really knows the EJ landscape of the city, be involved in the process, gives me a lot more confidence in a report like this. I'm actually surprised that was there something like this previously. Is this the first time the city's doing this kind of report?
[00:04:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it's the first ever for New York City.
New York City does a lot of plans and a lot of reports, as we know, but we've never had one for environmental justice. This, and this will be the first.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: Wow. I would say a little overdue. But you know what? Better late than ever. We'll take it. We got there, but I imagine something like this, most of us would expect probably a little complicated. There's lots of things, even just the term environmental justice. We spent a lot of time talking about what is it? And to unpack that into a report. It's going to be probably pretty long, right?
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a pretty long report. And we've got a little bit of preview and got to look at some of the early draft of the report and what kind of things are supposed to be in there. And it really does touch on all of the kind of intersectionality. That's the $5 word that I'm going to use for the day of all the work that we do. Because if you think about all of the kind of different podcast episodes that we've had where we've talked about composting, but we've also talked about energy use, and then we've talked about air quality and there's water quality. There's so many aspects to environmental justice, to consideration and. Yeah, and this report tries to do that as best as it can and be as comprehensive as possible. But there was a process where the public did get to see a little bit of the scope of work. Right. So there were a couple of different webinars that the public got to engage in and really kind of see what they're outlining or what's really important for environmental justice throughout the city. And people got to weigh in on that and provide comments and feedback. So that was also very much a great way to be informed by the public. And those who don't know much about environmental justice, what are they interested in and what's really important for us to know.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I vaguely remember some of these things kind of popping up. And for folks who are anticipating or really excited about this report, they actually have a link that you can look at what's supposed to be in the report and get some more of this background context. And we obviously included a link in the show notes. But just to kind of provide a high level overview, I can kind of walk us through it really quickly because they've done what I would say is a pretty decent job of breaking it into clear sections that kind of help break apart this complex thing that is environmental justice in the city, because there's lots of different components to it and there's lots of ways that you could really talk about it. So just quickly, the report is broken up in essentially to three primary tasks or sections, in addition to the first thing, which is identifying what are the environmental justice issues in the city. Right. Because you can't talk about environmental justice without really pointing to the parts of the city that we know have had a disproportionate impact. We can already say pretty clearly what some of those areas are based on historical policies and impacts. And just even if you look at health impacts, for example, you look at asthma in the city, you can look pretty clearly and see where some of these environmental justice communities are. You've seen plenty of maps, too, and you could probably draw it from memory. Yeah.
[00:07:01] Speaker A: And it's getting at the equity point that we always drive here versus quality.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: If we don't know who's being disproportionately burdened, then our plan will be useless.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So the report outlines these environmental justice areas that have been identified, and it also has these kind of three primary tasks that it's outlined to include in this report. And I think this is a part of the local law 60 that required this report be produced. So the first section is all about analyzing and outlining environmental outcomes and climate vulnerabilities. In other words, how are the environmental benefits and burdens distributed across the city, especially among historically marginalized groups? And they've done a nice job of kind of listing out some of them. I just pull up a couple of examples because it's a long list. Like I said, I think about a lot of the things that follow. You listed a couple of things. But, for example, some of the environmental justice concerns they've listed here, drinking water quality, sewage infrastructure quality, exposure to hazardous chemicals, proximity to and quality of green space, waterfront park space, outdoor air quality, lots of stuff on there. So I encourage you to take a look at some of these things because it's good to see what they're listing as some of those factors. Because there's so many dimensions of environmental justice. You might look at that list and be like, yeah, there's a couple of things missing, or maybe there's some more specific things that need to be on that list. But either way, I thought it was pretty comprehensive, or there might be some.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: Things that you didn't even realize were environmental justice concerns.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. So that's section one. That's, this first task is just looking at those environmental benefits and burdens. The second task is analyzing and outlining the city's contribution to environmental justice. That means looking at the city's programs, processes, activities and policies to see how they've impacted, for better or worse, environmental justice. So how has the city positively or negatively impacted environmental justice through the work that they do? So that is a very interesting thing to unpack. And I feel like the city has a lot of programs, a lot of things that it does in different dimensions. So I'm hopeful that they are thorough and look at even things that don't seem super related are less clearly environmental justice that they've managed to get to. Those two.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:09:30] Speaker B: All right, last one here. Section three, review public engagement by city agencies and participation in the environmental decision making. And you actually alluded to this a second ago. You said something about public engagement in the process kind of early on in some of the stages. And so it's great that they're including this as part of their report to really look at the public engagement piece, because when we talk about environmental justice. One of the pieces that people often forget is that meaningful engagement piece. How are you making sure that when you're making a decision that's impacting a community, that those folks are engaged in the process and have a say? So this section is supposed to look at how does the city involve New Yorkers in environmental decision making, especially on the distribution of environmental benefits and decisions? Do they integrate environmental justice principles into those engagement processes? Are they doing a good job of that? Yeah.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: Edmund basically touches at the mission statement that we say every episode.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Yes.
See, this is why we say, you got to remember that it's embedded. It should be embedded in all the things that the city is doing, that other governmental bodies are doing, and, of course, that we're doing, too. So lots of different components to this report. I'm excited to see what it actually looks like when it comes out. But based on this kind of outline, I'm optimistic. I'm hopeful that we're going to see some good stuff come out there that we can continue to build on and know what's next, what's next when we move forward and. Yeah, what do you think?
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's going to be great to have kind of, you need a baseline and you need data. You also need narrative. Right. We need to understand a little bit more. This is why it was important to have environmental justice organizations be a part of this process as well for the city, so that you just don't have a bunch of academics and researchers who are amazing at their job, what they do. But sometimes pulling in that narrative element of, like, how do we contextualize some of this data that we're getting really will make this report, I think, a unique and kind of, like, really enriched report in order to, again, we need a plan. We need to figure out what we're going to do. And so we have to have all that data. We need to do an assessment of the city first before we can make a plan.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I remember earlier this month we talked about the city budget and how that fits into our work here at we act and environmental justice in general. Is there a connection between the budget stuff at the city level and this report?
[00:11:49] Speaker A: There's a huge connection, and one of the major ones is that this report is supposed to identify the city's environmental justice areas. Right. But it's also analyzing environmental and climate issues and identify which communities are being disproportionately impacted by environmental burdens and which are not seeing benefits from green investments made by the city or where do we need to put more investment? In what areas are we not spending in the right money? Because like you talked about before in the last episode, that money is important. It's necessary to move the work that we're so, you know, New York City being very progressive in terms of a lot of its climate and environmental laws that it's passed, how are we making sure that our outcomes from those laws are coming to fruition? And also are they going to the right communities first? Which this is really important for that. So once we kind of have this report and we can create a plan, we can see where those gaps are in the funding and say, oh, we definitely need to invest a lot more into this space, particularly here.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Right.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: We can say that there's still lots of issues, maybe with air quality in the South Bronx. We've got the admir rates. We've got the truck traffic. We got whatever the case may be. So we have a plan for that. But then how are we investing our money to make sure that we are righting those wrongs?
[00:13:09] Speaker B: Absolutely. So really, all the more reason why it's important to understand what's going on with the city budget. And for anyone who didn't have a chance to listen to our last episode talking about the city and state budget in New York, definitely a good time to do that. In anticipation of reading this report and really understanding, if you look at this report and you're like, the city's got to do some work in X, Y and Z, then you'll understand maybe these are some things that we can do in the budget or get passed in the budget or encourage folks to pass in the budget to make those things happen. So I think that's a pretty good overview of the report itself. I don't want to take up too much time before we jump into this interview with Peggy because I think she has a lot of really great things to say about why this report is, know her experience being a part of the process and just her insights about environmental justice here in the city in this current time that we're in. So any last comments before we jump into that interview?
[00:14:00] Speaker A: No, I'm excited people want to hear.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Peggy, Peggy, Peggy, Peggy.
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Peggy, we're so excited to have you on the show. It's been a long time coming.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Peggy is, for those who don't know, is the chair of the environmental justice advisory board the first ever in New York City? And at the end of the month it's supposed to come out is what's called EJNYC report, and that's being released at the end of the month, and it's the first ever, and it will give a snapshot of the current state of environmental justice across multiple issues. So that's the environmental health aspects, the air qualities that we talked about, waste sustainability. And we are also in the midst of a budget season right now, and we know so much of the work that needs to be done, and we need money to do it. And so I'm kind of curious if, what are your thoughts on the current state of environmental justice in New York City? What are some things that are going well, and what are some things that we need? A lot of improvement.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: You know, our vision in developing we act for environmental justice was to ensure that environmental justice was on the city and state agenda. And I think it took us maybe about a year of working with two city council people to get legislation passed that required the city to develop an environmental justice task force and a report. And so that's why this report is coming out, because we were able to get the city council to pass that kind of legislation.
So this will be the first report.
I think it's a pretty decent report. It's based on the kinds of data that the city collects as a matter of course. So there might be some things that, some concerns we have that may not be addressed fully, but I think the basic ones are. And the idea is that the task force will now take that report and begin to talk with and consult with community folks to figure out how we address those problems. And so the legislation requires that we develop a plan to address that report. And so as soon as that report comes out in the next few weeks, hopefully New York City will have an opportunity to get a strong picture of environmental quality throughout the city and see what the issues are. And then we're going to need to be able to do strong community engagement on addressing these problems. And then, of course, there's an interagency task force made up of city agencies who will be meeting with the task force to propose some of these solutions that we're going to need to create a cleaner, healthier New York City. So this is a first for New York City. Hopefully, our mayor wants to invest in stronger environmental quality in the city. And if so, I think we can look positively towards this process over the next year or two.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: How do you think the mayor is doing right now? How unfiltered do you want to be?
[00:17:55] Speaker C: I think the mayor has a tough, I mean, gosh, I would never want to be mayor I mean, that's a tough job. And then you lay the migrant crisis on top of it, the homeless crisis that we already had, the lack of affordable housing and continuing police harassment in certain communities. It's a lot to deal with.
It's a lot to deal with.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Just as we anticipate this report coming out and thinking about some things that might be in it, what would you say over the last 35 years or so, what would you say that the city has made the most progress on in your mind? And what's something you feel like the city has made the least progress on that you feel like over the last 35 years has still been failed to address something that you're like, how have we still not gotten this right? Yeah. What would you say for those two things?
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Well, New York's a big city. I would say that air quality has gotten better for a lot of reasons that don't necessarily all have to do with the city. Certainly the EPA developing guidance on ultra low sulfur fuel early on in the Clinton administration meant that there'd be cleaner air because of cleaner fuel for interstate vehicles and buses around the know, the MTA investing in cleaner buses, the clean heat program again, cleaning up boilers and incinerators.
I think all of those things have helped to have cleaner air. I think the waste issue still, the waste transfer stations have gotten under better control, but the waste management is still a huge issue. And it's still a huge issue that we are exporting waste. Know, incinerators in Newark, which impact those communities. And I've even had people call me from Mississippi and Alabama saying, you're an EJ group and you're sending your waste down here. So the waste issue is not just a city issue, but it's a national issue. And just because New York City might not be as significant as it was 20 years ago or impactful, it doesn't mean that when we're exporting our waste that other communities and our colleagues and friends around the country aren't at risk. So some of those issues cannot simply be solved by any one municipality. But I do think New York has certainly attempted to have cleaner air, to be more aware of the impacts of waste transfer stations on communities of color, and to get some of them closed and better enforced. Because a lot of this work is about lack of enforcement. That's a big EJ concern, that things are not enforced in our communities the way they are in others. So working with government to ensure there's enforcement, working with state government around those issues, you realize quickly that you can't have a sustainable community without the policies that affect those communities being fair and just. And so that means policies not only at the city council level, but at the state legislature, at the congress. And so, again, understanding that we have to engage significantly in environmental policy at the state level and at the congressional level, and again, through our engagement and the engagement of many others around this country, we have something like $80 billion for the first time coming from the federal government to invest in communities of color and what they call underserved communities, disadvantaged communities around the country. That would never have happened without strong advocacy by the environmental justice community.
I co chair the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Again, have they taken all of our recommendations? Absolutely not. Have we made a difference? Absolutely.
We just got a pause in the LNG pipeline issue. Again, strong environmental justice pushback on people. You know, our voices are being heard. They're being prioritized. In some respects, the Biden administration has certainly raised the visibility of environment and climate justice in a very positive way. And so, again, it shows how leadership mobilization, community organizing, telling our stories, speaking for ourselves, ultimately makes a difference.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Thank you. I feel like you brought us really naturally to kind of starting to wrap up just to kind of help us kind of close up. I want to ask you one last question, which we kind of ask everyone and just kind of open it up and give you space to share anything that you feel like is important for us to address. While we're on this topic of some of the current challenges in the city related to environmental justice, is there anything that you feel like is important to mention that maybe we haven't asked you yet that you would like to share before we close out?
[00:23:47] Speaker C: Well, I think understanding that we have common issues with colleagues and communities all over the globe and that we understand issues that are just percolating in those countries that we have experience with the organizations and governments that are and corporations that are perhaps creating some havoc and negative impacts in other countries and how we can begin to have stronger linkages so that we can share information and understand from a global perspective and different countries'perspectives, on some of the issues we're dealing with. We may say we're against carbon capture and utilization, and there might be some other countries that are looking forward to it for a variety of reasons. So being able to understand each other and how these issues impact everyday life around the world, I think is an important direction for us and is important as we work to improve life all over the globe and to stop climate change from wreaking havoc in so many nations. We're going to really have to work together stronger, and we're going to have to have really strong, committed alliances, not only here in New York, in the country, but around the globe, so that we can, as disadvantaged communities, come together to really create the sustainability and health that we need.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: Thank you. What a beautiful place to end on. And I know that when we think about environmental justice, obviously we've touched on this. There's an inherent local component to it thinking and working locally, but also the reminder to think globally, think about how the issues that we're experiencing here translate and intersect with the issues folks are facing globally. So thank you, Peggy, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us. I feel like it was such a joy.
[00:25:58] Speaker C: Okay, thank you.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. Make sure to keep an eye out for the EJNYC report. It's scheduled to be released at the end of this month, so if it's out already, make sure to check the link in the show notes. Otherwise, keep an eye out on our social media and we'll make sure to send out updates when it gets released.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: All also, check out our next episode coming out in two weeks, where we talk about the early presidential primary for New Yorkers in April and the importance of civic engagement with the help of a very active weact member. If you like this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. And if you have thoughts about the show, we encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts and suggestions.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: At
[email protected] also check out weact on Facebook at weactfordj. That's weactforej. And Instagram, Twitter and YouTube at weactfordj. That's W-E-A-C-T number four, E J. And check out our website, weact.org, for more information about environmental justice. Until next time, don't forget to do your taxes chaching.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: I actually do need to do that's.
