Urban Pollution

          Green is the New Black is a speech made by Majora Carter to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights’ Solutions Salon, on May 19, 2006. She describes how her neighborhood in New York City handled 40 percent of the entire city’s commercial waste, acting as home to a sewage treatment plant, a sewage sludge pelletizing plant, four power plants, the world’s largest food distribution center and other industries which brought in tens of thousands of diesel trucks to the area each week. Carter uses her first-hand knowledge of the rampant pollution of the Bronx to depict how environmental degradation and social and economic divestment go hand in hand, and how these circumstances inevitably produce negative health outcomes for the members of the communities which they affect. She went on to explain how she and her peers employed grass roots activism to fight against the damage being done to their community, and outlines strategies that can be used to improve the environmental, and subsequently medical and economic, conditions of communities like the Bronx