[Ring tone chime]
Miriam: So in April I tweeted this.
Because, well, the pandemic.
And I wanted to know what climate people were doing to keep building on all this incredible
momentum now that meeting in person wasn’t safe.
Aditi Bansal: And because I was also sitting at home just staring at the Internet, I had
just read this incredible piece by Monique López.
and send tweet
MN: And I cannot stress enough how important reading this article, at that time, was.
In this beautiful, concise post, Monique outlined how planning, activism, and organizing needed
to change, both because of the pandemic, but also in general.
AB: Their article really resonated because I wasn’t seeing such thoughtful, compassionate,
conversations about planning and environmental justice - especially that incorporated COIVD
response.
MN: Which is why, I emailed Monique asking if they wanted to talk to us.
And lucky for you, they did!
Monique: My name is Monique Lopez, I am a social justice planner.
MN: Monique started Pueblo Planning, a participatory planning and design firm with the express
purpose of providing no-to-low cost services and resources to non-profit and grassroots
community-based organizations.
AB: We were just gushing about your piece
Monique: Laughs
AB: Since the first time I read it, I’ve just been reflecting on how, just, bad, our
response, especially in the US has been to this virus, but really everything.
Monique: That piece in particular was just like, bubbling up inside of me.
And I’m like, I just need to write this because I’m really concerned and also frustrated
with what I’m seeing.
As someone who is in the planning field, I felt it was my responsibility and like also
all of our collective responsibilities to say
hey wait, what are we doing?
What are we moving forward?
And are we leaving people out that have always been left out?
But also, like, the question really is,
what should we have been doing all along?
MN: And I think, especially when you wrote this, everyone was just scrambling trying
to figure out how do we keep doing what we’ve always done, but safely.
And wasn’t really taking the time to ask those questions.
Monique: What is being proposed right now in this moment is really moving a lot to online
platforms to conduct community engagement.
That is really going to disproportionately leave out Black, Brown, Indigenous communities,
and they’re the same communities that experience the digital divide, right, the digital gap.
To pause and think of new and creative ways to engage those that are most vulnerable to
climate crises,
which are the same communities that are vulnerable to covid-19, right?
AB: It’s just exacerbating all of the inequities that already existed in our communities and
now hopefully this will be like a tangible example of how these inequities exist and
affect communities of color.
Monique: And, it makes it crystal clear that the existing structures and systems that are
in place,
by and large, that have been backed up through planning, planning practice and planning theory,
can no longer stand.
But there's going to be folks that are gonna attempt to gaslight the entire country
as to what they just experienced and what was the culprit and the cause.
So even though the truth is really undeniable,
people, people will attempt to do that to maintain certain structures and systems and
certain practices and ways of being.
MN: Oh that literally took no time at all.
AB: We talked to Monique in April and since then we’ve seen people in powerful positions
literally denying the seriousness of the pandemic.
MN: And many are denying the seriousness by prioritizing the economy over people.
By trying to open schools, endangering the lives of students and teachers.
And choosing to continuously give bailouts to corporations, while the general public
only gets one measly check, if they got one at all.
AB: And what both of those decisions have in common:
they continue to put essential workers directly in the path of the most dangerous pandemic
in 102 years.
MN: It’s just protecting the rich who are overwhelmingly white who can continue to work
from home
and benefiting the billionaires who have only gotten wealthier during the pandemic.
AB: Take the example of New York City,
here’s a map of the percent of COVID cases by neighborhood,
which looks nearly identical to the maps showing the homes of communities of color and the
percentage of service workers.
Because, if you’re working at a grocery store or the post office, you're interacting
with hundreds of people every day
making the likelihood you’ll contract the virus, way higher.
And then add to that - those same communities are experiencing the highest rates of rent
burden
spending upwards of 30% of their total income on rent.
MN: While total cases are going down in NYC,
the impact of the pandemic on people’s housing situation, health - both emotional and physical,
is.
a.
disproportionate and b. not going away.
In a lot of ways, things are just going to get worse.
Why weren’t we ready for this?
Why weren’t we better prepared for this?
Monique: There are already a number of, like, plans that have been developed around hazard-mitigation
plans,
around crisis-management plans that cities have developed.
But why are those plans failing us in this moment?
And one of the reasons that we can point to is that because the voices of those that are
most marginalized weren’t elevated or even at the table
and included in the planning process to ensure that their needs are met.
MN: So its, what, July or August - the hottest months in New York.
And so on top of this pandemic, we’ve also been seeing heat waves.
But, it took reaching some arbitrary standards - like 95 degrees Fahrenheit
for the city to release information on available cooling centers.
So, if you needed a place to sit down last week when it was 93 the week before, you were
out of luck.
AB: Which is all kinds of bad, but if you squint you can kind of understand why these
places aren’t open all the time because of COVID risk.
Still, I have a hard time understanding why the map
and communication about preparing for a dangerous heat event isn’t available all the time.
MN: And here is a screen grab from a couple weeks ago because I can't show you what the
map looks like right now because the portal is closed.
AB: The city is trying to build heat solutions in a pandemic on a system that wasn’t even
working that well beforehand.
We don’t have time to get into that all in this video, but check out some of the links
down below.
But the point is, both the plans today and how the city operates during a ‘normal’
summer further leave out the people who need heat relief the most -
like people without access to the internet or lower literacy,
elderly folks and unhoused people.
We keep following the status quo, which clearly is not working and proving to be deadly for
so many people in our city.
MN: Frankly, what drastically needs to change is how much power is held by white people
both in the city and around the country.
Monique: Let’s think of ways that people already are in certain spaces
and how do we engage and connect with them in the safest way possible
and ensuring that risk is very much mitigated in those spaces.
And not say ‘well we’ll get to you once this is over.’
Because the truth is, that's what communities of colors and Indigenous communities, Black
communities,
have always been told is like: ‘we’ll get to you after we figure this other thing
out,’ right.
And so, we just, we can’t do that.
AB: And that totally squares with how we need to reframe handling everything, from COVID
to the climate crisis.
Monique: We are taking a deep look at what are the connections between
what people are going to experience in a climate crisis
and what they’re experiencing right now as a result of COVID-19.
And there are so many things that people are experiencing today
that could also potentially happen as a result of a climate crisis.
MN: Yeah, we saw the food supply chain completely break down.
At the same time as millions of people lost jobs.
Which just added onto already existing food insecurity.
While today we’re dealing with crops rotting in their fields, many future climate scenarios
predict crop failures from droughts, extreme heat, or massive flooding.
AB: But the result is the same - not enough food getting to everyone.
MN: And the other thing to keep in mind about disasters and crises, is that even after the
initial threat is gone,
recovering takes an extremely long time.
So while in the US we aren’t even close to this stage yet,
once the threat of COVID-19 is gone and we can go about our lives mask-free,
all the bad that this pandemic caused is just not going to poof away.
There will still be thousands dead, millions without work, communities where all the business
had to close,
and survivors of COVID with respiratory issues.
All of which make weathering the next storm way harder.
Because that is a lot of pressure to put on a city, on a community, or on a person.
Which means, that even after this pandemic is over,
places will be under-resourced and unable to respond, as they might have been able to
pre-pandemic, to climate impacts.
AB: So the idea that, oh hurricane season, or fire season, is going to be really bad
this year because of COVID-19, is true.
But it’ll also be bad next year, and probably the following year too,
because people and communities will have less capacity to respond.
MN: Which is why, we need to be doing something about COVID,
but also not stop dealing with all the other crises.
Now more than ever, we don’t have the luxury of dealing with one thing at a time.
Monique: There is a need to not tackle one problem at a time.
We’re finding out in real time that these impacts are going to compound with one another.
And so we need to look at these issues in a way that is holistic.
MN: And obviously that means dealing with climate impacts that are already here or coming:
like heat, storms and storm surge, wildfires,
but also it means building a just economy, ending police violence and the carceral state,
re-imagining education –
tackling every crisis as the one scary, massive, multi-headed dragon it actually is.
AB: But saying we need to fix everything is a lot easier than actually doing the work.
Monique: In terms of racial justice, I think we need to follow the lead of folks, like,
in the Movement for Black Lives.
We need to follow the lead of those in the movement for releasing folks that are being
detained
because of their immigration status.
I think we need to follow the leads of those movements.
We really need to have frank discussions about colonial practices that are part of our institutions,
and also white supremacy culture that is part of every single one of our institutions.
And how that is directly linked to why the same people are always most impacted by any
kind of crisis or catastrophe.
What this moment requires is I think two things:
great imagination and even greater love.
It's an opportunity for us to imagine,
and it's an opportunity for us to love each other in a way that maybe we didn’t do as
intentionally.
MN: Thanks so much for spending time with us.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on what we talked about today,
this is a really important conversation and we obviously weren’t going to cover everything,
so leave a comment downstairs so we can keep the conversation going.
If you want to know more about Monique’s work and Pueblo Planning, or read their writing,
check out the description box below.
And if you want to keep learning from Aditi you can follow her on the social medias.
Links also below.