[Music]
MAJORA CARTER: My name is Majora Carter and I am just working to just try to save the
world.
[Music]
My mission statement really is to create local and economic environmental development at
the same time.
To really create what I believe is the power of truly locally supported communities through
the environment and the economy.
Economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which in turn creates a social
degradation.
If we built all of our polluting infrastructure from waste facilities, power plants, sewage
treatment plants—all those things—in wealthy communities as quickly as we did in poor ones,
we would have had a cleaner, greener environment a long time ago.
We didn't.
So basically when we put all of that on the backs of poor people, you then get all of
the problems, y'know, that are associated with decreased public health outcomes.
Everything from respiratory problems to different kinds of cancer to know that we know proximity
to fossil fuel emissions causes learning disabilities in young kids and we know that kids who do
poorly in school have a tendency to go to jail in this country rather than onto higher
education.
So the social degradation that we're dealing with all directly related to all of those
things and then you also have the issues around the poverty and the fact that all of the impacts
of it from public health to unemployment to incarceration—all those things related,
concentrated in those communities that also happen to be environmentally and economically
challenged.
So all those social issues absolutely can be dealt with if by chance we looked at the
economy and the environment as a tool for good rather than as a way to make it easier
for the wealthiest folks in the community to be more comfortable because ultimately
it's gonna come back to haunt us all.
[Music]
My hometown, the South Bronx, was literally burning around me starting from the time I
was about 7 years old.
I mean this was the—my neighborhood was the epitome of urban plight.
I mean, there were drug wars, my brother was killed in one of them.
Y'know, landlords were torching their buildings to collect insurance money.
From when I was seven years old, my brother got killed, I started thinking about how am
I gonna get out of this place.
I was not alone.
And I used education as a way to get out and I did.
So that kind of notion of y'know when you're living in a really poor neighborhood if you're
successful, of course you leave.
That's normal.
Y'know, and you see it in a bunch of different education programs.
They will pluck out the ones who are talented and tell them "You're so great.
Y'know, you gotta get outta here."
And they do.
And I think that that is a problem that we've gotta deal with because what it does —that
kind of bright flight really deprives the rest of the community from talent that's there.
And it doesn't give the people that are there a sense of gosh, we can do this too if there's
nobody like it with all you see is poverty, then what else are you gonna be?
You can believe in the fact that you don't have to move out of your neighborhood to move
out of a better one.
That we can be a part of helping to make it better and that I want to show that there
are things that we can be doing together to make it a better place to be.
[Music]
Start Up Box South Bronx—it's one of the programs that we're gonna be working on through
our new non-profit called Hometown Security Labratories and basically it's a tech initiative
that's designed to support the start up tech industry in the South Bronx but also provide
a pipeline of new, young entrepreneurs from the South Bronx in the tech world.
One of the hurdles for starting up a tech venture in the South Bronx is it's not below
14th Street!
[Laughs] And that's a huge one!
We don't have the ecosystem that does make those kinds of places so attractive.
Y'know, we don't have the great places to eat.
We don't have the tech community that finds this place a very special, thriving place
to be because everybody's there and so what we are trying to build is just that.
Y'know, do we think we're gonna compete immediately right away?
Absolutely not.
But do we think we can set up the infrastructure that allows y'know people who we know are
actually going to school up in places like the Bronx whether it's Lemuth or Bronx Community.
They're learning this stuff.
Can they eventually graduate and decide to go downtown or into DUMBO Brooklyn, absolutely!
But we think that if we can create the kind of ecosystem where there is an attractive
place for people to be where they know that they're walking into a community that really
appreciates their work where they can also get a really cup of cappuccino or a drink.
I mean those are the types of things we're trying to build into our model right now so
that it's not just them in isolationb because I think if it is, they're—we're gonna lose
them right like that.
I've always been a big believer that you've gotta literally change what the environment
looks like in order for people to see that something's changing.
Because you can't just talk about it.
You've gotta show and not tell.
I'm Majora Carter and you're watching Epiphany!