Traditionally, the focus of Earth Week has been on global conservation efforts focused on the environment. More recently, city governments have begun enacting sustainability measures that not only protect the natural world, but also improve the health and vitality of low-income communities in cities. Here is how some cities have shown their commitment to environmental and social justice this week.
Milwaukee Combats Food Deserts
This week the Milwaukee County Board announced a new food security initiative called Sowing, Empowering and Eliminating Deserts of Food (SEED), partnering with the Hunger Task Force to create a mobile market that will stock fresh produce and nutritious food in low-income neighborhoods.
In addition, the county is planning to create 100 new community gardens before next year’s Earth Day. They will also be partnering with the group Growing Power to plant thousands of fruit trees in urban orchards that will provide fresh fruit and jobs.
In an editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel board chairwoman Marina Dimitrijevic pulls a fitting quote relating to SEED’s ambitions from Earth Day founder, and former Wisconsin governor, Gaylord Nelson: “Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living creatures.”
Seattle Mayor Launches Equity Initiative at Rally
On Wednesday, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray spoke at Seattle Central College’s Climate Action Festival, formally launching his Equity and Environment Initiative. Its goals are to identify communities most impacted by environmental injustice, create strategies to have them equally benefit from the city’s environmental progress, and invite “people of color, immigrants and refugees, people with low incomes, and limited-English proficiency individuals” to become leaders in the mainstream environmental movement.
The initiative has already created a new position in the Office of Sustainability and Environment and will result in an Equity & Environment Action Agenda by the end of the year.
“I … wanted to be here today on Earth Day at Seattle Central on Capitol Hill, a neighborhood that I’ve lived in for the last 31 years, a neighborhood that is about equity, a neighborhood that is about the environment,” said Murray at the rally, according to The Stranger. “[It is] a neighborhood that I again believe can lead the way, and lead the city of Seattle as we address climate change, as we address carbon emissions, [and] as we address oil rigs that shouldn’t come to this city.”
New York Shifts the Focus of Sustainability Plan
Like Murray, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio took Earth Day as an opportunity to call attention to equity challenges in his city. He announced that he would be revamping former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lauded sustainability roadmap PlaNYC as OneNYC.
In addition to advancing the city’s green agenda — reducing waste disposal, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving stormwater management — the plan calls for significant actions related to economic growth for all. It sets a goal to lift 800,000 New Yorkers out of poverty or near poverty by 2025, create and preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing, improve transit, and increase resilience in response to climate-related events.
Some environmental groups have expressed hesitancy in their support of the plan, saying the plan is too vague, could potentially be too costly and weakens some of the potency of the detail-oriented PlaNYC. Members of the city’s sustainability advisory board were not shown a full draft of the plan before the announcement.
“We liked the old name,” a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council told the New York Times. “But the critical thing is the substance, so that’s what we’re going to be looking at very carefully.”
“Environmental sustainability and economic sustainability have to walk hand in hand,” said de Blasio in an interview on Tuesday. “Some of my brothers and sisters in the environmental movement don’t get that yet.”
The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Alexis Stephens was Next City’s 2014-2015 equitable cities fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
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