S3 E5: “If we're witnessing something that's wrong, how can we work together?” Inspired by people who care deeply for their corner of the world, Christina takes a trip to the South Bronx to meet someone who’s committed to protecting their community. Mychal Johnson shares his story with Christina, from a childhood in Chicago that fostered love and respect for nature to his move to New York, and how he co-founded the grassroots organization South Bronx Unite. Mychal and Christina discuss how South Bronx Unite is breaking cycles of systemic environmental and economic injustice to ensure a more resilient future for all.
S3 E5: “If we're witnessing something that's wrong, how can we work together?”
Inspired by people who care deeply for their corner of the world, Christina takes a trip to the South Bronx to meet someone who’s committed to protecting their community. Mychal Johnson shares his story with Christina, from a childhood in Chicago that fostered love and respect for nature to his move to New York, and how he co-founded the grassroots organization South Bronx Unite. Mychal and Christina discuss how South Bronx Unite is breaking cycles of systemic environmental and economic injustice to ensure a more resilient future for all.
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[00:00:41] Christina Thompson: Hello and welcome back to A Little Green, an Avocado Green Brands podcast. I'm Christina Thompson. Last time, we spent the day with a grassroots group on City Island, and I was left pretty inspired by people who cared deeply for their places -- people who are making truly tangible differences in their neighborhoods today. So, in this episode, we're heading to the South Bronx to talk with someone who's similarly committed to making his own place livable, healthy, and truly resilient.
[00:01:22] Mychal Johnson: Okay. My name is Mychal Johnson. I am a co-founder of South Bronx Unite. I'm a resident of Mott Haven-Port Morris community in the South Bronx. Walking out of my door of my house, onto my stoop, either sitting there or going to the bodega a block away...
[00:01:41] Neighbors: Morning!
[00:01:41] Mychal Johnson: ...you're going to interact with...
[00:01:43] Neighbors: How's it going?
[00:01:43] Mychal Johnson: ...at least five people saying, "Good morning. Hey, how you doing? How are you? You all right?" You know, "You doing okay?" We all need that. So I feel that warmth right away in our community when I leave my door for the first time in the morning. That feeling, right away, is not a transient feeling. It's a feeling of community that's really embracing each other. Because I've been there for about two decades, I've had an opportunity to really become part of that community.
[00:02:12] VOX POP: ...I live in the South Bronx, right there on 140th and 3rd Avenue...
[00:02:15] VOX POP: ... I've been here for 10 years...
[00:02:16] VOX POP: ...I'm from Queens, but I've lived in the South Bronx for a few years now....
[00:02:20] Mychal Johnson: The people who've always lived in the South Bronx have been folks who have migrated there from other parts of the country, or even across the globe, especially the Global South. Earlier days were from Europe, and then that moved into folks coming from, of course, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, now, West Africa, Mexico, Honduras. A lot of different ethnicities, but it's always supposed to be the shining light of the United States: come, bring your people to this country to start your life. It's a variation of cultures that are coming together, celebrating, and expressing their own individual cultures and sharing those with others. So I grew up in Chicago with grandparents who were from the South. My grandmother migrated during the Second Migration to the North with her brothers and sisters to Chicago in 1945 with my mom, who was about six years old. A lot of stories about her experience in the South actually trying to run from Jim Crow in the South. Her mother was half indigenous, father was an African American. My grandfather was Haitian descendant, and so, all really nature, farming the land, feeding our-- generations of our people. And, in Chicago, I thought I actually was living in the country because the way they had this respect for, like, farming in the backyard. We even had hens, and it just felt really nature-based in country. Later on, as a-- almost a teenager, I realized I was a city boy and not a country boy. I probably was a little bit of both. I was raised with this understanding that Mother Earth was, like, there to help us survive. We had to respect that and not take, but also give. Same way you would do with your crops that you're growing. You had to nurture the ground that you were planting those seeds in if you were to get any kind of crop. Once I became older, having that foundation, it always felt like that was part of our responsibility -- to take care of what takes care of us, which is this planet. Understanding the connection. We're stewarding this space, right? We're not commodifying it, which it had became a commodity, and that's where things started going wrong. And we're still in that kind of situation where land has been, like, the nucleus of most of the harm across the globe. And so we're really trying to understand that connection and that stewardship responsibility.
[00:04:50] Christina Thompson: So, from Chicago to the South Bronx, how did that happen?
[00:04:54] Mychal Johnson: I had grandparents in New York, so I wasn't unfamiliar with New York City. In those days, it was when New York was bankrupt. It was pretty sad to see how people had to live. So when I transitioned to New York, I saw in the Bronx something that felt in our community, in Wicker Park in Chicago -- this really tight knit community of folks who were struggling, but really had this community feel. And I was immediately attracted to it, but I also started seeing that land speculation starting to happen. And real estate speculation leading to potential displacement. So the writing was already on the wall; I had seen this play already and play out.
[00:05:33] VOX POP: ...It's becoming more busy over here....
[00:05:36] VOX POP: ...The neighborhood's changing a lot. It's changing...
[00:05:38] VOX POP: ...I mean, it's getting gentrified little by little...
[00:05:41] VOX POP: ...A lot of new buildings, a lot of new people, new businesses...
[00:05:46] Mychal Johnson: That forced me to start getting involved.
[00:05:47] Christina Thompson: Mychal told me a lot about the history of inequity in the South Bronx, a pattern that started with colonization and ramped up in the days of Robert Moses.
[00:06:00] VOX POP: ...We're right by all the highways...
[00:06:01] VOX POP: ...All you hear is the cars on the highway...
[00:06:07] Mychal Johnson: We are a peninsula community without any access to it, but have highway systems encircling it. They were put there first by Robert Moses, the "great planner," right? Who thought it was a great idea to create this trench through the Bronx, creating a Cross Bronx Expressway to enhance vehicular mobility. Tearing up a borough, displacing folks, and then started doing that over again with two more highway systems that now is like a noose around the neck of this community, from the Cross Bronx Expressway to the South Bronx where I live. Creating incredible, negative health outcomes. A lot of struggle, decades of that, but it didn't stop there. It continued with creating one of the largest Significant Maritime Industrial Areas in the city in one community.
[00:06:59] Christina Thompson: These Significant Maritime Industrial Areas are zones for heavy industrial and polluting infrastructure. There are only seven in the city, and, according to the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, six of them are in storm surge zones. Not great for resilience. And this kind of waterfront use means:
[00:07:18] Mychal Johnson: No accessibility for the 60,000 people who live in the community, which is blocks away, with some of the second highest concentration of public housing of people who are on a lower level of the socioeconomic stratosphere.
[00:07:31] VOX POP: ...The access to the waterfront is kind of weak...
[00:07:33] VOX POP: ...Especially here in the South Bronx. There aren't any water areas where you can really get to...
[00:07:36] VOX POP: ...Because they use it for, like, trucks and stuff...
[00:07:38] VOX POP: ...I don't think we have any access to the waterfront due to the garbage train line...
[00:07:42] VOX POP: ...And it's kind of being not utilized all the way to its full potential...
[00:07:51] Christina Thompson: Instead of a place that can actually be enjoyed, the waterfront here is a hotspot of environmental inequity. It's cut off by train tracks for a train that only transports garbage to and from a waste transfer station. There's heavy diesel truck traffic, and it's home to a fossil fuel power plant.
[00:08:08] Mychal Johnson: So, no waterfront access because you're blocked off by this man-made impediment, which is this garbage trainline. Taking away a natural resource, right? A vital natural resource in that of a peninsula that could create healthier outcomes and increase quality of life.
[00:08:22] Christina Thompson: And Mychal told me, while all these industrial uses might increase the quality of life somewhere else in the city, they come with an unacceptable cost here.
[00:08:32] Mychal Johnson: Respiratory problems, everywhere you look -- someone's saying they have asthma. One in four of our children have asthma, but also some of the highest rates of asthma hospitalization, like, eight times the national average in this one community. We know the air our children are breathing is directly linked to their cognitive development, which is played out in our children's schools, where we have the poorest performing school district in all of New York City District Seven. So, not only are we breathing in harmful fumes, but our children's outcomes -- educational and occupational outcomes -- are being hampered by what they breathe. So the injustice is placing harmful, polluting facilities in localized communities like the South Bronx, because they don't either have the voting base because people are immigrants who aren't voting -- but are working two jobs or three jobs to put food on the table for their family because they're new to this country, or they're not strong on that socioeconomic status. So they're being dumped on with all the things you won't find in other places. We feel it's environmental racism if it's happening to people of color over and over again, but you don't see that happening to white communities or more homogenous communities that are economically more stable.
[00:09:56] Christina Thompson: By now, this story is just far too familiar. When disasters like Sandy hit, communities that are already dealing with environmental injustice are often hit the hardest.
[00:10:07] Mychal Johnson: When New York City catches the cold, we catch the flu. The impacts are so much greater in our community when things like natural disasters happen. So Sandy hit New York City. Our area was hit at low tide. Four feet of flood waters breached our shores. We saw the vulnerability of our peninsula, where it's mostly asphalt, which leads to runoff. Nothing will impede or have any permeability when you only have asphalt and not enough green, or grass, or permeable surfaces to protect or absorb. We also understood after Sandy how vulnerable we were. There's all this creating Significant Maritime Industrial Area there, placing all these harmful polluting facilities on our peninsula, but no nature-based solutions. And we had to create the plan ourselves.
[00:10:59] Christina Thompson: Mychal mentioned this earlier in our conversation, but the organization that he co-founded in his neighborhood is called South Bronx Unite, and their mission is to bring people together to improve and protect the social, environmental, and economic future of their neighborhood.
[00:11:13] Mychal Johnson: I knew the importance of stopping the cycle -- helping to stop the cycle. And it was all based on environmental injustices stopping and creating some sort of environmental justice. It's always been about better health outcomes for our community and everything that health touches. So, in there about 2014, our community came together and formulated a plan called the Mott Haven-Port Morris Waterfront Plan. At that time, New York State, the Department of Environment of Conservation had an open space committee, accepting nominations for important projects to create open spaces where there is need. It was born out of necessity after Hurricane Sandy, realizing how vulnerable we were because of it.
[00:11:59] VOX POP: ...Improvement will be pollution...
[00:12:02] VOX POP: ...There's so much land and nothing really going on over here...
[00:12:04] VOX POP: ...I mean, they could do better...
[00:12:06] VOX POP: ...Maybe if they built, like, another park or, like, something accessible to the public. That would be cute...
[00:12:09] VOX POP: ...You know, somewhere we could go relax...
[00:12:11] VOX POP: ...Instead of having a whole bunch of trucks being-- coming around here...
[00:12:14] VOX POP: ...At least to be able to be close to water is important, I think, for people's sanity and just, um, it'd improve their quality of life...
[00:12:24] Christina Thompson: The Mott Haven-Port Morris Waterfront Plan would transform almost a hundred acres of public land; land at risk of flooding, and currently used for harmful fossil fuel intensive industries. This area would become open green space that actually helps protect the neighborhood from flooding. And this proposal has momentum.
[00:12:45] Mychal Johnson: The emphasis, the impetus must come from the people to be the catalyst for these types of developments and to push for their implementation. So the environmental justice piece comes in is when we try to stand up and fight back against those harmful cycles that have been taking place decade after decade. It takes, like you say: small places make great change. And we know from being residents and parents of our community, if we don't do it, who will? I always say, the people who live in these communities are the experts, so you're getting the real true experts from the ground up. Top down are people-- are speculating. They're coming from already a plan that they're reproducing or replicating from what they've seen happen for decades. We're saying, "No, that's wrong," but when you have the right people talking about that, coming together, trying to implement this change, that's when you see, I think, really true, incredible work.
[00:13:46] Christina Thompson: I think there's a lot to learn from Mychal and his organization. Not only are they centering environmental justice, but they're also looking to nature for the solutions. And I think all of that really goes back to what Mychal was saying earlier about our responsibility to take care of what takes care of us.
[00:14:03] Mychal Johnson: Nature is the answer of our climate catastrophe and the health and wellbeing of the people who live in our community. It is the same fight. It's all around how we can go back to nature-based solutions. We're trying to really not use band-aids, but really cure the harm. We're pushing legislation. We're getting bills passed. I see promise. I see people rising. I see people working together. True economic development looks like when you protect people's health, and health outcomes, and our planet, and our sustainability, and our resiliency, and our ability to mitigate storm surge. That should be our economic driver, right? Force. Not how high we can build and how many residential developments and apartments we can build. We have to do something different if we're going to get a different outcome, because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different solutions, right? If we don't do it differently, we're going to pay the price. And the price is lives.
[00:15:11] Christina Thompson: What gives you hope for the future? And what, what sustains you in this fight?
[00:15:18] Mychal Johnson: Um, walking on my door every day, and speaking to my members of my community, and seeing our children play in the playground across the street and for those who think they can't do anything about it. But we can, together. We cannot not be engaged if you see there's something wrong.
[00:15:45] Christina Thompson: You can learn more about the amazing work Mychal and South Bronx Unite are doing at southbronxunite.org. And check out alittlegreenpodcast.com, or head to avocadomattress.com to read more on our online magazine. Next time, we're heading to one of the most polluted waterways in all of the United States... and it just so happens to be in my neighborhood.
[00:16:10] VOX POP: ...Yeah, the Gowanus has been a disaster in terms of how dirty it's been for a very long time...
[00:16:16] VOX POP: ...Well, the Gowanus Canal is disgusting...
[00:16:22] Christina Thompson: A Little Green is an Avocado Green Brands podcast. This podcast was written and produced by Anna McClain, and myself, Christina Thompson. The music you heard is by Aaron Levison. And thanks to Megan Hattie Stahl for additional production support.