majora carter talks green for green-gowned graduates

Majora Carter, the Environmental Justice Activist and founder of Sustainable South Bronx, gave a rousing speech on sustainability this afternoon at the Bronx High School of Science graduation at Lincoln Center. Carter grew up in the South Bronx, where she first began her environmental efforts in the early 1990s.  The South Bronx faces significant pollution problems, especially in terms of industrial waste. In a 2008 interview with CNN (and in today's address), she listed among them: "The South Bronx Handles 40 percent of the city's commercial waste. We have a sewage treatment plant, a sewage sludge palletizing plant, four power plants and the diesel emissions from about 60,000 diesel truck trips each week. Those are not nice places to be around. They have a pretty severe health crisis associated with them."

Carter was revisiting her beginnings by agreeing to speak at the graduation; she is an alum of the Bronx Science Class of '84. [A somewhat unrelated but fittingly coincidental side note, green is the school color.] In my opinion she was the highlight of a congeries of Commencement speakers who took to the podium throughout the three-hour long ceremony, and it was the only time I perked up to attention aside from listening for my sister's name among the 600 or so students.  I was profoundly inspired by her impassioned, frank and funny words, which were spirited not sappy, informative but not condescending.  She planted a new idea beside my blossoming green interest, that an unsustainable lifestyle is not just harmful to the environment but an injustice to it.