Activist: Sustainable environmental and economic development
are tools of positive change

Majora Carter, the founder and executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, a grass-roots organization dedicated to urban revitalization in the nation's poorest community, will be the featured speaker Jan. 15 (today) at the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) during its annual observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

(Photo by Zach Seckler)

The environmental justice activist and MacArthur Fellow will deliver her formal remarks, "Environmental Justice: Civil Rights for the 21st Century," at 5 p.m. in room 1040 of the Dana Building. The event is co-sponsored by SNRE, the School of Social Work and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies of LSA.

Carter, a lifelong South Bronx resident, has devoted her career to the pursuit of environmentally sustainable "green" methods for improving the quality of life in her environmentally challenged community, where 35 percent of the predominantly Latino and African American residents live below the poverty level.

"Ms. Carter tackles persistent urban problems of poverty, public health and the need for clean energy by creating beautiful physical environments using green technology," says Rosina Bierbaum, dean of SNRE. "Many urban areas could benefit from similar transformations."

In 2005, Carter won a genius award and a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for lifetime achievements and future potential as an urban revitalization strategist. In 2006, she was invited to appear as a featured panelist on the anti-poverty working group at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Carter holds an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a master's in fine arts from New York University. In 2001, she founded Sustainable South Bronx, which has worked to find solutions to urban public-health and economic problems, and global climate change-related issues, by beautifying the physical surroundings of low-income neighborhoods and demonstrating new environmentally sustainable technologies.

Carter has written a $1.25 million federal grant to conduct a feasibility study for the South Bronx Greenway, an ongoing community-led initiative to create a bicycle-and-pedestrian greenway along the South Bronx River.