Vernice Miller-Travis - Environmental Justice, The Future is Now and GIS is the Tool

This episode features a compelling conversation with closing keynote speaker Vernice Miller-Travis, a pioneer in the environmental justice movement. She shares her journey from early activism to conducting groundbreaking research that exposed the link between race and the placement of hazardous waste sites. Throughout the discussion, Vernice highlights the transformative power of data, mapping, and GIS in advocacy efforts, emphasizing how these tools have been instrumental in holding institutions accountable. She also reflects on the ongoing fight for clean air and water in marginalized communities, the importance of intergenerational activism, and the global implications of climate policies such as carbon credits. 

Her insights provide a powerful reminder that spatial data and storytelling are critical in reimagining a just and sustainable future. Tune in to learn how mapping can be used as a tool for change!

You can find out more about Vernice and her organization here:

www.weact.org
www.metgroup.com

Transcript

0:15

Be Black, Be Bold, Be Innovative, Show the World Equitable Geo. We're coming together as a collective to celebrate people of African descent, the diaspora, and talking about geospatial equity and justice. You're listening to The North Star Gaze, a podcast with intimate stories from geoluminaries. Okay. So hi everyone. So the next conversation is. A conversation that I'm really passionate about and what drew me to this particular guest is her view of what environmental justice is and what she does is marries civil rights and racial justice and then links this up with public health issues, environmental health issues, and being a techie who's in data, I think what I found mind blowing is the fact That she's using data and our lived experiences to create these irrefutable data sets that actually tell a story. And it's not just narratives, but it's backing that up with data and facts and maps. And I think that's what drew me to Venice. And so I think one of the other things beyond just that is the fact that being in tech, I've not seen situations where. It's an end to end cycle. It's an end to end loop that's being closed off where it's not just the data that's being looked at, it's the data and then putting the communities at the center of it, and then not just advocating, but also litigating. And for me, that's what was really unique and what stood out for me. And so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to welcome Venice Miller Travis, the closing keynote for the Homecoming event.. Hey, drum rolls. Hi, Vernice. How are you? I am good. I am good. As good as can be expected. Our country is in a bit of upheaval. And I like that you brought that up because it's interesting how that change really has affected the rest of the world it's also changed how Kenyans are currently talking politically, right? So I'm going to start with your homecoming presentation, which I think was very powerful on environmental justice and the different projects you've supported from the. toxic waste, the landfill project, and, why are these kind of communities important? I and a small group of my colleagues, at the time worked at a racial justice and civil rights division of a small protestant church denomination here in the United States called the United Church of Christ. and I'm talking in the mid 1980s and We saw a lot of black member churches in the southeastern United States who were finding themselves the unwitting host of hazardous waste landfills and other polluting sources, storage, transport, generation, refining, but no one had bothered to have a conversation with those community members about what a state government, or the federal government, was wanting to do in their midst, and certainly no taking into account what could the possible adverse effects be for those local populations. So they turned to the National Church and asked for help in trying to get their hands around what was going on. And it was one particular group of people in a particular majority, African American County and Warren County, North Carolina, and they asked for help. The church came in to help. I get hired as a research assistant. I'm working with this person, Charles Lee, who was the research director. Charles would turn out to be probably the most pivotal thinker and strategist in the environmental justice movement. And the research turned into a report called Toxic Waste and Race in the United States. And we published that in 1987. And and I was responsible for creating the maps of the correlation between race. And where people lived and the location of hazardous waste sites. Now, at the time, we did not have access to GIS, right? So we were early adopters, Charles and I, because as soon as we began to be able to have access to geographic information systems. We immediately gravitated to that space, knowing that if you could aggregate this data much more quickly than the six months it took me to create these maps you could tell a more compelling story. I shared this at the North Star GIS conference, I remember telling my grandmother, who was a nurse, What I was finding as I was doing this research, and I was so excited. So her first question, how much did you all spend on that research? And I said, I don't know grandma I'm not responsible for the budget, but I think somewhere between 150, 000 250 thousand dollars and she said immediately so you all spent a quarter of a million dollars To tell you something that every black person in America knows to be true. All the bad things are where we live. Everybody knows that. The dumps are where we live. The landfills are where we live. The transportation sources are where we live. The chemicals are refined and manufactured where we live. Every black person in America knows that to be true. So, I had to think quickly, and I said, Well, Grandma, you're a scientist, and you know this. There's anecdotal information, and then there is peer reviewed, data analyzed, database, data grounded, Information that should go along with that anecdotal information so that people get a very realistic depiction of what's happening to folks. And so our report. Toxic waste and race in the United States, was the first report ever produced in the United States to link race and the location of hazardous waste, which then went on to break open this conversation that was kind of nascent happening in communities around the United States, indeed around the world about this linkage, but no one had linked up the data. The lived experience and then analyze that and then put that forward into the sort of national discourse. Let's have a conversation about this, right? And it just, took on a life of its own. I can show you a map. That shows you what is going on in United States and in five minutes, you will understand the depth and the expanse of this problem, but it would take me hours to explain to you what that map means. But when you see it, it has such an impact. It tells such a story. I love that. I love that. That's what you've given on lovers and adopters of GIS. And speaking of that, I'm curious as you're talking about all these projects, what would you say is the biggest breakthrough for these projects when it comes to integrating mapping and being able to create this map impact wise? What would you say was the biggest breakthrough for you? Well, one impact was something that I was able to bring forward in my own community where I lived in New York, in the Harlem community, and they decide, I think I wasn't even born yet when this decision was first made by the city of New York. To build a waste water treatment plant, but they're first gonna build it south of where we live, in a white community. And one of the very powerful city planners at the time said, Yeah, that's not gonna happen. And so they decide to find another location. But the location has to be on a waterway, on a riverfront. So they could transport that effluent to a landfill. We lived right next to the Hudson River, which is a wonderful, beautiful, majestic river that, whose headwaters are, are in Canada. And they found our community. It took them 30 years or more to build this plant. They decide that they're going to make some engineering shortcuts. And one of the shortcuts they're going to make is to not. Include any odor control devices in a plant that treats 180 million gallons of raw sewage and wastewater every day. When I tell you it's across the street from where people live. It's on the other side of the street from where thousands of people live. So Our air quality was so god awful bad. So it smelled like a giant toilet bowl that was backed up. It smelled like that for eight years. So we're fighting EPA. We're fighting our state environmental agency. I'm a resident of this community. My mother and I live in this community. Right. So. In this regard, I'm not a researcher. I'm a resident, And so we're, we're doing everything we can. We're gathering information, and eventually I met. The person who directed the air division at the branch of EPA that oversees environmental issues in New York, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico and the U. S. Virgin Islands, and happens to be a black man, and I'm giving this presentation with someone from EPA. About why they need to pay attention to civil rights and environmental justice issues. And we're talking to the universe of air program directors from state and local government from all over the country. They meet like three times a year. And I was there with this EPA, friend. Explained to these people why they needed to pay attention to civil rights issues and environmental justice issues. This guy gets up and he says, So what do you need, Vernice? And I said, What do you mean? What do I need? He said, What do you need? So I lean over to the person from EPA who is still a dear friend of mine, and I whisper in his ear. I said, Who is this guy? He said, That's the air division director from region two. You know, the people that you talk really bad about every time you all have a public meeting. He is their boss. Okay. So I'm like, I'm, I'm thinking on my feet. Right. And I said, I don't know, we need, we need mobile monitors. And he said, how many do you need? I said, I don't know, 50, 60, 75. He says, how about this? I'll get you 60 mobile monitors and you arrange a community meeting. And we'll talk with the community members and we'll ask them where they think the monitors should go. So we do that and he puts up these monitors and the monitors run for about 9 months. Turns out we have the highest level of exposure to find particle pollution PM 2. 5. any community in the United States. In fact, any community in the Western Hemisphere. And by then, we're now working with people at the local hospital, Harlem hospital, and Columbia university and their school of public health. So we have the highest rate of death from asthma of any community in the United States. We have the highest rate of premature death from asthma. And we have the highest rate of exposure to PM 2. 5. I'm telling you all of that to say that the data changed our lives. We have been complaining for seven years. We filed a lawsuit against the city of New York about how that sewage treatment plant was really impacting us, but we didn't really know exactly how it was impacting us until EPA set up those monitors and we began to pull down that data. And when I tell you that our lives changed from that moment, when that data started to come, our lives changed because. Everybody then started to act like their hair was on fire. It was not a secret. It was just a secret to us, the people who were dying. And so it's almost 30 years right next year will be 30 years. It took a while for that to happen. But without that data It would just be what my grandmother said, right? It would be anecdotal. We had community meetings once a month. Everybody came to the meetings. We wanted to talk about the sewage treatment plant. They wanted to talk about asthma. The people were right that something was really wrong in our community. And once we started listening to them, really listening to them and then trying to get. The data we saw that we were in crisis, and unfortunately, not a lot of communities can get access to that kind of data, right? That directly correlates to something that's happening in the lived experience of people in a given community. but we were able to we were able to get that and it changed everything for us. It changed everything. I want to reference back to your grandmother, right? And, how do you interpret the silence? Or rather the acceptance of the conditions we live in, and I can't help but think about where does this place the role of mapping communities, the GIS communities, there's something we can do in terms of addressing that because I'm just thinking we're in so many situations where we know what's happening. But it's that narrative where we keep saying but we know that right but I'm trying to think from a holistic perspective, how do we address that as mapping communities as a person who's from that community creates maps, do you think there's a bridge that needs to be bridged there. Yeah, absolutely. Because I will tell you this, when you have lived in a place for a really long time, my great grandparents lived in the Harlem community, and my grandparents, and then my mother, and her siblings, and my grandmother, and, then me. That's three generations, of people who lived in that community, but I noticed this in all the communities I work in the United States. People are so used to living with poor air quality, or poor water quality, or poor housing conditions, or lack of access to decent food, bad working conditions. People get so used to that, because it happens over generations, it doesn't occur to folks that there's something they can do to change it. And when you add race to that, people would say in the communities. Well, everybody knows the bad stuff is where we live now. My grandmother said that right off the top That's the first thing she said like this is not news and her other point was and you didn't need to spend a quarter of A million dollars to tell you something that every black person in America knows to be true She was like, this is this is our reality. We all know this. What are you bringing to the conversation? The data was new the data And it's connection to race and exposure to environmental hazards. That was new. No one had connected those dots before. And then you can connect so many other dots. You could, you can connect poor health outcomes. Then you begin to get a sense of what is happening in our community. Now, when we first started publishing this data, the government and all the companies that produced the pollutants, said, well, you can't really make a correlation between people's exposure to those things. It really has more to do with people's diets. Really? but it's not the salt, right? The salt is not giving us cancer. And the other answer that people would say, well, then maybe you should move. And so then the question becomes, why should I move? Their great grandparents, their family members are in those cemeteries. They're not leaving. People feel that way about place. And I think you would really understand this because I think people on the continent Have such a deep affection and appreciation for the village or the place where they come from, where their family history and story starts from. And people don't want to leave those places. And there's so there's a dear friend and colleague of the nonprofit that I started in New York West Harlem Environmental Action was its original name. Now we're known as we act for environmental justice. And we had a colleague who was a psychiatrist at Columbia University, Dr. Mindy Thompson, full of love. And she published a book called Root Shock. And she talked about how people have a psycho social connection. To the place where they live and the place where they're from and when you move people from that place, particularly if you move them by force, right? It destabilizes them. Now they may go on to live in what we call better communities, but the firmament in which their roots are based. means everything to people in a way that you can't always describe that. But when I read her book, I knew exactly what she meant because that's how I feel about the Harlem community in New York. That's why people stay. That's why a lot of people don't move because something about that place. Means everything to them, right? I'm curious. And so I'm just trying to link that back to younger generations and the strategies that we should probably have in place to have more Vanice Millers and Wangari Maathai when it comes to passing it on and creating footsteps for how we'd want the future to take that up as well and keep the fight moving, right? To create sort of a continuity pipeline and being able to be bold, like the generations that have gone before us. What are some of the strategies we can use to bridge the gen, the generational gap that we have? What a great question. So the difference I think, across the generations is that in fact you can really study. Environmental justice. You can study it as an academic course, right? It could be in law. It could be in public policy. It could be in public health. It could be in the sciences. It could be in geography. It could be in sociology. It could be in a multitude of disciplines. But what is different, markedly different now than when I started in this work almost 40 years ago, are the tools and the technology that allow you to be able to aggregate a lot of data in a really short period of time, right? So EPA developed a tool, which is based off a tool that the state of California have built called E. J. Screen. I don't know if you've if you've seen it environmental justice screen, and it's a it's a G I s to that you put in an address or you put in a location and then you list. What kind of data do you want to know about this particular place? And in a matter of minutes, you are going to get multiple maps that tell you all kinds of data. Now, remember back to the beginning of this conversation, I said that I was looking at one set of environmental hazards. The location of hazardous waste sites in the United States and what was the, the racial composition of the residential zip codes in which they were located. It took me six months to create that map, pulling down data, right? The one data source was a data source from EPA. You can do that. In minutes. If you know what you're doing, young people have access, but they also have the talent, right? They are so good at this aggregation of data and so good at how to use social media and science and data to aggregate and tell a really, really, really amazing, amazing stories, right? Stories that are data based. And the reason that the data is so important is because we want regulatory agencies. We want local government. We want national and state government. We want decision makers to make different decisions, different decisions that do not continue to adversely impact the same population of people again and again and again. helps people to recognize there's something really amiss here. We really should look into this and we really should do something about it. And so, young people, in the regulatory agencies, young people studying in school, young people doing mapping of their own communities, being taught how to use these tools, and then how to tell their own stories about their communities. It's a game changer. It's a game changer. The young people can take this to a level that those of us that that didn't have access to this kind of data and these kinds of technical tools earlier in our evolution, they can take it and take it to the next level. And maybe they can help articulate public policy that talks about preventing harm and preventing people from being targeted for environmental hazards. I'm hoping that I'm still alive to see the day When our race is not the thing that determines where we live or how we live, right? Yeah. And you mentioned some very important points that I'm going to go back again still on strategies right and involving the young community and bridging that multi generational gap. You've talked about your grandmother knowing, Like, why would you spend over a quarter million dollars to tell us what every black person in America knows? And I'm wondering if there's an accountability component there. Um, how do we hold the surrounding communities accountable? Or does it matter at this point? It definitely matters. It continues to matter again, that issue about how people feel about the collective good versus the individual. Opportunities are choices, right? We are building subdivisions here, but we are not building community and you have to have a sense of community and a sense of common purpose, common interest, even common threat so that people come together to decide what they need to do, how they want to change circumstances that you'll find. Where some of the strongest environmental justice campaigns are underway in the United States are where people have a sense of community and a sense of collective responsibility to each other, So that's something that we struggle with, is our dwindling sense of collective responsibility to each other. And I think that's part of Living in a modern society where acclimation of things is more important than the well being of everyone that you live with, right? And I, I see our young people and our younger generations being able to take all this information And aggregate it and then recast it in a way that pulls people in and helps people to continue to have that sense of collective responsibility. As you're speaking, I'm thinking about where I'm from. I'm from the Global South and still on environmental justice and what's happening when it comes to climate change. And I'm going to talk about it from African perspective. I'm curious being an environmental justice defender and fighter for all these years I'm curious on what your thoughts are on carbon credits and what that means for communities, because I know I don't think that's something that's very relatable, in the US. Because you I don't think you're directly affected as much as third world countries are affected with carbon credits. Right. And so I'm curious to know what your thoughts are and what that means at a global level. And how will that shape the conversation around climate change. Environmental justice, right? And also what's happening on this other side of the globe. So I have a friend, Diane Dillon Ridgley, and she and Wangari Maathai were really very close friends. And it was through Diane that I met Wangari. And Diane, used to say that our communities were the South and the North, right? So this is definitely the global North. Ain't no question about that. But. There's a stark differential among different communities, different populations, and that differential is often about race. So, first of all. I'm not sure that carbon credits is a really transparent or accurate kind of marketplace, right? That you can continue to pollute in certain areas as long as you aggregate these credits someplace else. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to reduce the carbon emissions in a particular place, right? You just have this marketplace and you can trade, right? That cap and trade scenario. I'm not sure that it is benefiting. The folks who have the higher rates of exposure and higher levels of carbon emissions. I don't see it necessarily reducing those emissions. The other side of that, that we have going on here in the United States is the proliferation of carbon capture and sequestration, right? Which is a really experimental technology. So they say. That they can build this technology that will suck the carbon out of the air. So my first question is, so what happens to it? It's a real thing. What happens to it? Where does it go? Um, and as my dear friend, Dr. Beverly Wright. The founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans said to our former EPA administrator, so this is what I think. If carbon capture is such a good thing, since it's still experimental, why don't we build it where white people live? And why don't we see if we can. Perfect the technology and then you come back to us and we talk about the distribution in a building of carbon capture facilities and plants. We already have the sources of the pollution. Why don't we distribute this other experimental technology into other populations? It was a damn good question, right? And he didn't really answer the question. Because we are still, even in our thinking in the United States, we are still thinking. That whatever we do in terms of new energy or in terms of trying to reduce our carbon emissions and our carbon footprint, we're going to experiment. We're going to do cap and trade, which will keep some communities with a lower carbon burden, but others are going to stay the same. Or even get higher, right? And until we come up with a marketplace, a mechanism, a technology that actually reduces carbon emissions, which, of course, is what green energy is about, right? That conversation has to be real. If we don't get this right. We are going to doom our future generations to a future that is much more limited than the lives that we have led and the past that we have come from, right? And we got to get very serious about this. So, is that, was that, does that answer your question? Yeah, it does, it does. Um, and one more, the other thing that I'm also thinking about, when we're talking about the police here, art, Afrofuturism and geography. If you were to paint an ideal utopia, what would that look like for you from an environmental justice perspective? Well, we have to have imagination and we have to have imagination that casts for ourselves a different vision, not what we've been living through, but what could life look like? What could our communities be like? What could our countries do? If we had different ways of thinking different ways of policymaking, different kinds of leadership, different values, right? And that the values cannot simply be about aggregation of things and wealth, that capitalism has taken us To the brink of destruction, we're living what they call this period that we're living in the sixth great mass extinction of species, fish, flora and fauna, food sources, animals, reptiles, because our climate is getting so hot. There's so much carbon in the atmosphere, so the future that I'd like to bequest to my younger family members, and the generations coming behind me is one where we value every person. We value every living thing, We make space and way for them. We make sure that people's needs are met, and there's no such thing as homelessness. There's no such thing as people being kicked off their land. I continue to watch what's happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in terms of the exploitation of the rare earth minerals that are needed for this new energy economy, right? But you can't just kick people off their land, but they are, And they're funding internal warfare, so people can get access to those minerals. And people over here are buying the EVs like there's no tomorrow. Nobody asks, what's the production? Right? How do you get those batteries? Where does that lithium come from? So my vision of the future is one where we ask those questions. We think about what the social and ecological impacts are of decisions that we made and that those determinants are far greater and drivers of decisions that we make than how you can accumulate wealth. Now, I know I'm asking for a lot, but if we don't get there. We're going to do people the world over to a life in a landscape that cannot support life as we know it. And then unless we do something dramatically different, things are going to get worse. And I, I don't mean to be. A naysayer. I'm just trying to be realistic. What are we doing and what are we willing to do? And it's going to require some sacrifice. And that's the thing that as at least as an American society, we have a really hard time with the notion of sacrifice, so we know what we need to do, but we're being tested right now. as a society. We are being tested right now in a way that we've never been tested before. I want us all to be able to thrive, not just to survive, but to thrive as a society. And that's surely an idea for the future because it surely ain't happening now. That is very powerful. And to wrap it up, I'm curious to know 2024 bingo card. So, what wasn't on my bingo, well, first of all, what was on my bingo card, and I really, When I tell you that I believed this with all my heart and soul, I believed that we were gonna elect Kamala Harris as President of the United States. I believed that with all my heart and soul. We are in a dire circumstance, having elected someone who, doesn't believe in science, doesn't believe in data, wants to go back to an oil dependent economy. Doesn't believe in public health, doesn't believe in global interdependence, doesn't believe in foreign aid, doesn't believe in the World Health Organization. And we have got to do something dramatic to save ourselves and to save. We are in the fight of our lives. We are in the fight of our lives. It's going to have immediate repercussions for people around the world. We failed. I didn't have that on my bingo card. I'd so I wonder what Octavia would write about where we are right now. I wonder what she would write. Thank you so much, Venice. That was very insightful, thought provoking, powerful., and for gracing us with your presence at the North Stag is we are more than happy to have you again. And thank you thank you for having me. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about Northstar of GIS, check us out on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at GIS Northstar. Northstar's programming is produced in large part by donations and sponsorship. If you'd like to support the next season of the Northstar Gaze podcast, please submit your donations to northstarofgis. org slash donate. If you'd like to sponsor this podcast or the homecoming event, reach out to us at the following email address. Podcast at notestarofgis. org or notestargis. org slash sponsorhomecoming. You'll find all these links in the show notes. We want to thank our sponsors of the 2024 Homecoming event, our institutional partner ReGrid, and our sponsors New Light Technology, Afrotech, and Black at Work. We'd like to thank our keynotes, Tara Roberts, Linda Harris. Dr. Paulette Hines Brown and Vernice Miller Travis. We'd like to thank Howard University and the staff at the Interdisciplinary Building and Photography by Imagery by Chioma. We also want to thank our guests for trusting us with their stories. Tara, Linda, Paulette, Christian, Abraham, Jason, Vernice, Stella, Beye, Karen. Nikki, George, Frank, Labdi, Toussaint, Victoria, and the HBCU Environmental Justice Technical Team. And finally, thank you to the North Star team and our wonderful volunteers. We are your hosts of the Season 2 of the North Star Guest Podcast, which is based on the 2024 Homecoming Conference event. This podcast is produced by Ayesha Jenkins and audio production in collaboration with Cherry Blossom Productions, Kied Bodega, and Organized Sound. Thanks for listening to the North Star Gaze, intimate stories from geoluminaries. If you're inspired to advance racial justice in geofields, please share this podcast with other listeners in your community. The intro and outro are produced by Organized Sound Productions with original music created by Kid Bodega. The North Star Gaze is produced in large part by donations and sponsorship. To learn more about North Star GIS, Check us out at north star of gis.org and on Facebook or Instagram at GIS North Star. If you'd like to support this podcast and North Star of gis, consider donating at North star of gis.org/donate or to sponsor this podcast, email podcast at north star of gis.org. You've been listening to the North Star Gaze.