On this episode of The Overstory, we explore the connections between systemic racism and environmental destruction. Hop Hopkins, director of the Sierra Club's strategic partnerships, discusses how the ideology of white supremacy fuels environmental degradation and social injustice. Corina Newswome talks about how she launched the online happening, #BlackBirdersWeek. Plus: NASA climate scientists Dr. Kate Marvel explains why the pandemic doesn't have an environmental silver lining and Christy Goldfuss, a former Obama White House officials, breaks down the Trump administration's assaults on bedrock environmental laws.

Transcript

Hop Hopkins: We're in this global mess because we've allowed the ideology of white supremacy to basically declare parts of the planet disposable, and those people that live there disposable as well.

Jason Mark: That's Hop Hopkins. He's one of the leaders at the Sierra Club. And on today's show, he and I talk about why you can't fight climate change without also fighting white supremacy.

Hop Hopkins: Racism is really killing our planet, Jason.

Jason Mark: Also on the show, we discuss the surprising ways the pandemic is affecting the planet.

Dr. Kate Marvel: I was worried that people were going to take these reductions and turn them into an argument that there's a silver lining for this pandemic.

Jason Mark: And we hear about how the Trump administration has used COVID as a cover to roll back environmental protections.

Christy Goldfuss: So we are expecting one of the more devastating regulatory rewrites under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Jason Mark: And we spend some time with Corina Newsome, one of the organizers of Black Birders Week.

Corina Newsome: When I got online, there were just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Black people of all ages. You know, young kids, older people, everything in between, just being Black and outside, and I started crying.

Jason Mark: I'm Jason Mark and this is The Overstory.

Racism is Killing the Planet (1:21)

Jason Mark: In the last month, amid this historic uprising for racial justice sparked by the police murder of George Floyd, a lot of us have been having, what I'd call, the conversation. If you're white, the conversation might be a dialogue mostly with yourself, a self-interrogation about what you're doing, about what you can do better to defend Black Lives. If you're a person of color, the conversation is probably different. I mean, it involves discussions with your white friends or family or neighbors, and it might involve a lot of basic explaining, some real elementary level education. Ignorance is its own form of privilege. And let's face it, a lot of environmentalist have had the privilege to be ignorant about the cruelty faced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color in America.

 We're going to try to keep the conversation going today with Hop Hopkins. He's the director of strategic partnerships at the Sierra Club. He recently wrote a piece for Sierra Magazine titled Racism is Killing the Planet. Ever since we published that piece, I've been eager to hear more about Hop's thoughts. So I gave him a call.

 Hey, Hop. How you doing, man? Thanks for taking the time.

Hop Hopkins: Yeah, no worries, Jason. I'm cool, as cool as can be given the context and the times that we're in right now. So yeah.

Jason Mark: Yeah. I do want to talk about the essay you wrote. You write, "We'll never stop climate change without ending white supremacy."

Hop Hopkins: Racism is really killing our planet, Jason. We're in this global mess because we've allowed the ideology of white supremacy to basically declare parts of the planet disposable, and those people that live there disposable as well. And communities of color, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, have been at the brunt of the cumulative impacts of our fossil fuel industry, whereas their communities have been regulated as sacrifice zones. And you really can't have sacrificed zones without having disposable people. You really can't have disposable people without having racism. But the cumulative impact of these are such that now, the entire planet is falling victim to climate change and environmental degradation because of our extraction practices.

Jason Mark: Many people have made this point now, but the pandemic kind of peeled back the inner workings of society. You got to sort of see these structural inequities that were there. And among those was this sort of revelation for some people of structural racism. When you look at the fact that, in this country, Black deaths from COVID are outpacing white deaths from COVID three to one. Three to one from latest I looked it up. That's just another clear example, right, of the way that racism intersects with environmental health and welfare.

Hop Hopkins: Absolutely. Because of the accumulation of these structural racist practices, like the types of environmental regulations that allow for industries to be placed in neighborhoods right across from schools, and it's the cumulative impact of that, that when something like COVID hits, it has an inordinate impact upon a Black, Indigenous and people of color communities. And what I say is that COVID isn't a conspiracy against Black folks, our whole society is a conspiracy against Black folks, in that these cumulative impacts of chronic historic structural racism and white supremacy have put Black people in such health states that when COVID came along, you get TO this place where you're now three to one.

Jason Mark: You say that an ideology of white supremacy creates sacrifice zones by allowing us to consider that some places and people are disposable. I think it's important to just be honest about the fact that the environmental movement, and I guess I'm using shorthand for meaning the essentially white mainstream environmental movement, has done a pretty good job of saying no places should be disposable, but has not always, in fact, has been very inconsistent about defending the idea that no people should be disposable. And I'm wondering if you think that this rupture that we're experiencing in 2020 might allow us to actually reckon with that. And by us, again, I mean, sort of the environmental movement writ large, hopefully an environmental movement that now is, or can become, a multiracial movement.

Hop Hopkins: When the future history are written, Jason, I think this chapter of the book will be titled The Move For Black Lives Saves The Planet. And I think you've seen this resurgence of the largest human rights movement on the planet. You've seen protests and demonstrations and uprisings in all 50 States, many small towns, rural areas, and in a number of countries around the world simultaneously. Never before in our history have we seen such a movement rally around a cause such as Black Lives Matter.

And the call to defund our police is really a call for saving the planet. And when I say that, initially, I know a lot of folks don't make that connection. And what I mean by that is when we defund the police and we reallocate those resources towards things like a Green New Deal, things like parks, things like transportation, clean transportation, things like increased healthcare, we then began to address some of the chronic systemic historical impacts of white supremacy, not just on communities of color, but on our society writ large. And by addressing this call for defunding the police, we can then begin to take a down payment on really making the types of changes in our society that we need in order to combat climate change.

Jason Mark: One thing you point out also really well is that white privilege does not offer an escape from the climate chaos. I mean, right, no one's going to go to Mars with Elon and Zuckerberg and Bezos. And what I take from that is also a message or a spirit or an ethic of solidarity, right? The idea that an injury to one is an injury to all.

Hop Hopkins: I really hope that that's true. And I think that we've seen the burgeonings of this in terms of the mutual aid and solidarity networks that have cropped up, that we are recognizing that there's only one planet. And thanks to Plutus who've been profiting from the exploitation of Black and brown and Indigenous communities, we're in the process of making that one planet we have uninhabitable.

 And I think folks are beginning to recognize that that ability to dehumanize those communities and the communities that I come from, is having a collective impact on us all, that when one of us is injured, it doesn't protect those folks who think that they weren't. And you'll see this refrain going around a lot these days, your silence will not protect you, whereas solidarity actually calls upon both sides to recognize that their liberation is intermeshed. Not being racist is not enough. You have to actually be actively anti-racist. And I would hope that that folks don't go back to sleep once the move for Black Lives falls from the headlines and the backlash begins to happen.

 Because it will, and that's when we need to be strongest. And the work we can most do in this moment, in that vein of solidarity, is having those coffee table conversations with your partner or with your grandpa or grandma who says that thing, with your cousin. Those are the conversations that matter. Having those conversations with your colleagues when they are challenged by the idea of defund the police, breaking it down for them, challenging it, not being silent, not remaining silent when you hear something that flies in the face of what you now have come to understand is the way of the world.

Jason Mark: Yeah. In a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine making the case for reparations for slavery, the writer, Nicole Hannah Jones, says that this time, this moment feels different. And then she ends on kind of a challenge. She says, "But will this time be different?" And that's my question to you is will it be different? And if so, why?

Hop Hopkins: Well, I think it's already different. We can no longer separate the white supremacist nature of the cumulative negative impacts upon communities of color and environmental degradation and climate change. They are very much interconnected. And so I do think that this time will be different because it already has been different. What will happen as we get closer to the election in November? That will test us.

Jason Mark: Yeah.

Hop Hopkins: And we will need to lean heavily in on our solidarity and we'll need to lean heavily in on each other, for sure. And remember that chapter in the book I said, when it's written about this time, it'll say that the move for Black Lives is what saved the planet?

Jason Mark: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Hop Hopkins: And I sincerely believe that if we can make connections to all those things we've talked about, we can then lean into the idea and the vision that we're going to build healthy communities, that we're going to stop racism from killing our planet, that we're going to reject the status quo of militarized state violence in the form of the police. And we are trying not only to just save ourselves, but we're also trying to save the planet.

Jason Mark: That's an amazing vision, man. Hop, I really want to thank you again for writing this piece in the first place and for all your leadership on these issues. Stay safe out there. Take care of yourself.

Hop Hopkins: Yeah, you do the same, Jason. Peace and blessings to you and yours, and love and endurance and rage for the future.

Jason Mark: That's right.

Hop Hopkins: I'll see out there.

Jason Mark: Hop Hopkins is the director of strategic partnerships at the Sierra Club. He recently wrote an essay for the magazine, Racism is Killing the Planet. You can check out the whole thing at our website, sierramagazine.org.

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The Environmental Recovery of the Pandemic Was Brief (11:42)

Jason Mark: When the pandemic first hit and the world felt like it was on the brink of collapse, there was one slight, I'm not sure what else to call it, silver lining maybe? As we humans sheltered in place, nature appeared to be bouncing back. You might've seen the photos. The air over LA and Delhi suddenly looked clearer. And you might've seen the videos, mountain lions prowling the streets of Boulder and bears wandering the deserted plazas of national park visitor centers.

But that silver lining may have been just an illusion. While the pandemic has spurred some environmental recoveries, they've been local and they've been brief. What about the big picture? To learn more, I called up Dr. Kate Marvel. She's a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies In Columbia University.

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Jason Mark: Hey Kate, how are you doing?

Dr. Kate Marvel: I'm good. How are you?

Jason Mark: I'm well. What were your first impressions when you saw data coming in that was showing, and correct me if I'm wrong, like a 25% decline in air pollution over China this spring, and other indicators like that? I mean, what was your first thoughts when you saw the impact of the pandemic?

Dr. Kate Marvel: I think one of my first thoughts, to be honest, was worried. I was worried that people were going to take these reductions and turn them into an argument that there's a silver lining for this pandemic. And I actually don't think there's a silver lining at all.

Jason Mark: So tell me more about that.

Dr. Kate Marvel: I think it's true that the reduction in people driving places, some of the reduction in energy demand, has led to an improvement in air quality over some major cities. I think that's a good thing. I think more than anything, that's an indictment of the way things were before.

But I think it's important to remember that those little bits of air pollution, those things that are making us sick, aren't necessarily what is causing longterm climate change. What's causing the planet to heat up is greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. And even though I think some estimates show that we're going to see about a 5%, 6% decrease in annual CO2 emissions, that's not very much and that's not going to be enough.

And the way I like to think of it is, if you have been filling a bathtub for a really long time and the bathtub is overflowing, if you turn down the top a little bit, you're not really going to notice that and all the water that's sloshing out of the bathtub. What you really, really need to do is turn off the tap and then start drawing down that water to stop it from overflowing.

We've been putting a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've been doing it continuously, and we've been doing it at kind of an accelerating rate. So now that that has fallen slightly, I don't think future researchers are going to be even able to detect this fall in carbon dioxide emissions.

Jason Mark: And again, it's amazing, right? That you pause virtually the whole global economy for a couple of months, and we're looking at a 5, you said 5, 6% in annual CO2 emissions. And yet we know that if we're going to keep to under 1.5 degrees Celsius, we need something like, what? A 7% decrease, basically, year after year.

Dr. Kate Marvel: Yeah, basically every year until we get to net zero.

Jason Mark: Okay. So if we know that getting everybody out of their cars for three months, essentially halting industrial activity for three months, is only a 5% decrease, then what are some of the ways that we get much bigger decreases that are sustainable?

Dr. Kate Marvel: This really points to the weakness of some of these personal responsibility arguments. It really shows that everybody can stop driving. People can stop going to work. We can really shut down our economies, and it really is not going to register that much.

So what we need to be doing is focusing on systemic problems and what we need to be doing is targeting industries, targeting the incentives, targeting the way that we generate electricity and the way that we power our means of transportation.

I'm really sympathetic to some of the arguments that, "Hey, we're going to have to recover from coronavirus economically," and why not make that recovery an efficient one? If we have to build new things, if we have to create new jobs, why don't we ensure that we kind of kill two birds with one stone, or if you're looking for a less violent metaphor, just do two things at once, right?

Jason Mark: Dr. Marvel, anything else you want to add on this conversation?

Dr. Kate Marvel: You know, it can be really tempting to kind of fall into despair, right? To say, "We shut down the entire world and this is all we got from it." And I think that's the wrong way to look at it. I think solving climate change isn't about shutting things down. It's not about giving up things and it's certainly not about suffering. It's about building things, building new renewable energy facilities, building new infrastructure, but also, I think building new societies and new ways that we relate to each other.

Jason Mark: Retooling. I mean, that's what you're talking about. We need to retool the entire economy.

Dr. Kate Marvel: I think so. And I think we've always had to do that.

Jason Mark: Dr. Marvel, thank you so much for taking the time and thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us.

Dr. Kate Marvel: Thanks so much for having me. Stay safe.

Jason Mark: Yeah, you too. Take care out there.

Dr. Kate Marvel: All right. Bye-bye.

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Jason Mark: That was Kate Marvel. She's a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Columbia University. You can follow her on Twitter @DrKateMarvel. This conversation was inspired by a recent essay we published, The Dream of Rewilding, by David Gessner. You can find it at sierramagazine.org.

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Trump’s Rolling Back of Environmental Regulations (18:01)

Jason Mark: While we've all been busy watching videos of wildlife come back during the pandemic, and also hopefully been out marching the streets, ideally with masks on, the Trump administration has been busy rolling back environmental regulations. There's an old political truism, don't let a crisis go to waste, and the Trump administration has followed that to a T as it uses the COVID pandemic to peel away protections for clean air, clean water and a stable climate.

To make sense of it all, Sierra's senior editor, Paul Roeber, spoke with Christy Goldfuss. She's the former managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality during the Obama years, and she's now at the Center for American Progress, a Washington D.C. think tank.

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Paul Roeber: Hi, Christy.

Christy Goldfuss: Hi, Paul. How are you?

Paul Roeber: I'm good. Thanks for joining us today. We are looking at what, in any other time, would be just earth-shaking, astonishing developments in the environmental field. Christy, to start off, have you ever seen anything like this magnitude of environmental tumult?

Christy Goldfuss: No, it's absolutely staggering and chilling. We've seen weakening enforcement of rules and standards for polluting facilities. The Clean Car Standards were rolled back, refusing to lower the legal limit of particulate matters, so that's really the pollution in circ the air, and then the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards rollback, which was just absolutely unheard of. But why would you actually want women and children, about everyone to be exposed to mercury, which really causes brain damage and real learning disabilities in the future?

So I can only suspect or speculate that there is some urgency in the Trump administration at this point because there's potentially some idea and some awareness of the writing on the wall that this could be their last shot. That's my most optimistic view of this particular moment.

Paul Roeber: One of the things I think we're seeing is a rush to beat the Congressional Review Act, right? This is a act that says that anything that is passed in the last 60 legislative days of a congressional session can be basically overturned by the next Congress. So they've been trying to jam through things before that deadline.

Christy Goldfuss: That's right. And it's really hard to know exactly when that deadline is because it's based on the congressional calendar, and certainly in an election year, it's hard to know how much time they're actually going to spend here in Washington D.C. So there is a rush. We know sometime in June would be the earliest day that would be marked as the beginning of the Congressional Review Act period, but we know it could flip depending on how many days are actually in session to some point in July.

And we've seen one of the more devastating regulatory rewrites under the National Environmental Policy Act. This is one of the laws that has really given communities voice to any kind of infrastructure development or federal government decisions that impact pipelines, roads, bridges, you name it. And this regulatory rewrite is absolutely devastating because it would allow federal agencies to really cut communities out of that discussion and race forward with a lot more fossil fuel infrastructure.

Paul Roeber: The National Environmental Policy Act, that is really bedrock environmental law in the United States.

Christy Goldfuss: Exactly. Yeah.

Paul Roeber: It's like the Endangered Species Act or the Clean Air Act.

Christy Goldfuss: Correct.

Paul Roeber: It's that level of law that they're tinkering with. Let's talk about some of the attacks on clean air. The Trump administration moved to overrule the Obama era of auto fuel efficiency standards. As I understand it, the automakers themselves were not even asking for this. It seems, as many things that the Trump administration does, to be motivated by pure spite. It was something Obama did, and so Trump wants to undo it.

Christy Goldfuss: Yeah, but I think it goes farther than that. I mean, this is really about locking in a commitment to fossil fuels at every single turn. So certainly, they want to undo what Obama did. But part of the reason the autos are not, the actual industry is not supportive of this is that they know where consumers want to go. They know that the future of their industry is in electric vehicles. Around the world, they're seeing commitments made in other countries to actually stop selling internal combustion engine vehicles. So United States car companies don't want to be in the position that they're so far behind in terms of electric vehicle technology that they're not able to compete.

 So they know that's where consumers are going. The Trump administration is saying, "No, we want to commit this country to the dirtiest forms of energy for as long as we possibly can." And it's the last step. It is a desperate, desperate attempt.

Paul Roeber: What can we do to prevent something like this happening again?

Christy Goldfuss: So I'm hoping that the real shift, if we do have one politically, and we have a moment and an opportunity, will be that we need to invest in community as to undo, as much as possible, the systemic racism of this country, to build there first towards the pollution free future that we want.

And that is going to be a difficult shift. It would have been very hard if we were at full employment, but we now have a situation where we're going to want to put a lot of people back to work. And we had awareness before the coronavirus that the country's infrastructure was crumbling, so now we can think big and think in a way that is not tied to the same institutions that we've had before, but really invest in a new way in communities to address these intersecting crises. Because that's really how we get to a place where people are healthier, where people are bought into the future that we need, that we changed the politics and we changed the value system in this country about who the government works for.

Paul Roeber: Well, thank you. Christy Goldfuss, senior vice president for energy and environment policy at the Center for American Progress.

Christy Goldfuss: Thank you for having me.

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Ms. Green Talks Toilet Paper (25:12)

Jason Mark: Do you remember the early days of the pandemic, when we were all stocking up on beans and pasta and yeast and toilet paper? The sudden scarcity of TP raised a kind of obvious question. Why are we wiping our butts with the bones of dead trees? Our advice columnist, Jessian Choy, AKA Ms. Green, has some thoughts.

Kelly: Hi, this is Kelly. I'm calling from Port Saint Lucie, Florida.

Ms. Green: Well, hi, Kelly. I heard you had a question about bidets.

Kelly: Yes. Thank you for having me on the show. My question, I've been looking at bidets for some time now, and then just recently with this pandemic going on, when toilet paper was really hard to find, any paper, much less any kind of green brand or a brand that's low impact to the environment, it kind of brought that bidet question back to my head, but I was concerned about how much water the bidet uses versus even any kind of toilet paper or the green brands. It was just a lot to try to research and consider. So I sent the question off to you hoping that you could research it and find some answers. How much water does the bidet use, and is it the best green alternative?

Ms. Green: Yeah, it was a really great question. And I didn't try any of this until you had asked me this question, and it's changed my life. And yes, the short answer is yes, bidets are what I'd like to call the #GreenerThingToDoo. I learned that although Americans make up just 4% of the world's butts, we generate more toilet paper waste than any other country.

Kelly: When I was traveling in Europe and using the bidet, I found it way more hygienic. So I'm not sure why America hasn't adopted that.

Ms. Green: Well, the history is very interesting. There's a few takes on it, but the short version is that the Scott company, it was the first US company to sell toilet paper on a roll in the 1890s. And like many products or companies, they displayed luxury in their ads to get people to buy stuff they might not need. So as you might know, that luxury comes with the price. The toilet paper industry, they wipe out like 27,000 trees a day worldwide-

Kelly: Wow.

Ms. Green: Including like virgin trees that are hundreds of years old, which contributes to our climate crisis. But many people in Europe, as you know, also in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, they use water to clean themselves. And to answer your question about water, each bidet uses only about an eighth of a gallon each time you use it. And if you want to match the water savings of a bidet, you'd have to limit yourself to like 1.5 sheets of toilet paper per bowel movement. So as you can see, you probably want to use more toilet paper than that. So with the water savings with a bidet, you'll get that.

 But, B-U-T-T, that math does not factor in the water or natural resources it might take to make a bidet, so the greenest thing to do is to use a bidet that you already have, or what some people call like a bum gun. It's basically any squeeze bottle. So I like to use like a good sized, not a tiny shampoo bottle because you'll notice that you'll need more water than that. If you're using like a bottle, just remember to practice at least six millimeters of social distancing between your butt and your [crosstalk 00:29:09]. And aim down, especially... When I was researching, no one was going into the details of like where are you squeezing from? And you have to reach behind to squeeze, pat dry with a tiny bit of the greenest toilet paper, the Who Gives a Crap, plastic-free, 100% post-consumer recycled toilet paper.

 And one way to save toilet paper and trees is to fold it instead of crumpling it, which I wish someone told me a lot earlier. But if you do need a fancier one, you might want to avoid ones with batteries or ones that say antibacterial, antimicrobial or micro ban.

Kelly: Well, I definitely want to try the bum gun. So I cycle too, so I have just a cabinet full of water bottles that are the squeeze water bottles. So I can totally recycle and use one of those, dedicate one just for that. I definitely will be trying that, especially in light of any kind of toilet paper. It's still hard to find in the stores. But definitely, I am very conscious of how much it takes to make a roll of toilet paper, which is just ridiculous. So I will be telling a lot of my friends about this so they can make their own own gun.

Ms. Green: Well, thank you so much for your question and thank you so much for being green and biking and using the bidet and being conscious. I really appreciate it. Every little bit helps from everyone.

Kelly: Well, thank you so much, Ms. Green, for having me on the show. This has been fun.

Ms. Green: Thank you so much.

Jason Mark: That was Ms. Green. Find her on Twitter @RealMsGreen. Drop her a question there, or go to our website, sierramagazine.org. Click on Ask Ms. Green. If you send us a question, you might get featured on The Overstory podcast.

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Black Birders Week (31:18)

<audio from external clip>

Amy Cooper: Would you please stop? Sir, I'm asking you to stop.

Christian Cooper: Please don't come close to me.

Amy Cooper: Sir, I'm asking you to stop recording me.

Christian Cooper: Please don't come close to me.

Amy Cooper: Please take your phone off.

Christian Cooper: Please don't come close to me.

Amy Cooper:  I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life.

Christian Cooper: Please tell them whatever you like.

<audio from external clip>

Jason Mark: Back in May, a white woman was recorded threatening Christian Cooper, an avid birder and a Black man in the ramble of New York's Central Park. Cooper had asked the woman to leash her dog. It's park rules and it's also the courteous thing to do in a place that's among the premier birding spots in all of New York City. The woman refused and then she called 911 to report that, "An African American man is threatening my life." A completely fake accusation.

<audio from external clip>

Amy Cooper: I'm being threatened by a man. Please send the cops immediately.

Jason Mark: That grotesque, but all too common episode helped spark Black Birders Week, an online happening in which Black bird watchers took the social media to demand equity in nature. At the forefront of this effort is Corina Newsome. She's a graduate student at Georgia Southern University, where she's studying the impacts of climate change on seaside sparrows. Here's her story.

Corina Newsome: When I was five, I wrote a note to myself that said, "When I grow up, I want to be a scientist and I want to be a scientist on bugs and animals." But when it comes to birds in particular, I was not really interested in North American birds per se, actually, not at all, but as part of my degree in college, my zoo and wildlife biology degree, I learned about the blue jay. And I had heard of blue jays before, but I had never seen one.

And so when my professor introduced us to the blue jay, I was like, "What is that?" And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. And I was like, "This is like a parrot." You know what I mean? Like all of these blues, all these shades of blue and the white and the black. I was just like, "This bird can't be in North America. This feels like some sort of exotic species." And then when I went back outside, I realized that they were everywhere. And from that point forward, I have been chasing birds.

 So now, I am almost finished with my master's degree at Georgia Southern University and I am finally studying birds, the thing I always wanted to do. And I'm specifically studying a question important to the conservation of a bird called the MacGillivray seaside sparrow, which is climate-endangered, which means that climate change is going to pose a threat to their survival.

 So Black Birders Week was really the brainchild of a group of my friends, virtual friends, really, a group of people who could encourage one another and share stories and find comradery and community. Because typically, we are the only ones who are Black in all of our spaces. So it's just nice to have people like us, somewhere where we can decompress and have community.

 After what happened to Christian in Central Park, and Christian is a really well-respected Black birder who, most of the birders in the group have definitely heard of and a few of them know him. One of the women in the group, who's actually an economist, she's not in natural sciences at all, she was like, "We should do something to celebrate Black birders." And literally, within 48 hours, we had crafted and designed Black Birders Week.

 I never would have imagined that it would have been as global as it was and as well received as it was. But one of the biggest fulfillments for me was that I and the other Black people who participated were so encouraged by what they saw of other Black people. Like when I got online that first day, the hashtag was like Black In Nature. And there were just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Black people of all ages, young kids, older people, everything in between, just being Black and outside. And I started crying because typically we are the only ones like us in our physical spaces, but to see this magnitude of engagement and this many Black faces was absolutely encouraging.

 So the thing that is most important to me is wildlife conservation and human justice. And when I graduate, I will be seeking to work at that intersection. I want to get communities like the one I grew up in involved in wildlife conservation efforts and exploring the outdoors and recognizing that they belong there as well, and kind of reversing the narrative that has been perpetuated for a long time, and that being that the outdoors is a white space and the natural resources are white resources and that such spaces are hostile to Black people. I want that to change and I'm going to do everything in my power to make that change. That's what my mission is going forward.

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Notes and Thank Yous(36:00)

Jason Mark: The Overstory is produced by Josephine Holtzman and Isaac Kestenbaum at Future Projects Media, with help from Daniel Roth. Our theme music is by Jeff Brodsky. This episode was mixed by Merit Jacob. I'm Jason Mark, and you've been listening to The Overstory.

What’s Next?

 Check out Season Two, Episode Five (The End of Oil is Near), in which we talk about the pandemic's effect on the gas and oil industries and the fires in Oregon.