We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems, and repair ourselves. It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums, and other tributes to all of our collective failures.
Interpretation
Collective effort is necessary to improve our environment and society, moving away from failed projects.
Majora Carter emphasizes the importance of collective action and responsibility in addressing societal and environmental issues. Rather than continuing to invest in projects that symbolize our failures, she urges us to focus on repairing and improving our communities and ourselves, highlighting a shift towards more sustainable and constructive endeavors.
In practice
This quote can be used in a community meeting focused on environmental restoration efforts.
Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base.
Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.
Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
One thing I noticed working in the Bronx is that leaders come in the craziest places. They don't always show up at community board meetings. Sometimes it's just the guys on the corner that the boys on the block respect.
Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.
I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.
Change is never easy, and it often creates discord, but when people come together for the good of humanity and the Earth, we can accomplish great things.
There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more.
Rwanda is not over needing aid, but we can survive with less aid than before.
That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred ans sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thence forward, and forever free.
Solyndra's failure isn't a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.
We are not going to achieve a new world order without paying for it in blood as well as in words and money.
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