Transcript | Ep. 137: Environmental Justice League

Vernice: When you try to split environment out by itself, you find that you only have a few people who focus on that. But when you center environment in the midst of so many other issues that communities are struggling with, then it becomes part of a holistic conversation about how do we build thriving and resilient communities. And environment is fundamental to being able to do that.

[theme music]

Caroline: Hey y'all and welcome to Unladylike. I'm Caroline.

Cristen: I'm Cristen.

Caroline: There are two facts about the environment that you should know for this episode. One: Studies from Yale University and elsewhere consistently find that compared to white Americans, people of color are significantly likelier to be concerned about climate change and support environmental policies.

Cristen: Which makes sense when you consider fact number two: Black and brown folks in the U.S. are disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards, such as global warming, air pollution and toxic waste.

Caroline: Today on the show, we're meeting two unladylike forces of nature working at the intersection of race and environmentalism. Our first guest, Vernice Miller-Travis, has been at the forefront of the environmental justice movement since it took shape.

Vernice: Everything is about the environment. Every single thing that affects your life is somehow intertwined with the environment. And we need to pay attention because when we don't pay attention, that environment can be heavily polluted and heavily contaminated. And our well-being, our lives, our mortality becomes less of a priority for decision makers, less of a priority for elected and appointed officials. And if we don't stand up for our own interests, who is going to defend our interests? Who is going to defend our communities? Who's going to fight for our lives?

Cristen: Vernice Miller Travis has been taking on that fight for decades. Her environmental passion ignited in the mid-80s when she helped publish a groundbreaking report that demonstrated for the first time just how deeply entwined pollution and systemic racism are in the US.

Caroline: Vernice is going to tell us the incredible story of what it took to get the EPA and other eco heavy hitters to finally acknowledge that environmental racism is real.

Cristen: Our second guest, Leah Thomas, wasn't even born when Vernice published that landmark report, but the pair have forged an unlikely allyship to help younger activists connect the dots between the environment, climate change and identity.

Caroline: All to find out: What happens when environmentalism gets intersectional and intergenerational?

[stinger]

Vernice: So imagine you are 27 and 28 years old. And this is where you start and you literally are starting at the beginning. And there you are, and all this information is unfolding on your desk, and it's your data and your analysis, along with everybody else at the at the Commission for Racial Justice and I did not know then that we were busting open this conversation about environmental racism. All I can say is that I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful that I had something that I could offer in charting this path and it has been my foundation for the past 36 years.

Caroline: Vernice never envisioned herself as an environmentalist. When she started college at Barnard and Columbia in the late 70s, she initially planned to become a civil rights attorney. The schools are both located in Harlem, and Vernice was also one of the only Black students who’d grown up in the neighborhood.

Vernice: I was very politically active, way more politically active than both my administration at my college wanted me to be and certainly that my dad wanted me to be. But I was active in a lot of different things. And one of the things I became active in was a campaign to free a group of people called the Wilmington Ten from prison.

Caroline: In 1972, nine Black men and one white woman had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for bombing a grocery store during civil rights protests in North Carolina. The Ten were led by a United Church of Christ pastor named Ben Chavis, and Vernice considered him a civil rights role model.

Cristen: Ben was finally released from prison in 1980. When a former classmate told Vernice that Ben had since moved up to Harlem to go to seminary, she was determined to meet her hero.

Vernice: So for about six months I started walking up and down the street, back and forth from campus, going to the library, going to class, whatever I was doing. And I was looking for Ben Chavis every day, every day for months. I was looking for Ben Chavis. And sure enough, I ran into him one day on the very corner of the street that I lived on. He lived on the same street that I lived on one block up from me.

Caroline: Shortly after Ben and Vernice connected, the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice sent Ben back to North Carolina. Protests had broken out against the state’s decision to dump an enormous amount of cancer-causing toxic waste into a landfill in a rural, majority-Black county. Police arrested 500 people during those protests, including Ben. When he was thrown in jail, Ben declared, This is environmental racism.

Cristen: The protests didn’t stop the toxic dump. But they did spark a brand new movement for environmental justice. In the wake of a congressional inquiry which found that three of the Southeast’s four toxic waste landfills were situated in Black communities, Ben and the Commission for Racial Justice launched a new project. They wanted to find out just how big this problem was. Who else was having to deal with toxic waste in their backyards?

Caroline: Ben and the commission were going to need help. Vernice was more than ready to pitch in.

Vernice: I'd say every quarter I would call Ben and I would say, you know, you need to hire me at the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice because I am the future of the civil rights movement. Now, you know, nobody has hubris like a young person in college. I just kept calling the man and said. You need to hire me. You need to hire me!

Cristen: In 1986, he did. Vernice was in charge of mapping out alllll the hazardous waste sites in the US that posed major health risks to anyone living nearby.

Vernice: We wanted to see where those sites were located and what was the racial composition of the residential zip codes where those sites were located? Is there a correlation between those three things? And so we looked at dozens and dozens and dozens of variables that could affect that: level of educational attainment, home value, home ownership, and on and on and on, all kinds of variables. Race being one of the variables.

Caroline: Today, Vernice could pull that together in no time with computer mapping. But in 1986, She had to plot it all out by hand. She spent a year crunching the numbers and mapping the data.

Vernice: And it turns out that it didn't matter where you lived in these United States. If you lived in a place where the majority of the population were people of color, you were likely to have a hazardous waste site in your midst. It could be in the most rural, isolated Indigenous Native American reservations. There would be hazardous waste sites. It could be in major urban areas. It could be in rural communities. It could be in Latino communities. But wherever people of color lived in these United States, you would find a hazardous waste site in close proximity to where they lived. Were we shocked to find that out? We were not shocked, but we were blown away by the degree of statistical significance. When you see a pattern repeated over and over and over again, what you can draw from the repetition of that pattern is that it's intentional. It's not random. The main thing I contributed, I think, besides the maps to Toxic Wastes and Race, is that what we found was a pattern of intentional siting of hazardous waste sites in the places where people of color lived. And then that had all kinds of other ramifications and implications, particularly health implications.

Caroline: The report was titled Toxic Wastes and Race. It statistically proved the existence of environmental racism and revealed a legally problematic pattern: Existing laws meant to protect people from hazardous waste sites like the one in North Carolina weren’t being fairly applied.

Vernice: What we found is that people are not being treated equally before the law. The Constitution requires under the Equal Protection Clause, that everyone is to be treated equally before the law and because we could see so clearly that that wasn't happening, when we released the report, Ben Chavis said at the press conference that what we are looking at here is environmental racism. Now, if you look back in the report, you don't see the two words environment and racism together anywhere in the report. But Ben said that at the press conference. And it was affirming for a lot of people, but most of our recommendations in the report were directed at US EPA. US EPA didn't say a blip. We know they got it. We mailed it to them. We delivered it to them. We know they received it. But they never said a word. They never said, we agree with you. We disagree with you. We think your recommendations are crazy. Nothing, like, you know, radio silence.

Caroline: But it was only a matter of time — and more agitating — before folks started taking notice. The early 90s saw new interest in Black Americans’ grassroots environmental work — particularly in the South — and more academic work on the intersection of race, class and the environment.

Cristen: And in July of 1992, five years after the study came out, the EPA finally stepped up. They published a report of their own called Environmental Equity: Reducing Risks for All Communities. It was one of the first EPA reports to acknowledge environmental disparities by race and class.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break.

Cristen: When we come back, Vernice puts her research into action once again to combat a pollution problem she didn’t see coming

Caroline: Don’t go away.

[stinger]

Cristen: We’re back with environmental justice trailblazer Vernice Miller-Travis. Vernice grew up in Manhattan during the thick of the civil rights movement. Her mom was part of a union. Her dad was a labor organizer. They were divorced, so Vernice split her time between their homes in Harlem and the West Bronx near Yankee Stadium.

Vernice: Everything was happening just right there in the community. It was like it was like a movie set, but it was our lives.

Caroline: Vernice and her dad often ventured off their neighborhood movie set. They loved walking all over the city. Vernice noticed how her surroundings changed from block to block. And nowhere was that change starker than strolling from Spanish Harlem to the Upper East Side.

Cristen: Spanish Harlem was one of the poorest congressional districts in the US. And just one intersection away from one of the nation's richest congressional districts, the Upper East Side.

Vernice: Once you cross that street, you begin to see that there's no garbage in their streets. It's the same city. It's the same community. You just walked half a block. Everything seems to be pristine, there are doormen, there are just, you know, there are services, there are pharmacies on every corner. There’s just a vibrant community. And in my many, many, many walks across Manhattan with my dad and across the Bronx, I just noticed that there was a profound difference between how some communities were, you know, were allowed to thrive and grow and have their needs met and other communities were not. And the only difference seemed to be that white folks lived in one set of communities and people of color lived in another set of communities.

Cristen: Young Vernice was especially struck by the sidewalks. In Spanish Harlem and other communities of color, the sidewalk concrete was a disaster, and there was trash everywhere. Some stretches didn’t have any curbs. But a block away where rich, white folks lived, the sidewalks were spotless.

Vernice: And it wasn't that the people were unkempt, it was that our municipal services were just completely not engaged and providing just the basic necessities for our community, particularly the South Bronx part of the community.

Caroline: Not only did trash collectors seem to care less about keeping Black and brown people’s streets clean, the city was also letting their most vulnerable neighborhoods burn to the ground.

Vernice: So what was happening was there were a lot of low income apartment buildings, hundreds of them, thousands of them all over the Bronx and. But because the rent rolls were not that high, the people who owned the buildings, the landlords, felt that they could get more money from having the buildings burn down, they could get more money in insurance payments than they could from the rent rolls in the building. So there was just whole scale burning down of buildings.

Cristen: Those towering infernos were the product of official New York City policy in the 70s known as benign neglect. It was essentially a euphemism for we dont give a fuck about poor people of color. In practice, it meant withdrawing tax-funded services from blighted neighborhoods and leaving folks to fend for themselves. Shutting down libraries, public transportation and fire departments...

Vernice: And that really, really, really stuck in my head. And it would be years later, it would become the foundation of my work in my research over decades, this relationship between place and undermining of the particular places where particular people live to not provide basic services, but also to transform the landscape in a way that it's not really fit for human habitation.

Caroline: After the Toxic Wastes and Race report was published in 1987, Vernice went all in on her fight for environmental justice. But rather than drilling down on another nationwide survey, Vernice’s next project emerged closer to home.

Cristen: A friend told Vernice to check out some local political organizers, so she stopped by one of their meetings in Harlem.

Vernice: I walk in the door, and the people are talking about the North River sewage treatment plant and how US EPA, New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, New York City Department of Environmental Protection, are trying to build this giant sewage treatment plant on our waterfront, the Hudson River waterfront. And I wasn't in that room for 20 minutes before I realized, oh, my God, the very thing that I'm researching in communities around the country is happening in my own community where I live.

Cristen: Vernice joined the fight against the sewage treatment plant doing on-the-ground organizing in Harlem. In 1988, she co-founded We Act for Environmental Justice. The group had meetings once a month to address what was going on with the sewage plant.

Vernice: And hundreds of people would come, hundreds of people. And we wanted everybody to focus on “we want to stop this sewage treatment plant from going online in our community.” But what the community wanted to talk about was asthma. Everybody who stepped to the mic — and almost everybody did — wanted to talk about asthma. And no matter how we tried to shift the conversation back to the sewage treatment plant, they wanted to talk about asthma because it was so prevalent in their lives, it was so prevalent in their households. Their family members had it. Their children had it. The adults had it. The babies had it. Everybody had it. And people were dying from asthma at an astronomical rate, but we did not realize the depth and the breadth of the problem in our communities.

Caroline: Vernice listened to the community’s concerns. She decided to reach out to an old classmate of hers who was a pulmonary physician and specialist at Harlem Hospital. She explained that she’d stumbled upon this huge problem of asthma and needed to better understand it.

Vernice: He said, wow, that's interesting. He said, because we're getting ready to do a big research project on asthma prevalence in Harlem. He said that we're going to do a household asthma survey. I said, well, what’s prompting you to do that? He said, because the the level of admission, hospital admissions, pediatric admissions, emergency admissions for asthma and asthma-related disease in Harlem Hospital is off the charts.

Cristen: Vernice and We Act for Environmental Justice joined forces with Columbia University's School of Public Health to investigate what was going on.

Vernice: Some of that research generated some extraordinary findings, one of which was that we had the highest rate of particulate pollution in the entire United States of America. Our singular community had the highest rate of it's called PM 2.5, particulate matter 2.5. And it lodges in your lungs, it lodges in your respiratory system, and it triggers all kinds of problems. It's also known as black carbon or black soot, the stuff you see coming out of the back of truck tailpipes and bus tailpipes and other major industrial facilities. We had the highest rate and incidence of asthma of any community in the United States. The rate of asthma in our community was so high that it drove the national incidence and rate of asthma in the United States of America. And we had the highest rate of premature death from asthma of any community in the United States. Well, you could have knocked us over with a feather. We knew something was wrong, but we didn't know the degree and the depth of the problem.

Caroline: Vernice and the team next had to figure out why Harlem’s air pollution was so off the charts.

Vernice: Oddly enough, it was not the sewage treatment plant. The sewage treatment plant was the source of a tremendous amount of odor that really transformed our lives. But it wasn't the source of the particulate pollution. It was truck traffic and busses.

Cristen: Of the six or seven municipal bus depots in Manhattan, FIVE of them were in Harlem or nearby.

Vernice: All of the buses that service almost the entire county, are generating in and out of our community. We found that truck traffic particularly coming off the George Washington Bridge, a major, major entry point into New York City that the truck traffic was allowed to transverse our community, but it was not allowed to transverse residential communities south of us. The residential community south of us were overwhelmingly white. So they could only go on certain streets. They can only go at certain times. But in our community, the trucks could come through residential streets any hour of the night or day. Again, a source of particulate pollution. The railroad, the subway came through our community. Amtrak comes through our community. Everything came through our community. And we're not far from both Newark Airport and LaGuardia Airport. And so we were sitting ducks, but we did not know that. We needed a wholesale reevaluation of our transportation system, particularly in Northern Manhattan. And why was that? Because it was killing us. It was literally killing us.

Caroline: Over the past 30+ years, Vernice and her group We Act for Environmental Justice have helped convince the city to switch its bus fleet from diesel to compressed natural gas. They’re still pushing for apartment buildings to quit using oil for heat. And their relentless activism has likely saved lives in Harlem.

Vernice: We no longer have the highest rate of asthma. We no longer have the highest rate of asthma mortality, though the high rates of asthma still do exist in New York City and other communities in New York City. The sewage treatment plant, the city of New - we sued the city of New York for operating a sewage treatment plant as a public nuisance to our community and got them to spend $55 million to install a pollution control system, which they had built the sewage treatment plant without, though it treated and processed 180 million gallons of raw sewage and wastewater a day. They built that plant without any odor-control systems. Would never happen in an affluent white community or even a working-class white community - would never, ever, ever happen. So we've had a lot of victories at that level.

Caroline: But even as Vernice and her allies continued sounding the alarm about environmental injustice, the predominantly white mainstream environmental movement wasn’t especially eager to talk about race. Its priorities like clean air and water and resource conservation were about protecting the planet, not people of color.

Vernice: Today, it's a very different set of relationships than it was then. But then it was another place where we just got radio silence. Nobody said anything. Nobody reached out. Nobody said, hey, let's have a conversation. Let's have a dialog. Can you come and speak to us? Can you tell us what you're doing? Nothing. We were on our own and we remained on our own for decades.

Cristen: In 2007, Vernice’s successors updated and remapped all the data on who was living near toxic waste sites across the country. They wanted to see what had changed in the 20 years since the original Toxic Wastes and Race report came out. What they found was ... not much. “The conclusions are very much the same as they were in 1987.”

Caroline: That didn’t mean the environmental justice movement wasn’t making change. It just shows how monumental of a task it’s been to convince the EPA, environmentalists and policymakers to care about poor people — primarily people of color — and the more toxic air they breathe.

Cristen: But then in the late spring of 2020, the pandemic and police brutality ignited a whole new awareness of environmental racism. Folks started noticing a disturbing throughline. Police choking and suffocating Black people. A Black birdwatcher enjoying the outdoors gets the cops called on him. Black communities having to fight for safe drinking water.

Caroline: Environmental racism wasn’t just being discussed in grassroots circles. It was suddenly a mainstream conversation. But what wasn't getting talked about was the Black activists and researchers who'd laid the entire foundation decades ago for what we now know about environmental injustice. And that didn't sit will with our unsung trailblazer, Vernice.

Vernice: We have been in a steady slog to make sure that this was a national conversation and indeed an international conversation. And it's been a hard, hard, hard fight. But here we are at this moment when everybody wants a piece of this conversation and in so doing, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom, right? But just don't forget who planted the seeds.

Cristen: When we come back, Vernice crosses Twitter paths with a rising environmental activist and together, they ensure that her seed planting isn't forgotten.

Caroline: Stick around.

[stinger]

Caroline: We’re back. When we left off, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 had put racism into the center of environmental conversations like never before. Vernice noticed the shift unfolding on Twitter. Her handle? @HarlemGirl59. Hell yes Vernice.

Cristen: Tweets from someone named @greengirlleah especially caught Vernice's attention.

Vernice: She kept talking about this intersectional environmentalism. Initially it rubbed me the wrong way because I'm like, do you mean environmental justice? Is are you trying to come up with a new way of saying that, but having a different conversation with a different group of people? Because that is the very definition of environmental justice, is that it's intersectional. But we said that 35 years ago.

Cristen: One greengirlleah tweet in particular stuck in Vernice's craw. It read: ‘Do you know that most communities of color have elevated levels of air pollution?’

Vernice: And I responded and said, “Um, yes, we've published extensively on that for the last 30 years.” So, you know, let me be perfectly honest and transparent. She said, “Vernice, I always get these snarky comments from you.” She said that on Twitter. So we're having this conversation on Twitter. Right. And I'm like, I'm not being snarky. I'm just saying read a freakin book. Right? Do a Google search. This is not news. But she came back to me and said, “You know, I really want to have a conversation with you.”

Caroline: As in an face-to-face, not-in-DMs dialogue. greengirlleah sincerely wanted a sit-down!

Leah: So with me, my story was that I basically just like kind of blew up online last year, and some people were like, who are you? Like I've been in the game,like, who is this girl? GreengirlLeah like, what are you, what are you doing? So I really needed to like, prove myself in the space and then also realize, like, I was taking up a lot of space when there are a lot of other women who have been doing this for a long time.

Cristen: Meet @greengirlleah. Aka Leah Thomas. She’s the founder of an educational platform and community called Intersectional Environmentalist. Leah and some collaborators launched it last year after one of Leah’s posts went viral on Instagram.

Caroline: On May 28, three days after George Floyd was killed, Leah was fed up. She'd marched in the streets for environmental causes, but from what she was seeing, fellow environmentalists weren't showing up or speaking up for anti-racism. Not to mention, The largest, deepest pocketed environmental organizations are overwhelmingly white. Leah knew better than to wait around for them to break the silence.

Cristen: Leah created an Instagram graphic that said Environmentalists for Black Lives Matter. She posted it along with a definition of intersectional environmentalism and an intersectional environmentalist pledge. Leah captioned it in part, "I’m calling on the environmentalist community to stand in solidarity with the black lives matter movement and with Black, Indigenous + POC communities impacted daily by both social and environmental injustice.”

Caroline: The post blew up. It attracted tens of thousands of likes, including from environmental giants like Greenpeace and Sierra Club.

Cristen: But Leah's viral moment had been years in the making. She’d started her greengirleah instagram in college, while majoring in an extremely white environmental sciences program.

Leah: There was a really big focus on conservation and all these like great leaders that have come to the United States and created these national parks. But there wasn't a lot of acknowledgment that, like these spaces were there and they were there were so many indigenous people that were living there and are living there and are living there.

Cristen: Leah clocked the absence of indigenous people and any communities of color in the curriculum. But at first, she couldn't fully articulate why that was a problem.

Leah: Initially, I was like, maybe I'm wrong. Like, I feel like a nuisance for wanting to bring up environmental justice. And sometimes I was trying to say, like, oh, yeah, like race seems to be a big indicator of whether or not people have like national parks in their area or whether or not they have clean drinking water. And it was kind of like, OK, interesting. So there's a lot of gaslighting, I don't think intentionally, but maybe it was just an elephant in the room, but it became really frustrating and I started to get more vocal about it.

Caroline: In the summer of 2014, Leah was home for her summer break in Ferguson, Missouri, when Michael Brown was shot and killed by police. Her sister was tear-gassed during the protests. Like young Vernice in the Bronx, Leah was watching her community go up in flames. She felt awful returning to school for the fall semester.

Leah: It was just really scary. And then I'm all the way in California while this is happening, feeling like I've abandoned my city in some ways. And I'm trying to learn about the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. And I'm like, but there's people in Ferguson who are drowning in the smoke of like smoke bombs. And are you know, their eyes are burning from tear gas. I don't know. It was just something about that happening side by side while I'm trying to learn about the successes of the environmental movement and the EPA, while people, my people, are dying. So, yeah, it was really startling and really eye-opening for me.

Caroline: Leah started to do some research to learn more outside of her college program. And she was like, wait a minute. So, in the 60s and 70s there was a civil rights movement that was largely folks of color and then there was an environmental movement that was largely white. But they were working separately?

Leah: And it started not to add up for me. Wouldn't it have made sense if like they worked together in some ways? And then why did we need to have an environmental justice movement that again, was BIPOC-led in the 80s? Like what went wrong, basically, because all these environmental laws were being passed, but it seemed like they were mostly just protecting white people. Because, yes, they were able to get toxic waste out of their communities. But guess where it went? Into a lot of lower income and black and brown communities. And then in the 80s, we're seeing all these environmental justice leaders have to create their own movement that's not getting nearly enough attention as Earth Day movement trying to advocate to not have all these toxins in their communities. So when I was looking back on that, I started to realize how intentional it was because the environmentalists at that time, they adopted - appropriated - so many tactics from the civil rights movement. However, they didn't include them in their movement. And that made me really, really sad and upset.

Cristen: So what does intersectional environmentalism mean?

Leah: To me, I think intersectional environmentalism, you know it builds off of intersectional theory by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Essentially it’s probably good to understand intersectional feminism before understanding intersectional environmentalism. So intersectional feminism seeks to kind of acknowledge all of those parts of someone's identity and not kind of ignore them and see how it might contribute to privileges they might have or privileges that they don't have. And I felt really safe in intersectional feminist spaces where I didn't have to, like, separate my blackness from my womanhood for the comfort of other people who might be grappling with guilt that they have because maybe they haven't been great advocates for racial justice. .. So in intersectional environmentalist spaces, it's really important to consider the ways that identity might have really big or might play a really big role in whether or not someone's experiencing environmental injustice.

Cristen: Intersectional environmentalism also means intergenerational environmentalism. Which brings us back to Leah’s not-so-meet-cute with Vernice Miller-Travis on Twitter. When Leah DM’d Vernice wanting to clear the air, Vernice heard her out.

Vernice: She said in her four years of college, she didn’t have one class where they talked about the disproportionate impact of environmental harms on communities of color or people of color. And the reason that she was motivated to start this conversation is because she was starting to do her own research and saying, hey, there's a whole body of research out here that I was never exposed to, and I want to make sure that those conversations are linked and so, you know, you got to lift up the effort and you got to lift up and and be thankful that young people, even though they're oftentimes not exposed to this field, are still finding their way to it. And that gives me so much hope and so much appreciation that for the longest time we thought we were going to have to keep doing this until we died.

Cristen: Then, Leah and Wawa Gatheru, who founded Black Girl Environmentalist, invited Vernice and a few of her contemporaries to have a roundtable chat about bridging the generation gap in environmentalism.

Caroline: Vernice brought a stack of books with her. She wanted to show these up-and-comers that they had a lot of learning to do.

Vernice: And it was a wonderful experience. But I, you know, I said to them then and I say to folks now, I am so happy to see the level of receptivity to the construct and the concept of environmental justice, environmental injustice, environmental racism that we see today.

Cristen: In the meantime, Leah has also been working with her college to fill in the intersectional gaps that frustrated her in her environmental studies program. In fact, the school offered their first official environmental justice course last year

Caroline: Well, Vernice better be on that syllabus

Vernice: It's not just our organization and it's not just our community in northern Manhattan. It's communities across New York City, across New York State, across these United States, across this hemisphere, people who have absorbed the brunt of bad environmental decisions and bad policy making and unequal treatment before the law. Those people are leading us into a conversation about a new way of living, a new way of thinking about the environment as as intersectional with racial justice and gender justice and criminal justice and educational access and all of those other things. That's what motivates us. And so we're you know, we're all still in the game. But I am so happy to see so many young people coming into this field, so many young people all across the country, white kids, kids of color, everybody. Because when they think about the kind of environmental work they want to do, they think about environmental justice, speaks to them in a profound way. And I'm incredibly grateful for that.

Cristen: To learn more about Vernice Miller-Travis you can head to Weact.org to learn more about We Act for Environmental Justice, the organization she co-founded. You can find Leah Thomas at @greengirlLeah on Instagram or over at intersectionalenvironmentalist.com and pre-order her book, The Intersectional Environmentalist

Caroline: If y’all wanna get in touch with us, you can find us on instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also support Cristen and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll not only get our undying love and gratitude, y’all, you’ll also get weekly ad-free bonus episodes like the one we just recorded about weaponized incompetence in the home and the workplace. Find it over at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Cristen: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Caroline: This podcast was created by your hosts, Caroline Ervin

Cristen: And Cristen Conger of Unladylike Media.

Caroline: Next week...

Jen: It can take a long time for people to figure out what works for them. And the bottom line is it's their body, it's their life. It's not ours to control. It's not ours to say, oh, why don't you just sign this contract that you're going to keep this implant in your body for a certain period of time, which we know is happening with implants and IUDs. And so if someone's coming in, even if they got their IUD yesterday, even if they got that implant earlier today, they're real freaked out or they don't want it for any reason at any time. They don't even have to justify it to us. It's their body and it's our job to to help them access removal whenever they want, if that's the situation.

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