In an essay published this week ahead of Juneteenth—the holiday that marks the liberation of America's last enslaved people in 1865—essayist and poet Rasheena Fountain describes how her personal history informs her connection to the land and her mission to “reimagine a new Black environmental memory.”

Rasheena’s family history reflects the broken promises of the post–Civil War “40 Acres and a Mule” order, which would have given Black people an ownership stake in the agricultural system they had already built. Her grandmother, Catherine Brookins, née Seaberry, dropped out of fifth grade to work as a sharecropper in Mississippi. Then as a teenager, she moved north to Chicago, where racist housing policies followed her to the neighborhood of Austin, on the city’s West Side. In the face of this oppression, Catherine poured herself into tending a backyard vegetable garden, a small green patch on a slab of concrete from which she made fried green tomatoes and stuffed bell peppers, and turned out feasts for family and neighbors. “Looking back, I see those acts of abundance despite the scarcity as forms of resistance,” Rasheena writes. “Displacement can take away land but not our relationship to it.”
Read Rasheena’s essay. >

A Traffic Stop Gone Wrong Shaped This NRDC Advocate

On the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, NRDC senior policy advisor Khalil Shahyd reflected on his own harrowing encounter with law enforcement while he was a student at the University of New Orleans. The incident, which started with accusations of a broken headlight, led to abuse at the hands of police, a wrongful arrest, and three nights spent in a high-security prison wing—as well as the loss of his part-time job. It also informed his career path.

“When my community organizing led me to the city’s [New Orlean’s] Calliope and Melpomene public housing developments, I saw from a higher vantage point how police systematically target Black people,” Khalil writes. “After I started hanging posters in the covered hallways around the developments imploring people to ‘know your rights when stopped by police,’ the NOPD brought me in for questioning, as if a community educated on its legal rights were a threat to the agency’s mission. Today, as an environmental policy expert, I see the same communities fighting for their human rights: the freedom to breathe clean air, to live lives protected from harm, to be valued as people.”
Read more about Khalil's experience. >

The Electric Car Revolution Shouldn’t Leave Anyone Behind

A new program in St. Louis, Missouri, is bringing EVs and charging stations to low-income neighborhoods—and turning senior and disabled residents into early adopters. The Black-led Northside Youth and Senior Service Center (NSYSSC) serves the city’s historic neighborhoods of color and gives an average of 10,000 rides each year. Typically, the organization’s drivers arrive in large white vans, but starting this summer, they’ll also show up in a Chevy Bolt. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be a part of something that’s going to so radically change the way people move about,” says Leon Threat, NSYSSC’s executive director. This equitable electric car–sharing program is one of several around the country helping to make electric vehicles—and the cleaner air they bring—more accessible.
Learn more about St. Louis’s strides in transportation equity. >

Tackle Your Climate Footprint with REVERB

NRDC is excited to be a part of REVERB’s Music Climate Revolution, which is helping to change the way the music industry does business and encouraging fans to act for the planet. Billie Eilish, The Lumineers, Dave Matthews Band, Shawn Mendes, Guster, Dead & Company, and other artists are working with REVERB to reduce carbon footprints at their upcoming tours and to engage their fans in climate activism.
Enter to win concert tickets and start taking action today. >

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