Rebecca Bratspies-Working for Environmental Justice

Show Transcript

Rebecca Bratspies on Environmental Justice

[00:00:00] BOB GATTY: Today we're focusing on the environmental challenges facing our world with Rebecca Bratspies, founding Director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. She's the author of an award-winning environmental justice comic book series, the Environmental Justice Chronicles. The three books. Maya's Lot, venus Plant and Troops Run are designed to bring environmental literacy to a new generation of environmental leaders. So stay with us. 

[00:00:32] Now, Mark Bello and I are delighted to welcome Rebecca Bratspies to our podcast. Rebecca is an award winning author, scholar, and speaker, and Executive Director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. That's a social justice initiative of the City University. of New York School of Law, where Bratspies is a professor of law. Her most recent book, Naming Gotham, the Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names, uses the names New York gives his roads and bridges to tell bigger stories about racial and class politics, and to highlight who has the power to name things, and who gets to define what counts as history.

[00:01:14] Rebecca Bratspies, thanks for joining us for our podcast today. 

[00:01:19] Rebecca Bratspies: Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here. 

[00:01:22] BOB GATTY: Hey, tell us about the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. You're the founding director of the center. Why was it established? 

[00:01:30] Rebecca Bratspies: It was established because as a public university in New York City, right?

[00:01:35] The City University of New York Law School is Here to both educate people and to serve the city of New York and an area where there was a desperate need for assistance is in communities that are trying to organize around questions of environmental justice. So we don't, we're not their lawyers. But we support them and help them understand what kind of processes they need to navigate what kinds of arguments are likely to resonate with the discretion that some, that a decision maker might have.

[00:02:06] And we work alongside communities as they struggle for liberation. 

[00:02:12] BOB GATTY: Okay. 

[00:02:12] Mark M. Bello: Rebecca, It's wonderful to have you. I listened to your testimony before the New York City Racial Justice Commission. It's about, that's about two years ago. Yes, it was fascinating stuff. You speak of structural racism, redlining, the fact that people of color and poor are far more prone to COVID or respiratory disease or certain types of cancer.

[00:02:39] And basically you're essentially establishing that they're victims of what you call environmental justice. I'd like you to define environmental justice or environmental justice, and I'd also like to know whether anything's changed in two years, and what your current aims and objectives are in trying to establish environmental justice in America.

[00:03:07] Rebecca Bratspies: Okay, so I'm going to take those one by one, I might forget along the way. Environmental justice. Is the basic notion that everyone is entitled to fair treatment with regard to the environment and to meaningful consultation for decisions that affect them. So it's got both a substantive and a procedural component.

[00:03:30] The fair treatment part is that everyone has the right to breathe air that is not going to make them sick, to drink water that is not going to poison them, and to live on land that is not going to make them ill, right? That is the core of fair treatment. Meaningful involvement is about having a voice that is heard in the process of making decisions, that decision makers actually listen to and respond to in some fashion doesn't mean you always get what you want, but it means that you are part of the decisions that affect you and have a real voice in the outcome. And. That's environmental justice.

[00:04:08] Unfortunately, what we see a lot of across the country and around the world is environmental injustice, the lack of substantive equality with regard to a safe environment and. Lack of access to the processes by which these decisions are made. So that's the definition that I work from.

[00:04:32] I forgot your second question, but we'll get back to it. Cause I want to say really quickly, what has changed in New York? A lot has changed since I gave that testimony two years ago. First of all, the voters of New York overwhelmingly amended the state constitution to recognize a human right or a, sorry, not a human right, a constitutional right to clean air, clean water, and a healthful environment.

[00:04:56] And so we're in the process of trying to figure out how does that change things. And then in New York, also, there have been a number of statutes that have been passed that focus more directly. On environmental justice. And of course, on the national level, we've had tremendous movement in terms of both responding to climate change through federal legislation, but also in environmental justice.

[00:05:18] Mark M. Bello: The last question was the current aims and objectives in trying to establish environmental justice. And I want to point out that there is no constitutional provision that guarantees those things in the United States Constitution, right? 

[00:05:32] Rebecca Bratspies: No, there is not. There's no express provision in the United States Constitution, and federal courts have uniformly rejected attempts to argue that the existing amendments to the Constitution convey environmental rights.

[00:05:47] So the environmental rights we have under federal law are based on environmental statutes, which give and on guidance that agencies have created about how to best fulfill those statutory conveyances, because in our system we have a federal system of government where you have federal law governing the entire country, but each state also has its own constitution and its own set of laws.

[00:06:13] So in Massachusetts, New York. Hawaii, Montana, and Pennsylvania, there are constitutional environmental rights and other states, there aren't necessarily constitutional environmental rights, but every state has statutes that convey pieces of those rights, at least as does as do the federal laws. For example, the Clean Air Act sets what are called national ambient air quality standards. Those are the standards that states through a process of cooperative federalism are supposed to meet in how they regulate polluting activities within the state. Those federal standards are set at a level and this is the actual language from the statute requisite to protect human health with an adequate margin of safety, so the standards are supposed to be set at a level that will meet that substantive environmental justice requirement. Unfortunately, 1st of all, the standards aren't necessarily set at a rigorous enough level and more than 100Million people live in areas where those standards are not met. So to the extent that we have, even to the extent that we have standards, they aren't being met. 

[00:07:31] Mark M. Bello: When you say that there's regulations at the state level, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's regulation at the local level and if the state conforms, but a certain section of the state or a local area does not, as long as the state conforms, that's okay. I want the people to understand that. Is that correct? 

[00:07:49] Rebecca Bratspies: Yeah, so that's the huge environmental justice challenge, is that the standards are set, first of all, the air quality standards are set for the nation as a whole, and they are assessed on the county level, so even, yeah, so even if a county is in compliance, that doesn't mean that the air that everybody breathes in that county is in compliance. It means that where the sensors are, the air is in compliance. And some of the regions that are assessed, first of all, a lot of the counties are not in compliance, but for the ones that are, what we often see is that polluting infrastructure is concentrated In maybe a small portion of a county that's usually the portion that is heavily populated with black and brown residents.

[00:08:40] And it's often the area that is the poorest area of the county that area might have really bad air quality, but the rest of the county, as a result of concentrating all that polluting infrastructure into a small place, the rest of the county might have pretty good air quality and it's that concentration of polluting infrastructure in the most vulnerable communities. The communities with the least political influence, the communities that are overwhelmingly black and brown, that is why many people refer to this not just as an environmental injustice problem, but as an environmental racism problem. 

[00:09:17] BOB GATTY: Rebecca, I want to talk to you about the Montana court decision that came down just recently where they ruled that the state's constitution does indeed guarantee the right of all citizens to live in a clean, safe and healthy environment. You're a friend of Maya van Rossum, who I had on this show recently, who talked about this. And she's leading efforts across the nation to get other states to do the same thing.

[00:09:45] What are your thoughts about all of that? 

[00:09:47] Rebecca Bratspies: Maya was very influential in New York in the struggle to amend our state constitution. And she's been a leader in Pennsylvania in interpreting it in the state constitution there. So Montana is really interesting because Montana amended its constitution 50 years ago to add three environmental provisions.

[00:10:08] There's an express right to a healthy environment. There's a state obligation to protect and preserve the environment for present generations and future generations. And then the preamble also refers to the rights of future generations. So it was a pretty clear cut case in Montana. What the young plaintiffs were objecting to was a state statute ordering The environmental agency to never consider carbon emissions as part of making decisions about fossil fuel extraction in the state, which is irrational, first of all, but it also is directly in contravention with those constitutional provisions.

[00:11:00] And that's what the court decided in a very detailed, very.

[00:11:03] This law that Montana had enacted was harming the youth plaintiffs and would continue to harm them into the future, and that it was not necessary for any compelling state purpose, which is the standard for assessing the constitutionality of something that implicates a fundamental right. Okay. 

[00:11:25] Mark M. Bello: Lawyer to lawyer, Rebecca, I don't see how the, how Montana could have decided that any other way.

[00:11:33] How do you carve out an exception for carbon emissions? 

[00:11:37] Rebecca Bratspies: It is completely irrational. The Montana legislature was basically grandstanding. It was a wholly political decision, not one that had any basis in any kind of science, and in fact, the the head of the Montana agency was the only witness that Montana put on, testified that he had never heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

[00:11:59] I don't know if he was, he was under oath, I don't know if that was true or not, but... It was ridiculous, regardless. 

[00:12:07] Mark M. Bello: What are the perjury laws in the state? 

[00:12:09] Rebecca Bratspies: Yeah, they're pretty much the same everywhere. 

[00:12:11] BOB GATTY: The Montana Attorney General said they're gonna, they're gonna appeal right away.

[00:12:16] Rebecca Bratspies: They are going to appeal right away. Their argument is probably going to be either that the plaintiffs do not have standing. It's a better argument. That, that's how states across the country have been responding to these cases. In order to have standing, there are three basic elements that you have to have.

[00:12:36] You have to have an actual injury. You have to have, that injury has to be caused by the conduct of the defendant, and the injury has to be redressable by something that the court could order. And that's why it matters so much that the court made a extremely detailed hundred plus Factual finding decision because what the court did was lay out very clearly what the injury was that these plaintiffs were already experiencing and would continue to experience and how Montana was causing that injury, right?

[00:13:13] It wasn't the whole cause, but it was clearly one of the causes and that the those injuries were redressable by montana changing its law to account for climate change and make decisions accordingly. 

[00:13:27] Mark M. Bello: Sounds like they anticipated the appeal. 

[00:13:29] Rebecca Bratspies: Yeah. Not only did, not only obviously the plaintiffs were expecting an appeal, but the court wrote a decision, I think, with, the Montana Supreme Court in mind.

[00:13:39] This case had already gone up to the Montana Supreme Court twice because the the state was trying to get rid of it. And twice the Montana Supreme Court refused to dismiss the case. So now they're going to get the case again on a very extensive factual record, right? Facts are not Up for negotiation on appeal.

[00:14:00] Only the legal standards and the application of the legal standards are up for negotiation on appeal. And so that's why it really matters that the court was very detailed and very specific about how these plaintiffs meet the legal threshold for bringing the case and why they should win.

[00:14:18] BOB GATTY: These plaintiffs, they were college kids or what? 

[00:14:21] Rebecca Bratspies: Some of them are now, and they were much younger when it started. This actually was a pretty rapid case in terms of how long litigation can take. It was filed, I think, in 2020. So it, it's been a three year process to get to this decision.

[00:14:37] Some of the plaintiffs are now in college. They were all young people when they started, the kind of young people that the comic books that I work with are designed to target. 

[00:14:47] BOB GATTY: Yeah, I want to talk to you about those comic books. You're a law professor. What prompted you to start doing environmental justice comic books?

[00:14:58] Rebecca Bratspies: So I do a lot of work in New York City public schools, and always when I would go into a classroom, one of the first questions I would ask is, do you live in an environment? And there was always at least one kid who said no, I don't, because to them the environment was, someplace pristine with trees and bunnies and like I'm all for trees and bunnies and pristine places, don't get me wrong, but we're an increasingly urban country, we're an increasingly urban world. And if young people in the cities don't think that they live in an environment and that environmental protection is about them and the places that they live, we're not going to make the progress we need to make. So I wanted to create something that would reach people who weren't already interested in the environment.

[00:15:41] And I partnered with an unbelievable artist the comic books are gorgeous. They're really just so beautifully done because he's incredibly talented Charlie LaGreca Velasco is his name. And what we did was we tried to create Books that both were fun and interesting and like you could read them just as a book and at the same time were teaching tools that would help people understand how to develop an environmental advocacy campaign and how to build a community advocacy structure and then use it to intervene in legal decision making.

[00:16:20] Mark M. Bello: How is that working out? Are the books being used to build a new generation of environmental leaders? 

[00:16:26] Rebecca Bratspies: I hope they're being used to build a new generation of environmental leaders. They're definitely being used. Chicago adopted the first book, Maya's Lot, as part of its equity curriculum. Urban Waters also adopted Maya's Lot as part of its or its environmental education curriculum.

[00:16:43] I get. permission requests from teachers across the country at the university level, at the law school level, as well as at the high school level. The books are available for free download for any educational or non profit use from my website, which is just my name, rebeccabratspies. com. You can also get them from the website of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform, but it's a little less user friendly.

[00:17:09] Mark M. Bello: They're free? Are schools downloading them by the thousands? I would think so. 

[00:17:15] Rebecca Bratspies: I don't know. Part of why I'm here is I'm really trying to get the word out. I'm always disappointed when people don't know about them. EPA just gave us, Charlie and me, their 2023 Clean Air Act Award. I'm messing up the name, but it's the Clean Air Act Award for Excellence in Education and Outreach.

[00:17:37] And we're hoping that's gonna, make it more. Visible. That's always a challenge when you have an educational tool, it's just making sure that people know about it. 

[00:17:48] Mark M. Bello: How would you characterize the state of our climate today and the importance of moving our energy sources from fossil fuels like coal to renewables, like wind and solar?

[00:18:00] Rebecca Bratspies: We're facing a crisis. We are in the middle of a climate crisis. It's only going to get worse. There's no way to Completely prevent a lot of really bad things from happening, but there's a lot we can still save and we need to take action today. 10 years ago would have been better. 20 years ago would have been even better.

[00:18:24] But today is a whole lot better than tomorrow or next year or in a decade. 

[00:18:29] BOB GATTY: Nearly 150 million Americans were under heat alerts just yesterday, or the day before yesterday, after July marked the planet's hottest month on record, devastating downpours dumped two months of rain on Vermont in two days, smoke from Canadian wildfires choked East Coast skies causing the worst air quality on record for some locations, and Hawaii is reeling from the deadliest US wildfire in a century.

[00:19:01] Yet a new Washington Post University of Maryland poll showed that only 35 percent of Republicans and Republican leaning independents think climate change is a major factor, compared to 85 percent of Democrats. I want to know what it will take to convince the doubters that extreme weather patterns like this that we're experiencing are caused, at least in large measure, by man and our reliance on fossil fuels.

[00:19:31] Rebecca Bratspies: The fossil fuel industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars doing exactly what the cigarette industry did with regard to smoking. Trying to say, It's not proven. There's a doubt. Let's not act. Let's not be hasty. Let's figure this out. It's not surprising that those hundreds of millions of dollars have created confusion in the minds of people, especially people who are being told by their political leaders that either this is a hoax or it's something that's natural or that there's nothing we can do about it.

[00:20:08] Neither of those are true. It is definitely not a hoax. Climate change is real. It is happening. It is happening more rapidly, unfortunately, than we expected. It is not natural. The changes that we're seeing are far beyond anything since I forget the name of the period. The Earth has had periods like this before, but we as human beings have not existed during them, and, there's no guarantee that whatever changes happen will be compatible with our societies and our civilizations. But it's also not too late. It's not, I, climate doomism, I think it's as much an enemy as climate denial is because the sense of the ice sheets are melting, we're doomed, the ice sheets are melting, but, and the sea level will rise.

[00:20:57] We've locked that in, but every step that we take prevents further catastrophe, right? We can limit The damage, we can still pass our Children and our grandchildren a world that they can live and thrive in, but we have to act and we have to act now. 

[00:21:17] BOB GATTY: I think it's important to be doing what you're doing and that's working with kids with your comic books to try to get them to understand what's going on.

[00:21:26] They are the ones are our children and grandchildren. They're the ones that are really are going to be dealing with this going forward. 

[00:21:34] Rebecca Bratspies: We used to say that we used to say this was about our children and our grandchildren, but it's now about us. Because, yes, our children and our grandchildren are going to be inheriting this world, but so are we, right?

[00:21:45] We are living in this world in our current selves and our future selves are in jeopardy. And I think that reality is changing the way people think about climate change. I'm actually a cautious optimist is what I would say. I think that they're first of all, I think that the technology is leaping ahead and we are going to have a transition to clean energy regardless of whether or not that 35 percent of Republicans agrees or not, because in terms of technology, it makes sense.

[00:22:20] BOB GATTY: I do a series of podcasts with an energy environmentalist, a guy by the name of Jack Kerfoot, who actually started out his career in the oil industry. But now he's a huge advocate for. Renewable and he's a scientist, and he's just based on everything is fact with Jack.

[00:22:41] At any rate he talks all the time about the need for transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar, and points out that the argument That a lot of the politicians make that it's all about jobs, supporting the coal industry, supporting the natural gas industry. It's all about jobs.

[00:23:04] His documented information shows that there are far more jobs provided in solar and wind and renewable. Yeah, then in coal and that the coal mines are dying out regardless. They're going to be gone. They're not there forever. Wind and solar is, 

[00:23:25] Rebecca Bratspies: Yeah, it's very true.

[00:23:26] Mark M. Bello: There's a, there does seem to be a. a corporate effort, like with electric vehicles and what have you, to change despite that 35%. Yeah. So I share your optimism. How do you convince the doubters though to Bob's question? 

[00:23:44] Rebecca Bratspies: I don't know that you do. I think you move forward and eventually They pick up the rear, which is really you don't need everybody to agree.

[00:23:51] You just need to move forward. 

[00:23:53] Mark M. Bello: We just drag them kicking and screaming, right? 

[00:23:56] BOB GATTY: Look what's going on with electric vehicles right now. Every day I see a new ad for a high end brand coming out with a new EV with increasingly increasingly large. What's the word I'm looking for range so that they'll, 

[00:24:14] yeah, the range, but what I want to know, here I live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and yesterday or the day before yesterday, there was a story that said it's the fastest growing city in the entire country.

[00:24:29] We, we are under a huge building boom and gas stations are being built and strip malls are being built. But in those gas stations, I don't see one, I don't see one indication that they are preparing for Electric vehicle charging facilities. They're still putting in gas pumps.

[00:24:51] Rebecca Bratspies: They are going to be, they're going to be stranded assets. And they're going to be stranded assets much more rapidly than they realize. 

[00:24:57] BOB GATTY: Yeah. I know my next car is going to be an EV. 

[00:25:00] Mark M. Bello: That's Didn't the recent legislation, I think the Inflation Reduction Act, didn't that, or the Infrastructure Act, didn't that include money for charging stations around the country?

[00:25:11] BOB GATTY: Yes, it did. 

[00:25:12] Rebecca Bratspies: It did. You can already easily drive across the country in EVs. There are charging stations all over the place. Almost every hotel has them, if you're, a guest traveling the country. My brother in law's a car guy. He works for Audi, and he he's really, he likes cars as cars.

[00:25:30] And he did a cross country trip in an EV just to see what it would be like, and blogged about it. And he was like, he came back a complete convert. And I think that's the key. It's once people who are into cars realize how much better they are, How much easier they are to maintain and the fact that you can pretty easily go across, go anywhere you need to go in an EV.

[00:25:54] That's part of what's tipping that scale. 

[00:25:58] Mark M. Bello: You're also seeing Bob that they're making it cheaper now too. I've been seeing, I've been seeing inexpensive leases for for EVs for the first time. 

[00:26:05] BOB GATTY: Actually, I was in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago on a little weekend vacation and I rented a I rented a car.

[00:26:16] At the airport, and I had signed up for an EV, but when I got to the to the rental car place at the airport they tried to talk me out of taking the EV, they said the range was only like 150 miles and that I'd have a hard time finding a place to get it charged and so on and so forth, and in the end, I ended up Getting a regular gas powered vehicle, and they charged me an extra 50 bucks for the, yeah, for doing that.

[00:26:50] So that'll be the last time I do that. That's for sure. That's craziness. 

[00:26:54] Mark M. Bello: That's the next challenge though, creating the infrastructure for that transformation. 

[00:27:00] Rebecca Bratspies: That's true. A lot of that infrastructure already exists. Yeah. 

[00:27:04] BOB GATTY: Let's talk a little bit about your book about New York City history and the naming and all of that.

[00:27:11] Rebecca Bratspies: Really, it's such a fun project. So it, the project emerged from my frustration of getting stuck in traffic. To be honest . My parents live in Pennsylvania and I live in New York City and to visit them, we would drive on the Major Deegan Expressway, which is the road that goes past Yankee Stadium on the way to the George Washington Bridge.

[00:27:33] And anybody who's ever driven on the Major Deegan will tell you that driving is really a euphemism. What it really means is being stuck in traffic. And I would always get so frustrated and I would just like curse Major Deegan, who was this guy, I hate him. And the interesting thing is no one had a clue who he was.

[00:27:53] Everybody, you take it to get to the George Washington Bridge. Everybody knows who George Washington was, but nobody has a clue who Major Deegan was. I was like I want to find out who the guy was, because I hate him. And so I did, and it turns out that he's way less impressive than you might expect, given the fact that he has this major road named after him.

[00:28:13] And that sort of sparked my curiosity of who are all these... People that we name roads and bridges and civic institutions after and why do we name it after them. I that's how I wrote the book. The book is pretty. It's not a scholarly book. I've written other books that are directed at scholars.

[00:28:35] This one is written for my parents. For lovely people, but are not scholars. And it is fun. It's gossipy. It's, if you want to know about scandals in New York City, it is full of scandals from the time of the Dutch to now. So from the 1600s to now, this is a book about the liars and cheaters and politicians who finagled their way into having traffic jams named after them.

[00:29:06] BOB GATTY: Sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, actually. 

[00:29:09] Mark M. Bello: The name of the book is Naming Gotham, 

[00:29:11] Rebecca Bratspies: correct? 

[00:29:11] Naming Gotham, the villains, rogues, and heroes behind New York place names. 

[00:29:16] BOB GATTY: I mentioned that I live in Myrtle Beach. Every little overpass here has somebody's name on it. The other day I was on, I was just on a Going down a road and there was a like a culvert over a little stream and it had some sergeants.

[00:29:36] This is called the sergeant whatever. Yeah, bridge. And I always wonder who are these people. And my wife says, Why isn't anything named after me. 

[00:29:49] Mark M. Bello: I was gonna say is there a Gatty bridge. 

[00:29:51] BOB GATTY: No. 

[00:29:52] Mark M. Bello: Maybe it may be a park bench somewhere.

[00:29:55] What did the book teach you about racial justice, if it did? And Bob, in researching the podcast, told me that the book led you to get involved with the Renewable Rikers Project. Why don't you tell the people what that is? And how the book relates to your environmental work on racial justice.

[00:30:21] Rebecca Bratspies: So one of the big topics that the Biden administration is grappling with is the legacy of racism in road construction. And how roads were literally used as a way to Isolate black communities from commerce districts and from white communities. It was an actual strategy that the Federal Housing Administration had and the Department of Transportation had.

[00:30:50] So that's, and a lot of those roads here in New York were built by Robert Moses. And with the collaboration from some of the people who are in my book. They're probably more on the villain scale rather than the hero scale of the books. But Rikers Island, which for those of you who don't know is New York City's main jail and has been for about a century.

[00:31:15] It is a penal colony, literally. It is an island in the middle of the East River connected to Queens by one bridge. There's one bridge off and on the island. People have been dying at Rikers Island at a truly alarming rate. So much so that there's a good possibility that management of the federal prisons will be put into federal receivership.

[00:31:39] Sorry, the Rikers Island jail will be put into federal receivership very soon. It is a place that is toxic by every measure that a place could be toxic. What happens there is toxic. It's incredibly violent. It's poorly run. The infrastructure is run down, ill maintained, and not conducive to either health or to safety.

[00:32:05] But the island itself is also toxic and that's a sort of an interesting story. It goes back to the Rikers family that owned the island. The Von Rikens were Dutch settlers who got title to the land as one of the last things that Peter Stuyvesant did before the British Conquered New Amsterdam and took it over. The Von Rikens then anglicized their names because they went with the flow to Rikers.

[00:32:34] They were a slave holding family they made a fortune off of enslaved labor that they then parlayed into social and political influence. And one of the main villains in naming Gotham is Richard Riker, who was the city's recorder, which was like a municipal judge in the 1830s, 1840s. And his task as recorder was, among other things, to oversee the manumission of slaves as New York was ending slavery, but also to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

[00:33:09] And he got together with the the police chief and a couple other political actors and created what came to be known as the Kidnapping Club. 

[00:33:19] Mark M. Bello: We're in the mid 1800s here, right? 

[00:33:22] Rebecca Bratspies: Yes. The run up to the civil war. So the kidnapping club was a scheme not only to arrest people who had liberated themselves from slavery and made it to New York, but also to grab random black New Yorkers and say, Oh, you're a fugitive slave, deny them the right of habeas corpus to prove that they were in fact free New Yorkers, and sell them into slavery. It's villainy on a scale that's really hard to imagine. So that story really, I think. represents a lot about Riker's Island because at the same time that Richard Riker was doing this, he was viewed by white New Yorkers as a courtly, gentlemanly man.

[00:34:10] Someone read a poem about him. He was really adored and respected. While to black New York, he was a menace. He was a lawless menace. And that really represents the current day experience around Rikers Island, the unconstitutional stop and frisk policy that the New York Police Department was doing was targeting black men in particular.

[00:34:33] And we see that the overwhelming majority of people who are incarcerated on Rikers Island are black men. And at the same time, white New York really didn't see anything, right? History sort of repeats itself. And so the move to close Rikers has been growing for a while. It's a movement that is led by formerly incarcerated people, by justice impacted people.

[00:34:57] And I am proud to be allied with them, but I am, small cog in a wheel that I didn't create and I don't lead. The Renewable Rikers project is the idea that once the island is no longer used to incarcerate people, and that was a huge victory in City Council. In 2017 City Council decided that by 2026 the jails on Rikers Island would close. That Rikers Island was irredeemable, and it just needed to be shut. COVID stretched that out a year, so it's now 2027. When the jail closes, though the plan that you know, we, meaning a whole collaboration of people that I'm one of, convinced City Council to commit the land to renewable energy generation and storage and wastewater treatment and composting to get that polluting infrastructure out of communities that were most impacted by mass incarceration on Rikers Island.

[00:36:02] Mark M. Bello: That would be wonderful. 

[00:36:04] Rebecca Bratspies: It's a win for everybody. Is it going to happen? The law says so. You never know what's going to happen, but the jail is going to close in 2027. The city is in the process of assessing the wastewater treatment plant to be built there. There's the report due this fall about the feasibility of wastewater treatment on the island.

[00:36:27] The city has incorporated renewable energy on Rikers Island energy and storage into its overall planning for transition to zero emission energy generation, which is another city law requirement. It's also a state law requirement under a law that was passed in New York called the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

[00:36:51] BOB GATTY: Is the jail the only thing there, or do people live there? 

[00:36:54] Rebecca Bratspies: Only the jail. So the people who live there are people who are incarcerated there. And the other thing to say is this is a jail. This is pre trial detention. Almost. Every single person who is being held on Rikers Island is being held pretrial.

[00:37:10] There are people who have been convicted of nothing but can't afford bail. So this is really about being poor much more than anything else. 

[00:37:20] BOB GATTY: So Trump doesn't need to worry about going to Rikers Island if he's convicted in New York, right? 

[00:37:26] Rebecca Bratspies: No, he would go, if he's convicted in New York, he would go to a real prison.

[00:37:32] He would not be serving his sentence at the municipal jail. 

[00:37:36] BOB GATTY: Okay. Do you have anything else you'd like to talk about Rebecca? This has been good. 

[00:37:44] Rebecca Bratspies: Oh, it's really been fun. I would encourage everybody to check out the comic books. Like I said, they're available for free download. The book is really, my book is really fun.

[00:37:52] I'd love you to check it out. I'm sure you could get it from your library if you don't want to buy it. But it's available wherever books are sold. I've always wanted to say that. 

[00:38:01] BOB GATTY: She always wanted to say that. 

[00:38:03] Mark M. Bello: Rebecca, two years ago, Bob's Baltimore Orioles were the worst team in baseball, and now they're contending for the World Series, so it's all possible.

[00:38:12] Rebecca Bratspies: Yeah, there's a chapter on Shea in Navy Gotham.

[00:38:16] Mark M. Bello: What happened to Shea? Is Shea being used right now? 

[00:38:19] Rebecca Bratspies: Shea Stadium was demolished and that's where Citi Field is. So the Mets play in the same location.

[00:38:27] Mark M. Bello: Oh, Citi Field is on Shea's property? Okay, I didn't know that. 

[00:38:31] Rebecca Bratspies: And there is still a bridge there named after Shea. But the funny thing is that when they named Shea Stadium after William Shea while he was still alive, And his comment was, yeah, 15 minutes after I die, they're going to change the name.

[00:38:44] And so he would be totally down with the fact that there's a new stadium there. It's a beautiful stadium. I've been there. It is. So 

[00:38:52] BOB GATTY: Shea is in your book. 

[00:38:53] Rebecca Bratspies: Shea is in the book. 

[00:38:55] BOB GATTY: Cool. I gotta get this book. Yeah, we gotta get the book. Alright. It's been great fun Rebecca, and we learned a lot, and I thank you for being with us on both the Justice Counts and Lean to the Left podcast.

[00:39:09] Thank you. Thank you.