Published at Yes! magazine, this excerpt from Angelou Ezeilo comes from her book, Engage, Connect, Protect: Empowering Diverse Youth as Environmental Leaders:
Over the last couple of decades working in the environmental space, I’ve discovered that for many Black people, especially older generations, the outdoors conjures a lot of historical negativity that they’d rather forget. Carolyn Finney persuasively investigated this phenomenon in her 2014 book, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. Finney claims that the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial violence have shaped our cultural understanding of the outdoors and our view of who should and can have access to natural spaces.
We see this every year with each new group of interns, hear it in the voices of their parents when they’re asking us questions about their children’s safety in these far-flung parks surrounded by White people. We have their babies, and we’re sending them to places they’ve never been before themselves. In some of these parks, there’s virtually no cellphone coverage, so they can’t get hourly check-ins once their child is gone. We find ourselves doing a lot of counseling and consoling with the parents. In effect, we’re rewriting that family’s entire idea of the outdoors as a dangerous space, shifting the paradigm completely by saying it’s OK to be in those places.
As of 2018, we had sent more than 5,000 interns into national parks and forests across the country, and wonderfully, easily 85 percent of them reported having positive experiences. Many of them now even bring their families back and have picnics with their parents and their aunties and their grandparents. They send us pictures all the time. Their decision to become interns through the foundation has a mushrooming effect on everyone in their lives, rippling outward and touching Black folks across the land.
After the internship is over, many parents are not entirely comfortable with their child announcing that they want to pursue an environmental career, thinking: Is that good and stable enough? Can you make enough money doing that? We need to send out the word that careers in natural resource management can be added to the list of good stable jobs.
For too long, federal land management agencies were focused on one demographic: middle-class White males. But now those long-time White male rangers are retiring. The National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other federal land management agencies are discovering all of this hidden talent among young people they never before considered.
Of late, we have set our sights on another lily-white corner of the environmental world: the outdoor retailer industry. These companies have long been connected to federal land management agencies because they provide gear that outdoor enthusiasts and workers need when toiling outside in all kinds of conditions. If you look around at the workforce of these companies, you see the same homogeneity that plagued the federal agencies. Their demographics were a perfect mirror of each other, except one was private and one was public. [...]
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“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.”
~~Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Message to Congress on the Concentration of Economic Power” (1938)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2011—Republicans leaving FAA shut down and thousands out of work through August:
Over the past week, the partial shutdown of the FAA has been massively overshadowed by the debt ceiling fight. If you needed better evidence for how maimed our nation's political situation has become, think about that: a major federal agency is mostly shut down for more than a week and it gets little attention because there's an internal danger facing our government and economy that so dramatically outweighs it.
Here's a rundown of what you may have missed and where things stand now. The short version is, the FAA will remain closed through August, because House Republicans declined to stay in session after voting on the debt deal. That came despite Senate Democrats, led by Jay Rockefeller, saying they would introduce a bill cutting the rural air subsidies that Republicans had allegedly wanted cut; even Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison decried her party's decision not to end the shutdown before recess.
Why wouldn't Republicans jump at Democrats agreeing to a cut they proposed, aside from wanting to get out of town? Because it was never about a $16.5 million cut, of course.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: The Stormy Daniels hush-money case rides again. Maria Butina's other "relationship." Lindsey Graham throws out the Judiciary Committee rule book; sternly worded protest lodged. FBI report says Trump pals around with terrorists!