As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do.

Race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities.

Environmental justice [means that] no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other.

You know, 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.

To me, charity often is just about giving, because you’re supposed to, or because it’s what you’ve always done — or it’s about giving until it hurts.

If we are going to be part of the solution, we have to engage the problems.

It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility.

I want to be known as someone who got caught trying. Yup. Trying to make communities that didn't think much of themselves see themselves as fabulous, powerful, beautiful, loving, kind, members of this world. That's what I want people to say about me.

We've got to decide that we want to live in a world that is sane and happy and healthy, and that everyone deserves that.