Homelands senior producer Jonathan Miller reports from Ithaca, New York, whose ambitious Green New Deal seeks to deliver drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and major benefits for the community’s most vulnerable members. It’s a hometown story with implications for hometowns everywhere.
Jonathan Miller
Special Projects
The Town that Would Transform the World
Jonathan Miller
Special Projects
The Town that Would Transform the World
In “The Little Town that Would Transform the World,” Homelands senior producer Jonathan Miller reports from Ithaca, New York, whose ambitious Green New Deal seeks to deliver drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and major benefits for the community’s most vulnerable members. It’s a hometown story with implications for hometowns everywhere.
The half-hour piece is the latest episode of Living Downstream, a podcast about environmental justice produced by Steve Mencher of Mensch Media and distributed by Northern California Public Media.
Miller introduces us to Ithaca’s sustainability director, Luis Aguirre-Torres, a Mexican engineer (his Ph.D. research was on entropy) with a global vision and an activist’s passion for disruption. Aguirre-Torres is both an insider and an outsider, a veteran of international climate policymaking but new to Ithaca. Since he arrived this spring, he has sought to broaden the climate conversation to include social change agents and people whose lives are likely to be most affected by climate change — and by climate policies.
We also meet Richard Rivera, an outreach worker at Ithaca’s sprawling homeless encampment, who deserves a podcast of his own, and civil rights activist and organizational consultant Laura Branca. Both know how hard social change can be, but both are hopeful that progress is possible. Both also appreciate a local government that doesn’t just see the connections between social justice and climate change, but pushes hard to bring the two together.
For Mexican women of a certain age, finding decent work can be nearly impossible. Vicki Ponce was in her 50s, selling tamales, grateful for the money her daughter sent home from the U.S.
Whyman Richards says he’ll give anything a try.
Pam Pardy and Blair Ghent left good jobs in Toronto to return home to rural Newfoundland. They thought the quality of life would be better there for their son Brody.
The term “ecovillage” evokes pastoral visions of earthen homes and glistening solar panels. But in cosmopolitan Los Angeles, the idea of ecological alternative living gets stretched to include an urban slum neighborhood and a Mexican-American barrio, complete with electric low-riders and solar-powered rap recording studios.
A story of the birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico.
The birth of a sustainable housing movement in Sonora, in northern Mexico. A