Majora Carter, the founder of Sustainable South Bronx, is a brilliant dynamo of a worldchanger any urban environmentalist needs to give a listen to. The South Bronx isn't exactly the kind of neighbourhood that comes to mind when one thinks of cozy l'il Victoria, but that shouldn't stop us from listening closely to what she has to say because she has much to teach us all.

She presented in February 2006 at TED, the US$4K-plus "by invitation only" annual conference in Monterey (yes, you get to pay them if, after applying to attend, you manage to wrangle an invitation -- this is not an event for wallflowers...). Her talk -- and it is absolutely gripping, like Occam's Razor, it slices and dices your brain and reconfigures preconceived ideas -- is available via thisTedBlog link. Absolutely tune in and listen.

Some key ideas: environmental justice, which basically means that race or class shouldn't determine whether you have to live in a degraded environment or a healthy one; triple bottom line, meaning that developers, government, and community should all profit ("I've discovered my inner capitalist," she says, "and if you haven't, you should," and she adds that "this is a city, not a wilderness preserve"); and "green -- it's the new black," among others.

She describes in wrenching detail (and breakneck speed) how her family's property and community were destroyed by Robert Moses's "land use" policy of highway expansion; how her community was dying after it became home to practically every waste site and trucking hub in the city; how it was "red-lined" by the business community; how its citizens are x-times more likely to die of an environmental or "lifestyle" associated disease or calamity (including crime & getting shot: her own brother, who survived Vietnam, was gunned down 5 blocks from their home), and how a mangy stray puppy she adopted led her, literally, to discover a forgotten patch of riverside access in an otherwise bleak landscape of waste facilities -- access that she developed and leveraged into greenways and park renewal, and most of all: environmental justice, for the South Bronx.