The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York led a new series of studies that examine how ecological inequalities are influenced by historic — and ongoing — racial and class-based segregation.
Cary Institute urban ecologist Steward Pickett co-led the special issue recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He spoke with WAMC's Lucas Willard.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Pickett: There's segregation throughout the world that is in part a legacy of colonialism, but in part, just because that's how people operate their economies is based on socially defined rankings.
Willard: Tell me about the decision making that goes into the policies that are placed when we're talking about a city or state government when looking to improve flood resiliency or adding green spaces. How does the segregation actually impact the decision making that goes into putting environmental improvements into cities?
Pickett: Oddly enough, it doesn't always it doesn't always play in, and part of that is that urban planning and the way we think about management of cities is kind of core scale.
It's big chunks, and sometimes the different places that people live or the different places that people have available to recreate or how they travel about — they kind of fall through the cracks of the big planning kind of doctrines or habits that we have, and so they actually need to be better taken into account. And in the current philosophy of many people want to say, well, 'let's not let's be colorblind. Let's not see race. Let's not pay attention to race.' And if you explicitly do that, then you are going to miss segregations that exist, and you're going to miss the causes of it that are sometimes hidden or not really not really obvious, so it needs to be elevated to to be recognized in policy as well.
Willard: One of the papers that you worked on took a close look at Baltimore, Maryland, and it examines everything from where trees are planted to where housing is built. But why did you focus on Baltimore? What about the city makes it an interesting place to take a look at this of of this case and this this example of of how segregation affects ecology?
Pickett: One of the reasons is the fact that Baltimore has been — since the late '90s — one of the major long-term social ecological research sites in the United States. It was funded by the National Science Foundation for a couple of decades, and now exists as a consortium run by various institutions. It's symbolic of the importance of segregation because Baltimore was in 1910, 1911, the first city in the United States to enact segregation policies. It became part of the city ordinances that Black people and white people were not allowed to live on the same block. And so there's been a long history of segregation. So there's history that you can actually unpack and say, 'hey, what has this done? How does that play out in the in the present?' And it and it really does. But at the same time, Baltimore isn't unique. Back in the '30s, redlining for mortgage lending purposes for ranking risk to mortgage lending occurred in 239 cities throughout the United States. So there's institutional roots of this in Baltimore, but in many many cities as well. Baltimore is a good study case, but not unique.
Willard: I'm sure that there're several examples, many examples of neighborhoods not receiving really critical infrastructure investment because of a misguided assessment or judgment about the ability of that neighborhood to thrive.
Pickett: That's a very good point, and I think that we have that kind of feeling in a lot of American cities, a lot of bias like that. Very often, these neighborhoods, because there isn't investment, because there isn't the capacity of people to to get loans, the upkeep is impaired, and oddly enough, outsiders, people who have control of the purse and where investments are made, will say, 'Oh well, it's their fault. These people are lazy,' or 'they don't deserve support.' But in fact, a lot of the reason that they are in bad situations economically or educationally is because the outside world has not invested in those places and not corrected the problems that do get corrected in other neighborhoods because they don't have resources, are not part of, not politically empowered. So they they don't they don't have a voice very often.
