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NYC Council: Powerful testimony by Girl Scouts of NYC, NYers for Parks, and others and Council Members: Grodenchik, Rosenthal, and others..

The Atlantic What is the backstory?

Why a Statue of the ‘Father of Gynecology’ Had to Come Down J. Marion Sims’s advances in medical science were made through experimentation on enslaved women.

The debate over the Sims statue echoes the debate over Confederate monuments, with supporters of keeping the statue accusing those of wanting to remove it of attempting to erase history. Sims developed a groundbreaking series of treatments for a condition known as vesicovaginal fistula, “an abnormal opening between the bladder and the vagina” that causes incontinence, through a series of agonizing experiments on slave women, performed without anesthesia. Those experiments formed the basis of medical breakthroughs that would later be deployed for the benefit of wealthier, whiter clients in more voluntary settings. Sims’s medical advances reflect how white Americans benefited from the slave system as a whole: Just as profits from slavery fueled American industrialization, so modern gynecology was birthed by the anguish of black women treated as chattel. And just as the critical role of slavery as a cornerstone of American capitalism has been neglected until recently, Sims’s reliance on human experimentation has only become controversial in the past few decades.

Play Fair

We’re introducing Play Fair, a new multi-year advocacy campaign for parks leading up to the Mayoral election in 2021. In 2019, we are kicking off the Play Faircampaign by focusing on a significant increase to the expense budget for the Parks Department, which would “baseline,” or secure, funding for much-needed maintenance, gardener and park worker positions in the City budget. Investing in greenspaces also improves air quality, makes our neighborhoods more resilient, and brings New Yorkers closer to nature.

New Yorkers for Parks is partnering with Council Member Barry Grodenchik, Chair of the Parks Committee, the New York League of Conservation Voters, and DC37, the Parks workers’ union, to form the PLAY FAIR COALITION. 

We’re having a rally to formally launch Play Fair, and we want you to be there with us. On Thursday, February 28th from 12:00pm-1:00pm, we’ll be on the Steps of City Hall to demand a bigger piece of the pie for Parks. We need YOU to help us show decision-makers that parks deserve significant public investment in maintenance and operations for cleanliness and safety.

RSVP

The Play Fair Coalition will ask the Mayor and the City Council to direct much-needed maintenance and operations funding to the NYC Parks Department. Although City parks make up 14% of NYC’s land, last year the agency only received a meager 0.59% of the total City budget. For too long, parks and gardens have been overlooked as essential infrastructure for healthy neighborhoods: now is the time to demand change and PLAY FAIR for PARKS!

NOTE: Please arrive to the rally by 11:30 AM to clear security. Signing up isn’t required, but will help us know how many people will be joining us.

RSVP

From The Guardian:

“When you consider 80% of biomass of insects has disappeared in 25-30 years, it is a big concern.”

“More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5% a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.”

Prof Paul Ehrlich, at Stanford Universityin the US, has seen insects vanish first-hand, through his work on checkerspot butterflies on Stanford’s Jasper Ridge reserve. He first studied them in 1960 but they had all gone by 2000, largely due to climate change.

Ehrlich praised the review, saying: “It is extraordinary to have gone through all those studies and analysed them as well as they have.” He said the particularly large declines in aquatic insects were striking. “But they don’t mention that it is human overpopulation and overconsumption that is driving all the things [eradicating insects], including climate change,” he said.

From Patch:
“Wins Backing A fledgling effort to fill empty tree pits across the East Village, Lower East Side, and Chinatown is in the works.”

“Wendy Brawer, who has lived on Rivington St. for three decades, first started this specific street trees effort last October, asking herself, “What is something that is a benefit to all?”

“Brawer hopes a community-based street tree program can be a way to increase community resiliency and mitigate at least some of the impacts.”

“It’s a concrete climate mitigation action,” Brawer said.

“The Parks Department street tree map says the East Village, Lower East Side, and Chinatown gain $600,000 of annual benefits — whether from stormwater reduction, energy conservation, or carbon dioxide emission reductions — from around 5,000 trees across the neighborhoods.”

Register here.

From NYC Council Speaker Corey Johnson: “Dear Friends, 

Block associations bring neighbors together and help to maintain and uplift communities. They advocate for safer streets, work to beautify neighborhoods, cultivate a sense of community among residents, and much more.

Please join us for a workshop with the Citizens Committee for New York City to learn how to start a block association or get connected to an existing block association in your neighborhood.”

Big thanks to local resident and professor Keena Suh for her work with students of Pratt Institute.

With critical thinking, sharp questions, careful listening, an analysis of the issues in the park based on in -person surveys and in-person study of the park and surrounding area, historical analysis, and a wealth of creativity and skill we were grilled on our thoughts.

And this was only week 4 of the class!

We look forward to more, and for the opportunity for the entire neighborhood and the Park’s Department to hear and see their ongoing study and expertise in action – as well as having the neighborhood and Park’s weigh in as a group to what they want, what they think is possible here!

‘The #GreenNewDeal is not just another climate policy … it is a call to redefine politics and establish a new social contract for America.’

We have a path forward. Here’s the video. The Green New Deal

Think FDR’s NEW DEAL?

The Sunrise Movement—Justice Democrats and @AOC are calling on politicians to make a choice: Fossil fuel money or a livable future.

From New Consensus: The Green New Deal – in Summary

Guiding Vision

The Green New Deal will be the most ambitious and transformative national project taken on since Franklin Roosevelt’s original New Deal and World War II economic mobilizations.

The Green New Deal includes investments not only in communities and public infrastructure, but also in private industry to enable a sweeping transformation of our entire economy – with the public receiving appropriate ownership stakes and returns on its investments.

The plan calls on and enables our whole society to participate in a single great national aim: the rapid transition to a forward-looking society of broad opportunity, equal justice, productive prosperity, and environmental sustainability.

Goals (a world like this) and more below:

Goals

The Green New Deal has five main goals:

• achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers;
• create millions of good, high-wage jobs; and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States;
• invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;
• secure clean air and water, climate and community resilience, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment for all;
• promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing the historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities.

A national mobilization of the size and scale of the Green New Deal presents an unprecedented opportunity to not only combat the climate crisis, but also to eliminate poverty in the United States and to make wealth, prosperity, and security available to every person who participates in the transition. Thus, the goals of the Green New Deal represent both what is needed to effectively address climate change and what is needed to transform our current economy to one that is just, prosperous, and sustainable for all Americans.

Projects

The Green New Deal brings together into one coherent whole a multitude of interlocking, complementary, and critically necessary projects, including, among others:

• Replacing or upgrading every U.S. building to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, and durability. Properly designed, this project will create millions of new high-wage jobs in every community and will be designed to foster ownership by communities, with the work being led by local firms, organizations, and co-ops. The project must also make startup capital available to people who want to form new firms and co-ops, and take care to invest especially in communities that have been denied capital and development for generations;
• Meeting 100 percent of our power demand through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources by dramatically expanding and upgrading existing renewable power sources and deploying new capacity. This will be possible only with massive public investments into domestic wind turbine and solar cell industries, among others;
• Making massive investments into U.S. manufacturing industries to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Because these investments generate incalculable public benefits not capturable by private profits, only the public can rationally undertake them;
• Overhauling U.S. transportation systems to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, by investing in zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing, as well as clean, affordable, and accessible public transit and high-speed rail.

Financing the Green New Deal

The Green New Deal will be funded as all other ambitious American projects – including public works, bank bailouts, wars, and tax cuts –have been: through carefully targeted, Congressionally authorized spending. As the post-2008 consensus among serious economists and financiers affirms, this does not require “new taxes” unless inflation emerges. And since (a) well over $5 trillion in tax cuts and war expenditures in recent years have not triggered inflation, (b) the Fed is still struggling to get inflation consistently up to its 2% target, and (c) the Green New Deal will produce new goods and services to keep pace with and absorb new expenditures, there is no more reason to let fear about financing halt progress here than there was to let it halt wars or tax cuts.

It should also be noted that unlike wars and tax cuts, many Green New Deal investments will be compensated, be it through equity stakes, interest payments, or other appropriate returns on investments. These will of course act in counter-inflationary fashion. Similarly, the new prosperity that the Green New Deal will bring to scores of millions of Americans below the top of the income and wealth distributions will rapidly grow the nation’s tax base, vastly expanding federal revenue even without raising marginal tax rates.

Furthermore, the question of how to pay for the Green New Deal must take into account the tremendous costs of inaction. We know scientifically that a plan of the scope and scale of the Green New Deal is the only thing that will stave off irreversible climate catastrophe and, with it, tremendous economic loss. Thus, we must ask not only what the Green New Deal will cost, but also what costs it will avert – especially in light of the growth and prosperity it will create.

Forward Together

The Green New Deal will improve on the New Deal and the Second World War economic mobilizations. These mobilizations, though they brought broad progress and improvements to American life, were also marred by compromises made with conservative politicians to obtain Congressional cooperation. Injustice cannot be the price we pay for a green economy. The Green New Deal projects must be designed from the start to ensure justice and equity for all.

The Green New Deal is Possible and Practical

As a country of 325 million, with the world’s largest and most advanced industrial economy, the United States has every necessary tool at its disposal to achieve the goals of the Green New Deal. For too many decades, fear and complacency have kept our leaders from fulfilling the promise of America to its people. The result is malaise and stagnation, with wealth concentrating ever more densely at the top, poverty overwhelming the bottom, and insecurity menacing the middle. Meanwhile, climate change threatens humanity and most forms of life with extinction. All we’ve awaited throughout this decline is good faith, clear vision, and passionate leadership.

The faith, vision, and passion are here. Now we shall move forward.