EcoAvengers Assemble! Comics & Environmental Justice with Rebecca Bratspies

[00:00:00] Welcome to Most Popular, the podcast about pop culture and the impact it has on society. I'm Dr. Adrienne Trier Bieniek. I'm a professor of sociology, and I will be your host. Today's episode, like, Pretty much most things in my life can be traced back to my love of the Ghostbusters franchise. So, for those of you who do not know, in the original Ghostbusters, like from the 80s, the bad guy, and I'm using air quotes, the bad guy was a man from the Environmental Protection Agency whose ignorance about the trapping of ghosts resulted in the epic end of the film where we get the guys fighting Gozer the Gazarian on a rooftop.

If you remember, they had to walk up 27 flights of stairs to do battle with a Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. It was awesome. Anyway, one unintended consequence of that [00:01:00] film was making an EPA guy the antagonist when looking at it in 2024. He kind of had a point. Like, maybe a business shouldn't build a unit that contains contaminants without any oversight.

Even if those contaminants are ghosts hellbent on taking back their city. Today I am talking with Rebecca Bratspies, an attorney who teaches at the CUNY School of Law. She is a scholar of environmental justice, human rights, and environmental law, and she's also a comic book author. So along with the artist Charlie LaGreca Velasco, they created the comic Environmental Justice Chronicles, which introduces the environmental justice issues that urban communities face.

Rebecca and I talk a lot about the way comics can be used in schools to teach about social activism and social change. And I really wanted to talk with Rebecca about her work, both as an attorney and a comic creator, but also her draw to connecting the environment with the law. The last few years have brought more and more conversations about global warming and the way corporations should be [00:02:00] environmentally regulated and what the science of all of it means for future generations.

In my class in my classes, students have often told me that they are worried about having kids because of the impact of global warming, and honestly, they're not wrong. So I'm very excited to share this conversation as it gives some suggestions for how to be more active and creative at the same time.

Here's my conversation with Rebecca. Hi, everybody. I'm Rebecca Bratspis. I'm a law professor at CUNY School of Law, where I run the Center for Urban Environmental Reform. My scholarly focus and my teaching is centered on environmental justice, which is about the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of people in decisions about the environments that they live in, they work in, and they play in.

And I teach a host of other classes. And I've been teaching for a while. And I also just wrote a book about New York city history called naming Gotham that we'll probably talk about. I make environmental justice comic books. I, one of the things you'll see as we go [00:03:00] through this conversation is I tend to have trouble staying in my lane, so I do a lot of different things.

I have a trouble staying in my lane too. I really relate to that very well. I like to describe myself as a square peg round hole person. Yeah. So can we talk about your background first? Because did law come first? Was that your, your degree? I do have a law degree, but I was actually intending to be a research scientist.

I majored in biology as an undergraduate and I went to do graduate research in genetics at the University of Texas, and I realized that I was not cut out to be a research scientist. The level of meticulous you need and the That wasn't a sentence. The level of sort of care and detail and meticulousness you need, I didn't have.

And really what interested me much more were the social implications of science. And that sort of led me to law with the intention that I would go into [00:04:00] environmental law because that's really where my interests lay. I love when people say I started at X and I moved to Y I think it's such an, especially since this is mainly going out to college students, but I think it's important to hear, like, I started on one path that didn't work and I changed gears and pivoted and things still worked out great, but sometimes that happens, you know.

Absolutely. I always tell students that when they look back, they'll be able to tell a coherent story because they will see the through line, but they may not see it in the moment. And there's nothing wrong with trying something out and saying, you know what, this is not the right fit for me. There are parts of it.

I like parts of it. I don't like and then you can try to take the parts that you do like into the next thing that you do. And it's all grist for the mill. I love that. I was a theater major and I didn't know what I was going to do with that. And then I changed majors six times. Right. And clearly it's some of it stuck because I can speak in front of anyone.

I mean, you can put me anywhere and I can, you [00:05:00] know, hold a room. So I, I love that. What led you to environmental looking at environmental law? And can you talk a little bit about what, what that means? Like what the definition or what it constitutes? Yeah, so I was a really, really little kid during the first Earth Day, which was in 1970.

And my parents took me to a celebration and I was not really old enough to remember it, but either I do or I heard about it so much that I think I remember it. And so it has always been the orientation of my mind towards how can we produce things and have A functioning society without destroying the environment that we need to live in.

I grew up in a steel town. I saw all of the pollution and the main, the steel plant is now shut, but it is a Superfund site, meaning that it was designated as one of the most contaminated sites in the [00:06:00] country and is being cleaned up. So Superfund is one of the environmental laws that. Exist on the federal level.

So during my childhood, the federal government was passing a whole bunch of laws, and I saw the difference that it made in terms of air quality. I didn't see, but I know the difference that it made in terms of water quality, in terms of fish coming back to rivers, in terms of plants living and thriving around waterways.

And so it really became the task of my life to try to figure out. How can we take these what are called externalities, right? We there are costs that. Businesses impose on the rest of us that they don't internalize it as costs that they are paying for their business. And instead we breathe dirty air or drink contaminated water or live on toxic land.

And how can we. Force the internalization of those costs in a fashion that protects [00:07:00] people and makes. Industry better and stronger, because now they're actually addressing the full impacts of what they're doing. This may sound, this is an area that I have very little pre knowledge in, so if this sounds ignorant, I, I apologize.

Is this kind of like the argument that people say where, you know, you need to recycle and do things personally, but if we're not changing the way that, that corporations do things, then the environment, like, that's the, that should be one of the main focuses. Is that kind of what you're, what you're getting at?

Yeah, exactly. Right. The way, and that's what law and regulation do. It does, right? It forces structural change that's far beyond what you or I can do as an individual. And we're presented with choices in the marketplace, and we can make the most responsible choices within that context, but what we really need is for the choices in the marketplace to be different.

And the only [00:08:00] way that's going to happen is if we force those who are producing things to do that differently. And, you know, that's true for protecting the environment. It's also true for protecting people who are the ones who are typically overburdened, right? And that's where environmental justice comes in.

Because if we look at who bears the overwhelming burden of Polluted air, polluted water and polluted land. It is black people, indigenous people and people of color as well as low income people and changing that again requires structural change. It requires looking not just at. How much pollution are you emitting?

But where are the roads and why were the roads? Why were the highways directed through certain communities and not others? Where are the waste transfer stations? Where are the landfills? Where are the power plants? How did we as a society create a situation where [00:09:00] certain communities are overburdened and other communities Right.

Get the benefits. Mm hmm. And how do we change that? And that's really my, my focus is not just on this is bad, but what can we do today and tomorrow to make things better? I love that. I grew up in a really rural community in northern Michigan. And I think it was like 2005 There there's a very wealthy power plant in the area and they got a thing from the, I think it was from the government saying you've spent X amount of dollars that you need.

You have X amount of dollars that you need to spend on improving environmental electricity or whatever. So, basically, the way it worked was they decided to install windmills all over the community, but they picked where my parents are, which is probably 1 of the. Forest most farmer based most already have like, like you said, the landfill within sight of what's going on and they've started.

And what they did was they pitted the neighbors against each other. So they told some neighbors. Hey, so and so is signing on for this. You [00:10:00] should too. And they specifically picked the older. The older neighbors who didn't know to google didn't know to look things up. And I'm not saying anything against windmills, but it was interesting to watch it play out in terms of we're going to come in and make this change in your area.

You don't get a choice, but we are going to make you fight over who wants it and who doesn't. And then they gave insane amounts of money to the people who signed on. So of course they said yes. And then, of course, the people who didn't sign on were like, well, why am I not getting this paycheck? I can still see these things.

It was a very interesting dynamic between a corporation coming in and doing something that has environmental benefits, but also using the folks in the community to muscle in and get what they wanted. So the other aspect of environmental justice, aside from. Like basic fairness and equity in terms of who has to bear burdens is about meaningful involvement in the process and so that what you're describing is exactly a [00:11:00] lack of that, right?

That is an outside force coming in and making choices and manipulating people to to make it happen as opposed to coming in. With the beginning in a listening mode, not a talking mode and finding out what the community is like, what its priorities are, and then seeing whether and how collaboratively they can make choices that work for the corporation and work for the community.

And that's one of the that's the other main pillar of environmental justice. Can we talk about the environmental justice chronicles then? Because you did something that I think is just. Super cool. You have a comic, you have a, a animated series, a comic book, whatever you want to call it, graphic novel.

If we're being fancy, it's a graphic novel, but it's really a series of comic books. Yeah, but this is amazing. So can you talk about what, what got you started down that path? So in 2010, [00:12:00] these two conservative scholars published this article called the death of environmentalism and what they said was, nobody cares anymore.

Young people don't care about the environment. And so, and, you know, the regulation is too complicated. This is this that era is over and made a lot of people really angry. And it wasn't, it didn't actually track with the world. It was very much like this posturing kind of thing, but it made me think, well, I wonder what young people actually know about protecting the environment.

If you've grown up with environmental laws in place, you sort of take for granted that there is a certain that The stuff coming out of the smokestack is not going to is not as toxic as it might be. I mean, maybe you maybe that assumption is not warranted, but like, there's all this law in place. So people assume that things are safe and they're a whole lot better than they were.

So anyway, I was really curious about what young people know. And so I. My kid was in [00:13:00] school here in New York City, so I started going into the classroom and just talking about the environment. And every classroom I went into, at least one student would say in answer to the question, do you live in an environment?

They would say no, because to them, an environment was someplace pristine with trees and bunnies and mountains. And like, I'm all for protecting pristine environments. We need to do that. There's no question about it. But my interest is what about the places where people live? Particularly urban environments and so I wanted a way to reach that kid and to reach the other kids who did not see protecting the environment as a justice issue.

I mean, they cared about it, but not the way that they cared about social justice. So I. Worked with a very talented artist, Charlie Le Greco Velasco, to make the Environmental Justice Chronicles, which follows young people as they organize their community to build a healthy, safe environment in a [00:14:00] poor urban community that didn't have a healthy, safe environment.

Can I ask just a question about the process of that? Yeah. So, how did you Because the thing I like about pop culture is that you find a way to, pop culture basically is just finding a way to make something that everybody is already interested in accessible to anyone, right? So, you know, a really easy example of this is something like music, like everyone is talking about Taylor Swift right now, and if you look at what she's done, the economic benefits of her tour for the country.

That's the, that's kind of the end, right? Like, Oh, I like Taylor Swift. And then you can kind of start to say, Oh, well, look, she's doing this for the economy. And so I'm curious, a way to talk about misogyny in media and yeah. Yes. I just did a podcast with a woman where we talked about the economic impact of Barbie Taylor Swift and Beyonce's tours and how those three things combined.

drove the entire summer economy in the United States. And it's, it's such an [00:15:00] interesting point of view. So how did, how do you connect environmental law and how do you, what's the through line for that into comics? Well again, it's all about trying to make these somewhat esoteric topics accessible and.

You know, law is public. It belongs to all of us. It shouldn't be this rarefied thing that only people who've gone to school for X number of years feel like they have the right to talk about and know and engage with. So, my goal was to really take the civics that kids were learning in high school. There are three branches of government.

Everybody knows that, but no one has a clue what it means. What do they really do? Like, if there's a problem, who does what? So that's what we did. We created a a licensing, right? An attempt to cite a toxic waste facility in an already overburdened community. And we had a young [00:16:00] girl who was really concerned about that, who joined a local group, and together they made a plan to show up at the public meeting And to present evidence.

So it teaches kids, like, what's the difference between data and anecdote? How do you go about collecting data? How do you present at a public meeting? And where, where does a public meeting fit into the process of approving something like a hazardous waste facility? It's also just a really fun story.

Like you can read it. Without saying, I'm going to learn now the art is spectacular. And the story I think is a good story. We tried really hard to make authentic stories that were like, standalone, just fun to read. And then I'm sorry. Go ahead. Sorry. I just want to say. And then alongside of that, right?

We go into the classroom and we teach them about these basic topics about law and about regulation and [00:17:00] about who has it. Discretion over a problem. We talk a lot about administrative discretion and, and, and who gets, like, who gets to decide when is a noise, a nuisance, or when is it just noise? And if you have a problem, how might you go about persuading somebody who has discretion to exercise that discretion in the way that you want them to?

So the other thing we do with the kids is we always create discretion. Environmental justice campaign about an issue that they identify as a concern in their neighborhood or in their school. And then we identify all the legal and regulatory decision makers who have any authority over it and what their authority is, how we might persuade them to use that authority to change things.

I love that. I love the whole approach to this because it's a multi pronged approach to trying to get get some understanding out there. And that's what I, one of the things I took away from, from looking at it is I think you also are [00:18:00] teaching folks not to be afraid to go to those meetings and ask the difficult questions or even sometimes simple questions, but the, the, the hump of.

You're allowed in those rooms like you're allowed to be in that space that your groups. Yeah, that that was one of the things I was taking away that felt very intentional from you. Yeah, yeah, it really is. I mean, we're working with typically marginalized communities and marginalized kids. And part of the goal is to make them feel like.

These public officials work for them and that these spaces are their spaces that they are not only entitled to be there, but that they are necessary voices in the room and kids who've worked with us have testified before City Council. They've had meetings with elected officials. They've held held press conferences.

They've written petitions. They've done all kinds of really cool things that make them the environmental leaders in their community. [00:19:00] It also just feels like it's a good life skill, you know, like it's important to know that you can write to people if you have an issue. There is someone you can call or write or whatever protest petition.

Like it just feels like that's at the basic level. It's a, it's a really good. like introduction to how the process works. And I, that's why I'm drawn to it. I think it's great to use a comic for that effect. I have nieces and nephews and my oldest nephew is almost 12 and I'm watching him shift from illustrated books to the anime world and to the illustrated world.

And I don't know that he grasps that the messages are being carried on that he, from the books that he liked when he was littler. To the comics that he's reading now, but I appreciate that part about like intentional storytelling. I think that's what you're what you're talking about doing. What do you how do you think comics could be?

Better how do you think comics could be used for social justice [00:20:00] work? What place do you think they have in it? How do you see them situated in that world? Well, you know, there's so many artists who are doing incredible work now. The graphic novels are really, I think, cemented a place as literature and not as You know, like, I don't know, when I started this project, it was very marginal.

People were like, you're gonna do what? Yeah, comic books? Seriously? That's, you know, Superman? Nothing wrong with Superman. But there was no sense that this was a legitimate storytelling medium or that it was a legitimate scholarly medium. And I think that has changed radically. There are such incredible graphic novels, you know, when Congressman Lewis makes March or when students read Mouse in school, or there's this incredible book called Wake, which describes the transatlantic slave trade and female led slave revolts.

There are, there's just so many [00:21:00] incredible artists doing this work now that. You know, people are doing all kinds of things, and it's really just a matter of if you're teaching, finding it, and using it, and one of the challenges that we've had is making sure that people know that the Environmental Justice Chronicles exists, and that the books are available for free download on online.

It's so funny that you would bring up John Lewis. I was just talking about that book the other day and the way that he used that to not only tell his life story, but to kind of give a, maybe a new, I don't know if twist is the word, but he definitely gave a new generation a way to look at the civil rights movement and what his position in it was with it.

Yeah, it's so important. Okay. So let's pivot just a little bit and talk about your, your other, your other book. My other thing that is that you're like, you're a law professor, you're doing what? Yeah, but Naming Gotham. So what's that about? So I just wrote, [00:22:00] I came out almost a year ago now, a book called Naming Gotham, the Villains, Rogues and Heroes Behind New York Place Names.

And what it is, is a. A sort of place based vision of New York City history and New York State history and really US history. So what it does is it uses the people that we name things for around the city, the, like, the Major Deegan Expressway, the Kashusco Bridge the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, and it Asks first, who are these people, and why is something named after them?

What did they contribute? What was their contribution? For some of them, there were massive contributions like Adam Clayton Powell of Junior Boulevard in Harlem is named after the first black new yorker became was elected to congress adam clayton powell jr. And he was really a a leader in civil rights.

He had a What became known as the powell amendment because he added it as a [00:23:00] rider to every bill before every committee that he was in which was that no federal funds could be spent on projects that discriminated on the basis of race national origin or Religion, and everybody laughed at him until it became title six of the Civil Rights Act.

Yeah. So, you know, there are heroes like that. I mean, very complicated legacy. He was a complex guy, but and then there were the villains of the story too. Like things are named after people who were pretty freaking evil and that's worth knowing as well. The biggest example of that is Rikers Island, which, you know, has just on its own today, right, is, means, Violence and bigotry and oppression.

And when you look back in history, and you see that the family that owned the island before the city of New York bought it were made a fortune off of enslaved labor. And then Richard Riker as the [00:24:00] recorder of the city, which is a municipal judge. Was part of what became known as the kidnapping club in the run up to the Civil War when the fugitive slave laws were in place and northern courts were sort of coerced to send people who had liberated themselves back into slavery.

Well, he not only. happily participated in that, but also was part, again, of the kidnapping club, which was a plot to grab random black New Yorkers off the street, say that they were fugitive slaves, deny them the right of habeas corpus to prove that they were in fact free and entitled to be released, and then send them into slavery.

So talk about villains, right? There seems to be a relationship between history and law with what you're talking about. Where, what do you see that as? Because I, when I teach basic sociology, I always say that you can't look at what's happening right now in, in this case, 2024, without looking at what's happened in the [00:25:00] past, there's no way we can take.

The goings on right now and not look at what has happened before it and what has influenced it. And I'm sensing that's what's happening with the way you approach looking at the law. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I, it's really important to understand the way that things that may seem neutral on the surface have roots in.

Inequality or roots in discrimination in order to do what we were talking about in terms of environmental justice, right? To build things that are better, fairer, more equal, less polluting is you have to understand how we got to where we are. And so that is what I try to do in my teaching in my scholarship.

It's what I try to do with the comic books and also what naming Gotham is about. So we're getting toward the end. I did want to, if it's okay, I did want to ask. What advice you give for anyone who's interested in [00:26:00] becoming a lawyer or going into the law? Yeah, I'm glad to answer that question. We need people.

We need people to be lawyers, especially people who care about social justice and care about law being fair, right? Having a society where we have a system that we are ruled by law, not ruled by people. And, you know, it doesn't a lot of people think if I want to go to law school, I need to major in something specific as an undergraduate.

You don't there is no major that makes you better prepared for to be a lawyer than any other. But, you know, make sure that you want to do it is what I would say being a lawyer involves a tremendous amount of reading and writing and analysis and also talking. In front of juries and, you know, there are a lot of different ways to be a lawyer, but if you don't like reading and careful [00:27:00] analysis, you probably won't like being a lawyer.

So that's something to keep in mind. It's not just I'm smart and I don't like the sight of blood. So I'll be a lawyer. You have to, you know, it's something like, if you, if you want to be happy at it, you really have to like the parts of the job. But I would say is, you know. Learn what excites you and then think about how it relates to law.

I mean, just like you said, you started off as a theater major and you have skills that you brought from that that help you in your job. Now, if you are an English major or a theater major or a chemistry major or a molecular biology major, like I was. Or a history major or an economics major, all of that background knowledge will be helpful to you in law school.

So don't feel like you can't go unless you take certain classes. You do have to take the the LSAT most of the time. That's sort of unavoidable and then at the end of law school, there's the bar exam, but law can be a wonderful Career. It really can be. [00:28:00] And, you know, for people who want to do the work, it's, it's great.

It's a lot of work. Yeah. But I think it's important to remember that skill sets are, are, are kind of the, the more, I don't want to say more important, but it's, it's the the thing that's going to carry you through more than just what your title is as a degree. You know, it's what you've done with it. Okay.

There's one question I ask everybody at the end of every episode, and you can take your time if you want to answer it. Okay. But the show is called most popular because it's a pop culture podcast. So who or what do you think should be voted most popular? And this can be anything that you can think of.

I'm going to tell you something from naming Gotham because my kid always teases me that I have a crush on cashew scope. Who was a revolutionary war general and I do in fact, when we went to Philadelphia, I made I dragged the whole family to the house there, which is tiny. And it's not a huge exhibit because he was so incredible.

He was a [00:29:00] revolutionary war general. He came over to the United States from Poland to join the fight. And he walked into Benjamin Franklin's printing shop in Philadelphia and said, I'm here to fight for the revolution. I believe in freedom. And he was a passionate anti slavery advocate. During the Revolutionary War, his aide de camp was a free black man named Agrippa Hull, and together they were at a profound force.

And after the Revolutionary War, he went back to Poland, where he led the Kosciuszko Uprising, which overthrew the Russian invasive government. And as The head of the new government, he basically ended serfdom and gave religious freedom to people in Poland, particularly Jews. So he is incredible.

Everybody should know about him. And I think he should be most popular. [00:30:00] This is one of the better answers I've gotten. I love it when it's people that I've never heard of because now I'm in a deep dive later. Well, there's a chapter in Naming Gotham about him. There are lots of books written about him as well, but if what you want is the gossipy human side, then it's, you'll find it in Naming Gotham.

Thank you so much. I feel like I could talk to you all day, but thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. And this has just been a joy to learn from you. Well, it's been so much fun talking with you. Thank you. Thank you again for listening. You can find more episodes of most popular on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts.

Please take the time to follow, rate and review, and if you're so inclined and you are not one of my current students, there's a Patreon for most popular setup in LinkedIn. The show. I'm also going to link in the show notes Rebecca's website with the information on the comic and different blog posts she's written.

More information including additional resources for educators can be found on my website, which is AdrienneTrayer Beanick. com, also linked in the show notes because I know my name is extremely long. [00:31:00] I am also on Instagram at at dr. adriennetv. Thanks again to my, for my students for the encouragement to keep making these episodes and I will see you next time.

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