Fast fashion is a disaster. For the planet, for the oppressed workers, and for the souls of those who are constantly exhorted to throw out their clothes and buy new ones. Today’s guest offers an antidote.
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Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams returns to the podcast to talk about his new book, Healthy at Last. Part family memoir, part political mission statement, part science review, part self-help book, and part cookbook, this is a celebration of the possibilities of health for the American people in general, and the Black community in particular.
We talk about the title – from Etta James, and not Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a dream” speech, as I first assumed – and the fact that, in Adams’ words, “slavery never ended,” and remains entrenched in the slave foods that are still harming Black people to this day.
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Today’s guest, Jovita Lee, is co-founder and vice president of Democracy Green, a North Carolina-based non-profit dedicated to environmental justice.
The environmental movement has a long and shameful history of privileging certain parts of the environment over others. Specifically, it’s focused on preserving spaces enjoyed by the rich, and where the rich live.
The result is a nation in which environmental racism condemns poor people and people of color – regardless of income and economic status – to lives cut short by chronic conditions caused and worsened by pollutants and climate instability.
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Meryl Fury is a registered nurse and CEO of the Plant-based Nutrition Movement. And she’s a fierce advocate for justice and sanity in a world lacking both.
Emblematic of her approach to life is the story of how she went vegetarian at the age of 15, to help her family make ends meet during the economic troubles of the mid-1970s. When her mother admonished her to continue eating meat to stay healthy, Fury refused, and even spat out the meat sauce coating her spaghetti.
Just as she outlasted her mother’s insistence 35 years ago, Fury is still striving to outlast the broken food and healthcare systems that disproportionately harm people of color.
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If you’re fortunate enough to have savings, you’ve probably thought about how to invest them responsibly.
The standard answer is to stick your money into no-load mutual funds that track the market and leave it there for as long as possible. Low risk because of the diversification. Low fee because there’s no genius managing your money, just an algorithm. And high return because over the long term, it’s almost impossible to beat the market.
What could possibly be wrong with that?
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For the last 7 years, I’ve worked to improve human health and wellbeing by focusing on better nutrition, vigorous physical activity, sleep hygiene, and stress management.
Turns out I may have been missing the most important determinants of health – the social ones.
Marta Zaraska has written a book that is fun, fascinating, scientifically sound, and socially revolutionary. In Growing Young, she argues that eating well and exercising are all well and good, but spending time with friends, cultivating a positive attitude, and helping others are far more powerful (and enjoyable!) determinants of health.
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Lisa A Smith is a serial entrepreneur who’s made it her life’s work to empower the Black community with information, skills, and philosophies that support health, peace of mind, and mutual support.
Ms Smith is the founder of the Black Health Academy, creator of the Pharm to Table course, and executive director of the 7000+ member Plant Based Nutrition Support Group operating in Detroit (see below for an interview with the founder, Paul Chatlin).
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Carolyn Raffensperger has been advocating for the environment since 1982. She’s currently executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, which is a key proponent of the Precautionary Principle when it comes to balancing economic and environmental impacts.
Raffensperger sees the environmental movement’s best strategy to reverse the destruction of our planet as one of civil rights litigation. Governments, at their core, are here to keep safe the commons upon which all life depends: clean air, clean water, clean soil. She argues that our current policies are violating the “Rights of the Unborn” to a clean and healthy environment.
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adrienne maree brown is author of Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is a writer, social justice facilitator, pleasure activist, healer and doula living in Detroit. brown has been facilitating professionally for over fifteen years, and has worked with hundreds of organizations at all levels of scale including informal collectives, foundations, national networks and more. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World podcast.
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Jesse Herrera is founder and chief visionary of Urban Theory, which I’d categorize as a “think tank” and an “act tank” for social and economic and environmental justice.
Jesse is a former gang member, as well as a recovering architect. An urban planner.
A visionary realist.
We met at the World Healthcare Congress this past May, and immediately bonded by nerding out over sustainable small-plot agricultural tools and strategies, such as 2-wheel Italian tractors and compost tea.
And discovered that our missions aligned. I work with individuals and organizations, while Jesse targets cities and communities.
His passionate vision and clear-headed appraisal of obstacles and opportunities makes for an inspiring conversation.
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