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Developers are asking Pittsburgh City Council to vote on another major tax giveaway scheme – giving up to $200 million dollars to a handful of Downtown private real estate companies, without any requirements around public benefit. This vote to implement the Downtown Transit Revitalization Improvement District (TRID) will divert tax revenue from the Strip District, Downtown and the North Shore for the next 40 (!) years into the coffers of private corporations.

Right now, when working people and our public agencies are struggling to make ends meet, Pittsburgh City Council is being asked (via the Urban Redevelopment Authority) to hand the Golden Triangle yet another golden ticket.

Take Action: Tell Council to fund neighborhoods, not developers What is the TRID proposal?

A TRID is a type of legislation intended to fund transit improvements—but this one won’t do that. Instead, here’s how this proposal would work: 

• The City (i.e., taxpayers) would initially borrow $50 million to invest exclusively in the TRID area: the Strip District, parts of the North Shore, and Downtown. This money would effectively be a grant paid to wealthy developers, with the City gambling on future tax revenue to pay down the debt.
  • Many Downtown developers are concurrently challenging their commercial property assessments, so that they could pay lower taxes in the future.
    
• Only 20% of this money would be invested in public infrastructure—but they’ve not named any particular public projects that would benefit. By contrast, the remaining 80% has been earmarked for specific, private, for-profit real estate developers.
  
• All future public tax dollars from Downtown, the Strip District, and the North Shore for the next 40 years would be diverted to a “Golden Triangle Reinvestment Fund”, exclusively financing development in a small pocket of Downtown. This fund would be controlled by the non-elected Urban Redevelopment Agency (URA)—not City Council, a public body that is accountable to the public.

Members of Pittsburgh City Council and the Mayor’s administration have said that we are facing a massive City budget crisis. So why are they fast-tracking a $200 million handout to Downtown developers, with almost no public process? 

What’s at stake

We have already given almost a billion dollars to Downtown developers in tax breaks over the past 5 years. Enough is enough. 

Our communities deserve so much more: public transit infrastructure, affordable housing, local food initiatives, street and sidewalk repairs, childcare programs and more. These are critical investments for the well-being of our City—and we cannot fund them if our City Councilmembers signs away millions in tax dollars to private developers for the next four decades.

Transit riders must tell our elected officials to vote NO on implementing the Downtown Transit Revitalization Investment District (TRID). Public dollars – whether borrowed or generated from tax revenue – should be invested across all communities – from Fairywood to Fineview, Brookline to Bloomfield. Our resources should be allocated through the annual City budgeting process, with robust public input to ensure that our tax resources are distributed equitably and address the needs of the moment.

We say: no more handouts to Downtown corporations until our neighborhoods, our small businesses, our workers and our students are given their fair share!

Take Action Now

After you send a letter, CALL your City Councilmember to urge them to vote NO (find your councilmember here):

• District 1 (Northside, Strip District, Parts of Downtown):
  Bobby Wilson (412) 255-2135
• District 2 (West End, Sheraden, Elliott, Banksville):
  Kim Salinetro (412) 255-8963
• District 3 (Oakland, Southside, Arlington, Allentown):
  Bob Charland (412) 255-2130
• District 4 (Beechview, Brookline, Carrick, Overbrook):
  Anthony Coghill (412) 255-2131
• District 5 (Greenfield, Hazelwood, Lincoln Pl, Swisshelm Park):
  Barb Warwick (412) 255-8965
• District 6 (Manchester, Downtown, The Hill, Uptown, Perry Hilltop):
  Danielle Lavelle (412) 255-2134
• District 7 (Bloomfield, Lawrenceville, Polish Hill, Stanton Heights) :
  Deb Gross (412) 255-2140
• District 8 (Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Oakland):
  Erika Strassburger (412) 255-2133
• District 9 (East Liberty, Larimer, Homewood, Garfield):
  Khari Mosley (412) 255-2137

The post ACTION ALERT: Pittsburgh City Council Considers New Slush Fund for Downtown Developers—on our Dime appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

Soy madre y miembro de la comunidad latina que lucha con PPT por un sistema de transporte que realmente sirva a todos. ¿Te unirás a mí haciéndote miembro que paga cuotas?

Me llamo Evelyn Ulysse Alcántara. Uso el transporte público a diario para ir al trabajo, al médico,  actividades de ocio,  reuniones, llevar a mi hijo al colegio— para todo. 

Soy latina y mi inglés no es perfecto, así que cuando me mudé a Pittsburgh me costó usar el transporte público porque había muy poca información disponible en español. Por eso me ofrecí de voluntaria para ayudar como embajadora en los Recorridos de tránsito de PPT. Fue muy frustrante y aislante  intentar aprender a usar el sistema de transporte público por mi cuenta. Sabía que si podía hacer algo para apoyar el aprendizaje de mi comunidad, ¡tenía que hacerlo!   

Ser miembro de PPT no solo ha mejorado mis propias necesidades de transporte. Me abrió la puerta para ayudarme a marcar la diferencia.

Cuando hubo recortes en el transporte público en Beechview, hubo ocasiones en que el autobús o el Tren no venían—y no sabía la razón, porque los cambios sólo se comunicaban en inglés. Pero hoy, si vas a Steel Plaza o Wood Street Station, ¡escucharás anuncios en español! Y hay instrucciones paso a paso en español en la web de PRT. Esto se debe a que PPT y Casa San José se unieron para dar voz a mi comunidad, para que PRT pudiera entender el verdadero impacto que esto estaba teniendo en nosotros.

Este es el verdadero poder de PPT: realmente escuchan a la gente.

Cuando descubrí que PPT, me pedían testimonios sobre el papel que tiene el transporte público en la vida de las personas, para mostrar lo importante que sería un programa de media tarifa. Sabía que tenía que dar mi testimonio, porque necesitábamos actuar para mejorar el acceso. En aquel entonces solo era una idea y un proyecto, pero hoy es una realidad que lleva el servicio de transporte a la gente.

Me encanta el PPT porque sé de primera mano lo que podemos lograr juntos.  

Solo en 2026:

• Llevamos a 120 miembros a Harrisburg para arrojar luz sobre la brecha presupuestaria de 80 millones de dólares y enfatizar la importancia de los servicios para tránsito y viajes compartidos para nuestros representantes.  
• Compartimos habilidades y construimos poder con 170 personas de todo el país, compartimos habilidades y construyeron poder en nuestro Entrenamiento de Primavera 2026. 
• Formamos a 13 becarios de organización comunitaria en toda la colina del barrio de PGH, y las regiones de Lancaster y Lehigh Valley en Pensilvania. 

Por eso quería preguntar: ¿apoyarán el trabajo urgente de PPT haciéndote miembro que paga cuotas hoy?

Puedes apuntarte por solo 2,75 $, ¡el precio actual del billete de autobús del PRT! Ese dinero va directamente a la defensa de un presupuesto de transporte que mueve a TODOS los habitantes de Pensilvania. Todo el mundo merece acceso al transporte público.

¿Nos ayudarás a hacer realidad ese sueño?

The post Transporte Público para la Gente: Únete a la campaña de Socios 2026 appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

Image Description: Evelyn Ulysse Alcantara, a dark-skinned woman in a red PPT shirt, smiles in front of a collaged picture of Pittsburgh

I’m a mother and member of the Latino community fighting with PPT for a transit system that truly serves everyone. Will you join me by becoming a dues-paying member? Donate to become a PPT member!

My name is Evelyn Ulysse Alcantara. I use public transportation daily for going to work, the doctor, leisure activities, meetings, bringing my son to school—everything.

I’m Latina and my English isn’t perfect, so when I first moved to Pittsburgh I struggled to use public transportation because there was so little information available in Spanish. This is why I volunteered to help be an ambassador for PPT’s Transit Tours. It was so frustrating and isolating to try and learn how to use the system by myself. I knew that if I could do something to support my community’s learning, I had to do it!  

Being a PPT member hasn’t just improved my own transit needs. It opened the door to help me make a difference. 

When there were cuts to transit in Beechview, there were times the bus or T didn’t come—and I didn’t know why because the changes were only communicated in English. But today, if you go to Steel Plaza or Wood Street Station, you’ll hear announcements in Spanish! And there are step by step instructions in Spanish on PRT’s website. This is because PPT and Casa San Jose came together to uplift my community’s voice, so that PRT could understand the true impact this was having on us. 

This is PPT’s real power: they truly listen to the people. 

When I first found out about PPT, they were asking for testimonies about the role transit has in people’s lives, to show how important a half-fare program would be. I knew I had to give my testimony, because we needed to take action to improve access. Back then it was just an idea, but today it’s a reality that brings transit service to the people!

I love PPT because I know firsthand what we can accomplish together. 

In 2026 alone, we have: 

• We brought 120 members to Harrisburg to shed light on the $80 million dollar transit budget gap, and emphasise the importance of paratransit and shared ride services to our representatives.  
• We trained 13 community organizing fellows across the Hilltop neighborhood of PGH, and the Lancaster and Lehigh Valley regions of PA. 
• Shared skills and built power with 170 people from across the country at our 2026 Spring Training.

That’s why I wanted to ask: will you support PPT’s urgent work by becoming a dues-paying member today?

You can join for just $2.75—the current cost of a PRT bus fare! That money goes directly towards advocacy for a transit budget that moves ALL Pennsylvanians. Everyone deserves access to public transportation. Will you help us make that dream a reality?

Donate now to join Evelyn as a member—and build transit for the people!

The post Transit for the People: Join the 2026 Member Drive appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

In January Congress passed a “minibus” bill that raided $500 million in previously appropriated coal mine cleanup funds to pay for other federal programs. We’re now seeing the first results of that bill: $45.5 million less in mine cleanup funding every year for the next 11 years. Combined with growing inflation, this means fewer jobs will be supported cleaning up mines and more hazardous coal mining damage won’t be reclaimed in Appalachia and across the country.

When it passed in 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided about $10.9 billion for the reclamation of Abandoned Mine Land (AML) sites across the country in fifteen annual grants to states and tribes. The first four years’ worth of grants were awarded between 2022-2025. The minibus bill cuts $500 million from the total AML funding provided under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – but it was unclear at the time of passage if the $500 million would be cut entirely from the last (fifteenth) year of AML grants or equally across the remaining 11 years worth of annual funding. Now we have our answer.

The 2026 AML grants for states and tribes were announced in May and the cuts are here. According to the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, the $500 million cut “will be applied equally to the remaining 11 grant distribution years, approximately $45.45 million per year.” The figure below shows the annual reduction in funds for each state and tribe, as well as the total cuts that will play out over the next 11 years. Pennsylvania and West Virginia have the largest cuts (by absolute value), at about $15 million and $9 million per year, respectively.

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The cuts are reducing the amount of damage states and tribes can reclaim. Inflation – especially recent rises in fuel costs that can drive up the cost of operating construction equipment – is also lowering the spending power of reclamation dollars even from last year, further reducing the amount of reclamation states and tribes can accomplish in 2026.

States and tribes have a five-year window to spend their FY2026 AML grant, and those agencies will now begin planning for fewer dollars by taking steps like selecting fewer reclamation projects or reducing the scope of projects. In Pennsylvania, for example, the cuts are equivalent to the cost of two large abandoned mine drainage treatment systems.

As we explained in a previous post, the extent of AML damage that needs to be cleaned up is likely twice as large as the existing $10.9 billion in funding– even before $500 million was cut.

This is damage to land and water that has lingered since at least the 1970s, and now residents will have to wait even longer for cleanup. If this cut hadn’t occurred, $45 million per year in more mine cleanup would be put to use across the country in the next few years, removing hazards to the local population and supporting more jobs, such as in construction, doing reclamation work primarily in rural areas. Congress should reverse the $500 million reduction, and should protect the program from similar cuts in the future.

The post Breaking down how much Congress cut AML funds by state appeared first on Ohio River Valley Institute.

June 6, 2026

Read new San Francisco Gate story:

“US Navy finds radiological material in unauthorized storage in San Francisco”

June 2026:

Bayview Hunters Point Community Call to Action and Demands issued by Greenaction and the Marie Harrison Community Foundation, Inc.

June 24th noon rally at San Francisco City Hall to support community demands for health, justice, and full cleanup of all contamination at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard Superfund Site.

June 24, 2026 Call to Action for Bayview Hunters Point

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 4, 2026

Statement on ACT NOW Clean Tech Initiative

ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — On June 4, Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato signed the Advancing Clean Technology for Neighborhood and Next-Generation Opportunity and Workforce (ACT NOW) Executive Order. In response, Ohio River Valley Institute Industrial Decarbonization Program Manager Justine Hackimer issued the following statement:

Clean technology and advanced manufacturing present a generational opportunity to strengthen Allegheny County’s economy, create high-quality jobs, and build on our region’s long history of industrial innovation. 

For generations, southwestern Pennsylvania’s workers, manufacturers, and research institutions helped power economic growth across the country. As global markets increasingly demand cleaner technologies, our region is well-positioned to compete for the industries that will shape the next generation of manufacturing. 

But realizing that opportunity requires more than individual projects. It takes coordination and smart policy like ACT NOW to ensure workers and local communities directly benefit from investments. We applaud County Executive Sara Innamorato’s leadership in shaping a clean tech future that works for all Pennsylvanians.

By investing in the industries of tomorrow while strengthening the systems that support workers and communities, the region can build a more diverse, resilient economy that creates opportunities for generations to come.

###

 

The post Statement on ACT NOW Clean Tech Initiative appeared first on Ohio River Valley Institute.

Price floors and supply management programs seem common sense to policymakers when it comes to oil and minerals, but what about US farmers and our overall food system? By: Patti Naylor, FFD president, George Naylor, FFD board member, and Laurel … Continue reading →

By Vanessa Mascia Turri

Naples became one of Europe’s most ambitious experiments in democratic water governance after Italy’s 2011 referendum against water privatisation. Yet bringing water back into public hands did not necessarily redistribute power over how water itself would be governed.

In 2011, after the Italian referendum against water privatisation, Naples became one of the most ambitious experiments in remunicipalised water governance in Europe. The city transformed its water utility into ABC Napoli (Acqua Bene Comune Napoli), a publicly owned entity presented not simply as a return to public management, but as an attempt to implement the “democracy of the commons” theorised by the Italian Forum of Water Movements.

Within this perspective, water was understood not only as a public service, but as a common good whose governance should involve the direct participation of citizens and social movements.

Over the following decade, Naples became a testing ground for a broader political question that has emerged across many remunicipalisation struggles: what happens when the language and practices of the commons enter public institutions? The Neapolitan experience shows that bringing water back into public hands does not automatically democratise its governance. Instead, participation became continuously negotiated and reshaped through political conflict, financial pressures and struggles over who should control public resources.

From water struggles to the democracy of the commons

Since the early 2000s, struggles against water privatisation have connected local mobilisations to broader debates around the commons. Struggles against water privatisation in Europe have often gone beyond opposition to market reforms and increasingly connected demands for public ownership with broader claims around the commons and direct democracy, as explored throughout the Reimagining, remembering and reclaiming water series. In many countries, water movements have challenged not only privatisation, but also the idea that essential services should be governed through technocratic and top-down forms of management, increasingly linking water struggles to broader claims around the commons and direct democracy, as discussed in Transforming capitalism? The role of the commons and direct democracy in struggles against water privatisation in Europe.

In Italy, these debates converged in the Italian Forum of Water Movements, one of the broadest water movements in Europe. As broader discussions around the commons in Italy have shown, these debates extended well beyond water itself and raised wider questions about collective resources, democracy and institutional change. Under the slogan “si scrive acqua, si legge democrazia” (“it is written water, it is read democracy”), the movement argued that remunicipalisation should involve not only public ownership, but also direct civic participation in water governance.

Naples became the most ambitious attempt to translate this political vision into institutional practice.

 

Poster from the 2011 Italian referendum campaign against water privatization reading “Water is not for sale.” Image courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua.

Naples became the most ambitious attempt to translate this political vision into institutional practice.

Yet public and academic debates on remunicipalisation have often focused on privatisation conflicts and legal transitions, paying far less attention to what happens afterwards. How are participatory mechanisms actually organised inside remunicipalised utilities? How much power are institutions willing to share with social movements and citizens once remunicipalisation has taken place?

My article From theory to practice: evaluating civic participation in Naples’ remunicipalised water service examines these questions through the case of ABC Napoli, reconstructing how participation was progressively organised, contested and reshaped during the decade following remunicipalisation.

Participation and the limits of the commons

At the moment of remunicipalisation, Naples faced deteriorated infrastructures, chronic underinvestment and a massive municipal public debt. For many activists of the Neapolitan water movement, remunicipalisation was therefore not only about public ownership, but also about transforming the priorities of water governance through ecological restoration, infrastructural investment and more equitable access to water.

Over the following decade, ABC Napoli experimented with different forms of civic participation. Initially, the municipal government opened the board of directors to representatives linked to the Italian Forum of Water Movements and to environmental associations. Yet local activists who had led the mobilisation against privatisation were largely excluded from these arrangements, generating immediate tensions over who had the legitimacy to participate in the governance of the utility.

The most ambitious participatory experiment emerged with the creation of the Civic Council, a public assembly open to citizens, activists and ABC workers. Meetings were held directly inside the company and addressed issues such as tariffs, infrastructure maintenance, hiring policies and investment priorities. Delegates from the assemblies also participated in discussions with the board of directors, creating one of the most advanced attempts in Europe to institutionalise direct civic participation inside a remunicipalised water utility.

However, participation became far more conflictual once these assemblies started intervening in concrete political and economic questions. Members of the Civic Council promoted long-term infrastructural investments and the recruitment of specialised personnel while defending the financial stability of the utility. According to several interviewees, these priorities increasingly clashed with those of the municipal government, which was more focused on short-term employment policies and the management of public-sector jobs within a broader context marked by debt, unemployment and political pressures surrounding public employment.

These tensions ultimately led to the removal of the board of directors and to the progressive weakening of participatory governance. In the following years, participation increasingly shifted towards weak consultative mechanisms with limited influence over decision-making processes. Many activists gradually distanced themselves from the experiment, while severe financial constraints continued to limit investments in infrastructures and ecological renewal.

Rather than evolving towards deeper forms of democratic governance, the Neapolitan experience progressively revealed the difficulties of institutionalising the “democracy of the commons” within existing municipal structures and political priorities.

Remunicipalisation without democratisation?

Poster from the Italian public water movement following the 2011 referendum campaign, emphasising water as a public right rather than a source of profit. Image courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua.

The experience of ABC Napoli complicates many celebratory narratives surrounding remunicipalisation. Bringing water back into public hands did not automatically redistribute power inside public governance. On the contrary, the Neapolitan case shows how quickly the language of the commons can become absorbed into existing institutional structures once participation starts challenging concrete political and economic interests.

The weakening of participatory governance inside ABC Napoli did not result from a lack of civic mobilisation or technical expertise. Quite the opposite: activists involved in the water movement developed increasingly detailed proposals on tariffs, infrastructures and long-term investments, becoming capable of intervening directly in the governance of the utility. Participation became problematic precisely when it stopped being symbolic and started questioning how public resources, infrastructures and employment should be managed.

In Naples, these tensions unfolded within a broader context marked by public debt, deteriorated infrastructures, unemployment and long-standing systems of political mediation surrounding public-sector employment. Under these conditions, the “democracy of the commons” increasingly collided with the political and administrative logics shaping municipal governance.

More broadly, the Neapolitan experience suggests that remunicipalisation alone cannot democratise essential services without a real willingness from public institutions to share decision-making power. Commons become politically difficult when they move beyond participation as consultation and start demanding participation as co-governance.

Rather than offering a linear model of democratic transformation, Naples reveals the unresolved tensions that emerge when social movements attempt to institutionalise the commons inside existing state structures. The question, then, is not simply whether remunicipalisation is possible, but whether public institutions are truly willing to democratise the power through which public resources are governed.

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Featured image: Protest sign reading “Public water, public management. Clear?” during a demonstration of the Italian water movement. Photo courtesy of the Forum Italiano dei Movimenti per l’Acqua (acquabenecomune.org).

The post From remunicipalisation to the democracy of the commons appeared first on Undisciplined Environments.

Russian-Speaking Leftists, a group based in Germany, on 19 May published this interview with a socialist activist living in Russia who, they write, “stands for revolutionary defeatism”.[1] I translated it and added the footnotes. SP. Download this article as a PDF Q: Please tell us a little about yourself. A: I am a communist. I […]

This factsheet shows that Ontario can easily accommodate enough solar and wind installations to meet the projected provincial demand for electricity in 2050.  These options will be lower cost and faster to deploy than new nuclear. Read the factsheet

The post Does Ontario Need New Nuclear to Keep its Lights on in 2050? appeared first on Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

This post is based on a talk I gave at the Ecosocialism conference in London on Saturday 30 May, about the Fare Free London campaign, in which I participate, and the wider movements of which it is part. I was on a panel on “Organising the climate movement” with Tyrone Scott of War on Want […]

Check out “Censored News” coverage of May 16

Protest in Utah against Energy Fuels uranium mines and mill

“CENSORED NEWS: Shut Down Energy Fuels — Uranium Mining and Radioactive Dumping on Native People”

 

Backbone Intern Giacomo Moody's Story Map for We the People is now LIVE!.

The Story Map traces the journey of this Iconic image, from its 2007 debut at Seattle Center to its current deployments in pro-democracy protests around the country. Check out Giacomo's great work and the amazing fruits of our collective labors.

Learn more about joining us in DC or pitching in to support our team going to Washington, DC to mark the 250th Birthday of this country. We'll once again take the streets in a defiant and beautiful expression of common cause and our shared commitment to fulfilling mission of creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic nation, and a future we can be proud to hand our children.

Check out the We the People Story Map at BackboneCampaign.org/WeThePeople.

 

 

We the People featured at NW Folklife Festival this weekend!

Two copies will be at Seattle Center this weekend at the NW Folklife Festival, one at the Mural Amphitheater Stage, near the Space Needle and another in the International Fountain Pavilion, with pens for signing. Use this chance to add your signature in time for it to be taken to DC this July 4th!

Over the last 19 years, Backbone's giant We the People banner has served as an icon of people power and our aspirations to fulfill the shared mission of creating a more perfect union. Adding two more Preamble sections has allowed it to appear in even more cities in the past year, collecting signatures and grabbing the attention of the press and public as a symbol of resistance and resilience.

In April 2026, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision barring racial gerrymandering designed to dilutes the voting power of Black communities. The Trump administration called it a victory. For communities on the frontlines of pollution, climate change, and environmental injustice, it is one most deliberate act of erasure and as Dr. Beverly Wright of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) says, it is a “theft of our movement’s inheritance”.

This ruling did not arrive alone. It is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to remove impacted communities — particularly Black communities — from the rooms where decisions get made. Through the courts, through Executive Orders seizing control of elections, through the SAVE Act’s documentation barriers that would block more than 21 million Americans from voting, through a Department of Justice that has sued all 50 states to build a national voter surveillance database, and through the threat of criminal prosecution against election officials and civic organizations.

This administration’s goal is not election integrity. The goal is the permanent political marginalization of Black communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color.

The pattern is unmistakable when you see it whole. The Supreme Court’s ruling applies not just to Congressional districts, but also to state legislative districts and maps for county and municipal elections — determining who gets to serve on a school board, a city council, or in the judiciary. 

Meanwhile, the administration has turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into an agency that violates the very definition of civil rights, redirecting it toward suppressing voting rather than protecting voting rights. 

At the same time, another assault on voting rights is being advanced through Congress. If signed into law, the SAVE Act would require every American to produce a passport or certified birth certificate, in person, at an election office just to register to vote, eliminating online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives. For Black communities, this lands on a foundation of deliberate historical denial: many older Black Americans were never issued birth certificates by governments that refused to recognize their full humanity. 

For Indigenous communities, the SAVE Act’s promise that Tribal IDs will suffice is a fiction, ignoring the fact that virtually no Tribal ID includes place of birth, another barrier buried in the bill’s text. And even with documents in hand, the nearest election office can be a hundred miles away across reservation land, or in Alaska, accessible only by plane. 

These are not bureaucratic inconveniences; they are systemic barriers deeply rooted in this country’s history of racial segregation. They reflect the architecture of laws written around people who were never meant to be politically represented and applied to communities still fighting to be counted.

The same communities facing barriers to their rights to vote are bearing the greatest burden of air pollution, toxic contamination, extreme heat, and climate disasters. And the fact that these communities are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income, and this is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of political exclusion and the enduring legacy of segregation. 

When communities cannot elect representatives who share their priorities, when their votes are diluted through racial gerrymandering, the outcome is a petrochemical plant permitted next to an elementary school, a neighborhood left without clean water, or a community absorbing the full cost of an energy system it had no power to refuse. 

A political system that makes voting harder perpetuates the very conditions that make environmental justice necessary.

This is also why the assault extends beyond the ballot. The same administration that is dismantling voting rights protections is also terrorizing immigrant communities — deportation threats, surveillance, and the weaponization of documentation status as a tool of political control. 

What this administration is attacking, in every instance, is the fundamental democratic principle that the people most affected have a rightful voice in decision-making. 

That principle does not begin and end at the voting booth. It lives in every planning meeting, every regulatory comment period, every public hearing, every coalition room where communities are fighting for their lives and their land. Undocumented neighbors, visa holders, green card holders, people who live and work and raise children in the same fenceline communities, who breathe the same air and drink the same water, carry knowledge and moral authority that no policy process can afford to exclude. 

Voting is an essential mechanism through which communities exercise the most direct form of political power available to our communities, and its protection is non-negotiable. The fight for voting rights and the fight for full community participation are intrinsically linked because they are being waged against us by the same forces, for the same purpose: to ensure that the communities with the most at stake in our climate and environmental future have the least say in shaping it.

 Our communities continue to show up, no matter the barriers put in our way: voters and non-voters, citizens and non-citizens, people who cast ballots, people who testify, and people who organize. No matter the injustices we face, environmental justice leaders know that our solidarity is unstoppable and our resolve to fight for true representation will never be broken by any court or politician.

Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).

Sources:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab

https://www.vote.org/save-act/

https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/narf-save-act-native-voters.pdf

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/environmental-justice-requires-a-healthy-democracy

https://www.aclu.org/trump-on-voting-rights

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/we-arent-paying-enough-attention-to-what-the-scotus-vra-decision-means-for-state-legislatures

https://abcnews.com/Politics/congressional-black-caucus-lose-seats-amid-redistricting-fight/story?id=132965013

LCV – https://www.lcv.org/media-center/lcv-statement-on-scotus-decision-in-louisiana-v-callais/

Not NRDC Action Fund: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/news/scotus-voting-rights-act-decision-hurts-our-democracy-and-the-court-itself/

Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/04/sierra-club-statement-supreme-court-ruling-gut-voting-rights-act

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-supreme-courts-callais-decisions-undermine-the-voting-rights-act-and-sow-election-chaos/

WE ACT: https://weact.org/updates/in-response-to-regressive-voting-rights-act-supreme-court-decision-we-act-committed-to-fighting-for-our-democracy/

The post How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice appeared first on CEED.

At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?

RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events. 

Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen. 

Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was. 

On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while. 

When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening. 

One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.

 But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.

NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.

LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines.  The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy. 

I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.

I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.

NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk. 

 My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.

 If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint. 

If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.

But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.

We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.

LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.

 Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that  many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”

So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid. 

So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands. 

There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and  don’t leave wills.

So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few  generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.

Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture.  He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.

We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.

The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”  

NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration. 

LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that  we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers. 

So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening. 

 A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.

The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough. 

We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work. 

NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?

RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas. 

One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat. 

It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie. 

That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.  

But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.  

Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy. 

In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.

India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers  which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.

It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.

NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.

RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.

The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.

What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided  that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.

Particularly now,  given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.

NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the  matriarchy and the patriarchy.

We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders. 

LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network. 

The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.

We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.

On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by  women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together. 

Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.” 

NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?

RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.

Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens. 

What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.

What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.

NAOMI:  The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of  food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?

LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.

The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.

The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative.  We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.

So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.

The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.

By Nagraj Adve Seeking to cushion the impacts of global warming is like aiming at a moving target. What’s worse, the target is now moving faster. Over the last decade or so, there has been a significant acceleration in the rate of warming globally, from about 0.18 degrees Celsius (°C) per decade during 1970–2010, to […]

PRT Must Set & Track Goals on Ridership, Service Reliability, Rider/Worker Satisfaction and Funding 

A bus network redesign is a tool for massive change—whether good or bad. With the Bus Line Refresh, Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) has the opportunity to make positive changes that our system needs. PRT has shown a commitment to rider needs by updating its Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 to include valuable new neighborhood connectors, expanding service frequencies on popular routes, and more. But in order to make the system work for its riders, PRT needs to commit to improving ridership, reliability, funding, and rider/worker satisfaction—regardless of what shape the Refresh ends up taking.

A strong transit system is one in which ridership is robust, buses and trolleys show up on time, and both riders and workers feel positive about their experience with the service. A strong transit system is also one in which there is stable funding to maintain and expand the service. 

Ridership, Reliability, and Satisfaction Metrics Should Come First

At May’s Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) Board of Director’s committee meetings, we were pleased to see some progress in our organizing for more transit system accountability, with PRT staff reporting to their Board on ridership and reliability trends by month. That’s a start: with more attention paid to these metrics, we hope to see clearer plans for how PRT is going to improve them. We have seen 40% of our total transit service cut over the last 20 years, and PRT service reliability is poor- as a result, transit ridership levels are now at a devastating low. That is why it is critical that PRT identifies goals and a plan for strengthening our system, and makes it clear how the Bus Line Refresh will help meet those goals. 

The Bus Line Refresh needs to be part of a coherent broader PRT strategy around transit restoration, growth and improvement-—not just managing or accelerating decline—and the public must be able to evaluate the success of the plan implementation against those metrics. A Bus Line Refresh that clearly lays out its purpose in strengthening our transit system to the benefit of riders can then be used as a tool to organize for stable and expanded state transit funding.

Since the Bus Line Refresh is cost-neutral, any service improvements in one community must come at the expense of others. Over the last several weeks, our participatory research committee has identified the potentially harmful impacts of this proposal as well as the improvements that riders would see under Draft 2.0.

4 Key Recommendations for a Successful Refresh 1 . PRT should establish specific goals for growing ridership, improving reliability, improving rider/worker satisfaction, and supporting advocacy for expanded state funding.

Whatever the Refresh looks like, our system cannot succeed without dedicated attention and clear progress towards these vital goals.

2 . PRT must create transparency and accountability towards these goals by collecting data related to the impact of the Bus Line Refresh—before, during, and after implementation. 

PRT should report monthly on these critical metrics to the PRT website and Board of Directors, as well as the Western PA Regional Data Center. Data to report include

• Average ridership by route
• On-time performance by route
• Crowding by route
• Number and type of customer complaints and their resolutions (in particular, as a way of daylighting ongoing communications, scheduling, disability and safety-related issues). 

In addition, PRT should run parallel transit rider and transit worker satisfaction surveys, before, during, and after the implementation of the Bus Line Refresh. This will provide critical insights on whether the Refresh has improved or worsened transit outcomes for its primary stakeholders- its users and its workforce. 

Some key questions to ask riders in these surveys are: 

• Overall approval of transit
• Ease of use
• Perception of reliability 
• Satisfaction with amenities at stops, stations or on vehicles 
• Satisfaction with the safety, accessibility and proximity of the bus stops to trip origins and destinations
• First-last mile accessibility
• Satisfaction with value for the fare paid
• Total commute time
• Do you have more or fewer transfers under the Bus Line Refresh than before?
• How long is the wait time for your transfer(s)?
• Do you feel like your trip is very fast, ok, or too long?
• Are you paying more, less, or the same for transit?
• Is your bus easier or harder to identify with the new naming system?
• Demographic and geographic data, to assess Refresh impacts based on those characteristics

3. PRT should maintain features that work for current riders—and make key improvements now, during regular service changes.

• PRT should not cut bus stops as a part of the Bus Line Refresh. Bus stop usage and accessibility must be carefully evaluated before any consideration of stop removals are advanced.
• PRT should maintain the existing route names to the greatest extent possible, to keep buses familiar and legible for riders.
• PRT must minimize the number of new forced transfers under the plan. Adding transfers where riders previously had direct connections causes riders to stop taking transit.
• Some widely beneficial aspects of the Refresh—like the restorations of the 61D and 71A/C/D Downtown—do not need to wait for a full Refresh implementation, and can be implemented during regular service changes. PRT can also make immediate changes to alleviate overcrowding, expand weekend service, and make other minor improvements as appropriate. 

4. The rollout of the Bus Line Refresh is just as important as the plan itself.

The Bus Line Refresh is a massive change to almost the entire system. Without a thoughtful, clearly communicated plan for implementation, riders will not be able to successfully navigate it. Here are some ways that PRT can ensure a clear, harm-minimized rollout:

• In implementing the full Refresh, it is important that neighborhoods gain any service improvements at the same time as any service losses, so that they do not suffer any gaps in transit service. 
• There must also be opportunities built into the implementation process in which PRT pauses and evaluates the impacts of the Refresh—and reverse course if necessary. 

• During implementation, PRT must pay careful attention to how they are scheduling multiple routes sharing a common corridor. PRT schedulers must ensure that those routes are evenly spaced, providing the most convenient level of service for riders, rather than having multiple buses arrive at the same time, with a subsequent large gap in service.
• PRT needs to ensure that their communications on their website, social media, Ready2Ride and third-party transit apps, on the printed schedule and at the bus stop are aligned, so that riders are clear about the changes before they happen.

The post How PRT’s Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 Can Benefit Our Region appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.

Whether you live in McKeesport or McKees Rocks, the Hill District or the South Hills, our public transit system needs to work for everyone.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) will soon close their community engagement period for the second draft of their Bus Line Redesign (BLR). The redesign proposes a completely redrawn map of where transit routes will run. It includes new schedules for how frequently and how late at night buses and trains operate, and renames all the routes in the system.

Tens of thousands of people who use the system every day will be affected. Allegheny County Transit riders, transit workers, businesses, social service providers—we all have a stake in a Bus Line Redesign that works for all.

The Bus Line Refresh plan is complicated and will affect everyone differently. That’s why it’s very important that transit riders and transit workers review your routes and give feedback now! You can check out how your routes will be impacted and give feedback online, by phone, or at an upcoming PRT community event here. 

This is the last opportunity for the public to weigh in before PRT finalizes and ratifies this transit plan—one that will impact our transit service for generations! 

Notable Improvements Under the Proposed Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0

Under the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0, some communities are being proposed for transit service improvements: higher frequency service, or new direct connections to critical destinations. Other communities will see transit service cuts; this is the consequence of Pittsburgh Regional Transit deciding to develop a “cost-neutral” plan rather than a more visionary proposal for service restoration and expansion. 

But riders spoke up about Bus Line Redesign Draft 1.0 and Pittsburgh Regional Transit made important changes based on our feedback! In particular, PRT took our advice to scale back the proposed disruption to our routes. They also provided riders with a commute “calculator”, allowing riders to model proposed changes to our trips, and ensured that the proposed “microtransit zone” communities like McKeesport, the Southern Hilltop and Natrona Heights would be provided with expanded fixed route buses, not irregular on-demand shuttles.

Check the list below to see if your routes/communities would gain significant service under the Refresh Draft 2.0.

Note: Old route numbers are listed where those numbers are continuing to be used, otherwise the new route number is listed here. Routes are listed numerically regardless of alpha-prefix.

Service Restoration 

• Restoration of service to Arnold 
• N63 restored Jenny Lind Ave service
• 71C Restored to downtown and uptown 
• P78 restoration of weekend service

Service Extensions

• 6 Spring Hill extension to North Hills Village
• 12 McKnight extension to Wexford
• 16 Brighton extension to Emsworth
• 28X extension to Carnegie
• 79 extension from Lincoln Park to East Liberty via Larimer
• N1/N3 Extends and restores service to parts of Allegheny And Natrona Heights

Improvements in Service Span

• 7 Spring Garden all day service on weekdays
• D25 Moon/Robinson to Downtown all day, 7 day service ( Also restores 25A connection between Robinson and Moon cut over 15 years ago )
• N77 all-day weekday service on Universal Rd in Penn Hills

New Connections

• O9 new connection between the East End to McKnight Rd ( Pseudo 12U restoration )
• N17 new connection between Bellevue/Avalon/West View to McKnight Rd ( pseudo restoration of 15A / Partial 9/11C restoration )
• 27 new connection between McKees Rocks to Crafton-Ingram shopping center ( Partial Restoration of 24A )
• N34 new connection between Carnegie crosstown to Brentwood loop
• O35 new connection between West Liberty to Oakland 
• N41 new connection between Bower Hill Rd to Carnegie 
• O45 new connection between Carrick to Oakland to East Liberty 
• 54 new connections between Polish Hill to Bloomfield and the Southside Works
• D58 new connections between Swisshelm Park, Squirrel Hill and Greenfield
• 64 new connection to Millvale
• N66 new connection North Braddock to Walmart
• O73 new connection between Homewood to Bates St to Southside Works to Wharton Square
• 81 new connection between Lawrenceville to Bloomfield to Hill District to Mercy Hospital
• N84 new connection between the Hill District and the Strip District
• 86 new connection between the Strip District and Penn Hills
• 87 new connection between the Downtown to the Strip District to Garfield Heights
• D89 new connection between the Lawrenceville to Stanton Heights to East Liberty

The post The Communities that would Benefit Most from the Bus Line Refresh Draft 2.0 appeared first on Pittsburghers for Public Transit.