"Ask where the landfill is, and you'll find where the Black people live." That's what Vernice Miller-Travis' grandmother told her. Vernice Miller-Travis helped write the report that first proved, with data, what Black communities had always known: Hazardous waste sites are not randomly distributed; they're concentrated in communities of color.
She has spent decades building the environmental justice movement, co-founding WE ACT for Environmental Justice, leading environmental justice grantmaking at the Ford Foundation, and founding the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Environmental Justice Initiative.
Miller-Travis, who is Ken’s guest today, now serves as executive vice president for environmental and social justice at Metropolitan Group, working with communities and institutions on the racial and economic conflicts that persist in our environment due to regulatory inaction.
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Vernice Miller Travis: The air is not segregating. Yeah. The air is not saying- Yeah ... "Well, this is where the white folks live." Yeah. You need to care about these environmental threats wherever they happen because eventually they're gonna wind up- Yeah ... at your front door, coming out of your faucet, impacting your kids while they're in school or while they're in the park. We are not safe, and just putting it in somebody else's community doesn't make us safe.
Ken Cook: I am here with someone I've known for decades and admired for decades, and I think of Vernice Miller Travis, VMT, as j- I think I'm the only one who calls you that maybe. But I think of you as really one of the founders of environmental justice in the United States. As I read through your resume, every job description or title seems to have first in front of it. First Program Officer for Environmental Justice at the Ford Foundation. You were the founding director of the Environmental Justice Initiative at the Natural Resources Defense Council, co-founder of the legendary We Act for Environmental Justice, the great New York City environmental justice organization, and on and on and on. Author of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. Well, contributing author. Contributing author.
Vernice Miller Travis: Contributing author.
Ken Cook: And so much more, and recently, uh, received from Sierra Club the, uh, Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award.
Vernice Miller Travis: Well, but not to brag, but really, the Bill Riley Award from American University- Yeah in 2024, and with the administrator sitting right there in the audience, and we fought with him- Yeah ... uh, quite a bit. But had it not been for him, there would've been no EJ space at EPA, right? Yeah. So,
Ken Cook: um- Yeah, he was my boss at World Wildlife Fund and Conservation- Was he? Oh, yeah. I worked for him. I didn't know that. He's still- we're still very close.
Vernice Miller Travis: I didn't know that.
Ken Cook: Yeah. He's a
Vernice Miller Travis: good man.
Ken Cook: He's a very good man. He's a really
Vernice Miller Travis: good man.
Ken Cook: So while we're talking biography, say a little bit about how you found your way. You, you were a political science urban planning major in, at Barnard College, right?
Vernice Miller Travis: Barnard and then, and then at Columbia.
Ken Cook: And then at Columbia. Pre-formal recognition of- Oh, yeah ... a field called environmental justice. It
Vernice Miller Travis: was.
Ken Cook: Um- And you were the one of the pioneers who- I
Vernice Miller Travis: was, I was ... broke it open. We lived in Harlem when I was growing up. Every summer, and that's the entirety of the 1960s, we would go to Nassau for the whole summer, Nassau, Bahamas.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So we went the Saturday after I got out of school, and we came back the Saturday before I went back to school.
Ken Cook: Oh, wow.
Vernice Miller Travis: You know, it was like summer camp with my father. Yeah, yeah. But it was summer camp in a place that meant everything to him, and my father was a great swimmer, and he loved the ocean. He wouldn't put his foot in the water when he was in New York, right? Same ocean- Yeah,
Ken Cook: yeah, yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: that he could not convince me was, when I was a child, was the same ocean. I think it was the going back and forth and seeing how dramatically different things were there. We also walked a lot in New York. I did notice, and you couldn't help but notice, that once you left our community, things started to look dramatically different, right? The sidewalks looked different. The tree canopy looked different. You know, Central Park, the northern edge of Central Park is in Harlem.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: But we didn't necessarily feel like it was our park, you know? And there were lots of trees in that park, but once you came outside the park, there were not a lot of trees. There was not a lot of grass. Just the quality of the infrastructure was so fundamentally different in the places where we lived, where my family lived in the rest of the city- Yeah, yeah ... where we visited. And that just- So
Ken Cook: even as a kid, you
Vernice Miller Travis: no- Even as a kid ... you noticed that. It paid, it, it, it- Yeah ... really stuck in my head.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And, you know, then I stumbled into this field. I mean, I didn't go to school to be an environmentalist because-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: you couldn't go to school to be an environmentalist when I was in college. I met, I had met Ben Chavis while I was in college. Yeah. So he was- When he got out of prison from the Wilmington 10, long story, look it up, Wilmington 10, excellent, excellent story. He finished his master's in divinity when he was in falsely imprisoned in North Carolina, and then he came to New York to finish his PhD at Union Theological Seminary. Union Theological Seminary is directly across the street from Barnard College. And so I had worked on the campaign to free, get them out of prison. Mm-hmm. When I was in college, and a friend of mine, a class ahead of me, she'd gone to UNC Chapel Hill to graduate school, and she said, "You know, Ben is coming to New York. He's coming to the community." I said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "He's coming to Union Theological." And I said, "No, he's not." And she said, "I'm telling you, Vernice, he's coming." So after she told me that, I would walk from my apartment to campus, which is a whole three and a half blocks, and I scoured. Some days I'd walk on Broadway looking for Ben Chavis. Some days I'd walk on Claremont Avenue looking for Ben Chavis. Some days I'd walk on Riverside Drive looking for Ben Davis. One day, I ran into him. One cold Janu- frigid January morning, I ran into him on the very corner on the street that I lived on. We lived on the same street. Graduate housing for Union Theological- Yeah, yeah ... was just up the block from, from my apartment. So we stood there talking and talking and talking, and I asked him if he would come to campus and speak to the Black Students Organization, and he said he would, and he did. And my objective for that was that my impression of my classmates, for the most part, Black classmates, was that everybody came to Barnard and Columbia to become a very successful lawyer or a very successful doctor or a very successful engineer or architect or what have you.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: But nobody came because social justice was something that they thought about, right? And I, I felt like a fish out of water the whole time- Uh-huh ... I was there. Plus, the university had this really interesting is a mild way of stating, saying that they had open hostility for the Harlem community, which was really odd, because Columbia University is right dead in the middle- Yeah ... of Harlem, right? Yeah. It's surrounded 360 degrees by Black and brown people.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And I would say, "You know, people come from all over the world to see this place."
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: That Harlem community means something. It's culture. We launched a whole school of literature, the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the doyennes of the movement. Yeah. The first Black woman to graduate from Barnard College. We exalted Zora Neale Hurston on campus. Yeah. But not the community that, that she ultimately would become a part of. And so it was a very uncomfortable time. You know, Ben would then come and talk to us on a regular basis. And when I finished school, I would call him every six months and say, "You know-" The Civil Rights movement leadership is getting kinda old, and I wish somebody would say that to me today about the EJ movement, which is true. But I said, "You know, y'all are getting kinda old, and I think I am the future of the Civil Rights movement, so you need to hire me." He was working at the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice- Mm-hmm. Yeah ... which is a Protestant denomination, very small Protestant denomination. It's the remnant of the church that the Pilgrims established. The Civil Rights division were the very, very active. Andrew Young was an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, but also worked for the Commission for Racial Justice the whole time that he worked for Martin Luther King. So the church paid him while he was doing all that great work with- Yeah SCLC and with Dr. King. So from 23- Yeah ... to 26, I'm constantly harassing him. "You need to hire me. You need to hire me." One day I call him and I say, "Bet, you know, I'm still here." And he says, "Well, we're about to undertake this project, a special project on toxic injustice, and I don't know if you would be interested, but why don't you come and meet our research director, Charles Lee, and if the two of you hit it off, maybe you could come and help us with this report."
Ken Cook: The famous
Vernice Miller Travis: Charles Lee. So the famous Charles Lee. So it was just Charles and I. It was a two-person team. Yeah. Yeah. It was me and Charles. We had a data company that we hired to verify all this data we were collecting, and so my job was to Take the National Priorities List at EPA. For your listeners, the National Priorities list is, well, I don't know if they still keep it, but for decades EPA kept a list of the most hazardous sites in the nation.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And then they did something called hazardous ranking, and they would determine which ones pose imminent threat to human health and the environment. So this is-
Ken Cook: So you worked your way through all the science-y stuff- All of it ... and all of that, right? All of that. You had to... That was- I
Vernice Miller Travis: had to go through. I had to scrub that-
Ken Cook: On the job ...
Vernice Miller Travis: I had to scrub that whole list. Yeah. And I wasn't scrubbing it to debate it. I simply was trying to overlap where those existing sites were that were known to EPA, what the residential zip code was where those sites were located, and what the racial composition was of the zip codes where those hazardous waste sites were located. But I did this by hand, Ken, because I think the only entity that had access to the early stages of geographic information systems- Yeah ... data analysis was the Department of Defense.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: A small church wouldn't have it. Hell, universities didn't have it. Yeah. Nobody had access to GIS, so you know, it took me six months. I had a map the size of this table, and the map was of the whole United States broken out by county. And, you know, what I was finding, and I, you know, to tie this back to one class in college, which was my most difficult class, which was statistics. I certainly remembered some of the fundamental principles, and one of which is if you keep seeing the same pattern repeat itself again and again and again, that means it is not a random occurrence. It is intentional.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: The pattern that we were seeing of the almost one-to-one correlation between where people of color lived and where hazardous waste sites were located was not a random occurrence. And EPA had a whole encyclopedia of rationale for why that was happening, right? First of all, it was random, according to them. Yeah. Secondly, nobody would intentionally target folks-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: for something like this. And I'm like, "Well, my data says X, and my data is your data. You just haven't aggregated the data the way that I did, but here, take it."
Ken Cook: Yeah. "
Vernice Miller Travis: And do your own analysis. I really want you to. I wanna know, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice wants to know what you think." So all of our recommendations in that report are directed at EPA, all of them, because what we found was that you have CERCLA, you have Superfund.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: You have RCRA. Sorry for the acronyms, y'all. Yeah, yeah. These are fundamental environmental laws.
Ken Cook: Bedrock environmental laws.
Vernice Miller Travis: Bedrock environmental laws that govern how our government Follows, uncovers, treats, and makes sure that the public is not an imminent threat for human health
Ken Cook: From hazardous
Vernice Miller Travis: waste from hazardous waste. Yeah, yeah. There's a whole body of law that just looks at this, right? And I became expert in that body of law. And then when I went to graduate school, after doing toxic waste and race, or at the same time, I meet Peggy Shepard and Chuck Sutton-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: who are building this independent Democratic Party, like very, very progressive Democratic organization in Harlem, in West Harlem, the part that's along the- Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah Hudson River. And s- a friend of mine that I had worked on the Jesse Jackson campaign with says, "You need to go and meet these folks in your own neighborhood. They're in your own community, and they're building something that I think you might wanna be a part of." And I, you know, pooh-poohed it for us, like Democratic Party politics in New York, in New York City, in Manhattan. Oh, hell no. Yeah. Um, that's not where I wanna spend my time. I don't think that's the most progressive space that one could occupy. But I go. I'm working at the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. I'm working on this report. I go to this meeting one night in November in my neighborhood, right near City College. And I walk in the door, Ken, and they're having a conversation about the North River Sewage Treatment Plant And I'm like, "What's going on here?" Right? Yeah. And this one night, one meeting, two hours, I realize that the very things I'm looking at, that I'm identifying how they're happening all over the country, is happening in my own community where I live. Of
Ken Cook: course.
Vernice Miller Travis: How could I not know it? Yeah. It's so behemoth. It's huge. Yeah. The sewage treatment plant that they were building, right? How could I not know? So telling the story of what we were finding was really important to them, telling the story differently, and then I had, I had the goods, if you will.
Ken Cook: Mm-hmm.
Vernice Miller Travis: I had the foundation- Yeah ... of what it is we're experiencing here.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? So I wrote my master's thesis about the land use and siting history of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, which is an exercise in blatant racism.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Just blatant racism. But when I realized how interconnected the things were, and I tried to pull them apart, at the base of it was land use and planning. Land use planning and zoning, right? Mm-hmm. And zoning-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: where industrial sites are, right?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Where residential places are. Yeah. Zoning is the mo- one of the most powerful tools that we have in our nation, except people don't pay attention to it, and the people who do it, either at the local government level or on a volunteer level like I did when I joined our local zoning board, have really a lot of power. A
Ken Cook: lot of power.
Vernice Miller Travis: But people don't pay attention to it. Yeah. Like, we live in a community of 100,000 people. If we got 50 people to show up for our planning board meeting, which happened once a month, that was a successful meeting. Yeah. Yeah. If we got 50 out of 100,000 people to show up. So I made the connection that the zoning issue is what was killing us, not only in our community, but across the country, and that somebody had to go in and really understand it, but also try to Inform the field
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: I don't know what y'all think you're doing, but you are committing people of color, immigrant communities, poor communities, to a lifetime of poor health, to a lifetime of premature- Yeah morbidity and mortality because you keep making the same bad decisions. And people like to talk about redlining, and redlining was a thing and is a thing.
Ken Cook: Sure.
Vernice Miller Travis: But the fundamentals of redlining are zoning, right? So you zone that Black people live here.
Ken Cook: So y- by this time you're sort of, you're mid, you're late 20s.
Vernice Miller Travis: Uh, late 20s.
Ken Cook: And has anyone even coined the term environmental justice yet?
Vernice Miller Travis: Yes. I think the term was coined in Warren County, North Carolina.
Ken Cook: Uh-huh, yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: In the early to mid-'80s, residents there, majority African American county, rural, they were engaged in a battle with the State of North Carolina, who determined that they were gonna build a hazardous waste landfill-
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: in-
Ken Cook: It's a landfill fight, wasn't it ... in
Vernice Miller Travis: their community. They hadn't talked to anybody. They hadn't had any public hearings. They hadn't so much
Ken Cook: as- Just looked like a good spot
Vernice Miller Travis: Just looked like a good spot.
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: You know? So, um- Yeah ... let's put
Ken Cook: it here D- do have some Black people nearby,
Vernice Miller Travis: but- But that's okay. Yeah Right? They'll be fine. Eventually, that landfill would be sited and operated there for many years. It's still there, but- They really put this issue on the map before any of the rest of us recognized the correlation between the things that they had recognized. There was a pastor there from the United Church of Christ, who was a member of the Commission for Racial Justice, Leon White, and Leon called up to New York and said, "Hey, we're having this thing here."
Ken Cook: This fight. "
Vernice Miller Travis: We need help. Can you come down and help us?" Right? And so Ben went down and took some other staff, and they got into it, and really helped to bring, I like to say, some scientific organizing.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? People think that, you know, all you gotta do is make a sign and stand on a corner.
Ken Cook: Mm-hmm.
Vernice Miller Travis: And there you have a demonstration, right? Organizing and mobilizing people is a science, and you can tell it's a science 'cause you look at the most successful outcomes, and you see that they went on for a really long time. Yeah. But there's strategy, there's mobilization, there's hope, inspiring people to put themselves on the line to attack a system or some systemic thing that's doing people wrong. Yeah. So Ben brought that, but there were a lot of people in Warren County who had been organizers themselves, and so there's something magical about this place. And
Ken Cook: that was probably from c- civil rights organizing. From
Vernice Miller Travis: civil rights organizing, exactly. The first per- Black person elected to Congress from North Carolina post-Reconstruction was from Warren County, Eva Clayton.
Ken Cook: Congresswoman Clayton-
Vernice Miller Travis: And just- ...
Ken Cook: was, uh, on the agriculture committee. Exactly. And she was a great ally. Exactly. I loved working... We worked on Black farmer issues. I was, uh, invited to a retreat of the agriculture committee- Mm-hmm ... when she was on it. Mm-hmm. I'm not sure why they invited me Bernice, because I wasn't exactly on message with the agriculture committee. I was going in and saying, "Why, why aren't y'all doing more about the environment? You're wrecking the communities that your farmers are and families are living in." And I don't know what I said, but she came up afterward and she said, "You know, you have a nice way of saying hard things to people." I'm so proud. I never thought of myself that way, but it was a fairly hostile audience. Yeah. Except for a few people like her. Uh-huh. And she got it, be- probably-
Vernice Miller Travis: Because of where she lived.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Where she was from.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: I've had the great pleasure of meeting her, and she's still alive.
Ken Cook: I know.
Vernice Miller Travis: Yeah. And she's still very much in the fight. But they, on the ground in Warren County, were the first ones to say environmental racism. So remember- Uh-huh.
Ken Cook: Okay.
Vernice Miller Travis: Yeah ... this conversation started with a framework of environmental racism, but nobody wanted to step into the space with us when we were talking about racism. EP- They didn't
Ken Cook: wanna say the word racist?
Vernice Miller Travis: They didn't want to acknowledge that there could be some connection between environment and racism.
Ken Cook: Hmm.
Vernice Miller Travis: Because when I think about it in retrospect, everyone who was in the environmental space had turned themselves into pretzels. Denying, not seeing, not acknowledging that all of us are not having the same experience
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: Right?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: The people who are in the fields growing the food are not having the same experience, though we shouldn't be eating the food that's sprayed with the things that it's being sprayed with. But it's being sprayed on them directly.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We didn't wanna acknowledge that.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We didn't wanna acknowledge that race was a defining driver-
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: of where our environmental threats were coming from and/or how we were enforcing existing law.
Ken Cook: You could look for smokestacks, uh, I'm just speaking figuratively, or you could look where Black people are.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right. Ken, it's so funny that you say that because, and I've told this story many times, my mother was a nurse, my grandmother was a nurse, and deep in this research for Toxic Waste and Race, I called my grandmother one day, and she was retired by then, and I said, "Grandma, you won't believe what I'm finding." Right? And I tell her. And so when I finish telling her, this is what she says. She says, "How much money did y'all spend on that study?" And I said, "I don't know, Grandma. I'm not responsible for the money. But I'm gonna hazard a guess here and say somewhere between 150,000 and $250,000." And she said So y'all spent a quarter of a million dollars of people's hard-earned money, she said, and I wanna... I'm just gonna guess here and say that the money came from the donations that people make to the church.
Ken Cook: To the church.
Vernice Miller Travis: She said, "I belong to a church." She said, "Half of that money goes to the local church, and half of that money goes to the national church. I know how this works." And then she said, "I'm so glad I don't belong to the United Church of Christ." And I said, "Grandma, really?" I said, "You know that's my denomination. Really, really?" She said, "I'ma tell you why. Because y'all spent a quarter of a million dollars to tell you something that every Black person in America knows to be true." Yeah,
Ken Cook: yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: I, I mean, she caught me off short. That is just the most fundamental truth that there is, right? Yeah. If you're driving through someplace, and you've never been there before, and you're Black, and you wanna find out where the Black people are, ask where the landfill is.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So my grandmother was just speaking straight truth.
Ken Cook: Just the truth. Her lived experience.
Vernice Miller Travis: Her lived experience. And so this was what I said back to her, and I said, "Well, you know, Grandma, that's true. You're absolutely right." I said, "But you're also a scientist, and you know this- Yeah ... that unless and until you can have some peer-reviewed research that can be replicated, the outcome of which can be replicated again and again and again with different variables, but it's gonna tell you the same thing, it's gonna wind up with the same conclusion, then it's like it didn't happen." Yeah, yeah. Essentially, that's the experience of Black people in America. We could tell you a million things that can elucidate any- Yeah ... field of endeavor, any field of endeavor, through our lived experience, and we could tell you what took you God knows how long to figure out, but we coulda told you that.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And when we did tell you, you didn't believe us.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? I said, "So we did this report, Grandma, so that people would know that-" Yeah "... our lived experience is factual. It has a scientific base to it. We had independent folks come and look at our data and run different data sets, and it always turned up the same." Yeah. Where people of color live, no matter where that was, it could be in the most rural Aleutian village in the Arctic Circle, and you're gonna find PCBs.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? You're gonna find something wherever we are. Yeah. And that's the point of this study. And she said, "Well, okay."
Ken Cook: But those early studies, to put it mildly, there was a lag for white environmentalists. But when I first read about those studies, uh, and, and the work that Bob Bullard did, among others- Mm-hmm ... I grew up in the suburbs in St. Louis. Mm-hmm. We didn't have waste around us. Mm. We were white suburbs.
Vernice Miller Travis: They had 'em in East St. Louis.
Ken Cook: They certainly did. But I remember thinking, you know, all the people that were around those, those dumps were poor. They were poor people, and so you could have just said, "Well, where are the poor people?" That's right. And what I'm gonna find there are these problems, or you could say, "Where are those problems? And I'm gonna find poor people around them."
Vernice Miller Travis: That's absolutely true. But the thing that was unique about the research that we did and the conversation that we opened up is that it was much more accepting for people to say, "Well, yeah, poor people always get the short end of the stick."
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And when we would come with the race analysis, folks would say, "This is really about poverty." It made people feel, I don't know why, as if, you know, treating poor people bad-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: is somehow better than treating people of color bad. Yeah. But it made people feel it was more acceptable, right? Yeah. It wasn't right, but we treat poor people bad in this country.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? But what we were saying is that it's not poverty. For example, where we lived in West Harlem, West Harlem was also known as Sugar Hill. So in the writing of the Harlem Renaissance, they talk about this community on a hill, right, with all these well-to-do Black people. That's West Harlem. These were not poor people. They were working class people-
Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: for sure, but there also were a lot of professional Black people. Thurgood Marshall lived in this community.
Ken Cook: Yeah,
Vernice Miller Travis: yeah. Right? Our first Black mayor, David Dinkins, lived in this community. Lots of doctors. Striver's Row in Central Harlem, all doctors, right? And lawyers and judges and, you know, you name it, the Black professionals. But they could not escape living near the North River Sewage Treatment Plant.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: They could not escape having the highest rate of exposure to PM2.5- Yeah, yeah ... fine, fine particle pollution of any community in the Western Hemisphere.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? That was our community. So we were trying to show people that poverty is absolutely a contributing factor, but race- is the most statistically significant- Yeah factor in the research that we've done. Now, many people have come behind us, now we published that report in 1987.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Many people have come re- behind us and tried to replicate the study, and have. Bob did a toxic waste in race at- Yeah ... 10 and a toxic waste in a race at 20, and it just gets worse, right? And I don't think it gets worse because conditions are getting worse, I think it gets worse, what we find, is because the technology and our analytical tools are so much greater and deeper- Yeah, yeah ... and more precise, that when we apply those things, we see that it's actually much more vast- Yeah, yeah than we originally thought, right? Of course. And we're not really doing a lot to try and do anything about that. It's like, that stuff is here, maybe we can just not keep adding to it.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: But, you know, if you live, like in Warren County, if you live in a rural community and they build a hazardous waste landfill with no bells and whistles, right?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So everybody's on well water, so everybody's drinking and it's getting into everybody's drinking water, right?
Ken Cook: Yeah, for
Vernice Miller Travis: sure. And, and that's what we try to explain to people, uh, in New York, that- You might think that because a hazardous waste incinerator or a landfill or a municipal waste facility is in that part of town that you don't live in and you don't go to is not gonna affect you. But if it's emitting into the air, the air is not segregating. Yeah. Yeah. The air is not saying, "Well, this is where the white folks live on the Upper West Side," right? Or on the Upper East Side. For sure. And let's just change the trajectory of what downwind is from that sewage treatment plant, and they won't be affected. And I think that's how we eventually began to help people understand that you need to care about these environmental threats wherever they happen. Because eventually, they're gonna wind up- Yeah ... at your front door, coming out of your faucet, going by your windows, impacting your kids while they're in school or while they're in the park. We are not safe, and just putting it in somebody else's community doesn't make us safe, and it also doesn't give us the environmental and ecological consciousness that we're trying to develop. To develop that, we gotta care about everybody, and you can't have any resonance when you talk about this, globally or domestically, if you leave some people in harm's way- Yeah and you're only talking about the stratosphere. Well, the stratosphere is fine, but I wanna know about ground-level ozone.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? Yeah. What's happening there?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Talk to me about that. Yeah. But the introduction of race into the conversation made everyone uncomfortable. Not those of us who were living with it-
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: but everybody else. Particularly the folks who had been in this conversation for a really long time, and somehow this was completely outside their realm of study-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: their realm of interest. It just wasn't something that they were focused on. And so we battled EPA for a really, really, really long time. Yeah. We battled EPA.
Ken Cook: And this would be in the late '80s, early '90s?
Vernice Miller Travis: Exactly.
Ken Cook: So end of Reagan, beginning of Bush. Exactly. And through, through the Bush administration.
Vernice Miller Travis: Exactly. But Administrator Riley, Bill Riley-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: stood up the first office of, what did he call it? The Office of Environmental Equity was the first office. Uh-huh. Which eventually became the Office of Environmental Justice. But he didn't say, "This is nonsense." Yeah. He said, "Well, let's see what, what more we can learn." And from there to the end of the Biden/Harris administration is a steady trajectory upward.
Ken Cook: And let, and let's talk about that. I thought it was an exciting- burst of intellectual- It
Vernice Miller Travis: was
Ken Cook: realization
Vernice Miller Travis: This is civil rights. This is racial
Ken Cook: justice. 100%.
Vernice Miller Travis: But nobody in the traditional civil rights arena is looking at this set of interconnected issues. And there
Ken Cook: wa- that was another lag, right? The big civil rights organizations-
Vernice Miller Travis: It, it's kinda still a lag. They didn't really wanna talk about the environmental piece of it or the environmental justice piece of it. I think we own some of that for creating a conversation that everybody doesn't see themselves in it. So that's what I've been doing for 40 years.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Is trying to create a conversation backed up by hard data, irrefutable data, that shows that some- Portions of our population are not being treated equitably. The existing environmental laws that we have are not being enforced equitably, which is a violation of the law itself, of the Constitution in terms of their equal protection clause. And then when I started to learn more- Yeah ... about environmental law, public policy, environmental law, land use, right? So I went to graduate school in '92 and '93, which was 10 years- Mm-hmm since I had been out of college.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: In the interim is all this WE ACT work, right? And what it showed me is that these three fields, at least from my perspective, environmental law, public health, and land use law and land use policy, are completely interconnected, and you gotta understand those three things, how they work, but also how they come together to create these environmental hazards that are particularly pernicious for communities of color.
Ken Cook: One of the things I noticed during that period is the profound impact that the practitioners drove tremendous changes in the academy, too.
Vernice Miller Travis: Yes.
Ken Cook: A- and all these, you know, theoretical structures and philosophies and so forth-
Vernice Miller Travis: Yes ...
Ken Cook: just blossomed.
Vernice Miller Travis: Yes. That is absolutely right in terms of the explosion of the field.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: This year, October of this year, 2026, will mark the 35th anniversary of the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, and that is when we really envisioned ourselves as a movement.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We had all these campaigns that were happening. West Oakland was happening. Yeah, yeah. Right? Bayview Hunters Point was happening in the Bay Area. Almost every indigenous reservation had some issue that was happening, particularly around the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuel, right? Yeah. Which for some reason, the Department of Energy seemed to think should go on their reservations without their permission or consent.
Ken Cook: Yeah. We're about to do it again, I'm afraid, but even more, but yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Everywhere, right?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: There were these local issues, and even our struggle in West Harlem, we thought it was only us, Ken. We didn't know. We didn't know that there were other people in New York City. We didn't know there were other people in New York State. And people have said to me, which makes me chafe, that, "Well, you all must have taken, you know, your marching orders from the work in Love Canal." I said, "Do you know how far- Love Canal is from New York City. It's 800 freaking miles. No, we were not paying attention to what they were doing up there, nor were they paying attention to what we were doing in New York City, but people wanted to give the credit for what we were doing- Yeah to Lois' work, and God bless Lois. Yeah. But I'll just say this- Lois Gibbs' work ... about that original work. Within two miles of the subdivision that Lois lived in where they discovered this hazardous waste underneath their new subdivision, within two miles was a public housing development that Black and Latino people lived in, and all of that mobilization and work they did around Love Canal, they never included those people. They never included those people. And all of that work led to CERCLA, right? Yeah. Led to the Superfund. Yeah,
Ken Cook: sure
Vernice Miller Travis: did. Right? It's... I mean, you can never, ever diminish the significance of what they did. Never.
Ken Cook: Completely.
Vernice Miller Travis: But they left out some people.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? And the work that we did was sort of a follow-on to that work. Like, there are all these hazardous waste sites, what are y'all doing?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Where's the dotted line that draws your enforcement actions to these sites that, for the most part, are uncontrolled in these communities and are affecting people at a devastating level? What are you doing, EPA? Yeah. Right? What are you doing? And it turns out we had the highest rate of exposure to PM2.5 of any community in the United States, and of any community in the Western Hemisphere- And
Ken Cook: these are these, this is these- ... at
Vernice Miller Travis: that moment ...
Ken Cook: very fine particles that go deep,
Vernice Miller Travis: deep- That, that are respirable-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: that you inhale.
Ken Cook: They go into your brain, too. Right.
Vernice Miller Travis: They, you inhale them. Yeah. They trigger asthma, lung disease, everything, but you can't see them- Yeah ... because they're so microscopically tiny, and it's the result of combustion engines, right? Yeah. So cars, trucks, buses, planes. Yeah. Right? Heavy duty vehicles. And we're stunned when we get this data. The folks at Mailman School of Public Health are stunned. The folks at Harlem Hospital are stunned. The folks in the New York City Health Department are stunned. Everybody is stunned.
Ken Cook: And no one should have been, but the ...
Vernice Miller Travis: And, and, and I say that, even to this day, Ken, I say no one should have been because this one thing we know. Whenever somebody dies anywhere in these United States- The coroner and/or the local health department, county health department, tribal health department, municipal health department, state health department, somebody has to write on every death certificate what that person died from. So we know that there's an explosion of death certificates coming out of our community that say people are dying from asthma and respiratory disease. Nobody in the New York State Health Department said anything to us. Yeah. Nobody in the New York City Health Department said anything to us. And, you know, do I wish that we didn't find this out? Do I wish- Of course ... that this wasn't true? Of course, I wish that. We also had the highest rate of premature mortality from asthma of any community in the United States.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: This was serious, and so households, mothers coming to these public meetings.
Ken Cook: Something ain't right.
Vernice Miller Travis: Something ain't right here.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And the community moved us-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: to where we needed to be.
Ken Cook: Let's jump ahead, 'cause I wanna g- I wanna get to where we are now. Okay. And it seems like there's a bullseye, o- obviously, on DEI. I mean, I think there's a misogyny and a racism combined here in a way I, I didn't fully see coming how aggressively the second Trump administration, which they didn't do in his first tour of duty, how aggressively This administration has gone after anything that they conceive of as diversity, equity, and inclusion, but also, you know, obviously in the center of all this is environmental justice. Did you see it coming?
Vernice Miller Travis: I don't think I saw it coming as intensely as it has come, and it feels very personal.
Ken Cook: Yes. It
Vernice Miller Travis: feels very, very- How could it not? ... very personal. But I think it's transitory. Don't get me wrong.
Ken Cook: Damaging, but transitory. Okay.
Vernice Miller Travis: I, I'm with you. Damaging, but transitory. Yeah. We will move through this. But what I'm hoping, Ken, is that as we move through it, as we figure out how we're navigating our way through this and to the other side, we take some hard lessons on the things we did right. You know, and even if we weren't all on the same page, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, so many things are worth remembering the struggle- Yeah to accomplish those things, but also taking some lessons. If we could go back and we would do it over again, what would we do differently?
Ken Cook: Mm-hmm.
Vernice Miller Travis: I think we would have different voices in the room.
Ken Cook: Mm-hmm.
Vernice Miller Travis: We would have some of those academics that you're talking about-
Ken Cook: Mm-hmm ...
Vernice Miller Travis: in the room. We would have students. We would have practitioners from the field.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We would have strategists. We would also have people from related fields in the conversation with us, and then we would go forward. But we can do that, right? Mm-hmm. We can do that. Mm-hmm. So we made a lot of progress. Given all the things we didn't do- Yeah ... we still did transformative work.
Ken Cook: Yes.
Vernice Miller Travis: No question. We still did. No
Ken Cook: question.
Vernice Miller Travis: So now, what do we do going forward? And a dear friend of mine, who you probably know, Dr. Beverly Wright-
Ken Cook: Yeah, of course ...
Vernice Miller Travis: is leading a conversation in the Gulf South, particularly in Louisiana, but in the Gulf South region- Yeah ... about reimagining the Clean Air Act, right? Mm-hmm. And so Beverly's thinking is, when we get the reins of power to our government back, and we will get them back, are we gonna spend time and spin our wheels trying to get back to where we were on January 20th, 2025? Or are we gonna have a vision and a plan ready to go about how do we expand that foundation- Mm-hmm of environmental law regulation and statute that we did develop? One, how are we gonna reinstitute it? And here's the, I'm almost hesitant to say this out loud, Ken. The one thing that these folks haven't thought about, and they've thought about a lot about how to dismantle that which we have done- Yeah and accomplished. But the one thing they haven't done because it's too hard, which is why we haven't done it, to go back and reorder that regulatory framework, right? That's heavy lifting. We did that.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We did that for 50 years.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right?
Ken Cook: Mm-hmm.
Vernice Miller Travis: And the reason that we keep going around the edges is because we know how hard it is. Yeah. And there's political reality.
Ken Cook: And there's pushback.
Vernice Miller Travis: And there's pushback,
Ken Cook: and it's- Because we've been successful.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And I'm glad you said that because I, I wanna make sure your listeners know this. The reason that we're fighting as hard as we're fighting, and they're coming for us as hard as they are, is because we were so successful- Yeah at what we did.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So successful.
Ken Cook: I agree.
Vernice Miller Travis: We changed the world as we knew it.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And we changed a global conversation. We set in place a global conversation, as well as a domestic conversation, as well as a hemispheric conversation. We were operating on all of those planes at once, but at the bottom of it was what we did here with Congress, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm. The laws and the legal- Yeah ... framework that we put in place. It was great, but it wasn't sufficient.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So now our next iteration is how do we expand the aperture, right? How do we make those foundational environmental laws, regulations, and statutes- Either be stronger, be more elastic, or the next generation of
Ken Cook: I agree that the pendulum will swing. Mm-hmm. There will be a pro-environmental presence in the White House and in Congress again at some point. But even with that, do you think we can go back into major federal environmental laws and have a working majority in the Congress, or do we have to work- I, I do- ... at the state level, or what do we have
Vernice Miller Travis: to do? Well, we have to do both things.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We have to work at the state level, and it seems to work really well when the states are making change- Yeah ... and driving a more- Pushing ... expansive interpretation, and then it's easier for the federal climate to accept that. Mm-hmm. A lot of work is going on at the state level, as- Yeah as you well know, and in no state is that work more hard-hitting than in the state of California. Yeah. And California has typically set the bar- Yeah ... and set the pace.
Ken Cook: Yep.
Vernice Miller Travis: And we know that it works. The economy in California's not tipping over on the other edge. Yeah. If anything, the economy is growing.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: The GDP of the state is growing, right? Yeah. And doing all these good, and creative, and inventive things does not set you back. So we can lift up California and other states- Yeah ... as this is what happens when you do good, right? Even Texas we can throw in there, right? Look at the reliability of their grid, because they have more wind power than- Yeah any other state in the nation. Yeah. Right? So we have lots of real examples of how the things that we are talking about are not pie in the sky, are not dreaming, but are realistic approaches to solving really difficult environmental issues. We have a lot of the answers. We don't have all the answers, but we have a lot of the answers. We know we need to expand the grid, and we know the best and safest way to do that is with clean and green energy.
Ken Cook: Yep.
Vernice Miller Travis: We know that.
Ken Cook: And it works.
Vernice Miller Travis: And it works.
Ken Cook: Yeah. And it works. We're not making it up anymore. When, you know- I used to say to people, you know, back even 20 years ago, maybe even less, you know, when you talked about a future of solar power and wind power, we were k- a little bit making it up, you know? A little bit like- It
Vernice Miller Travis: was a dream ...
Ken Cook: but now-
Vernice Miller Travis: But now it's reality ...
Ken Cook: it is very real.
Vernice Miller Travis: It's very real.
Ken Cook: As real as the panels on my roof- Exactly ... back in California.
Vernice Miller Travis: Exactly.
Ken Cook: Now, I think you're right. We need to be thinking about when we get our next at-bat, and making the most of it. But let's talk a little bit about how it makes, uh, all of us feel, but especially, I think, leaders in the environmental justice community. I mean, my God, it took you a long time to get everyone's attention, including the environmental establishment, which we've touched on. This bunch coming in w- under Trump, they're not really interested in making it more efficient, making it more effective. They're interested in getting rid of it. Yeah, they're interested in
Vernice Miller Travis: tearing it down.
Ken Cook: Getting rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, that's what Zeldin was hired to do.
Vernice Miller Travis: Yep.
Ken Cook: Just the fact that you have to take certain words out of your guidance- Yeah ... or your grant application. It's
Vernice Miller Travis: ridiculous. You know, you saw a story in the Washington Post, and I'm sure it's a national story, that- The administration now admits, this current administration now admits that the rescinding of billions of dollars in environmental grants by EPA and by DOE was rescinded in blue states particularly and only because they didn't vote for Donald Trump.
Ken Cook: Yeah, revenge.
Vernice Miller Travis: What kind of crap is that?
Ken Cook: Yeah, revenge rescission. Right?
Vernice Miller Travis: And it's being overturned in the courts. Yeah,
Ken Cook: yeah. Now,
Vernice Miller Travis: how that actually unwinds itself in terms of restoration of monies is yet to be determined, and they're gonna continue to fight that until- And they'll
Ken Cook: slow walk
Vernice Miller Travis: it ... until-
Ken Cook: Yeah
Vernice Miller Travis: but here's the upside of this, right? Not only does that money have to be returned and re-granted, or not even re-granted, just released, right? But that money, at least from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund- Yeah ... right, is sitting at Citibank, and it's amassing a massive amount of interest. So now you not only have the principal that was appropriated by Congress that you have to give out, but now you gotta give out the interest too, right? Yeah. So when we come back, we're coming back kicking in the doors, right? Yeah. But we did it legally. We followed all the guidelines. Congress appropriated the money. Only Congress can rescind money that Congress has appropriated, right? Yeah. So I was at a, an event in Raleigh, North Carolina, with an organization called Rural Beacon Initiative. The keynote speaker was former EPA administrator Michael Regan, and I, I introduced him, and he said, "Do not- Think for one moment that we're not gonna get that money back, because we are, right? Yeah. Do not think that we are not gonna go back to the trajectory that we were on and do that work. This is an aberration. Granted, it's a really bloody aberration.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: It's a really evil aberration.
Ken Cook: And mean. And
Vernice Miller Travis: mean-spirited Mean, oh ... but also stupid. Yeah. Also stupid. Yeah. Why would you pay somebody a billion dollars to shut down an offshore wind initiative?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Why would you do that?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And furthermore, where'd you get the money from? Yeah. Congress didn't appropriate it.
Ken Cook: How are things going with, uh, fossil fuel prices right now? Yeah, the, where you could maybe have solar panels and turbines, yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So-
Ken Cook: EVs, yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: we believe in the law. We believe in the Constitution. We believe in the right to vote. We believe in all these things that we thought were bedrock, and I'm not negotiating. I understand. I'm not giving up. I'm not throwing my hands up and saying, "No, I don't believe in it." Of course I believe in it. But we wanna have the ultimate mathematical proof so that everybody knows this is why we did what we did, and we go through all the hoops to validate our own research, to do it again and again, to peer review it, to have this committee look at it and that committee look at it. We do all of that, and then we come forward with new law or a reinterpretation of law or an amendment to the- Yeah ... law and the statute. We don't have time for that, right? We have proved it again and again and again- That's right ... that the science is right because we are cautious by nature, right? Nothing we have ever done as environmentalists has been freewheeling, right? Right. We don't just grab an idea and run with it and try and make policy. We go through a million different variations of proving, and we did that in the EJ field. I spent at least 15 years of my career arguing with people on the other side about whether or not environmental justice and environmental racism was a real thing, and it was an enormous waste of my time in every organization that I worked for in those times that I was doing it. The science is there.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: The case studies are there. The experiments are there. If you're gonna stand on a foundation that talks about environmental racism and inequality in the enforcement of environmental regulations, you can't just say that. Yeah. Right? You gotta have replete proof, and you gotta have reams of it before you walk out the door and, and that's what you say.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: But yet, we still spent an inordinate amount of time arguing with people about- Yeah ... whether or not our existence and our lived reality was real. I'm not doing that anymore. I'm just not.
Ken Cook: I've been saying lately that if you really understand what the regulated industry's, the premise is, it's that there should be no limit to the number of chemicals and the amount of chemicals- That we can emit into the atmosphere as long as they're legal, or if we don't know anything about them, or if it's de minimis or whatever other categories- There's no limit to the number of contaminants, pollutants, body burden chemicals you can have on a baby in the womb.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right.
Ken Cook: No limit. And then that's where we go back to the kitchen table and just say, "Does that sound right to you?"
Vernice Miller Travis: Well, I'm so glad you raised this, because somebody just asked me this the other day. You know, what's the most fundamental error that we made and we have to correct for? And I think it's exactly what you just said, Ken. We started from a premise that said there is a legal allowable limit to pollute.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Now, maybe at the time when we said that, there was X number of chemicals, right?
Ken Cook: Or that we only knew about.
Vernice Miller Travis: Or that we only knew about- Right. Yeah ... right? But now we know there are thousands upon thousands.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And yet I remember a data point that said when it came to EPA's regulating of chemicals, they had regulation and had tested about 7 or 800.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: But there were thousands- Yeah ... in commercial use.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? So we're still got stuff out there we don't really know what its impact is gonna be, but we have to flip that model of environmental regulation, and presume that it's gonna have adverse impact. The question is, before you put it on the market, and before you let it be applied, what are the adverse impacts?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: What can be done to obviate that? And if the answer is nothing, then you can't legally allow that to be used.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Some of our basic science, not that the science is wrong, the science did not appreciate the volume of what would be in the marketplace and in use and in our atmosphere.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? And so now that we know, we have better data, now that we have satellite instrumentation- Yeah that can show us at a more precise level, we need to apply all of that technology to helping us get a much clearer picture of what have we created. Because we are dangerously on the precipice of creating a c- set of conditions that we cannot unravel.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: We're seeing it in climate change. We're seeing it in the acidification of the oceans. We're seeing it in the heat that people are now experiencing, and then- Yeah ... how that has cascading ecological effects. We're seeing it in so many places in so many ways, and- You can't have all this intellectual capacity that we have worldwide and just go blithely through the world and say, "Yeah, you know, it'll work itself out." No, it won't.
Ken Cook: No. I use the metaphor of the kitchen table. If you just sit down with people and say, "Okay, you've got these pesticides in your food, you got this in your air, you got this in your water, you got this in your packaged foods, you got this on your couch, in the dust in your home. You got this coming out of your exhaust pipe." We've regulated only some of them, and still, under that regulation, emissions and pollution is legal.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right.
Ken Cook: It's still coming out.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right.
Ken Cook: Does that seem right to you? Don't you think we should take another look at that? Isn't there some way you can do it differently to completely avoid all of this? So we're not talking about cranking down pollution levels, we're just saying, "Let's get out of coal-
Vernice Miller Travis: Right
Ken Cook: and do solar or wind." Right. "Or let's, you know, let's- Right ... substitute materials so we don't have to have these pesticides on our food." Right. Whatever. Maybe we should just move around that problem with a completely different approach. A
Vernice Miller Travis: different approach.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: I think that's where we are.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And I think that certainly is what the environmental justice constituency has been- Yeah asking for, a different approach. Because the original approach left all of us out of the, you know, how we frame the questions, how we answer the questions, what were the inputs that we looked for. We left out millions and millions- Yeah ... of people-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: in that original framework. So we build on that framework, but we take it to the next level, and we try not to leave anybody out. And I hope for everybody who's listening, those of us who've been at it for a really long time, those of us who are just coming into the space, or any space, that you have the privilege that I believe you share with me. This is my life's work.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And my life's work has mattered.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: It has mattered to a lot of people. It has changed the course of how we think about environmentalism and civil rights in this country, and I'm so absolutely privileged- Yeah ... to have been able to do it. But along the way, we have kicked many asses. Many asses.
Ken Cook: Yes, we
Vernice Miller Travis: have. In courtrooms.
Ken Cook: Yep.
Vernice Miller Travis: In Congress, in the halls of Congress, in scientific journals, in books, in advocacy, in campaigns. The reason that they're coming for us as hard as they're coming for us, and they're throwing everything they got, is because we have been transformative. We have been so successful at what we've done. We have changed the world, and how the world thinks about environment, and how it impacts and enmeshes with human health, and civil rights, and human rights, and social justice, and ecology writ large, and science at every level. You gotta keep your eyes on the prize. What are we here for? What are we trying to do? What are we trying to accomplish? We're trying to make sure that no one suffers- Disproportionately. We're trying to make sure that there is a natural environment for us to leave and bequeath to the next generations, the generations coming behind us. We're trying to make sure that everyone is safe and sound.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And that you can thrive in whatever environment and wherever you are, that you can thrive. Yeah. That's what we've been doing. We've been doing a pretty damn good job of it. We've been doing such a damn good job of it that all the people who felt they were mistreated, right, the big industry folks, the coal barons, you know, the crypto folks who somehow are trying- Yeah to commodify this, right? The folks who are trying to get the materials to make the batteries, and they don't care who pays the cost. People are doing some bad things out there, and we are trying to make sure that there are guardrails. And we've won more than we've lost.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And that's why people are so pissed off at us. Because we keep winning. Right? But we win because the argument is sound. The science is verifiable and irrefutable. And we're making progress, but I, I would say sometimes the biggest legislative victories I was a part of were processes where we sat down at the table with the people on the other side. Superfund reauthorization. We had the oil companies and the chemical companies- Yeah ... at the table with us-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: when we did the last reauthorization of CERCLA. You gotta talk to these other people.
Ken Cook: Sure.
Vernice Miller Travis: And at first you're gonna fight. But eventually you will find there is a common thread that can connect us. Sometimes you gotta work really hard to find that common thread, but you also gotta walk into the room open-
Ken Cook: Yeah ...
Vernice Miller Travis: to the possibility.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: You know, there's that, but also how we talk about our work. That common thread of language that animates all of us to wanna come to the table or to wanna see these problems get resolved so that we can get on the other side of them. Everybody wants to be safe wherever they live. Everybody wants to thrive. Everybody wants to be healthy.
Ken Cook: Yeah. And fairness.
Vernice Miller Travis: And fairness. And somehow when we talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, when we talk about environmental justice, environmental racism, environment period, environmental policy and environmental advocacy- Somehow our language has left people thinking that we're not talking about them.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Like, when we talk about environmental justice, poor white folks don't think we're talking about them. We were always talking about them.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: But something in our language makes them feel that we don't see them, and that's all we've been trying to do for more than 40 years- Yeah ... is making sure that people see us. See us. Yeah. Our language has gotta be so inclusive that people know when we are fighting for the issues that we're fighting for, we're fighting for everyone who's being mistreated, everyone who's not getting a fair shot, everyone who has sick children because of what's happening in the air.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Or the water that your elderly family members have been drinking for years has been contaminated, and now they have some rare conditions that they don't know what to do about, and their, their local hospital doesn't know what to do about. Everyone who's been out in the field producing the food that I eat every day, who's been poisoned because of what they spread on the fields, we're fighting for you.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: And if I haven't made that clear in the things that I have said over these decades, if there's something differently that I need to say, then I'm working right now to try and figure out what is that framework, what are those words, what are the things I need to say to you so you know that this work is about you?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: So many young people didn't vote in the 2024 presidential election. I'm talking about my nephews and my nieces. I'm their Aunt Vernice, and some of them didn't vote. What happened here? And what did you do, Vernice?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Right? It can't just be about that they didn't show up to vote. I didn't give them enough of a reason to vote. I assumed they knew all this amazing stuff that was going on at the White House and how it was rolling out around the country. People didn't know. Yeah. People didn't know, and now that they see all this stuff being clawed back, they're con- They're getting the
Ken Cook: idea ...
Vernice Miller Travis: they're getting the idea. They're concerned, but we failed them. As communicators, we failed them. The administration, the, the Biden Harris administration, didn't do a good job of singing their own praises. I hope to God that we can get back to a place in the next administration where we pick up The baton that they put down, and then we take it to the next level
Ken Cook: I am with you all the way, and the environmentalists I love the most are the environmentalists who take it personally and know that we're imperfect, so we just gotta keep going. And you are, you epitomize exactly that kind of environmentalist in my mind, Ernie, so thank you for spending time with me. Well, and,
Vernice Miller Travis: and, and thank you, dear heart, for still standing, right? For still doing this work, for still moving it forward, um- Yeah ... and never giving up, Ken. Mm-hmm. You have never given up.
Ken Cook: No. We never will, will we?
Vernice Miller Travis: Never will.
Ken Cook: They're gonna carry us out by our green
Vernice Miller Travis: boots. Indeed. Indeed, indeed.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Vernice Miller Travis: Thanks again. A pleasure, dear heart. A pleasure.
Ken Cook: Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram, @kencookspodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about EWG, head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account, @environmentalworkinggroup. Now, if this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, please send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby. Thank you, Moby. And thanks again to all of you for listening. ```