The Georgetown Voice, 10/22/21

O C TO B E R 2 2 , 2 02 1

S I T N E M N O IR V N E E H T WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A SUSTAINABLE CAMPUS?

By Annemarie Cuccia

CAN D.C. BUILD BRIDGES WITHOUT BREAKING DOWN COMMUNITY?

By Caroline Hamilton

E U S

END PERFORMATIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM IN D.C.’S CLIMATE RESILIENCE PLAN By the Editorial Board

Contents

October 22, 2021 Volume 54 | Issue 5

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Editor-In-Chief Annemarie Cuccia Managing Editor Sarah Watson

voices

WILLOW VOLKERT

7

internal resources

Executive Editor for RDI Editor for Sexual Violence Coverage Service Chair Social Chair

4

news

Executive Editor Features Editor News Editor Assistant News Editors

features

news

One company’s push for sustainable shopping ALESSANDRA DE LA FUENTE AND NORA SCULLY

8

voices

GREEN hosts clothing swap to promote sustainable fashion KYRA RESNICOW

9

voices

What the pandemic teaches us about disability and disaster AMANDA CHU

11

Max Zhang Allison Grace O’Donnell Paul James Roman Peregrino

What does it mean to be a sustainable campus?

opinion

Executive Editor Annette Hasnas Voices Editor Sarina Dev Assistant Voices Editors Sarah Craig, James Garrow, Kulsum Gulamhusein Editorial Board Chair Darren Jian Editorial Board Annemarie Cuccia, William Hammond, Annabella Hoge, Paul James, Darren Jian, Allison O’Donnell, Sarah Watson, John Woolley, Max Zhang

ANNEMARIE CUCCIA

13

features

14

Can D.C. build bridges without breaking down community?

End performative environmentalism in D.C.’s climate resilience plan

CAROLINE HAMILTON

EDITORIAL BOARD

editorials

leisure

Executive Editor Leisure Editor Assistant Editors Halftime Editor Assistant Halftime Editors

Jakob Levin Roman Peregrino Hayley Salvatore, Tim Tan Alex Brady Langston Lee, Natalia Porras, Carlos Rueda

design

Executive Editor Spread Editors Cover Editor Assistant Design Editors

“The solutions to all these problems share a common starting point: D.C.’s policymakers must recognize that racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice are intertwined.”

Deborah Han Josh Klein, Allison DeRose Insha Momin Max Zhang, Alex Giorno, Anela Ramos

copy

Copy Chief Maya Knepp Assistant Copy Editors Maya Kominsky, Kenny Boggess, Julia Rahimzadeh Editors Eimon Aung, Donovan Barnes, Christopher Boose, Maanasi Chintamani, Jennifer Guo, Alene Hanson, Ian Tracy

multimedia

Executive Editor Podcast Editor Assistant Podcast Editor Photo Editor

PG. 15

on the cover

John Woolley Jillian Seitz Alexes Merritt Nathan Posner

online

Website Editor Assistant Website Editor Social Media Editor Assistant Social Media Editor

Looking at Tomorrow differently

Abby Webster Olivia Martin Orly Salik, Anna Savo Lucy Cook Chetan Dokku, Gokul Sivakumar, Abby Smith

sports

Executive Editor Sports Editor Assistant Editors Halftime Editor Assistant Halftime Editors

↑

leisure

Paul James Caroline Hamilton Annabella Hoge Ethan Greer, Sophie Tafazzoli, Nora Scully

“ecosystem” INSHA MOMIN

CAROLINE SAMOLUK

Anna Pogrebivsky Tyler Salensky Emma Chuck Margaret Hartigan

business

General Manager Alice Gao Assistant Manager of Megan O’Malley Accounts & Sales Assistant Manager of Abigail Keating Alumni Outreach

support

Associate Editors Samantha Tritt, Sky Coffey, Amanda Chu The opinions expressed in The Georgetown Voice do not necessarily represent the views of the administration, faculty, or students of Georgetown University, unless specifically stated. Columns, advertisements, cartoons, and opinion pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the General Board of The Georgetown Voice. The university subscribes to the principle of responsible freedom of expression of its student editors. All materials copyright The Georgetown Voice, unless otherwise indicated.

contact us

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graphic by sean ye; illustrations by deborah han

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

editor@georgetownvoice.com Leavey 424 Box 571066 Georgetown University 3700 O St. NW Washington, DC 20057

Staff Contributors Andrew Arnold, Nathan Barber, Nicholas Budler, Maya Cassady, Natalie Chaudhuri, Elin Choe, Erin Ducharme, Blythe Dujardin, Panna Gattyan, Arshan Goudarzi, Andrea Ho, Jupiter Huang, Lou Jacquin, Julia Kelly, Steven Kingkiner, Lily Kissinger, Graham Krewinghaus, Connor Martin, Bella McGlone, Amelia Myre, Anna Sofia Neil, Ryan Samway, Dane Tedder, Diego Ventero, Amelia Wanamaker, Alec Weiker, Katie Woodhouse

crossword by graham krewinghaus; animal doodle by elin choe

On Being Green: How overconsumption fuels climate change

Page 3

An eclectic collection of jokes, puns, doodles, playlists, and news clips from the collective mind of the Voice staff. → GRAHAM’S CROSSWORD

→ ELIN’S ANIMAL DOODLE

→ PLAYLIST

crossword by graham krewinghaus; animal doodle by elin choe

Songs that make you feel like a treehugger 1. Coastline Hollow Coves 2. As We Ran The National Parks 3. Fall, Fall, Fall Caamp 4. Dirty Paws Of Monsters and Men 5. Transcend Nyota Parker 6. Sedona Houndmouth 7. Sleep on the Floor The Lumineers 8. In The Woods Somewhere Hozier

9. Ends of the Earth Lord Huron 10. Evergreen YEBBA 11. All Will Be Well The Gabe Dixon Band 12. Jelmore Bon Iver 13. 4 Degrees ANOHNI 14. Plastic Moses Sumney 15. Bloomsday Samantha Crain

→ ANSWER TO LAST CROSSWORD

ACROSS

DOWN

1. Oohs and ___ 5. Windows device, e.g.

7. Worrying sound in lecture halls 9. Who has the meats?

12. Misnamed herb (it’s actually from South Asia and the Middle East) 14. Youth climate movement 15. All correct, in a 19th century meme 17. Breaking Bad to Breaking Bad fans, or The Crown to Crown fans 19. “___ ki yay, motherfucker” 22. Student in final yr., or “Mr.” in Spanish 23. Wise, educated 26. Badges indicating rank 28. What Bernie does, once again 29. Decree 31. Fiction for teens 32. “Chandelier” artist

1. We’ll be needing it more and more every summer if we don’t get our shit together 2. Destn. for the best athletes 3. Seeks legal recourse 4. Young activist that sailed to a climate summit 5. Accords the U.S. flip-flops on 6. 1 out of 10 dentists despise this brand 8. Wildebeest 10. “Bears, ____, Battlestar Galactica.”

11. IYK__ 13. Deal backed by AOC and Bernie 15. “__ vey!”

16. Ovens for pottery 18. Oculus, e.g.

20. Irritating, like an insect 21. 100th of a rupee 24. End of Ramadan 25. Platform from which to give a decree 26. State between MN and MO 27. ___-fi 30. Who’s actually grading your papers in a large class

OCTOBER 22, 2021

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By Annemarie Cuccia

I

t didn’t look like they were reimagining campus.

Nothing would have seemed remarkable to those who walked by the 15 people perched on plastic folding chairs in Red Square on Oct. 12, straining to hear over the roar of airplanes.

In fact, nothing seemed remarkable about the event when it was advertised; Georgetown, famous for its town halls in appearance only, was at it again. But as leaders from student environmental groups filtered in, the mood shifted. Maybe it was the fall air. Maybe it was the chance to speak and be listened to. At that moment, a sustainable future for Georgetown seemed within reach.

Or, as Noelle Gignoux (SFS ’22) said, “Access into decision-making places is something [students] have been lacking often, but I think that it is coming.”

The sustainability movement at Georgetown has been student-led and met with much resistance. Student advocates critique the lack of institutional support and transparency, while taking it upon themselves to sort through compost or explain how to recycle. Clubs designed to support university initiatives ideated, wrote, and proposed those initiatives.

But at the same time, university sustainability programs ran more effectively than many knew, poorly publicized

by Georgetown but worth attention. There was, to put it simply, a disconnect between ongoing university efforts and the vision students had for what campus could be.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

That meeting in Red Square was the first attempt to cross that divide. Two university employees most relevant to Georgetown’s environment efforts, Vice President of Sustainability Meghan Chapple and Director of the Georgetown Environmental Initiative (GEI) Pete Marra, sat down with leaders from Georgetown Renewable Energy and Environment Network (GREEN), VegOut, GEI, and other clubs to plan what the next five years of Georgetown sustainability could look like. To a close observer, it was something akin to hope.

“This is a reinvisioning time for Georgetown on sustainability,” Chapple said. She added in an email statement, “I intend to work with the Georgetown community to unleash a culture that promotes a regenerative relationship with the planet.”

The reshaping of sustainability at Georgetown kicked off just a month and a half ago with Chapple’s hiring. For almost a decade, sustainability efforts flowed through the Office of Sustainability (OOS), until last year the office found itself with no full-time staff. A handful of student interns, key to the OOS’s function, were left in limbo, and student activists were unsure where to turn.

Then, the university announced it was hiring a vice president of sustainability.

In name, this was a leap forward in Georgetown’s commitment to sustainability, allowing Chapple to exercise oversight over all areas of campus instead

of being siloed in the Department of Planning and Facilities Management like OOS had been.

“We were definitely excited about her because she was really open to student involvement, she really wanted student interns, she believed in that strongly,” Victoria Boatwright (COL ’22), former president of GREEN, said. Gignoux expressed similar optimism. “I think she does genuinely care about this as well; she’s not just here for a job.”

According to Anu Lamsal (SFS ’23), the current president of GREEN, Chapple’s track record speaks for itself. During her time at George Washington, Chapple outlined the university’s sustainability plan, which Lamsal admired. “She seems to be a lot more enthusiastic about bringing actual change to [Georgetown’s] sustainability plans, like she is pushing her own administration,” she said.

In practice, Boatwright was less optimistic about the process. Though the previous director of OOS left in January, no staff positions in the office have been filled, and Chapple has only been on the job for a month and a half.

Marra, who has been at GEI for two years, insisted that “the intent was never to shut down the office— it was to ramp it up,” a concept that students say should have been communicated earlier when OOS communications went dark during the pandemic. “To

me [it] really just seemed like kicking the ball along and stalling because there are a lot of things the OOS could do,” Boatwright added.

Chapple said at the town hall that the office had been left empty so the new vice president would have free reign to reimagine sustainability initiatives with a fresh team. Once OOS finishes its move from the New South basement to a townhouse, she promised there would be staff, though no one has been hired yet. She also indicated openness to restarting OOS’s internship program, and wants to incorporate intersectionality into sustainability.

For some students, it became hard not to see this whole process as representative of how sustainability work tends to progress on campus. While the university is taking action to drastically increase sustainability efforts on campus, students feel left out of the decision-making process, saying the administration communicated too little, too late. Or, as Boatwright said: “I am looking forward to where Georgetown is going but I am frustrated with the amount of time it has taken.” *** You don’t have to look hard to see potentials for and failures of sustainability on campus. The decrepit solar panels atop the ICC, half-heartedly used recycling bins in Leo’s, and sometimes-renewably-powered GUTS buses all point to a campus that is trying to lessen its environmental impact. But the reality, as is so rarely true, things are actually better than they appear.

Georgetown is a leader in renewable energy: at least half the university’s electricity is currently sourced from solar and renewables, according to Chapple, which she claims is not true for most of Georgetown’s peer institutions (and most don’t have an equivalent position to hers, either).

This data, however, is not on the OOS website.

To the Voice’s knowledge, it has never even been publicly announced. Boatwright argues there is a trend of Georgetown only publicizing goals after they are achieved, which limits the ability of students to actually hold the university accountable for progress.

The great irony of the university’s lack of transparency is that Georgetown is making huge strides with renewables every day. After a proposed solar panel installation in La Plata, Maryland, was widely maligned for both its location on native Piscataway land and the loss of fields of trees to create green energy, Georgetown shifted its focus to investing in existing sources of renewables.

Last October, the university committed to purchasing two-thirds of its electricity from solar farms in Maryland and New Jersey. The 15-year agreement will see Georgetown annually buying 100,000 megawatt-hours of electricity from the PJM grid, run by a regional transmission organization. Even before this agreement was fully in place, Georgetown led U.S. universities in percent of energy consumption coming from renewables.

Boatwright suspects that this move, combined with the university’s new partnership with Georgetown Energy Partners, could set the university on the path to 100 percent renewable energy. The energy partners are set to release a proposal this fall, according to Chapple, to make the university more energy-efficient.

The goal of the partnership is threefold: fully

renewable energy by 2035, a 35 percent reduction in energy consumption, and carbon neutrality by 2030.

As energy consumption goes down, the university is hopeful they will only need the electricity already purchased from the PJM grid.

Georgetown has not formally announced this goal to the student body, however, which makes Boatwright wonder if the university really thinks it’s feasible.

Lamsal took a dismal view: “This is a very unrealistic goal, and we have told them that, but they think somehow it’s obtainable,” she said.

While most energy consumption information is technically available online, the endowment is another story. In February of 2020, Georgetown agreed to GU Fossil Free’s (GUFF) demand that it divest its $1.9 billion endowment from all fossil fuels after six years of student advocacy. The announcement came mid-way through voting on a student referendum about whether the university should divest and has been followed with few updates.

Georgetown has long kept its investments private, and the policy has drawn repeated student criticisms about a lack of transparency, especially after previously undisclosed investments in fossil fuels came to light.

Boatwright and other GUFF members are continuing to ask for accountability on divestment, even if it is just the percentage of the endowment that is fully divested. “If you deny the ways that we have asked for [accountability], then you need to present a way,” she said.

The question of accountability was laced throughout the town hall. Students pointed out that the general population lacks knowledge on some of the most basic sustainability issues, such as if the university even recycles (a long-repeated myth that members of GREEN continually try to disprove), and how far along the divestment is. Even engaged students struggle to get answers from the university about their carbon footprint, investments, and energy consumption.

Though OOS used to post sustainability reports on its website, none are available for the last ten years. “I just don’t know what is going on with those reports in terms of circulation and distribution,” GUSA Vice Speaker Rowlie Flores (COL ’22) said, adding that GUSA has been requesting the reports for years.

This information is crucial because historically, the onus has been on students to jumpstart sustainability initiatives. Even when the university began to listen, like with divestment, it often took years of campaigning to make a change.

“We have worked very closely with administration in the past, and it hasn’t always been fruitful,” Lamsal said. “Our role really is to act as a checking mechanism for administration.”

With the past year’s administrative changes, some GREEN members are hoping that job gets easier.

Already, transparency from the administration has increased, according to Gignoux, who was encouraged by the return of monthly town halls with added administrative presence.

Chapple also seemed receptive to suggestions made at the town hall to begin a monthly newsletter with sustainability updates. “My hope is we can be really transparent about how our goals are and really transparent about how close we are to those goals or not,” she said.

illustration by sean ye; design by allison derose

Lamsal has no illusions that this will lead to perfect information sharing. “I’m still kind of skeptical simply because she is part of the administration and Georgetown really likes to sort of pull the rug out from under students.”

But any measurable increase in transparency and action from the university could shift how sustainability work is done on campus. With clubs spending so much time lobbying the university, they’ve had less available time to educate students. While GREEN has some educational programming, making that their key focus would be a sea change. It would also be a potential answer to the frustrated question Chapple asked at the town hall: “How do we get the rest of the student body on board with this?”

In the past, GREEN has advocated for sustainability education to be a key part of any new student’s orientation to Georgetown, pushing to include discussions of how to recycle and compost on campus in NSO and even creating a What’s a Hoya course in 2019, which 400 students completed—all initiatives Chapple indicated she would follow up on.

“We are so much more well-positioned to educate the student body sometimes because they are our peers, and we are learning right alongside them,” Gignoux pointed out.

The majority of that education is around waste.

As a campus, Georgetown generates a considerable amount of plastic waste, which students don’t always know how to dispose of, especially with plastic-only options at Leos. During the trial period of a pilot compost program run through GREEN and OOS in 2019, students often put trash in the compost bins, according to Flores. Since that program ended, members of GREEN have been “guerilla composting” in buckets and walking or driving it to a drop-off point in Dupont Circle. According to Chapple, a reiteration of the program is set to begin in downstairs Leo’s sometime in the next few weeks, and the university is in the process of hiring a zero waste manager, though they have claimed this for the past four years.

It’s not just waste reduction that students are working on; GREEN runs a community garden aided

by Aramark workers and has proposed their very own sustainability plan. Flores, meanwhile, is hoping to ensure the GUTS buses move to fully electric and the campus scooter program gets off the ground to reduce students’ carbon emissions when it comes to transportation. And new projects floated at the town hall—launching an urban farm, a solo cup reuse program, front lawn renovation—could broaden the definition of sustainabwility even further.

Chapple was unabashedly optimistic about where Georgetown could go. “I don’t think there are constraints,” she said. “I think there’s really an opportunity to think differently and approach things differently.”

This answer clearly surprised the students who heard it. For those who have been involved in sustainability work on campus over the last five years, sometimes it seems like constraints have characterized their time on campus: not enough staff, not enough money, not enough information, no one who will listen.

These limiting factors have not disappeared; but the answer to the fundamental question, the question of can we, at this university, do our part to help our planet, is looking more and more like a yes. G UPDATE OCTOBER PUB 22,DATE 2021

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VOICES

On Being Green: How overconsumption fuels climate change

BY WILLOW VOLKERT

T

here’s something that’s not talked about enough on our campus.

Only on occasion do I hear a student quietly comment on the events occurring throughout the world—a change that we rarely dare to mention by name. We casually reference news about fires, floods, and other natural disasters without exploring their causes. We say how “bizarre it is” and how we “feel for those who are suffering,” but then we go quiet and the looming threat of climate change recedes in the distance as if our occasional thoughts and prayers have dissipated its stormy nature.

Perhaps we avoid these conversations because it often seems like everything we do is harmful. When you’re trying to shop while avoiding fast fashion, trying to eat at Leo’s without using plastic, or trying to find alternative proteins when none are available, ignorance can quickly become bliss. Rarely will my peers discuss environmentalism at length: what’s causing climate change, whether consumerist guilt does anything, or why Leo’s is only using god-dang plastic cutlery. In these conversations, the general consensus seems to be that it’s the largest 100 corporations’ faults, and all we can do about it is hope our government decides to impose stricter regulations; individual sustainability doesn’t really matter, they say.

However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years of nerding out about environmental research, it’s that no one issue contributes the most to climate change. Yes, of course, the fossil fuels used and CO2 produced by corporations play a large role, and the government action so commonly discussed is extremely important, but there’s more to the story than that. Climate change is the result of a knot of interconnected problems, woven together and united by a common thread: overconsumption.

We overfish (there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050), we over farm (one third to one half of global crops go to waste), we use excess energy, we pave down green spaces that regulate temperature, and we mow down any sort of nature that disagrees with our standard of beauty and perfection.

All of the issues society at large discusses— fossil fuels, animal agriculture, overfishing, inefficient design, plastic pollution, commercial

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

agriculture, and more—are not extremely harmful in small doses. However, due to our desire to constantly produce and consume, we have created a tangled web of predicaments with a common theme.

Our obsession with having more is contrary to the fact that we’ve spent our entire lives being told, “everything in moderation.” If this motto applies to all aspects of our own health—eating, drinking, exercising—shouldn’t it also apply to environmental health? How has humanity forgotten to apply our most basic principle to the world around us? The answer is simple; it’s because of our society’s insatiable desire for growth.

Growth is usually the primary goal in business, and that ideology permeates into our daily lives.

Grow your knowledge, grow your network, grow your business. Everything needs to be bigger; only through this growth can it be better.

This continuous pursuit of profit over the well-being of our neighbors or the natural world is what our countries are built on. Our society incentivizes us to take from others, whether that is a conscious choice or not. We take from the land through unsustainable farming practices, we take from other cultures and make jokes out of their traditions, we take from the forests and the jungles, and we take from the bones of the Earth itself; we constantly vacuum resources, leaving nothing for anyone else. By acting like this, by choosing to disregard any sort of balance, consumerist culture has made a choice to act as if we know better than billions of years of evolution.

Evolution has taught us that endless growth is impossible, literally. There are a finite amount of resources on this planet. Everything that lives dies; energy is neither created nor destroyed (who came up with landfills when this is the first law of thermodynamics?!) Even without these logistical boundaries, evolutionary processes always stop insatiable growth right in its tracks.

One example of this phenomenon is carrying capacity: the limit for the number of organisms an ecosystem can sustain before it collapses. We usually think of carrying capacity only in terms of animals, but, because we are just another species that evolution has created, shouldn’t we be subject to this law as well? Logically, if we consume past nature’s capacity, our ecosystem will collapse like any other.

However, in our quest for infinite growth, humanity has run up against this limit time and time again. We only manage to evade it by stamping out our competition, creating more food for an ever increasing population, and trashing any sense of interdependence with other species or the natural world. We have decided that the world was made for us, and for that reason we can manipulate the Earth and every ecosystem in it for our own purposes.

We must realize that the world was not made for us, as scary as that sounds. We are not the final product of evolution but simply another step in the formation and flow of time on this planet. We are not meant to take more than our share from the Earth; our attempts to deny the fact that we are subject to these laws will only lead to nature throwing larger and larger course corrections our way before, like carrying capacity states, our ecosystem completely collapses.

It’s time we change our vocabulary. The success of an individual or business should not be defined on growth but rather sustainability— or, even better, ‘thriveability’, as the book Cradle to Cradle puts it. Thriveability can be defined as having a positive impact on the environment instead of a neutral one, which is what sustainability entails.

Our first question when we begin to produce something should not be ‘How much can we make and how fast?’, but rather ‘What are the long-term effects of this production and how will it impact humans and the Earth?’

Instead of only worrying about how to not harm the planet, we should be thinking critically on how we can improve environmental health and reverse the destruction we’ve already caused. We must begin to ask ourselves how our actions and the actions of our businesses and governments are affecting the world around us. Are we giving as much to the world as we’re taking? Are we creating a world in which all can thrive? G

graphic by dane tedder; layout by josh klein

NEWS

One company’s push for sustainable shopping

BY ALESSANDRA DE LA FUENTE AND NORA SCULLY

C

reating an urban, eco-friendly alternative to Amazon is no small task. With 77 percent of people wanting to learn how to live more sustainably, reducing personal waste is a growing priority, especially among younger generations who are looking for ways to individually contribute to climate justice. One Philadelphia-based company is tackling sustainability in shopping in the D.C. area through student employees on the Hilltop.

The Rounds, a zero-waste delivery service, has expanded its business model to residents of Washington, D.C. and students at local universities for the last three months, providing affordable, environmentally conscious goods and services. Finding costeffective, zero-waste solutions can pose a difficult challenge for Hoyas, as the nearest zero-waste refill store, Mason & Greens, is in Alexandria.

The company allows its customers to choose from more than 100 products including toilet paper, shampoo, hand soap, and select products from local vendors that are delivered to their doorsteps in reusable containers and totes, called bundles, via the company’s fleet of e-bikes.

The Round’s business model works best in high-density population centers, catering to the needs of a rapidly growing customer base without relying on delivery methods that leave a large carbon footprint, according to Kelly Gilbert, the D.C. marketing manager for The Rounds.

“The idea is this customized, tailored service for all your essentials to get you your things exactly when you need it, so you don’t need to panic buy on Amazon for next-day shipping,” Gilbert said. “That’s what we’re hoping to do in cities: make sustainability affordable, accessible, and convenient for everyone.”

The Rounds currently serves 61 Georgetown students living on campus and in the neighborhood, according to Gilbert. Their services are also available to students at George Washington University and select dorms at Howard University. For students living in Virginia, there are three different drop-off centers—Earth Treks in Crystal City, SportRock in Alexandria, and Compass Coffee in Rosslyn— where individuals can sign up to have their bundles delivered.

Customers have the option of scheduling bundle deliveries weekly, biweekly, monthly, or bimonthly. Old containers and bags are picked up on a scheduled basis and replaced with new ones at each delivery, creating a sustainable loop for individuals looking to lower their waste consumption.

“If you’re into environmental causes or if you’re interested in being more sustainable, this is really an effortless way to do it,” Camille Williams (COL ’23), who receives monthly

deliveries from The Rounds on campus, said. “It’s very flexible—what you need and when you need it.”

To promote an individualized shopping approach, The Rounds’s algorithm measures how often an individual modifies the quantity and frequency of an order; this allows the company to deliver goods exactly when an item is needed. “Every individual will obviously go through things at different rates,” Gilbert said. “There’s got to be a way to predict your needs rather than on-demand buy everything.”

Ordinarily, there is a $6 monthly subscription fee that covers the cost of deliveries. The fee is waived for Hoyas who sign up with their university email address or use the code “Georgetown.” Students only pay the cost of the products themselves, which, since The Rounds orders the goods in bulk, are anywhere between 20 and 30 percent cheaper than most city retailers, according to Gilbert.

An additional perk for Hoyas is the drop-off location.

“It’s very easy because it doesn’t come to the Leavey Center, it doesn’t come to the mailrooms, it comes directly to your dorm’s lobby,” Rebecca Friedman (COL ’24), a brand ambassador for The Rounds, said. The mail room, overwhelmed by staffing concerns, an unprecedented package volume, and weeks-long delays, was a source of student frustrations at the start of the semester.

The Rounds employs two Georgetown students who drop off bundles inside residence halls. Students receive two text

alerts, once when their delivery is on its way and again once it has arrived, allowing students to walk down and grab their order just as they would with late-night food delivery.

CEO Alexander Torrey first identified a niche for The Rounds when he ordered soap from Amazon to his apartment. When it arrived in an excessively large box full of plastic packaging, Torrey realized how much unnecessary waste he and the other residents living in his high-rise apartment were contributing when they turned to Amazon for daily goods. “If we’re all ordering this way, there’s gotta be a better way to do this—a better way for the environment, a better way efficiency wise,” Gilbert said of Torrey’s thought process.

Torrey went on to co-found The Rounds in 2019 with COO Byungwoo Ko, and the company initially focused on expanding in the Philadelphia region. Two months ago, The Rounds expanded into the larger D.C. area, and one month later, started servicing students at different universities, like Georgetown. According to Torrey, the company’s rate of expansion in D.C. during its first 30 days of operation eclipsed its growth rate in Philadelphia, which took several months to see the same levels of success.

As the company has expanded, it has had to overcome a perception problem. “[We’re] trying to break that stereotype that more ethical, greener stuff is more expensive,” Friedman said. “It is a difficult service to pitch because sometimes, I guess for me, it feels too good to be true.” Sustainably-sourced goods often come at higher prices due to the cost of organic ingredients and fair wages, and then are marked up to make a profit.

The Rounds minimizes these high costs to consumers by purchasing in bulk.

One of the company’s goals, according to Gilbert, is increasing the number of partnerships it has with local businesses to provide a curated selection of goods to its subscribers. Students have the option of ordering goods from select D.C. businesses, like Compass Coffee, Seylou Bakery, or Bethesda Bagels.

Looking forward, The Rounds hopes to expand into other regions. “We’re trying to expand the zip code radius of where we can deliver,” Friedman said. As the scope of door-to-door deliveries increases, more individuals will be able to utilize the eco-friendly, zerowaste program.

“Our goal is no matter where you’re at, we can make something work,” Gilbert said. G

illustration by ryan samway; layout by graham krewinghaus

OCTOBER 22, 2021

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NEWS

GREEN hosts clothing swap to promote sustainable fashion

BY KYRA RESNICOW

T

he fashion industry is one of the most polluting sectors in the world, responsible for 10 percent of all carbon emissions and 20 percent of global wastewater. In response, some Georgetown students are promoting sustainable clothing practices in their own community through fashion reuse.

Georgetown Renewable Energy and Environmental Network (GREEN), the university’s largest environmental student organization, hosted a clothing swap on Oct. 10 for students to exchange clothing they no longer wanted.

GREEN’s swap aimed to reduce clothing waste while also allowing students to get new clothes for free.

“Clothing produces a lot of waste,” Rita Alan (COL ’24), a member of GREEN who helped run the swap, said. “We wanted to do something about all the waste from throwing out clothes on campus.”

While most clothing swaps require each participant to bring something to exchange in order to take something away, GREEN says their standards are more lax. “People have been coming and dropping off clothes they don’t want anymore and looking at clothes that are here,” Alan said.

“Everyone is welcome to take clothes regardless of whether they bring anything or not.” The club loosened its definition to ensure as much participation as possible while also making sure that a surplus of clothes were not left over.

The average American throws away around 81 pounds of clothing each year. For all discarded clothing, 57 percent ends up in landfills, where synthetic plastics in cheap fabrics wreak havoc on the environment. These plastics can end up in the ocean and take a long time to dissolve, damaging marine life and contributing to climate change.

Although donating to thrift stores seems like a good way to reduce clothing waste, most donations are thrown away if they are not sold within a certain amount of time. Unwanted clothing from U.S. thrift stores are sent to other countries, such as Pakistan and Malaysia, and if the clothing is in unusable condition, it is shredded and used as insulation. Clothing sold overseas can also harm local clothing markets, often displacing regional businesses.

Fast fashion brands such as Shein, Zara, and Forever 21 have immensely increased in popularity over the past few years and exacerbated the waste problem. Fast fashion is cheap clothing that is produced as quickly as possible to keep up with the ever-changing trend cycles and high rates of consumption. Since these clothes need to be made rapidly and inexpensively for the companies to keep their business models, they are often produced in poor conditions with shabby materials. Made quickly and carelessly, their lifespan is much shorter than more sustainably created clothing. All the harm the fashion industry contributes to the environment has inspired groups like GREEN combating climate change to formulate creative opportunities for people to buy clothes secondhand and shop sustainably.

In addition to the clothing swap, GREEN has other initiatives to promote sustainability on campus. It currently has six teams: gardening, zero waste, education, energy and water, environmental justice, and bees—a group that takes care of and harvests honey from beehives on campus.

“Our main goal is to increase sustainable practices within student life and bring sustainable education to campus and also advocate for more sustainability with administration,” GREEN President Anu Lamsal (SFS ’23) said in an interview with the Voice. In the past, the club has hosted events and educational projects to promote more sustainable practices on campus.

This was not GREEN’s first successful clothing swap.

In summer 2021, GREEN members who were living in D.C. traded clothing and, given the large number of people who participated in the swap on Oct. 10, GREEN believes that Georgetown students are excited about the initiative and will continue to partake in future swaps.

GREEN plans to pursue more initiatives to further their mission of reducing waste on campus. “As an offshoot from the clothing swap, we’re hoping to start up a popup thrift store,” Lamsal said. “We had a lot of clothes leftover from the clothing swap and we don’t want to

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ILLUSTRATION BY SABRINA SHAFFER

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

waste them. We thought that if we could source [clothing] from Georgetown students, and then sell it back to other students, we could reduce textile waste in that way and it would be really effective.”

Getting affordable secondhand clothing is important for many students who can’t buy new clothing, especially in a city where even local thrift stores can be expensive, according to Alan. “It’s pretty difficult to thrift in the D.C. area. Most places are pretty far away, and the options, especially in D.C., are very limited and more expensive,” she said.

Club members plan to have an on-campus thrift popup running by early next semester. GREEN will collect donations from students which will then be gathered and sold at the pop-ups for affordable prices. All proceeds will go to Georgetown Mutual Aid, a studentrun organization that manages community donations to other students. The details of the pop-up have not been fully figured out, but it will happen sporadically on campus, where students can easily engage in this sustainable fashion practice.

Initiatives like GREEN’s clothing swap help both students with sustainability in mind as well as those who would benefit from low-cost or free clothing alternatives.

The thrift store revenue will be another channel to redistribute resources among students.

Combatting fast fashion is a priority of GREEN, and members plan on hosting educational events about the fashion industry and its contribution to climate change.

“Our education team is going to take on some projects regarding clothing waste education, and I think they’re hoping to take on a poster campaign about clothing waste, textile waste, fast fashion,” Lamsal said.

With these upcoming initiatives and events, GREEN hopes to inspire more people to buy secondhand and to be more mindful of their shopping habits, as well as to be aware of the serious harm the fashion industry causes to the climate. G

VOICES

What the pandemic teaches us about disability and disaster

BY AMANDA CHU

W

hen Hurricane Ida displaced thousands of people last month, at least 15 nursing home residents died.

The storm arrived on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which claimed the lives of over 200 hospital and nursing home residents. Similar stories can be told about every disaster from Hurricane Maria to the Texas winter storm to the pandemic.

When we think of nursing homes and vulnerable populations, we usually think of the elderly, but disabled people make up the majority of the nursing home population. Approximately 96 percent of nursing home residents are disabled, and more than 15 percent are of working age. With climate disasters becoming more frequent, it’s important to understand why disabled people are consistently left behind. The answers lie in the workings of ableism and government neglect.

Let’s take a look at the pandemic. It’s estimated that nearly one-third of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. took place in nursing homes. These deaths were not accidental but a violation of civil rights. While most people with disabilities don’t need long-term care, for those who do require living assistance, multiple pieces of legislation exist to secure them quality care and autonomy in long-term care facilities, including the Nursing Home Reform Act, which has guaranteed “freedom from abuse, mistreatment, and neglect” since 1987.

Yet, time and time again, the government has failed to fulfill its responsibilities, succumbing to lobbying pressures for relaxed enforcement and putting disabled people at disproportionate risk. Since 2016, three-quarters of all U.S. nursing homes have had at least one infectionrelated infraction, including failure to wash hands and sanitize equipment. In 2019, the Trump administration relaxed infection control efforts, staffing ratios, and penalties for nursing homes that don’t comply with safety standards. Nursing homes continue to be short-staffed, and their employees overworked and underpaid. All of this primed nursing homes for rapid COVID-19 infection and left their residents to die.

Marcie Roth, the Executive Director and CEO for the World Institute on Disability in Washington, D.C., calls the disproportionate deaths of disabled people in the pandemic a “genocide.”

“We are to this day still described as ‘vulnerable,’ ‘old,’ ‘with underlying conditions,’” Roth said. “We’re not even given the humanity of being identified as people with disabilities who have rights.”

These euphemisms are seen even at the highest levels of government. The Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention lists diabetes and heart disease, among other conditions, as conditions that increase the likelihood of severe illness from COVID-19. These conditions are recognized as disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which protects people with disabilities from unfair treatment. Nevertheless, pandemic guidelines have refrained from the use of the word “disability” and opted for phrases like “comorbidity” or “underlying conditions,” making it difficult to document disabled people in the pandemic and excluding them from response efforts.

Similar government negligence can be seen in extreme weather disasters. Since 2016, 43 percent of nursing homes have violated emergency requirements, leaving them unprepared to care for residents in a disaster. In Hurricane Irma, 12 residents died in a Florida rehabilitation center after the air conditioning failed and they weren’t evacuated for days. After Hurricane Maria, nursing homes in Puerto Rico went without power or supplies, putting the lives of people with disabilities, many of whom rely on electrical equipment or medications, at risk. It’s estimated that about a third of all deaths came from the disaster’s interruption of medical care.

Disabled people in Hurricane Maria were already at increased risk due to Puerto Rico’s political status. Puerto Rico has the highest rate of disabled adults in poverty in the U.S. and no voting representation in Congress. It receives a lower amount of Medicaid funding, and its residents are excluded from Supplemental Security Income; both are essential welfare programs for people with disabilities.

We should not consider the safety of disabled people only in times of disaster. Government neglect shapes the care they receive every day.

Nevertheless, these cases of disaster provide opportunities to examine the cost of everyday inequalities and the people who pay the price.

We’re taught to see disasters as natural, as a product of environmental forces beyond human control. These cases show us, however, that measures can be taken to ensure disabled people are safe prior to disaster and included in recovery response. Too often the losses of disabled people are told as tragic stories, narratives that place

illustration by cecilia cassidy; layout by alex giorno

blame on individual vulnerabilities. Such accounts are attractive; when we see disabled people as expected losses, we can become complacent. We can ignore the larger, messier, more negligent forces that determine who lives and dies in disaster.

Government negligence and ableism have implications for us all. It’s estimated that over 70 percent of adults who survive to the age of 65 will need long-term care before they die, and over a quarter of Americans have some type of disability. Who is considered “able-bodied” and “disabled” is determined by society. We will all benefit from a society that ensures the inclusion and security of all people— something that will only come with reforming the way we provide long-term care and the way we see disability.

Typically excluded due to ableism, disabled people must have larger roles in decision making and disaster planning and response. Oversight of nursing homes should be improved and alternative models of care examined.

Greater efforts must be made so that disabled people can live in their community and maintain their health, safety, and independence.

As we continue to grapple with extreme weather events, and as the end of the pandemic in the U.S. appears close, a return to normalcy for long-term care facilities won’t do. As Roth noted, “That is a failed way of serving human beings.” G

OCTOBER 22, 2021

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LEISURE

Get lost in the psychedelic garden of Lorde’s Solar Power

BY SARAH WATSON

S

olar Power (2021) is an album best listened to on long walks.

You may have heard negative reviews of Lorde’s much-anticipated third studio album that brings an end to a four-year drought since her teen angst tour de force, Melodrama (2017). The slower, tired-girl energy differs from the undeniably catchy pop of Melodrama and Pure Heroine (2013). But like the audience who grew up alongside Ella Yelich-O’Connor (Lorde’s real name), both Lorde and her music are maturing.

If you did not like the new songs the first time you listened to them, plug in those headphones like you would pick up a hymnal, go on a walk, and meditate to her melodies. This album will not have us screaming about jet planes or broken champagne glasses, but it strikes a ripened, honest, and maybe even happier tone than her adolescent albums. Selfdubbed by Lorde as a “weed album,” it offers a psychedelic calm missing from the rage of youth.

Solar Power is rooted in nature. To accompany her vocals, Lorde released an enhanced album of photos and clips that show the inspiration of the album through nature. She cites her trip to Antarctica and isolation on New Zealand’s beaches, away from the pressures of Hollywood, as fuel for the music. “Some of these beaches helped raise me, helped me work through difficult things I was trying to understand about my life,” she says in an intro video. “A finger of sunlight peeping through a tree, a field of grass turned acid-colored in the sunlight, a beach at golden hour—these are ‘Solar Power.’”

Follow Lorde’s mosey into nature and go on a walk. Listen to the songs and feel the sunlight, because this album is a psychedelic, nature-inspired garden of emotions and sounds.

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THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Listening to Lorde is like being drawn into the poet’s process. “The Path” is a haunting welcome into a new era while retaining ‘moody Lorde.’ She acknowledges that her childhood journey was a shared one—most of her audience were also teenagers when she released “Royals” at age 16. Despite the fear of being thrust into an adulthood less glossy than youthful expectations, listeners are welcomed to continue walking next to her: “I just hope the sun will show us the path.”

The concept of aging is a bittersweet motif of the album. In “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” Lorde crushes hearts with the words, “All the music you loved at sixteen you’ll grow out of.” She leaves her audience insecure about self-worth, “I thought I was a genius but now I’m 22,” in “The Man With the Axe.” In “Secrets from a Girl (Who’s Seen it All)” she scares us with the relatable sentiment, “couldn’t wait to be 15, then you blink and it’s been 10 years.” This song responds to her cry in Melodrama’s “Ribs,” “It feels so scary, getting old.” To the fans who put her on a pedestal, she brings us crashing back to reality in “The Path,” singing “Now if you’re looking for a savior, well that’s not me.”

Lorde is brutally honest about her rejection of the spotlight. New Zealand might as well be Tolkien’s Middle Earth based on her public communication. She left social media and spoke to her fans only through poetically-coded emails. While Lorde is considered the expectation-setting harbinger for Billie Eilish and Clairo, she is unusual in her total disappearance from mainstream attention. She’s mature, puts herself first, and in “California,” she escapes the “poison arrows aimed directly at my head.”

While the hyper-specific lines of “The Path” prepare us for a Lorde that is fundamentally different from her earlier

albums, “Solar Power” is by far the most culture and how (particularly) white pop-oriented track on the album. It’s fun. women appropriate spiritual practices, It’s flirty. It’s not catchy like “Green Light” like yoga, from Indigenous Eastern or “Ribs” but reflects a mellowed-out cultures, sometimes in a harmful sexiness. Amidst the mental fog you might manner. Her line, “Let’s fly somewhere be in, bask in the sunlight for three minutes eastern, they’ll have what I need,” and 12 seconds. Tell me you won’t “blink critiques Western reliance on wellness techniques without respect for their three times when you feel it kickin’ in.”

Meanwhile, “Fallen Fruit” is a significance. Though she may at times canticle—a choir-like anthem. Lorde be guilty of appropriation herself, she treated us as peers when we were teenagers released a version of the album in Te Reo fighting the society we were coming of age Māori as an ode to the Indigenous Māori in, and now she offers a call to arms in of New Zealand.

Lorde’s songs get better the more defense of the climate. “And we will walk together / Psychedelic garlands in our you listen to them. She does not feed you a pop song wrapped hair / Through the halls of up with a bow. She invites splendor where the apple you on an imperfect trees all grew.” journey and asks you to The hallucinogenic dwell on the lyrics a little beat change will make you longer. Spoken words wonder what world you’re in songs can be quite in and then remember jarring, but in the best exactly why Lorde is a minute of Solar Power, we genius. The first half have a direct invite into echoes the refrain of the psychedelic garden escaping into nature, but The Path of Lorde’s third and most the second is a stunning Solar Power contemplative album. movement of young California Go for a walk in adults protesting against a nature, give this album a climate-ravaged world.

Stoned at the Nail Salon first, second, then third Lorde extends her Fallen Fruit * listen, and just like Lorde commentary in “Mood might have defined your Ring” to the commercial Secrets from a Girl teenage years, let her products that tell us how (Who’s Seen it All) * accompany you into a we are supposed to feel, The Man with the Axe * new stage of life. “You from celebrity news to Dominoes can stay as long as you placebo vitamins. She, need to get familiar with tongue-in-cheek, points Big Star the feeling / And then out how we are obsessed Leader of a New Regime when you’re ready, I’ll with seeking spiritual Mood Ring be outside,” the album connections and wellness asks. “We can go look at from external sources.

Oceanic Feeling the sunrise by euphoria, Lorde expands on the mixed with existential song’s meaning to Genius, * VOICE’S CHOICE vertigo. Cool?” G discussing wellness

photos courtesy of youtube user lorde and genius; design by allison derose

LEISURE

Looking at Tomorrow differently

BY CAROLINE SAMOLUK

T

omorrow. It’s a scary thing to think about and even scarier within the context of climate change. The earth has been in crisis for decades and humanity has done little to truly stop it. Everywhere we hear the long overdue alarm of impending doom. Though being honest about the severity of the current situation is an absolute necessity, the message is, honestly, demoralizing. In spite of the overwhelmingly panicked coverage of the environmental crises, Tomorrow presents hopeful and realistic solutions to climate change.

Tomorrow is a 2015 documentary created by French actress Mélanie Laurent and French writer and activist Cyril Dion. They admit upfront that their normal work has very little to do with the environment and they don’t have much scientific knowledge. What they do know is that a recently released report details what humanity would look like by the end of the century—and it isn’t pretty.

Laurent and Dion were concerned for the future of their children and humankind, so they used their filmmaking skills and resources to bring attention to the issue.

This sounds like a typical celeb-needs-a-charity-project kind of movie, but I was surprised to discover a genuine reflection on the realities of climate change. They affirmed the situation and recognized the seriousness of it while simultaneously flipping the narrative on its head. Instead of adding to the list of what we are doing wrong, they ask: What are we doing right? Who is doing it right? How can we expand their efforts?

The film presents a series of case studies following groups and individuals who are pioneering sustainable living. Each of the case studies fall into five chapters: agriculture, energy, economy, democracy, or education.

They begin with food, and oh boy, do I love food.

They visited two communities that use food to recover from systematic failures and economic hardships, which disproportionately affects people of color.

In Detroit, urban farms provide fresh fruits and vegetables, with everything grown within the city. A significant contributor to the changing climate comes from the high amount of carbon released in the transportation process. By growing food locally, the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation are reduced.

The residents of Todmorden, England are yet another community using every spare inch of public space to grow gardens. Sage, lettuce, strawberries, and peas, among many other fruits, vegetables, and herbs grow on the side of a busy road. The purpose of these urban gardens is not only to provide food locally, but to start a conversation about the planet and what actions can be taken on a local level.

Laurent and Dion effortlessly transition to another core reason carbon emissions are so bad: our energy sources.

Without electricity there is no internet, heating, or appliances— and the list goes on and on. But how can we produce massive amounts of energy without destroying the planet? By using renewable resources like water, wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass, the film explains. There is no one source of renewable energy which will fix everything, nor is it realistic to assume that the world can be powered by hydropower or solar energy alone. But the multi-sourced energy model implemented sets an example for the whole world.

The key to a sustainable economy is to use no more than what is absolutely necessary. Laurent and Dion went to Pocheco, a company in northern France that makes envelopes and uses only sustainable methods by reusing everything. The roof has solar panels, rainwater is collected and used for sanitary purposes as well as irrigation, dirty

n

illustration by deborah han; layout by max zhang

water is used to water the bamboo fields, and the bamboo is used to heat the whole factory.

The goal is not to make as much money as possible— in fact, stockholders receive no dividends at all. Pocheco is working against the current capitalist economy to be sustainable, setting an example of how business can be environmentally friendly.

This re-shaping of the economy necessitates a change in government. The crew returns to Scandinavia where, in Iceland after the 2008 recession, the people decided to write their own constitution. Everyone had access to the process, and the goal was to increase the transparency of the people’s representatives and hold them accountable for their actions. The ratification of the constitution stalled several years ago, but the situation offers hope that democracy can change to better support people and the environment.

The icing on the cake of this narrative is education.

In order to opt into all the alternatives explored in the previous four chapters, one must know that they can and should. This kind of knowledge and understanding, the documentary argues, should begin in schools.

A lack of education—particularly quality education— perpetuates dire inequities. A school in Helsinki proves that a community does not have to be wealthy to break the cycle. When teachers are well-trained and able to connect with students on an individual scale, the level of learning is greatly increased. Students can grow up to be informed, environmentally-conscious citizens.

This is a great documentary, but it is not without faults. For the most part, the film fails to recognize the environmental contributions of countries outside of Europe. Though there are some examples of education, democracy, and economy in India, there is a marked failure to recognize China’s contributions to hydropower and there is no mention of Africa and South America.

This is likely influenced by the fact the filmmakers are French—but, in order to give a full and accurate view of the situation, they needed to address the contribution of countries outside their home continent. If the aim had been to only highlight sustainability in Europe, that should have been explicitly stated.

Still, Tomorrow showed me it is possible to live a more sustainable lifestyle by making daily choices with those principles in mind. Since watching this film, I have become significantly more conscious of the waste I produce, working to reduce it through techniques like using microfiber cloths in place of paper towels.

The point Tomorrow ultimately makes is that living in a modern world without destroying the planet is possible. And it’s happening. The next step is to make global moves to cut greenhouse gas emissions and invest in sustainable systems. This documentary is honest and inspiring, and worth the watch. It teaches vital lessons about the environment in an easily consumable way—and it just might change your daily habits.

The more we all choose to opt-in to sustainability, the healthier we will all be. G OCTOBER 22, 2021

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LEISURE

Preview

DCEFF promises a reflective space for discussion on film and environmental issues

BY OLIVIA MARTIN

T

his coming spring, the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (DCEFF) will celebrate its 30th anniversary. As the festival commemorates three decades of history, organizers have highlighted the ways that the festival, and the environmental film industry more broadly, has evolved. The DCEFF promises to be a forum for meaningful environmental education and discussion, centering on some of the world’s most pressing environmental issues and showcasing the natural beauty captured by environmental filmmaking.

DCEFF’s lineup for 2022 has not yet been announced, but 2021 award winners include Inhabitants: An Indigenous Perspective (2021), They Keep Quiet So We Make Noise (2021), and The Long Coast (2020). The festival was voted Top Film Festival by readers of Washington City Paper in both 2019 and 2020.

Jacob Crawford, the director of online communications at DCEFF, discussed the mission of the film festival in an interview with the Voice, detailing what audiences can expect as the festival comes back to D.C. next March.

“We’re about bringing these environmental stories to people in a way that people find easily digestible,” he said.

“Our real mission is about the films and about the kinds of issues that they elevate in these films.”

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down DCEFF just a week and a half before its opening in 2020. Next spring, the festival hopes to have in-person components held at venues across the city, which have, in the past, included museums, embassies, the National Geographic museum, the National Arboretum, and even Georgetown. The festival is also prepared to occur virtually if needed, depending on evolving health guidelines for the spring.

This uncertainty seems frustrating, but after over a year of virtual programming and online movie streaming, the festival’s reach has, in some ways, expanded.

“That was a real test to see about bringing films to people on a larger scale,” Crawford said, referring to the festival’s wide-ranging viewership while online. “We were reaching larger audiences across the country and across the world in 2020.”

During the past nearly two years of virtual programming, DCEFF virtually expanded to other cities, states, countries, and continents—even Antarctica.

“We actually had a base in Antarctica reach out to us about the films that we were screening and [ask] if they could work with us to do their own kind of Antarctica environmental film screenings,” Crawford said. “That was just a really exciting bit of evidence about our reach and about who we can touch around the world.”

Even with films that reach audiences around the world, one challenge of running a festival is that the organizers, even if they have particular issues they wish to cover, cannot control what films come to them, putting them at the whims of the industry and its trends.

“We try to screen the very best films about environmental issues and especially some of the more pressing issues of today, but we can’t always control what’s out there, what’s in production, or what’s available to us,” Crawford said.

To ensure the range of topics includes issues such as environmental justice and the urgency of climate change, DCEFF will be shifting toward hosting standalone discussions about the more pressing issues of today, even if they are not always touched upon in the films being screened. Crawford mentioned environmental justice, voting rights, migrant issues, and the ever-present exacerbating climate crisis as likely topics for future conversations.

“We’re going to be focusing a lot more on making the discussions happen, even if the films aren’t there,” he said. “Just being a platform for people to come, have discussions, and hear different viewpoints about the more pressing issues that are going on right now.”

Over the course of the last 30 years, the film festival has changed along with the environmental filmmaking industry. As understandings of environmental issues have shifted, so too have the quality and angle of films relating to the environment. The focus has adapted over time from simple nature programming to issues such as the climate crisis or environmental justice.

Crawford cites An Inconvenient Truth (2006)— a famous film directed by Davis Guggenheim about Al Gore’s global-warming education campaign—as one of the works to bring environmental films into the mainstream in the early 2000s. Now, Hollywood directors and big names regularly create environmental films and submit them to DCEFF, and the quality of filmmaking relating to environmental issues has grown substantially over the years.

“I think [An Inconvenient Truth] changed what people saw as more commercially viable,” Crawford said.

“So we’re seeing a lot of bigger filmmakers get involved and put together environmental documentaries or environmental programs like that.”

For example, DCEFF streamed Becoming Cousteau (2021) online from Oct. 14-17. This film, directed by Oscar-

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illustration by dane tedder; layout by alex giorno

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

nominated and Emmy-winning filmmaker Liz Garbus, serves as a reminder of exactly how prominent the names of some key environmental filmmakers are within the film industry, as Garbus herself is so award-winning on some of filmmaking’s forefront stages.

“It’s not to say that the things we showed in the ’90s were in any way deficient or less artistically interesting, but the things that we’re showing nowadays are from really talented filmmakers,” Crawford said. “It’s not just that they’re good for environmental films, they would stand up against any film in any genre.”

2022’s festival will reflect not only on the environmental issues of the day but also on the art form of environmental film and its history.

“We’re definitely going to be celebrating our 30 years,” Crawford said. “We’re going to be looking back, not just to our history; because of how things have evolved in those 30 years, we will be taking a look back at the changing landscape of the industry.”

The Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital will occur March 17-22. Screened films are additionally available weekly on the festival’s website, often before they hit theaters. Be on the lookout for more information from DCEFF about spring 2022 events! G

Can D.C.

build bridges without breaking down community? by

W

hen the 11th St. Bridge Park opens in 2024, it will do more than connect neighborhoods on either side of the Anacostia River. Historically, the river has segregated majority-Black, working class, and low-income communities from their whiter, wealthier counterparts on the far bank. Redeveloping the bridge between the two communities could attract jobs and support local businesses—or exacerbate the city’s affordable housing crisis.

D.C.’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) and Building Bridges Across the River (BBAR) are hoping to use the structure of the existing, abandoned bridge to provide more green space for historically redlined communities east of the river. The park will span the renovated bridge and will connect to land-based parks on either side of the Anacostia.

“The goal that I think most resonates with District residents is bringing people together that wouldn’t usually cross paths,” BBAR Vice President and 11th St. Bridge Park Director Scott Kratz said at a virtual project update meeting on Oct. 6.

Alongside creating space for recreation and public events, designers hope the park will connect residents of the Anacostia and Fairlawn neighborhoods to economic opportunities from which they have been excluded. BBAR has touted job creation in construction, landscaping, retail, and hospitality, as well as increased traffic to local businesses surrounding the park.

But for a city that, until recently, was the most intensely gentrified in the country, an influx of wealth into poorer, majority-Black neighborhoods is often a warning sign of displacement. In addition to designing playgrounds and public art, project managers—as well as residents and community organizations east of the river—are contending with the possibility that the communities the park is designed to serve will be priced out by its construction.

While the opening of new green space might attract investment and help homeowners build wealth, more than 50 percent of Ward 8 residents near the site are renters. As the park’s amenities are likely to attract wealthier newcomers and increase property value, rising costs may become too much for these renters to bear.

When BBAR—a non-profit that addresses social, environmental, economic, and health disparities between Black and non-Black D.C. residents—pitched the project a

Caroline Hamilton

decade ago, Ward 8 residents like Sheldon Clark doubted it would actually serve the community’s needs. “I really kind of approached it as a skeptic, initially,” Clark said.

Funded in part by JP Morgan Chase and designed by leading international architecture firm OMA, the proposal came across to some residents as an attempt to enrich developers without addressing racialized access to green space and economic opportunity.

The proposal followed the Great Recession, which disproportionately impacted Black households and widened the racial wealth gap, Clark added. “There was a lot of skepticism in the community around big banks and big institutions coming into the community.”

That’s where the Douglass Community Land Trust (Douglass CLT) came in, where Clark is board chair. Governed by community members and public representatives, community land trusts purchase and maintain property to counteract rising prices. The model legally separates land from the buildings on top of it, allowing, for example, a lowincome family to lease a house on a plot they might otherwise not be able to afford. Now in his second term, Clark explained the organization was founded explicitly to maintain local control of housing.

“The notion of a community land trust was one of the solutions that came forward,” Clark said. “I was very pleased with the direction that it was going and really fell in love with the community land trust model through those early days.”

Since those early days, BBAR leadership has held more than 200 public meetings to gather feedback on how to revise its initial plan. In 2015, it published an equitable development plan that aims to better include local residents in the park’s planning and development.

At the Oct. 8 BBAR meeting, 11th St. Bridge Park Director of Equity Vaughn Perry offered an update on the plan’s implementation. “As a long-term Ward 8 resident, what really gets me excited is some of the investments that we have been able to secure for the residents,” he said.

In addition to creating jobs, promoting small businesses, and highlighting local art, the equitable development plan aims to protect and expand local affordable housing.

Measures include amplifying information about existing affordable housing options, partnering with housing justice organizations to boost homeownership, and leveraging

illustration by lou jacquin; layout by allison derose

relationships with the D.C. government to preserve existing affordable housing and build new units.

Like the land trust, BBAR is attempting to avoid the displacement associated with other infrastructure revitalization projects nationwide. A similar effort around Atlanta’s Beltline elevated park devoted more than $14 million to anti-gentrification programs. Still, a 2017 study found that housing prices skyrocketed “between 17.9 percent and 26.6 percent more for homes within a half-mile of the Beltline,” more than elsewhere in Atlanta between 2011 and 2015.

To date, Perry said, BBAR has raised more than $70 million to fund the equitable development plan—nearly as much as it will take to construct the park itself—but if evidence from Atlanta is any indicator, counteracting gentrification is a steep challenge. As the park’s opening looms, Perry and his team are trying to secure tangible, if incremental, victories.

“We focused on tenants’ rights workshops and organizing tenants. We also have been hosting and facilitating Ward 8 homebuyers’ clubs,” Perry said. He added that more than 90 residents east of the river have been able to purchase their homes through these efforts.

It’s this long-term commitment to the community, Clark said, that eventually got him on board with plans for the 11th St. Bridge Park.

“People haven’t had their voices heard. They haven’t had a lot of opportunities for their ideas to be acknowledged,” Clark said of his neighbors in Ward 8.

“If you’re there for engagement—not just for outreach— with true engagement, it’s a conversation.”

The 11th St. Bridge Park is scheduled to break ground in early 2023 and to open late the following year.

Disruptions caused by the pandemic make it difficult to predict what the D.C. housing market will look like then, but there is little to suggest the city will emerge from its affordable housing crisis anytime soon.

It’s unclear whether the efforts of Douglass CLT, BBAR, and other local organizations will be enough to ensure that Anacostia’s majority-Black residents will not be priced out of access to much-needed green space—or their homes. The trust of their community is hard-won, but policy and industry decisions over the coming years will be crucial to whether it remains intact. G OCTOBER 22, 2021

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End performative environmentalism in D.C.’s climate resilience plan

BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD

T

o understand D.C.’s relationship with climate change, looking at the District’s latest climate resilience plan is the place to start. When D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser released a lengthy policy roadmap in April 2019, she laid out four large goals which, in addition to environmental action, include promoting inclusive population growth, safer and healthier Washingtonians, and smart implementation of technological advancement.

While the plan does specifically address economic and racial inequality, it fails to lay out a path that will create an inclusive D.C. in the face of environmental crisis. The plan is rife with evidence that the District’s leaders haven’t listened to their most vulnerable populations; it ignores racialized zoning, neglects necessary Metrorail expansion, and leaves problems of inequitably distributed green buildings and green space unaddressed. Moreover, far from pushing toward racial justice, the climate resilience plan aims to expand policing in the city, a move directly harmful to residents of color.

American University professor Malini Ranganathan, who researches environmental racism, critiques the notion of “resilience” that the plan depends on. She argues that focusing on recovering from disruptive crises ignores the political origins of problems that make certain communities vulnerable in the first place. Instead, Ranganathan asserts that elevating marginalized groups through abolitionist climate justice—which prioritizes “history, intersectional experiences, and forms of care, healing, and solidarity”—is more appropriate.

In order to truly achieve climate justice, D.C. must center economic inclusion and racial justice in its climate policies. To that end, policymakers must address a legacy of environmental racism that continues to harm Black communities. They should expand the city’s provision of sustainable public services rather than expecting individuals to make sustainable choices themselves, since individual sustainability isn’t affordable, especially for working-class people. The best way to actually achieve these goals is to make climate action local: Amplify the voices of local neighborhoods and their representatives, especially in communities with marginalized or workingclass populations.

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spread by connor martin

THE GEORGETOWN VOICE

Tomorrow’s forecast In 30 years, rising sea levels will place huge swathes of D.C at risk of flooding during increasingly frequent and severe storms. The city will also face two to three times as many “heat emergencies”—days above 95 degrees fahrenheit.

These increased risks, however, won’t be distributed equally across the city. Due to government redlining and housing discrimination, Black residents have been priced into neighborhoods in eastern D.C., which are more at risk of flooding due to the proximity to the Anacostia River.

Many industrially zoned neighborhoods in northeast and southeast D.C., which lack green spaces, are projected to become considerably hotter than whiter, wealthier, nonindustrial neighborhoods in the west of the city.

These changes will disproportionately harm those without economic resources. People experiencing homelessness are particularly vulnerable to heat and flooding, since they often lack access to long-term accommodations or even air-conditioned shelters.

Even people with stable housing need income to ensure that their houses can remain cool and protected from inclement weather. The ability to adapt to climate change is thus directly linked to economic inequalities, which systemic racism exacerbates. It is unacceptable that D.C.’s climate plan refuses to adequately address this reality.

The particulate details of environmental racism The visible pollution around us—from industrial sites, bus terminals, construction facilities, and landfills— disproportionately harms people of color. Polluting industrial and waste management sites are often built in poorer, less-white communities, leaving residents with lower qualities of life and long-term health consequences.

D.C. is itself a case study in environmental racism.

Almost half of the District’s industrial zones lie within Ward 5, a majority-Black area of the city that hosts recycling centers, the D.C. garbage truck fleet, construction companies, and asphalt paving companies.

On top of these existing polluters, and despite the fact that bus exhaust is the most toxic kind of vehicle emission, the D.C. government is moving ahead with plans to build a gigantic bus terminal for the city’s school buses in Ward 5.

This industrial variant of environmental racism exposes D.C.’s nonwhite communities to significantly higher rates of asthma, respiratory illness, and lung disease—and puts them at higher risk of hospitalization for COVID-19.

Additionally, three of the District’s five waste transfer stations are clustered in the Ward 5 neighborhood of Brentwood, which is 85 percent Black. The city’s two other waste transfer stations sit in Fort Totten and Benning Road, also majority-Black neighborhoods. These stations attract disease vectors such as seagulls and rats, require dieselfueled garbage trucks, and emit airborne mercury pollution.

Though these risks have been abundantly clear for some time, D.C. has denied Ward 5 representatives’ requests for an environmental impact assessment. In contrast, when Brentwood was a white neighborhood before World War II, it received far more protections from pollution and industrial zoning. The role of systemic racism in enforcing environmental disparities is undisputable—while D.C.’s zoning laws force increased health risks and a decreased standard of living onto Brentwood residents, homeowners in majority-white Ward 1 and Ward 2 get their trash collected twice a week while having zero waste transfer stations in their vicinity.

Industrial zoning artificially depresses residential property values, too, lowering private incentives to invest in making these communities better, or greener, places to live. And not a word in the climate resilience plan aims to change that.

A public transit away from roads Transit is a huge piece of the environmental puzzle— and here, the plan fails, too. The public transit system’s failure to adequately serve lower-income and majorityBlack communities increases travel times and emissions unequally across the city. Because newer cars with better fuel efficiency ratings are more expensive, lower-income drivers with older vehicles will emit more on average than richer drivers will—especially when they commute from distant neighborhoods.

The D.C. government has exacerbated this disparity in emissions by gutting its public transit services over the past decade. Incremental privatization of various transit options, including MetroAccess Paratransit, which drives disabled residents to Metro stations or bus stops, has led to service cuts in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. A failed 2016 plan to reduce Metrorail service during peak hours included a map where more than half of the stations on the chopping block fell east of the Anacostia River, where most residents are Black and lower-income. Likewise, proposed cuts to 30 Metrobus routes in 2017 would have disproportionately hurt low-income workers of color in north Virginia. D.C. policymakers have forced the burden of public transit cuts onto the city’s most vulnerable, so it’s no surprise that DMV residents haven’t ditched their cars.

The District’s climate resilience plan acknowledges that the city’s residents deserve better public transit options. To its credit, the plan aims to improve and subsidize Metrobus services and invest in bicycling infrastructure, both of which are useful improvements. But the plan demonstrates a strange affinity for keeping people on roads. It calls for partnerships with private ride-sharing services, and even pledges to create “mobility corridors” for ride-shares and scooters. Not only are electric scooters significantly worse for city life and public safety than bicycles are, but

subsidizing ride-sharing also increases the number of cars.

The plan entirely ignores the single best way to improve transit outcomes across the entire DMV region: expanding and subsidizing the use of Metrorail.

Regional public transit already leaves many behind, not to mention late to work on their commutes from workingclass DMV neighborhoods to the affluent city center. Over longer distances, buses and bicycles won’t go anywhere as far as an expanded Metrorail service can. A commitment to more frequent, reliable underground transportation provides D.C. residents faster and safer commutes, economic development around stations, and steady jobs. Metrorail improvements will benefit everybody. The fact that D.C.’s climate resilience plan ignores this reality demonstrates how the city’s privileged interests—“Big Scooter” among them, strangely enough—have captured decision making.

Building inequality A city that doesn’t center the needs of its most vulnerable becomes a city segregated by peoples’ abilities to pay for greener surroundings.

D.C.’s climate resilience plan advises that all new buildings should be able to withstand possible climate catastrophe. But this advice is unlikely to benefit neighborhoods with lower property values which, possibly due to inadequate public transit and discriminatory industrial zoning, likely won’t see much new construction.

Moreover, every single one of the ten most “green” buildings in the U.S. Green Building Council’s 2019 D.C. rankings was located west of Union Station and south of Adams Morgan—some of the richest urban areas of the city.

The neighborhoods in D.C. that are gentrifying rapidly have the money to build in environmentally friendly ways that other communities cannot secure investment for.

Green space should be evenly dispersed across the District’s neighborhoods without leading to increased living costs. West of the Anacostia River, gentrifying apartments and considerable green space fill the Navy Yard neighborhood. East of the Anacostia River, majority-Black neighborhoods have hardly any green space to speak of. The lack of green space is itself environmental racism against Black people.

Having green space isn’t just for show: Higher concentrations of trees in a neighborhood can significantly lower temperatures on hot days. Residents of neighborhoods without green space will suffer more heat-related ailments— especially the city’s unhoused residents, who will have to suffer them outside.

The resilience plan advocates for investment into green space that helps eliminate these so-called “heat islands.” But it does so by pointlessly suggesting the implementation of smaller-scale solutions such as green roofs or investing in “drinking water,” with little clarification on what that actually entails. Though the plan hints that majority-Black and low-income neighborhoods are more likely to be heat islands, the reason they’re heat islands in the first place— the concrete architecture that comes with industrial zoning—go unmentioned. Unless these investments in green space and cooler cities come with changes to zoning laws and funding for green infrastructure, this plan may be doomed to ineffectiveness.

Climate crises not only expose the District’s economic inequalities, but they also highlight how policymakers have refused to consider the needs of the city’s most

vulnerable. Green space is a band-aid solution to what’s really a problem of political neglect.

Sustaining injustice D.C. leaders’ skin-deep commitment to environmentalism not only conveniently sidesteps pressing issues of climate and racial justice but also actively makes some worse. For example, D.C.’s Department of Transportation uses “tree-clearing” as an excuse to evict unhoused people from encampments. The needs of some of the city’s most vulnerable were apparently in conflict with the alleged health of its trees; here, the city’s leaders chose the trees.

The District’s resilience plan similarly furthers injustice under the guise of sustainability. For example, the plan commits to keeping 4,000 police officers on the streets but promises that new officers won’t use cars. As part of the plan’s goal of “Safe and Healthy Washingtonians,” it actually calls for an additional 200 police officers to engage in “community policing on foot, bike, Segway, and scooter.”

While the plan is quick to discuss racial disparities elsewhere, it makes no mention of D.C.’s racist policing history.

Bikes and scooters make police more mobile within limited green spaces, further facilitating the eviction of unhoused people from community land. Police often use bikes to harm people of color more generally, as seen through MPD’s kettling of Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. The “greenification” of police forces avoids the actual problems of policing itself, preventing the plan from achieving the racial justice and economic inclusion it purports to create. The fact that policing is part of a climate plan in the first place evidences how policymakers who don’t center the experiences of the vulnerable won’t connect environmental justice with racial justice.

Climate resilience requires justice Perpetuating racism in the name of performative environmentalism is unacceptable. Above are four instances in which the resilience plan abjectly fails to adequately serve D.C.’s most vulnerable. If policymakers have already overlooked these problems in a plan that claims to pay specific attention to structural racism and exclusion, it’s likely that the plan’s execution will also produce inequalities, even with the best of intentions.

The recommendations offered in this editorial will tangibly benefit the city’s vulnerable and marginalized communities. Obviously, these recommendations can’t solve climate change—to be sure, there are many problems related to these issues that this editorial does not address.

For example, food insecurity will only worsen as climate change disrupts food production, and gentrification will be exacerbated by climate disasters as property values fall for areas at risk of climate disaster and rise in greener, safer parts of the city.

The solutions to all these problems share a common starting point: D.C.’s policymakers must recognize that racial justice, economic justice, and climate justice are intertwined. If the District’s existing economic challenges make anything clear, it’s that the city needs better bottom-up governance. Neighborhood commissioners and local leaders like those in Brentwood know what their communities need to survive and thrive. Not only do D.C.’s leaders need to listen to the city’s most marginalized, but they must provide them with the resources real resilience requires. G OCTOBER 22, 2021

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