Countdown to 1.5 Episode 4 – ‘Time for Green Infrastructure’

Local Activists’ take on stormwater management Pt. 2

Welcome to the third episode of "Countdown to 1.5," a podcast about the environmental justice movement. For this audio report, Public Square's engagement editor, Esther Paul, spoke to Martha Arencibia, community activist and former co-chair of the Paterson Green Team.

This story was produced as part of the Northern New Jersey Media Collaborative Project "Stormwater Matters," a project focusing on stormwater management solutions in the state.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Narrator: Welcome to the ‘Countdown to 1.5,’ a podcast that zooms into the impact of global warming at the community level. I'm your host, Esther Paul. In this episode, we continue the conversation on green infrastructure and local activists’ take on stormwater management. In part one of this three-part series, we heard from Nicole Miller, co-chair of Newark DIG, and how they’re using Green Infrastructure to improve resiliency to flooding in Newark residents. Today, we’ll hear from Martha Arencibia, community activist and former co-chair of the Paterson Green Team.

Their teams are two of three overburdened communities pushing their municipalities to mitigate flooding. Camden is the other.

Thank you for joining us, Martha. Can you share with us the purpose behind the Green Team?

Martha Arencibia: The partnership of the Green Team was really to bring awareness and resources to the community on how to go green and green infrastructure. How can we all get to work together as a community to keep our city clean green and especially from the serious problems that we have with the flooding?

Narrator: Does it come under the city government or do you partner with Paterson?

Arencibia: No, it's no city government, it’s strictly volunteer. What we did was we did a lot of partnerships with organizations outside the city of Paterson that had a lot of resources that were able to provide us resources like the adopted catch basin program that we implemented to Paterson through the Green Team, which was amazing to interact and give away kits to the community on adapting a catch basin and that this helps alleviate the flooding that we could all do as individuals throughout our city.

Narrator: And how many projects has the green team been involved with since its inception?

Arencibia: We've done over 20 cleanups throughout the course of four years—we've done ranked gardens, we've done the adopt a catch basin program five times, we rolled out giving out over 50 kits per time, we did two severe water days to the city of Paterson, we did our first annual green fair, that we were able to bring over 35 vendors. And these are vendors like you know, the water company, the sewer company, New Jersey Future—the list goes on— with valuable resources on how we could be sustainable. So our goal was really to bring sustainability to the city of Paterson. So we educate our community to learn how to recycle, reuse, and reduce waste. So it's it's a learning process working together.

Narrator: Can you give us an example of one of your most current projects?

Arencibia: The last project that we did was our second city of water day that we collaborated with grants with the Passaic River Coalition. And we helped clean the Passaic river, the Passaic river runs throughout Paterson, and we have our wonderful, great falls so it was just about educating the community on— we have to keep our waterways clean, because we need clean fresh water. Paterson is one of 21 municipalities in the state of New Jersey that has a combined sewer system. So we flood a lot. So anything that we could do as community leaders to educate our community on how to slow down the process of flooding, and keeping our waterways clean.

Narrator: What are some future projects?

Arencibia: My future project is basically to bring more awareness to the community on what is the CSO, and how harmful and the unjust that we're facing has been. Because this brings a lot of health hazards that our community is facing when we have sewage backing up into our homes, house of worship, schools, bodegas. So this is a serious situation that needs to be addressed.

Narrator: CSO refers to Combined Sewer Overflow. It occurs when untreated or partially treated combined wastewater discharges from an outfall directly into streams, rivers, and for some overburdened community members, their basements.

Arencibia: For me, it's personal because I'm a flood victim, I'm a resident of Paterson and I live in that area, that have floods because of the combined sewer overflows and stuff that has to be addressed. It's it's something that we have to do together because there's grants, there's federal money to be had to help alleviate and fix and address the problems that will really be taxing our community members and our taxes. CSO is a complicated thing. So it's, I guess it's my job to bring awareness to it more or less, because you don't really know what's happening to you. And when you flood you don't really realize it's just not rainwater that's contaminated waste, sewage, that's coming back. And it's harming us. And that that's, that's a serious issue.

Narrator: Well, thank you for joining us Martha. PSA will continue to look at the role of local community activists in implementing green infrastructure in stormwater management. Until next time, this is your host, Esther, signing off. On behalf of everyone here at Public Square amplified, thanks for checking out the countdown to 1.5 podcast.

Credits

Music:

 “Rise and Shine” by Audiobinger is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

“State of Mind” by Audiobinger is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Produced by Esther Paul