TAKE FIVE!

October 12, 2021

Samantha Mango:
Hi, I’m Samantha Mango. Welcome to “Sullivan 180 Presents… Take 5!”. Our guest today is Taylor Jaffe with Catskill Mountain Keeper. Welcome Taylor, thanks for being here!

Taylor Jaffe:
Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited!

Samantha Mango:
Oh, me too. Can you please introduce yourself? Give us a brief description of your role and talk a little bit about Catskill Mountain Keeper.

Taylor Jaffe:
So my name is Taylor Jaffe. I’m the Environmental Justice Coordinator at Catskill Mountain Keeper. Catskill Mountain Keeper is a nonprofit in the region, working for environmental rights, protecting resources, helping with the smart economy and all of that kind of “good green stuff”.

Samantha Mango:
Great! Can you tell us about your research, and the work that you’re doing with Mountain Keeper?

Taylor Jaffe:
So my research started when I was doing some consulting last winter. I got a bird’s eye view of the region, so six counties: Delaware, Greene Otsego, Schoharie, Sullivan and Ulster counties. I was thinking about ‘environmental justice’ in terms of the issues in the region and also the communities,, and getting a sense of who is housing different hazards and who gets benefits.

Samantha Mango:
And what is considered a hazard?

Taylor Jaffe:
Great question. In my preliminary research, I started looking at things like super fund sites, dumps, transfer facilities, that kind of thing. Water infrastructure and different, really tangible issues. There’s definitely a lot more, but I went off of information that different government sites had available, to keep it as basic as we could get. Then I took all of those data points and overlaid it with different communities. The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) talks about ‘environmental justice communities’ in terms of potential environmental justice areas. So those are ‘census block groups’ that have different thresholds for being low income or minority communities. I was looking at how Superfund Sites and water issues intercept within these communities in the region.

Samantha Mango:
And how many are in Sullivan County?

Taylor Jaffe:
Great question. I’m pretty sure there are 38 potential environmental justice areas in Sullivan County and we don’t have a large population, so it’s definitely a lot! Out of all of the Catskill region, Ulster County and Sullivan County have the most hazards and the most potential environmental justice areas. So we’ve got some good work to be doing in the county.

Samantha Mango:
Sure do. Yeah. So what exactly does that mean for our county in both the short-term and long-term future?

Taylor Jaffe:
So in the short term, a lot of my work right now is taking what I gathered in this bird’s eye view and digging deeper: thinking about the history of what the community looked like when a superfund site was some kind of functioning place: “who lived there then, who lives there now and how did it get there?” So digging a little bit deeper at specific sites is the short term and the longterm work for environmental justice for Mountain Keeper. For me, it has a lot to do with intersectionality. This is a term and a phrase coined by Kimberle Crenshaw from the feminist movement, and it talks about how race, gender, class, and other individual characteristics overlap. So when we’re thinking about ‘environmental justice’, we’re thinking about all of these different systems intersecting with one another. The goal is that everyone has a healthy environment in which to live and work. Everyone gets to have a equal say in what gets cited: if we were to need a new dump, we want to make sure everyone is having a say in the process. And ultimately having ‘environmental justice’ would mean ‘justice across all of these different levels of intersection’.

Samantha Mango:
And we do have a lot of intersectionality in our county, which I think gets overlooked often because we are so rural.

Taylor Jaffe:
Yes! I think a big part about working in the Catskills, and Sullivan County specifically is that people see this nice background. We wake up and we see all these mountains and rivers and we have the best water, but even though we have all of these resources, everyone is not accessing them equally. That is really the challenge right now.

Samantha Mango:
So how can people stay up to date with your work and Catskill Mountain Keeper and learn more?

Taylor Jaffe:
Catskill Mountain Keeper is pretty active on social media right now, which has been very exciting. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. If you were to go to www.CatskillMountainKeeper.org, you can also sign up to be on our email list. Those are really great ways to stay up to date. If you’re curious about something in your area, feel free to contact me directly: my email is Taylor@catskillmountainkeeper.org. Part of my work right now is “listening”. If there is anything that you are curious about, or you have an experience that doesn’t feel right, or any kind of thing in the area, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll just listen, and see what we can do. I’m at a big information gathering stage, so I’d love to be able to listen to everyone in the community.

Samantha Mango:
Great. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah. Is there anything else that you’d like to share?

Taylor Jaffe:
Yes, I am so excited. There are only a few states in this country whose Constitution grants you the right to “a healthy environment” and New York state has the potential to become one of those.

Samantha Mango:
Wow.

Taylor Jaffe:
Yeah. So on November 2nd on the back of the ballot, you’ll be able to flip it over and vote YES for the right to a healthy environment, which is very important and very exciting.

Samantha Mango:
Great to know! Thank you for Sharing that.

Taylor Jaffe:
Thank you for asking.

Samantha Mango:
Well, thanks for joining us today, Taylor, and thanks for helping make Sullivan County a healthier community.

Taylor Jaffe:
Thank you so much. And thank you for the work that you do!