News from Pratt Center: April 2020

Since its founding in the early 1960’s, Pratt Center has worked with allies throughout the city and around the world to build more sustainable communities. This work to nurture a healthy planet and healthy communities has always been guided by a deep belief in our interconnectedness, and in the inherent value and worth of every person and neighborhood, regardless of race or class.

Today, the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day occurs during the Covid-19 pandemic, which is driving home the inescapable reality of our interconnectedness and exposing the glaring inequities embedded within our society’s institutions, policies and economies.

In the face of this reality, we are as committed to action today as when Pratt Center was launched to support the communities most severely impacted by the climate crisis and to ensure that the solutions they have developed and have been fighting for years to achieve are heard and implemented.

On this 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, Pratt Center stands with Climate Works for All, a coalition of community, labor, environmental justice, and faith groups, in calling for the adoption of the NYC Community and Climate Stimulus. The platform calls for job creation through investing in climate solutions across our City’s infrastructure, from localized renewable energy on public land and energy efficiency retrofits for affordable housing, to bringing clean energy production into our industrial areas and increasing access to clean transportation for transit-starved communities.  

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• Financial Times - The Pandemic is a Portal - Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
• NYC Environmental Justice Alliance - NYC Climate Justice Agenda 2020 - Strategies and pathways toward reducing greenhouse gases and localized emissions, advancing a just transition towards an inclusive, regenerative economy; and cultivating healthy and resilient communities.
• New York Times - The America We Need
• NBC - The Pandemic is a Fire Drill for Our Planet’s Future
• PBS Frontline - During the Coronavirus Crisis, the Trump Administration’s Environmental Rollbacks Continue
• Teen Vogue - The History of Earth Day: From Radical Roots to Elementary School Classrooms  
• The Conversation - Here’s what the coronavirus pandemic can teach us about tackling climate change - “The effects of coronavirus are likely to be temporary but the other global emergency – climate change – is not."