Our city’s bright future got a little dimmer following last week’s heartbreaking, untimely death of Cecil Corbin-Mark, a lifelong Harlem activist and deputy director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
Cecil died of a stroke. His funeral, on Saturday, Oct. 24, will be streamed on the Facebook page of WE ACT, a splendidly effective grassroots organization that has been battling against the pollution and health hazards New York has been dumping uptown for generations.
You can make a donation in his name at weact.org/home-3/getinvolved/donate/.
Cecil, the first permanent staffer at WE ACT, was hired in 1994. “I was walking down Convent Ave. one Saturday afternoon,” says Peggy Shepard, the group’s co-founder and executive director. “He was on the loudspeaker talking about environmental quality. I said ‘Who is this?’ I didn’t know him.”
A scrappy, ad hoc group at the time, Shepard and WE ACT won a $1.1 million settlement from the city after suing to halt the faulty operation of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant. “Cecil was the first person I called,” Shepard recalls.
He became an expert in the laws, policies and politics of the environmental justice movement. In a city full of boasters, bluffers and BS artists, Cecil was the real deal: a man far more interested in changing policy than in preening for the cameras.
He loved and served the West Harlem community, where his family has lived for 90 years, mounting one thoughtful crusade after another.
“He produced a whole energy portfolio of work. All on his own,” Shepard told me. “He just recently brought in a $740,000 grant to install electric stoves where gas stoves were.”
My last conversation with Cecil was a few weeks ago, at a WE ACT webinar called “Powering Change: New York’s Models for Equitable Energy Policy.” As usual, the group laid out some promising ideas about how to make the city greener, cleaner and more fair.
The 90-minute discussion was a reminder that, even before Congress grapples with passage of a sweeping Green New Deal law, there are plenty of ways to begin shifting New York away from our civilizational addiction to fossil fuel.
For starters, we have to put an end to the energy being wasted in many of the city’s forest of office buildings.
“In New York City, buildings account for about three-quarters of energy use,” said Nora Sherman of CUNY’s Building Performance Lab, a project to make public buildings more energy-efficient.
“We can do major retrofits. We can do major renewable installations of solar on the rooftops, green roofs on the rooftops,” she said. “But if the people who run the buildings don’t first of all run it at baseline — the highest performance level that they can — and if they don’t understand the relationship between their actions and the energy use in their buildings, then we’re never going to achieve the promises of renewables or major retrofits in buildings.”
The problem extends to small homeowners, particularly in lower-income neighborhoods.
“Our communities — sadly because of the historical legacy of redlining — have some of the buildings that are the most energy inefficient in the city, in the state, and in the country.” Cecil said. “That energy burden means that in some instances it can mean two to three times higher than the cost, for example, of a household that may live in a condo on the Upper East Side.”
The way to solve the problem, he said, is to give landlords a combination of carrots and sticks.
“We have to really make sure that the city is requiring that they focus on these directives,” Cecil said, “either by withholding their ability to get permits if they don’t comply with certain things, or directly by fining them if they are not in compliance with laws like Local Law 97,” which requires a 40% reduction in emissions from buildings by the year 2030.
Even more exciting is a partnership between WE ACT and a group called Solar One to bring solar energy to affordable housing projects.
“We’ve been able to train more than 100 workers, and we’ve been able to actually put solar panels up on 14 [limited-equity cooperatives] across the northern Manhattan area,” Cecil said. “We’ve put in more than 400,000 kilowatts of solar, and we’ve been able to help from our account more than 900 residents.”
Cecil was looking forward to the 2021 municipal elections. “Grassroots organizations have to be ready with a policy agenda literally on day one of a new administration. We have to be prepared to advocate for that policy agenda and keep the feet of the elected officials that come into office in 2021 to the fire.”
In environmental justice and so many other areas, that’s the spirit our city needs more of.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.
