Season 3/Episode 2: Jessica Dandridge: Water Justice and a Thriving New Orleans
Jessica Dandridge
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Can New Orleans thrive with water? Jessica Dandridge, Executive Director of The Water Collaborative in New Orleans, talks with John about what water justice means, how to engage communities in creating solutions, and why we should think about thriving versus resilience.
Show Notes
Read more about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans
Jessica says, “This city is built on the backs of black people.” Learn more about the slave trade in New Orleans.
She discusses the importance of the Port of New Orleans. Read more about it here.
Read more about the organizations implementing green infrastructure projects in New Orleans.
Read more about the heat island effect in New Orleans.
Learn more about New Orleans’ Urban Water Plan.
Read more about why New Orleans is sinking due to human intervention.
Read more about PFAS from the CDC
Learn about some of the organizations Jessica mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
START (JESSICA DANDRIDGE INTERVIEW)
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Welcome to Audacious Water, the podcast about how to create a world of water abundance for everyone. I'm John Sabo, director of the ByWater Institute at Tulane University. On today's show, how do we build a thriving New Orleans? My guest is Jessica Dandridge, executive director of the Water Collaborative in New Orleans. Jessica focuses on water justice and developing solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation in urban areas. Coming up I talk with Jessica about how the Water Collaborative began, what "water justice" means, and how New Orleans is learning to live with water through green infrastructure.
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Jessica, welcome to the show.
JESSICA: Thank you, John, I'm so glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
JOHN: Oh, you're welcome. This is great. So give me the elevator speech about the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. What's the vision? What's the mission? Tell me what it's all about.
JESSICA: So the Water Collaborative is a collaboration of people from various sectors that work to ensure all communities can live and thrive with water. And there's a lot of buzzwords in there, so a perspective, this organization was started back in 2013. I like to always say an "unlikely group" of colleagues, right, climate activists, and engineers, architects, who realized that the way we live with water, gray infrastructure, pumping, canals, isn't the answer to ensure New Orleans and surrounding parishes can be prepared for future climate risk. We formalized in 2017 and I became the director in 2019, and my role really was to, you know, kind of inject that concept that you talked about with equity and justice. Today the Water Collaborative focuses on two specific issues--climate adaptation and mitigation--mainly in urban and densely-populated areas. And then the other is water justice. And when we say "water justice" we're talking about water quality, water affordability, and water accessibility. We do that in three ways. One is community education. So we really focus on helping residents of all ages really understand how water works in Louisiana and the agencies that are involved in that water work, and how they can plug into that water work. The second is policy. So we like to say we're a bridge-builder and we try to really hear and listen - actively listen to what residents want and need, and connect them to local, state, and federal agencies, as well as contractors, or small businesses, think tanks, etc., about how we can improve our water systems through the policy lens. So we advocate for water policies that put people first and communities first, and we believe water is life, so how can we make sure that not only water is clean and accessible but also supporting a long-term, healthy ecological system for everyone involved? And lastly is equity, right? And again, "equity" is a buzz word you hear all the time, but when we say "equity" we're really thinking about how can we prioritize residents, and the workforce development, and long-term quality of life experiences around water? So not only, you know, greening, and park-space equity, and overall quality of life in urban areas, but we're also talking about workforce development, green infrastructure jobs, maritime jobs, blue/green economy jobs. There's a lot of different jobs, right? But this is a great way for residents to plug in. And I like to say that green infrastructure specifically, and natural infrastructure is a proven pathway to social and economic liberation. And when I say that it's because a lot of other areas around adaptation and climate mitigation are not accessible to people, but this is. And it's a direct way for people to see a benefit. So that's the easiest [LAUGHTER] way I can summarize the Water Collaborative. We do a lot of work. So - but yeah, that's the elevator pitch.
JOHN: All right, that's great. So when you think about New Orleans - I think about this a lot because I live downtown and I have a view of the city. And, you know, I'm new to this city but I think a lot about what Katrina must've been like after seeing Ida, which was, you know, nothing like Katrina. So, you know, I like to ask people, especially if they work on these kinds of issues in the city, when you think of New Orleans in 30 years, if you could change the timeframe what do you want the signature impact of the Water Collaborative to be in this space?
JESSICA: I think about that a lot, right, because being from New Orleans and going through Katrina I always think about what the future of New Orleans would look like. I'm not - sometimes I'm not very sure. Sometimes it's sad. Sometimes it's very exciting. I think for the Water Collaborative specifically we have been kind of - I say a quiet movement. We're not as loud as maybe some other sectors are but we get a lot done really productively and mindfully. And so with that being said, I would say in 30 years I hope the Water Collaborative has an impact on the long-term ability for New Orleans to thrive in an environment that may be unstable. And so there's so many things we're working on. You know, we co-wrote the current stormwater code for the city, and we're currently leading the charge for the stormwater (inaudible), which is kind of our big project that we've been thinking about for a long time. We're a part of the community engagement framework. And so I really hope that the work we're doing, the team and our partners are doing, leads to a long-term ability for New Orleans to be here. We're facing so many risks from obviously flooding and tropical storms. But then now we have tornados. I grew up in New Orleans--I didn't have tornados growing up. You know, sea-level rise and coastal erosion. There's so many barriers, right? And then of course there's heat-island effects and draught that also impacts New Orleans. And so how do we learn to live with all of these changes, right? And I think part of the way we do that is - I hope that's why we're doing the stormwater (fee). And I'm not trying to toot our horn, but I really hope that it helps us make the city more livable, not just for, you know, a short-term, but a long-term, that we really... It also helps people think differently and shift the cultural narrative here. Being from New Orleans I think we often - we have a lot of amazing qualities here, right? Our food, our culture, our traditions, we're warm, we're welcoming people. But we are also really tied to traditions. And I like to joke - I say people in New Orleans don't like change and they don't like surprises. And I think some of that comes from some, like, trauma from many, many, many years ago, up until Katrina where change has been put upon us rather than something that we had any autonomy in. But with that being said there's so much New Orleans could be leading in. And we already do lead, but we're not really championing that as much as we champion other things. Not only do I want to see the city be here, but we should be champions in 30 years. When people look at cities that have done what needs to be done--I mean, I think about the Gulf South all the time, I think about Miami, and I think about, you know, the panhandle and other cities that are also facing similar threats across the nation--I just think we're doing so much more, right? Because it's not just the state level, or the federal level, or, you know, agencies; it's the people - the people are thinking about it actively on a daily basis. And so I know that's a long-winded answer because it's a lot of compounding problems to think about. But for the Water Collaborative I think that's - I hope we have a hand in the positive outlook of the city long-term.
JOHN: That's great. You brought up a couple of things that I want to go back to. The first is thriving, but I'm going to put that on pause for hopefully the end, because I really want to get back to the word "thrive." And you used it a lot and in a very interesting way I think. I want to go back to sort of the idea of will New Orleans even be here? And you didn't say that in those words, but it's something that people ask me all the time who are not from New Orleans and haven't visited very much. It's kind of the question of, "Why do they live there anyway?" I got this question a lot when I was in Arizona. Like, "Why are there 3 million people in the desert where there's no water?" So I want to put that question to you, like, you know, why stay? Why is there a city here? Why should we not be thinking about building elsewhere?
JESSICA: Yeah. I love that question because I hate that question. Because I always ask - I said, "Well, why live anywhere?" I guess we should go to the moon. I guess maybe go to Mercury, I don't know. I mean, every city has challenges; that's A. And so I think there is an elitism of, one, Americans, right, and individuals, and colonialism that we're steeped in that makes us think, well, we live, A, in a better place than anywhere else, right? And I think that is highly incorrect. And we oftentimes don't think of our lives in globalized, international terms. So that's the first problem with that statement, right, that, like, if I live in New York, or if I live... I live in New York City and I wouldn't recommend anybody live in New York City [LAUGHTER]. And I love New York, right, but it is a lot - it's very tasking on your health and your mental health, right? And so it depends on what you want and what you're willing to deal with. And with climate change every single city is going to feel things that they've never felt before, right? You have high mountains in the Appalachians flooding, you have California flooding, you have draught in places that didn't see draught. So this idea that if I live in Ohio, or Michigan, or, you know, West Virginia I'm going to be less vulnerable is untrue. And I think it also ignores the fact that Louisiana wasn't always a vulnerable. It's become a vulnerable place because of human intervention. Before the French and the Spanish got to Louisiana indigenous communities lived happily and very healthy lives on the Mississippi River for over 5000 years. And so the idea that this land was always unstable is very untrue. The last thing I'll say, as well, is that--maybe I'm being an arrogant New Orleanian--but in my opinion New Orleans is the most important place in America. And I say that not just because we have way more fun than anywhere else in the world, arguably, but it's because we are truly the lifeline of this nation, right, coming from the history of New Orleans. I tell people, I say, "(Remind you), if it wasn't for us you wouldn't have the West Coast, so you're welcome, all right? Louisiana Purchase wouldn't have happened if Thomas Jefferson didn't have his bright idea to buy it from Napoleon." Additionally, you know, we have one of the largest ports in the world, right? Everything that comes in through foreign nations, most of it comes up through the Port of New Orleans, or the Port of Southeast (inaudible), Port of St. Bernard, Port of Baton Rouge. We are the lifeline of this country. And then we don't even talk about energy, right? And I know I'm not an energy worker, but all of the energy - most of the energy comes from this state. And so when Louisiana - I tell people if we go down the nation goes down. We keep this country rolling. And I like to think of it as the Hunger Games, right, and we're, like, section - or whatever they call it - district 11, right, where people think we're not important but we keep this nation running. But more so than that we are the cultural lifeline, right? Everywhere I go, no matter where I am in this country or the world, I say I'm from New Orleans--people get excited. It's not because of Wall Street, right, that New Yorkers have, it's because we have good food, and we made jazz, and we have bounce music, and we are the joy of this nation. And so when people ask me to that end, "Why do you live there?" I'm, like, "Well, why not?" I'd rather be here to the very end - and I can't go anymore to say "I was here to the end." And I'm going to hopefully be a lever for carrying on the culture wherever I live, but I don't want us to give up because it's hard to live here. Because arguably it's hard to live in a lot of places for a lot of different reasons. And so - and we love our city more than I think most places love their towns. Anywhere you go people here wear New Orleans shirts, and they wear the city and the state with pride, because we know that we built it from our - from pain and struggle. The migrant communities that came here, the Italian, and Irish, the Vietnamese communities, the Honduran communities, we didn't come here, you know, with wealth. We came here with pain, and then we made something out of it. And especially me being an African-American woman, this city is built on the backs of black people, and the state is. So no, I love this place, and my history's here, and my ancestors are here, and indigenous communities are here. We have so much to offer and I hope one day, even if we're gone because that's the last result, I hope that the history books will write that New Orleans is and was the greatest city in the country.
JOHN: That's great. I mean, place is home at the end of the day, right? Like, I think - and I think that's something - like, I love how you couch that in terms of elitism. Because I think when you ask a question like that you forget that there's this value of home, and finding community and home in another place is not an easy proposition for most people.
JESSICA: Exactly.
JOHN: Let's go back to your pillars. I wanted to ask you about natural infrastructure. It's a core piece of the ByWater Institute platform, and we call that research bucket or pillar "Designing our Future by Water." Tell me about green infrastructure in New Orleans and what kinds of projects you're most excited about.
JESSICA: Absolutely. And I think so much of the ByWater Institute, right, it became out of, you know, the Urban Water Plan and really rethinking how we live with our environment and water systems. One thing that I like to tell people all the time that's so exciting--it kind of alludes to my intro--is that we are leading the charge in green infrastructure from a community base level. Which is very different, right? I go to lots of different conferences and I talk to lots of folks, and the green infrastructure is all over the country; we didn't invent it. But I like to joke, and I said, maybe we're perfecting it, right? Because what we're doing is teaching residents and community organizations about green infrastructure and teaching them how to use it as a tool for helping support their communities. And for New Orleans it has so much more benefit than I think in other places, right? Out west it's all about, you know, water quality and storage. But here obviously we're reducing flooding. We're also talking about reducing heat-island effects. We're also talking about improved quality of life. And so there's a lot of benefits to green infrastructure. And so that's why you're seeing a lot of the work happening at a community level, and from the city and state's perspective they are working collaboratively with those communities, which I think is also a very different approach. So again, I think there's a lot of different projects. I won't even necessarily highlight the projects. I think what's unique is the organizations and how the non-profit sector has really pushed the work (inaudible), you know, Front (inaudible) Initiative, Thrive New Orleans, Water-Wise Collective, you know, Groundwork(s) New Orleans, Urban Scapes. You know, there's so many. And I'm really, like, chipping away at the - you know, at the few people who have really led the charge. And I think the projects that you're going to see city-wide in the next 5 to 10 years, I would say probably arguably more than half have been led by community members, right, either in the design process or even in implementation process. And I think the other thing I'll add to that really quickly, John, is that another movement I'm going to shout out, Ripple Effect, and really talking about how we're educating our young people to be leaders in this as well. That goes back to that changing the story of New Orleans, right? It's not just implementing green infrastructure and, "ooh, we've met that, you know, comprehensive zoning ordinance," and "we met the permitting process." It's about changing the way we think about ourselves, right? We are having to really undo this relationship that has really been I would even say, like a sparring match between man and water in Louisiana for over a century. And so now we're saying actually what if we're just partners? What if we get along with each other? But to do that we have to teach our young people. And so I also want to shout out the idea that organizations - multiple organizations are teaching young people at varying ages--from 5 year-olds, to teenagers, to, you know, young adults--about the work and how important it is. And I will say when I teach kids and I'm in classrooms, or if I'm part of a programming with young people, they're so excited because it gives them hope. It gives the future - it gives them a future that isn't the same thing, right? It looks at all of these different aspects. And the last thing I'll add before I stop is that I love green infrastructure because you can do it in any way you want, right? There's no technical rules. I mean, there are rules, right, engineering rules. But you could be a planner, or you can be a teacher, you can be an artist, you can be like me, a non-profit leader, and be a part of this movement, right? This is a larger cultural shift as much as it is an infrastructural shift. So I hope that - I didn't give a specific example because there's too many projects to name, but I think there's an overall movement happening and I think that's really exciting.
JOHN: Yeah, how impressive. And, you know, it's an impressive fabric of NGOs that you describe that are active in the area. And it's, I think very optimistic to think of - or not optimistic - it's excellent that there's some collaboration between - among those NGOs. Let me transition to stormwater. You talked about your activities with creating the stormwater plan for the city. The city is sinking. How are we going to fix that, and how does green infrastructure play into that?
JESSICA: Absolutely. So that's one of the other - you know, like I said, stormwater has such - so many benefits, but for New Orleans it's really a huge thing. For one, New Orleans--and I would also say surrounding parishes; I don't want to leave out St. Bernard and Jefferson because they are part of this story--is that we're all sponge - we're a sponge city, or a sponge region. For those who may not know, when we leveed off the rivers we started to prevent our land from being rebuilt, we started removing groundwater from the pumping stations - using the pumping stations, I'm sorry. That all led to New Orleans to sink at a much faster rate than it should. And we don't have any rock--we're sand, and clay, and silt--so that means that we have to rebuild our groundwater table, but also I would even say even post-Katrina - we've always had a flooding problem, but post-Katrina we started to really see an increased amount of (pavement). And I have to remind locals all the time, I said, "I don't know if you know this, but pavement doesn't (shrink) water." And I think some of that has to do with also our fear of mosquitoes, right, the yellow fever epidemic. There's a lot of layers to this story of why New Orleans is the way it is, and a lot of historical context. But the point being is that stormwater management I think is our golden ticket in a lot of ways, right? If we want to see New Orleans here in 50 years, or 100 years, the way we live with our water has to change. And so not getting too deep into the weeds of all the intricacies, we're working with the City of New Orleans, the local utilities sewage and water board, and a bunch of other economic agencies to really undo some of that harm. And so we just recently launched a concept called the "Water Justice Fund," which the Water Justice Fund is very different from any other stormwater fee that you'll see in any other city. Other cities have fees and they work just fine. We're kind of expanding that to say, we're not just looking to do largescale green infrastructure projects and gray infrastructure improvements and operations and maintenance, we're looking to do--again, harkening back to the history of green infrastructure in the city--we're looking to expand neighborhood scale and personal-property scale green infrastructure, right? And so that's why we're calling it the "Water Justice Fund." So we're hoping - we're in the middle of developing this process, but we're hoping that we're expanding our tree canopy, for example. We're expanding programs like the community adaptation program where low-income homeowners get $25,000 to retrofit their home with green infrastructure. So we're actually working with a company called "I See Change," where residents can submit their ideas for green infrastructure and other resiliency projects, instead of it being the other way around where the city says, "Well, we've looked at our data and we're just going to place this project on your neighborhood," right? We've seen a huge rebuttal of residents who are, like, "I don't want to do it that way. I don't want the city to tell me what kind of resiliency projects I want. I want them to listen to me." And so we're seeing a movement here of people who want self-determination and autonomy. So we're trying to build that into the framework of the stormwater fee. We're not trying to have it be a top-down process. But so every aspect of this Water Justice Fund has equity built into it, autonomy for residents to build their voice into that, and we're bringing it up to government rather than the other way around. So that's a little bit about what we're doing with stormwater, but there's a lot more work to be done, right? And so this is just hopefully one of many steps to help ensure New Orleans is thriving in the next several years.
[MUSIC]
JOHN: Coming up I ask Jessica about engaging the community and resiliency projects, what the Collaborative is doing to address water quality, and why we need to think about thriving versus resilience.
JOHN: That's amazing. I mean, and I'm really excited to work with you on some of these topics because what I'm seeing in science and research is a huge swing towards introducing community-based participatory models to research, even to engineering. And I think, you know, in some fields in academia this is always part of the fabric--public health is a good example--but in others green infrastructure, water-resources management, it's a little bit newer. And so I think there's a lot of grist there for us to talk about more offline at some point.
JESSICA: Absolutely. I mean, I'd just add to that really quickly, John, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening. And I'm glad that there's a shift in these sectors, right, engineering and planning, architecture, where the community voice is being embedded in the process. When I started even as - in this role almost four years ago it was kind of novelty.
JOHN: Right, exactly.
JESSICA: Right, it was a few people doing it; now everybody's doing it. And even I think recently the Army Corps of Engineers put out a report on community engagement. I was, like, what? I almost fell out of my chair, right? So I think that I'm excited to see what the future is going to look like. I feel like the future is bright because of that.
JOHN: That's great. Well, just on that note we have an Army Corps of Engineers project where a core piece of the research is social science to figure out how best to do that community engagement when doing combined natural and built infrastructure projects. So just to reinforce your point, I think that ball's rolling fast. And one more observation--just put in a DOE proposal for decarbonizing wastewater. One of the key requirements was to describe how you're going to engage the community in the project before implementing it.
JESSICA: Yeah. I think there's a shift in overall communities and their understanding of infrastructure. One being that I would say residents always assumed that they weren't interested in that, right? Engineers and architects would always think, "Well, people aren't really interested in the nuts and bolts and how these things are designed." And I really have always thought that that was untrue, especially someone living through Katrina. I'm, like - I was very interested in that even as a young teenager. And then the other thing I think is people are more educated about the impact of the built environment. Before we never talked about, well, if your house is, you know, close to, you know, a plant and how that impacts your quality of life. Or zoning laws... I mean, I've seen so many changes in how people speak about their communities, where it was just, "Oh, I just like my area because it has a mall," versus, "I like my area because it doesn't have a plant next to it," right? I think we've shifted as a country and I think I'm just really excited to see what can happen now that we're collaborating more on these topics.
JOHN: Fabulous. Let's shift to water quality. You said that one of your key focus areas is water quality. What are you doing in that realm?
JESSICA: Absolutely. So to that point, obviously we're working on stormwater fees and stormwater green infrastructure, and all these other thing. And I kept running into a very distinct problem, which is I'd worked with communities and I said, well, that's great, I'm glad you're working on flooding. But I also am concerned about my drinking water and I don't know how good the quality is. (Inaudible) worried about lead in my pipes. You know, all this stuff started coming up. And I also noticed that there was a bit of a gap, right, between communities--similar to what we do, right--communities don't know where to go for that information, or maybe they just don't know how to navigate that information even if they know where to go. And so my team and I - I added some public health team members and we really started to want to just try to navigate the data, right? Where can we find out where the water quality information is? How can we make it, I would say, accessible to residents where they can read it and understand what it means? And then one other area that we recently started working on is PFAS. And my director of policy said, "Well, there's PFAS data for Louisiana." And she looked and looked. And there was, like, a few sparse couple of data points, but it wasn't anything consistent. And so we also embarked on the water quality testing of the Mississippi River. We did - tested surface water at 31 sites along the Mississippi River. We also trained interns from both Tulane and LSU in public health to do this work. So they are now great PFAS-testers. And it was a great experience just learning how to do that. Myself and my team, we would drive - we drove up and down the Mississippi from (Point Hupe) down to St. Bernard Parish, checking for access points in the Mississippi River, checking to see if water quality levels were high or low, just checking to see if we can walk up to the Mississippi River or if it's accessible. We actually mapped over 200 points along the Mississippi River where we can access the river for testing. That was what we did all of last spring and summer. As a result we did find PFAS. We found PFAS at 7 of the 31 sites. At all of the 7 sites on average each of the results found that they were 360 times higher than the EPA standard regulation. And so we realized we have a lot more work to do. And so that was just published in January. We're going to continue testing for PFAS across the State of Louisiana, and also advocating for stronger PFAS regulation. EPA just released more regulation on that, which is great, because it makes our jobs a little bit easier. But we just had a conversation with LDH and they just told us, "Well, we don't think it's important to test for PFAS." So there's still work to be done even if the federal government says that we should. And the last thing I'll land on is we are also really excited to be working on lead abatement in New Orleans. And now, New Orleans I mentioned is a very old city. So we're in an interesting partnership. We have two community partners we're working with, Total Community Action and Civic Studio. And we're also working with NRDC, National Resource Defense Council, and (We Act), and Blue Conduit. There's a lot of partners. But the key point here is kind of like what we're talking about, John, right, that we're working with the City of New Orleans and the Sewage and Water Board to come up with a collaborative process on, one, mapping the lead service lines across the city; and two, coming up with a process for how residents can apply and receive (IGA) funding for replacing both their private and public side of their lead service line. We're really, really excited (inaudible) this process. It's going to be a long process but it's something that we're really excited to continue this work on with the city. So it's an expanding area that we're really working on across Louisiana, and we're very excited to do it. And I think the other thing I'll lastly add is that I always put a call out to other people--we need more people doing this work, right? I can only cover so many parishes. But our northern parts of the parish, our western parts of the parish need this work just as much. And maybe one day the Water Collaborative can be big enough to do all of it, but in the meantime this work is so important. And so yeah, that's a little bit of what we're doing on water quality.
JOHN: That's - yeah, that's great. For the non-water expert listener tell me about PFAS, what the health concerns for it, what it is, give me a little bit more information on that just for those listeners.
JESSICA: Yeah. And I will tell you, I tell people all the time that I'm also a non-water expert [LAUGHTER]. So I had to learn a lot, right? So my - like I said, my team members who work in public health are, like, "Hey, this is an emerging contaminant that you should be really concerned about." And so I'm going to put it in layman's terms like my staff members told me. They said there's different types of PFAS, and PFAS is either P-F-A-S, or P-F-O-A. And you can find them in a lot of different items all across the spectrum of items. The main thing to note is that you'll usually find them in non-thick-coating items, or items that are meant to last a very long time. But you can also find them in nail polish, you can find them sometimes in soaps. They come in everything, right? The whole goal of PFAS, when you see it, is to make sure whatever in the item is, it's (binded) longer, right--so it's a chemical change--and making sure the color lasts, or something doesn't break down as fast, or maybe it's non-stick. Which in reality we think is a great thing, right? Oh, my shirt hasn't faded, you know, after 80 washes. And my non-stick pans - or even our air fryers have PFAS in it, right? That's how we can get those non-stick items. But those things break down, and when we scratch them or when they're damaged, or just when they just naturally break down from the environment it goes into our water systems. PFAS has been a contaminant that has been well-known for a very long time. But honestly up until the last, I would say, two to three years it really has been a major issue for the EPA. And why is it a major issue? Mainly because it is cancer-causing. And we're finding it in everyone's blood, from toddler's, to adults, to elderly. We also are finding it in our food systems, our - whether it's chicken or seafood, fish. It's in everything. And so it's an understudied contaminant, so there's an idea that it can cause cancer and other illnesses, but we have - there's not enough data to say how much in your system can cause what, and what to avoid. And so it's really important now for cities, and states, and the federal agencies across the nation to be doing that data work so we can better figure out what the causes are and why they would cause that. So in a way it's something that we should always be looking out for, but also it needs a lot more data behind it. The last thing I'll say is that, that doesn't mean you can't protect yourself against it just because it's an emerging contaminant and there's a lot of work to be done on it. The main thing that I will tell people as a takeaway for PFAS is that I always use a filter at home. Most Brita filters or Zero water filters will actually take out PFAS. And if you're not sure you can always look online or read the box and it'll tell you exactly what it's going to take out. If you can limit your exposure to PFAS in your water systems please do. But again, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but it's in everything, right? You can - I love raw oysters--they found PFAS in raw oysters, right? They find PFAS in our seafood systems and our meat systems. So until we see much more research and data on it, as well as stricter policies on cleaning our water systems and our soil systems, we're going to have a problem for a while. And the sad part is that it's been going on for so long, so we don't really know how much of everything has been impacted and what that means for our health. So I don't want to give everybody, like, a definite answer, but it's a hopeful answer.
JOHN: That's a good answer, and it's a good answer to the next question I had anyway, which is can we drink out water? And I think you gave a good explanation of that: yes, you need to filter it though.
JESSICA: Yes - yes.
JOHN: Cool. So I want to transition into equity. And before we transition into that topic I just want to tell you - you've used the word "community" a lot. And I was at a water meeting in Aspen, Colorado where I was charged to define "community" and "community participation" in sort of disaster context. And the analogy I gave was a sandwich, and I want to describe this sandwich. I think it was right before lunch where I gave this talk, and so everybody was listening, which may not be the case on this podcast but let's try it anyway. So "community" can be used really broadly. And I think one way especially in the context of disasters like hurricane recovery that we can think about it is a sandwich. So you've got two pieces of bread. On the top you've got basically the industry and big business that supports jobs and sort of the financial sector of the city or community, if you will. And let's be honest that that upper piece of bread is mostly white, right? And then you've got the foundational piece of bread on the sandwich, which is the people that have those jobs, that live in the community, that participate and go to church, the kids go to school, they're part of homeowners associations, church groups, etc. And in both places that I've lived in my recent life here and in Phoenix, Arizona, that bottom layer is mostly brown, right? It's not - I mean, Phoenix, invisible Hispanic population, and here, as you said, the city's built on - by black people. In the middle you have services which are super important for gluing those two pieces of bread together, right? And so those include healthcare--and we talked about healthcare in a panel discussion before together--schools, churches, Tulane fits in there, police, fire. And so, you know, I wanted to give a palpable definition of community; and you may have a different one. But the thing that I want to think about - (inaudible) one, to react to that sort of visual of a community; and two, to what happens to that community after a disaster, and how we can make it thrive better. And we're going to get to the difference between thriving and resilience in a little bit. So the second part of this question is really my perception of what happened during Katrina is that the middle went away. You know, the top layer stayed because it can't go anywhere--it has big infrastructure that it has to protect and keep going in order for the business to maintain its revenue model. In that bottom layer, those who had resources left, and those that didn't didn't. And they were suffering because that middle layer was also gone. How do we fix that part? That's the second part of the question. So the first is, how do you see that community definition? How can you improve it? And the second is how do we keep services resilient? I'm going to use the catch-all term, and we'll get to that later.
JESSICA: Yeah. Well, to answer your first question about the definition, I really like - and the first time you told me (inaudible) you first said it, John, I said, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense," right? "I never thought of it that way." But also I want to add to that, right, it's an and-point, is that when we think of ourselves in community it's never linear, right? It's vertical, right? We are constantly - we're multifaceted-layered people, right? You have our, you know, gender, we have our race or ethnicity, and then we have the people that we live with and we love, the things that we're interested in. Right, I could say I'm a black woman, right, and then my demographics, right? I live in the South and I live in this city. But then I also belong to other communities, right? My family - my grandfather's from Jamaica, so I can say I'm part of a Caribbean community. And I could also say that my family's from Lafayette, so I suppose I'm from a Cajun community. And then there's other - like our social layers, right, you know, with the schools we went to and the experiences we have. I'm a Beyonce fan--am I part of a Beyonce community? [LAUGHTER] Right? Like, it's all of these communities that make us who we are. And so when - I always think of - when you said that first time, John, I think of when you bite into a sandwich, right? You have the bread, and the meat, and the cheese, and that's who we are. We're all of those layers (at once), right? Every time we bite into a sandwich. And so there's two ways to think of it is we're all multifaceted. And so when a disaster strikes or, you know, there's a moment in time where there's a challenging experience in your so-called "community," those layers are multifaceted. So for Katrina I went to a private, mostly all-girl - I mean, not mostly, it was an all-girls school. But it was down the street from a predominantly black low-end (inaudible) school, right? And so I thought of that as kind of an interesting sandwich, which I (living) going to a school where there's a lot of middle-income and upper-income young women. And then you have a school down the street where they don't have books, and they don't even have doors on their classroom doors, or bathroom doors. They don't have hot food. That experience still impacted me, right? Because I thought of myself - I mean, I went to this school but I'm a black woman, and my family went to this other school. And so I'm a part of that experience. And so even if you're the top layer, or even if you're a bottom layer, you're feeling it at all times, right? And I think that's - especially because of the interconnectedness of social media, and the interconnectedness of the technology, we're feeling - I think that's why everybody's so much more stressed, right? Because we get news on things that are outside of our community. But then we feel empathy, or we feel fear, or we feel anything, right? You know, anger. So we're more interconnected than at any point in I think human history, and so we're feeling the weight of all those communities at once. And so the other thing I'll say to that, too, is, to your second question about Katrina... Yeah, I think where we are right now is that I feel like we're missing a lot of that middle and bottom layer, right? I think we - because the top layer is the infrastructure and also you could say the wealthy, right, which own or control most of that infrastructure, they have been able to maintain their systems and not - and expand their systems. And the bottom has kind of fell out, right, the middle and the bottom. So it's kind of like you're getting an open-faced sandwich right now in New Orleans versus an actual sandwich. And I think it's because of everybody dealing with their own problems, also because of systemic racism, right? So I think both of those things intersected during Hurricane Katrina, that no one really knew how to deal with, right? We've never dealt with anything on that scale. So I think moving forward when we think about natural disasters and hurricanes, the key is--and I'm just going to keep - and that's why I do what I do here at the Water Collaborative--is investing in the bottom, right, investing in our most vulnerable communities first. I'm sure everybody's heard this who's listening, but maybe not: studies show that when you invest in the bottom, right, whether it's our most elderly or our most people in poverty, obviously our black, indigenous, and other people of color, we invest in those communities, everybody wins. And I think that is the story of New Orleans that we've struggled with. Even now at post-Katrina and post-COVID we've seen it happen over and over again. And I think the evidence is very clear that if we don't invest in our poorest and most vulnerable communities we run the risk of continuing this cycle of extreme poverty, and increased crime rates, and the lack of economic stability. The sad part because Louisiana, and I think also New Orleans, the way our economy is we are investing a lot in tourism, which means you have low-wage jobs. And then we have a lot of blue-collar jobs. So we have our energy jobs, we have maritime, we have people who are just hard workers. So they keep those systems running, right? If they don't have that structure to keep them going then everything starts to fall apart. So I just want to keep... I think we're getting there, and I think that's the whole point of this conversation, John; we've touched on it in so many ways. When we're talking about equity and we're talking about building systemic or procedural equity it has to come from the bottom. And then everybody wins, right? Everybody is successful. And I think historically in America, especially, we've never done that. It's always been the concept of trickle-down economics, right, which is, you know, to me sounds terrifying these days. But people still live by that idea, right? We still have people who are elected leadership and not elected leadership who think that trickle-down is going to get us to a better place, when obviously the studies show otherwise. So I think that's a - I don't (inaudible) be long-winded, John, but that's kind of where I'm thinking about the sandwich.
JOHN: Wasn't long-winded at all, I like that perspective. And that kind of got us through the third pillar I think of the Water Collaborative of greater New Orleans. I wanted to end on a point that some might think is semantic, but I think it's brilliant. When we were in that panel together the word "resilience" got thrown around a lot. And I think you said something along the lines of, "We need to stop using that word, because that word means that we're just getting by. We need to use a different term." Talk to me about that. What's the term? Why do we have to do that? Tell me more.
JESSICA: Yeah. And as a through-line to the last question, you know, I started this work at a young age as an organizer, and so I was in this kind of semi-philanthropic space but also grassroots space, really just trying to figure out how to navigate a post-Katrina world as a young woman. And I kept hearing this word more than ever, "resilience," or, you know, "100 resilient cities," and all these big (inaudible) philanthropic places talking about being resilient. And they kept saying how New Orleans was so good at bouncing back. Which I, on a very basic factual idea, yeah, we're very good at it I suppose, right? We have lived through the flood of 1927, and obviously the history around chattel slavery and plantations. There's a lot that people have been through here that they've been able to navigate, which I kind of allude to around the importance of New Orleans, right? Because we're associated with resilience, people from Louisiana, we're assumed to be able to do less with more. So not only do we have less financial resources and less technical resources to deal with the things that we're dealing with on a consistent basis, we're also having to deal with the stressors - the emotional, and physical, and mental stressors of rebuilding constantly. And I keep hearing from locals, "I don't want to be resilient anymore. We want to be thriving," right? And "thriving" says, "I have my resources. Those resources come to me rapidly. Those resources are redundant," right? "I want to have resources in that vein, not necessarily in any other way." We need to get to that point in Louisiana, and I think part of that is residents not putting the burden on ourselves. I had a really good friend during Hurricane Ida, and she, like, went all over the (inaudible) trying to help everybody out. And I said, "You're doubling down on this idea of resilience," right, "you're doubling down by saying, "I'm going to be able to fix it all. I'm going to be able to fix all the problems in my community on top of my own." I said, "That's not" - and then (not) soon after she had, like, an emotional breakdown, which I knew was going to happen. I see so many residents after a hurricane going to pick each other up and help each other out, because we do care about each other. We love this place. But that also means that we're putting a huge amount of stress on ourselves instead of keeping our federal and state agencies accountable and expecting them to do what needs to be done, and doing it correctly. That's where we should be putting our energy. And lastly, it's also about public perception. It goes back to that first question you asked me, John, about why does New Orleans matter? I think another problem with the American narrative is, again, people just think that it's our fault that we live here, and because we live here they just have to deal with it. But I don't think that - I know that's not true. Again, when people - we see people in California doing (inaudible) things we don't think, "Well, that's their fault. They live in the mountains, that's why they have fires." And so we have to change the narrative federally and internationally about why we live here and the importance of this place. And those two things are highly interconnected. So that's just a - I try not to be long-winded about it, but it's a really important topic, and it's at kind of the centerpiece of these conversations around infrastructure, whether it's land use, or air quality, or water quality. All of that has to do with the idea of whose responsibility it is and why does the burden of recovery have to rest on the shoulders of residents already dealing with so much, and historically so much, right? My family, some have been through Katrina, they've been through Hurricane Betsy, they've been hurricane Camille, and Gustav, and Ida, you name it. The stress is a lot. And if you can't get through that then you can never build wealth, you can never build a society that is healthy. And that's where we are in Louisiana. That's why we're in the position we're in.
JOHN: Wow, it's heavy. It's a good answer. I like where that landed on thriving, and I think we've come to the end of this episode. I want to thank you for being with me today.
JESSICA: Thank you, John, I really appreciate it, and it's been a great conversation.
JOHN: Awesome, look forward to working with you.
JESSICA: Same.
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JOHN: That's it for this episode of Audacious Water. If you liked the show please rate or review us and tell your colleagues and friends. For more information about audacious water visit our website at AudaciousWater.org/podcast. Until next time I'm John Sabo.
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END (JESSICA DANDRIDGE INTERVIEW)