Stories for Environmental Justice with Shilpi Chhotray

Apr 27

About This Episode

Shilpi Chhotray is the co-founder and executive director of People over Plastic. This week, she joins Carrie to share a story of waste colonization, social divides, and the work her team is doing to lift the intersectional stories of environmental racism.

People over Plastic is something truly special. On one level, it is a platform, the only multicultural media platform of its kind, publishing stories by BIPOC for BIPOC, uplifting environmental justice stories of the people who are living them in a way that is nuanced, sensitive, and in-depth.

But they have also developed expertise in events, creating safe spaces for frontline leaders to share their lived experiences in an unfiltered context. These storytelling salons are like nothing we've ever seen: creative, powerful, and made so much more potent in the vulnerability and courage that comes when facing the truths of shared narratives aloud, in public, and raw.

We are deeply impressed by what Shilpi and her team are doing at People over Plastic and we couldn't imagine this season of Mission Forward without her. And make sure to subscribe to the People over Plastic podcast to hear Shilpi in action!

Our great thanks to Shilpi Chhotray for joining us this week.

Carrie Fox:
Hi there and welcome to the Mission Forward Podcast, where each week we bring you a thought-provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communication. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B corporation. As you know, on this show, we talk about the role of communication in social change, and today's guest is Storytelling for Social Justice in a very powerful and exciting way. Shilpi Chhotray is co-founder and executive director of People over Plastic, a BIPOC led media platform dedicated to uplifting the intersectional stories behind environmental racism.
People over Plastic develops platforms and safe spaces for frontline leaders to share their lived experiences in an unfiltered context. And while those might sound like really interesting words, I can tell you, having been in one of these rooms and having seen one of their storytelling salons up close, I've never actually seen anything quite like it. The work is so powerful, so creative, so forward-thinking, is the definition of what it means to be community led. I'm so impressed by what Shilpi and her team are doing at People over Plastic. I couldn't actually imagine this season without her. Shilpi, welcome to Mission Forward. Thank you so much for being with us.

Shilpi Chhotray:
Thank you, Carrie, for having me and for that very, very kind and generous introduction. I loved having you in the room with us in DC at our story salon in the fall, and it's just an honor to be here with you.

Carrie Fox:
We have so much to talk about today. There's so much going on, and you've just launched season four. We'll get there in a minute. But first, given that this is about stories, I wonder if you would be willing to start us off with a story of your own. Tell us how you got into this work and go back as far as you want or start as recent as you want, but I'd love to hear a little more about you and what brings you to this work.

Shilpi Chhotray:
Thank you, and thank you for this question. I could start with a very boring path of how I got my undergrad at so-and-so, and then I studied marine science, but I won't do that. I won't bore you with those facts. I actually have been asked this question many, many times and I've never quite answered it in the way that I'm going to share today. When I think about my earliest memory in this work, and I've been working on plastic pollution related issues for almost 10 years now, which is crazy because I used to be like, "I've been working on it for two years, for five years." It's almost 10 years and very embedded on the humanitarian aspect and the social impact aspect of it.
But it didn't always start out like that. Actually when I think about my earliest memory, it's about when I was eight years old and I was on a trip visiting my motherland in India from a state called Odisha, which is quite conservative. It's right above the Bay of Bengal. I remember I was jet lagged, so I was up super early, like 4:30 in the morning, 5:00. My grandma was already up praying, so I was able to be hanging out with her. I was just looking around and I noticed outside there were these women and they were in traditional saris and bangles and they were carrying heaps of what it seemed like different materials on their head.
Some of them even had a baby on their hip. I was just so curious about these women. What were they doing up so early? What are they hunkered down on the ground picking up? What are they thinking in this moment? It's kind of cold out. I was just a very curious child. They were waste pickers when I come to realize later, and they were picking up the different types of waste that they were seeing on the streets. This time, it's the '80s, so there wasn't as much plastic pollution as we see now and not as much low value plastics, which we can get into later. It was better for them because they were picking up the type of material that they could actually exchange at a materials recovery center and get money for it.
They were doing their job. Three decades later, I'm immersed in what we called waste colonization, how the US is shipping so much of the waste overseas. A lot of it does end up in India. It's openly dumped and burned, and so much of the informal waste sector is realized by these women that wake up super early and this is their livelihood. It's just interesting. At that moment when I was eight years old, I never thought in a million years that I would be working actually closely with individuals like these all over the global south and different entities really dedicated to making sure their voices were heard, but also understanding from that age that I wouldn't be hanging out with these ladies anytime soon.
My family, not in a malicious way, but it was very clear that there was a social divide. And that was also an interesting thing for a kid to realize, I can't just go out and go hang out with them. It's very, very profound moment for many different reasons. I thought I'd share that with you because when I look back, it is actually one of the earliest memories I have of, oh wow, I was concerned with this for a long time.

Carrie Fox:
That's a beautiful story and thank you for sharing that. It really reinforces to me, Shilpi, how so many of us have these experiences early in life. And whether we realize it or not, they inform who we are and how we see the world. And that reflecting back is so important to understand where we're going, both at a personal level, but also at a much bigger level. It's so interesting that you have become this incredible advocate for environmental racism and injustice and how you use the platform you have built to create such powerful change that whether you knew it then or not, certainly it sounds like that moment really stuck with you.

Shilpi Chhotray:
Thank you. It's definitely been quite the journey. I would even say the work that we've committed to do on uplifting these voices and really uncovering this narrative around environmental racism was only a shift in my career in the last few years because I noticed there was such a gap in who was given the megaphone and also who created the megaphone. I became obsessed with those two reasons.

Carrie Fox:
Let's break that down a little bit because I suspect that folks who are listening generally know, and in fact, some folks might deeply understand what we mean when we're talking about environmental racism. Talk a little bit more about that and the work that People over Plastic is doing.

Shilpi Chhotray:
When I talk about environmental racism, it's about the insane amount of injustices that are put onto communities that are burdened the most by pollution, by capitalism, by industry. I'll put it very simply, why don't we see waste burning facilities or plastic producing facilities, petrochemical industries in white neighborhoods, in affluent suburbs? They are strategically always 100% across the board located in low income communities of color, whether that's here in the United States or headquartered by a European or global North US entity, and then breaking ground in where I'm originally from. That's very personal to a lot of kids of immigrants.
I am not at all impacted the same way as people that face environmental racism, so I want to make that really clear. I'm a very entitled Indian woman compared to a lot of the people that we work with. But our entire team, it's a deep passion and goal and ambition to develop those safe spaces to uncover these stories and make sure that these are the headlines that are being made and they're not being co-opted by industry or these big NGOs that do have the megaphone that aren't really close to the issue, but have their own agenda to spew.

Carrie Fox:
I mentioned before we started recording that there's someone who was on this season's show, his name is Buzz, who runs The Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts in Washington, DC, and he has this great line that both he and his co-founder often say is when you tell your own story, you have the power to change the ending.
I am thinking back to a moment that I was in a room with you at one of your storytelling sessions and a woman who was from Baltimore was talking about how she advocated for change in a way that I think many folks thought would be impossible, but she advocated for one of these large chemical companies to change where they were planning to put their facilities and how powerful any given person can be in creating, in affecting change, in challenging power.
That does not happen every day. But what you're doing through your work is opening up the door to possibility that every person can see the power they have in affecting injustices. Is that fair, or would you change that?

Shilpi Chhotray:
No, I think you're absolutely spot on. The one thing that I would add is there's a lot of portrayal when it comes to Sheshonda stories. We're talking about Sheshonda Campbell from South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Maybe I can just give a little background on her. When Sheshonda was 15 years old, she started this campaign called Free Your Voice, because the biggest waste incinerator facility was going to be built less than a mile from her school. If you don't know what incinerators are, it's a method of getting rid of plastic and other waste, but it really doesn't get rid of it. It just goes into another volatile form, ends up in the air, and then back in the soil.
She has talked about how people in her neighborhood, their lives are cut by half than the rich suburbs of Baltimore. I mean, that is a stark divide. It's a predominantly low income Black community. What she has done is incredible and she has a lot of integrity. There's empowerment in her story. I think the only thing I would add, Carrie, to your synopsis that's very accurate is just the mainstream media loves to portray Black and brown and Indigenous people in this vein of a victimhood. How many photos have we seen of poor Filipinos waiting in oceans of trash?
That is not the narrative we want to hear and we deserve to hear because there is so much that is being missed with the nuance and the integrity and the actual solutions focused work that a lot of these communities do. With Sheshonda, instead of incinerators, her proposal is community led solutions that have large scale organic composting, and it's also looking at Black land reparations. Often when we talk about environmental racism, there's social justice and racial justice inherently embedded into that work. Again, that nuance is often left out when we talk about things in just a conservation aspect or an environmental aspect.
It's that idea of developing a safe space and a platform for people to just tell their story and telling their story in it of itself is so powerful. We do feel like the audience, where these stories are told, are also really important. I remember we were having a conversation, Carrie, you're like, "Well, who comes to the audience? Who comes to these events?" The only thing we don't curate, I will say, are the stories themselves. There's no prep for that. But the audience who is in the room hearing these stories, it's really important that people that have influence and power and they have decision making authority hear this and do something about it.

Carrie Fox:
Tell us about how that's played out. What have been some of the reactions or the after effects of some of these stories and storytelling salons?

Shilpi Chhotray:
We've only had a few so far. People over Plastic is fairly new. We're about a year and three or four months in. It's really exciting. I think one of my most promising moments, which gives me a lot of hope, is a story salon we did with my boy Khafre's group. He runs Hip Hop For Change. We had a headliner, who's D Smoke, who's an incredible hip hop artist. I don't know if you know him. He came to fame on Cardi B's show Rhythm and Flow on Netflix. He heard about what this event was doing, including People over Plastic brought in a story salon with a local community leader Dr. Ahimsa Porter Sumchai that test radiation levels in Hunters Point, San Francisco.
It's where an old Navy shipyard came and left a lot of contamination, predominantly Black neighborhood. We had Jan Anderson from East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice. They also work on incineration in Long Beach, which similar to Curtis Bay, similar story of mostly Latino community there, but a lot of air pollution and asthma issues, reproductive health issues. And then I had Indigenous elder Casey Camp-Horinek come all the way from Ponca Nation, which is near Tulsa, to talk about what's happening with fracking and pipeline. Really amazing group of environmental justice leaders.
Okay, how do we get their voices out to a BIPOC audience that should know about these issues and get active? What better to do that than a hip hop show, right? Joining forces with Khafre's group was amazing, D Smoke coming in, getting excited and interested in these stories. Having that megaphone was just so game-changing for these three voices in particular. We want to do more collaborations like that. The story salon you came to, there were a few prominent policymakers in the room that are now taking plastic pollution more seriously from an environmental justice angle. So far, the mainstream dialogue has been let's focus on recycling.
Let's focus on cleanup, even though recycling is a hoax. We've only recycled less than 6% to date. These are the narratives. We are working really hard against this industry pedaled suite of false solutions that don't prioritize the voices that are most impacted. It's really exciting. We call it salon because it's this playoff of kind of the 1920s salon where it's not an NGO talking heads panel. There's poetry. There's drinks. There's food. As you know, we partnered with Busboys and Poets in DC for that particular event. We want it to be an evening out, like bring your date, bring your girlfriends, bring your favorite colleagues, and just come hang out with us, hear these amazing people do their thing.

Carrie Fox:
Right, right. For folks who are listening that know The Moth Radio Hour, I think I said this to you afterwards, I said, "I felt like I was in a live studio audience of The Moth Radio Show," because it was so...

Shilpi Chhotray:
Oh, you did tell me that.

Carrie Fox:
It was so real and so vulnerable and so moving. I remember thinking, this is unlike any DC event I have ever experienced. I think that's really important to remember that you are challenging how people connect on critical issues. You didn't mention this, but the next day you all went over to a very prominent university and had a set of students come together and think about how this could influence their pathways into legal careers. That there's something so interesting about how you're challenging how work gets done, how change happens.

Shilpi Chhotray:
Thank you for mentioning that. When I talked to Frankie, Sheshonda and Lorena, our three storytellers, one who actually came up all the way from Jackson, Mississippi, who had just been going through that water crisis in Jackson, where the city had turned off their water for over six weeks, just like what happened in Flint. But she is now getting resource from Georgetown Law students. The partnership was with Howard Law and Georgetown Law.
We did an academic round table where, as Carrie was saying, these up and coming law students who have been studying environmental justice curriculum, shout out to Sara Colangelo who runs that program, they were able to meet the people that eventually, hopefully would be representing in a court of law 10 years from now. Some of them said that they had never experienced anything like this and have changed their entire curriculum to go on the course of environmental justice. It is really exciting.
We are looking to partner with a suite of HBCUs this year to really focus in on the petrochemical buildout, which is happening in the Gulf South, which is a really important narrative that we need to hit the hammer home on plastic. I want everyone in this country and really in the world to associate petrochemicals and cancer causing emissions with plastic. It is not just an end of life issue. It is not just an ocean pollution issue. It really starts at the wellhead and at extraction.

Carrie Fox:
Are you going to be focused on that in season four?

Shilpi Chhotray:
Yes. You did mention season four. We're not quite in production yet. We just wrapped SE season three actually with Prism, who I know you work with very closely. Season four is focused on the petrochemicals and we'll uncover stories of what we call sacrifice zones. Who are the communities being sacrificed in the name of industrial power and corporate greed? There is a political agenda to this, and a lot of the oil lobbying companies are in bed with Republican senators and politicians.
We want to uncover this. Looking at Texas, Louisiana, there's a stretch of land in Louisiana called Cancer Alley, where 150 oil refineries and petrochemical plants live. There's more that are to be coming in that area. We want to make sure that that actually doesn't happen. Can we do this with the tools that we have, with the storytelling platforms that we're building? There's also a growth in Appalachia. Ohio River Valley is a area of concern too.

Carrie Fox:
Every one of the instances that you've shared today is connected to an environmental injustice. How does it not overwhelm you and yet keep you focused on moving the work forward?

Shilpi Chhotray:
I get so overwhelmed, Carrie. I don't feel like I have a good answer to that because the work isn't a typical 9:00 to 5:00. The people we are really passionate about uplifting are not just storytellers. They're our friends. They're our colleagues. They're people I spend hours on the phone with talking about personal stuff. It's very personal. There is an emotional labor to this that I wish there was a solution. I'm also a mom of a two-year-old, and I'm so grateful for my son because he is the only reason I have any boundaries. Before him, I was just go, go, go until collapse. And also this element of guilt. Well, you can't stop because there are people that have it so much worse that can't stop.
I think becoming a mom really forces you to have boundaries. I find myself so much more productive and able to contribute the way I know I'm best suited for after I've had significant work-life balance and having those boundaries of not working over the weekends, having evenings as family time, and also keeping my focus on where it needs to be versus getting pulled into a million things. But it is really challenging because the... This is for you too. It's not really just a job or a career. We feel very passionate about the issue, and we are against a ticking clock. People are really suffering because of something that could be stopped, and I think that's where I get so sucked in.
It's like, how could the industry keep doing this when they know? I mean, Exxon knew in the '70s that this was going to happen, whether it was climate or plastic. Exxon is a massive producer of plastic, by the way. That's where I get very obsessed. It's hard for me to take that moment of clarity of it's not going to happen overnight. This is a long-term process.

Carrie Fox:
It is. It is. But I have in my mind that wonderful quote from Dr. Maya Angelou of when you know better, you must do better. What you all are doing with the podcast, every story you tell means that your audience knows better. There was a story that I didn't know the background to. There was a story that I didn't know the depths of, the impact, and how every single episode of People over Plastic allows an audience to better understand, allows an audience to change their actions. You're right, it will take a long time to get Exxon to change its actions until it is forced to change its actions. And to think about the impact that you're having on moving the needle towards that is pretty impressive.

Shilpi Chhotray:
Thank you, Carrie. I really, really appreciate that. And also, thank you for listening to the podcast.

Carrie Fox:
Oh my gosh! I mean, for those who have not listened to it, there will be a link to it in the episode, and I will make sure that you listen to some of the episodes that I have listened to, some of my favorites, because the storytelling truly is... I mean, I feel like I get lost in the stories as I'm listening to them.

Shilpi Chhotray:
Thank you so much, Carrie. That's so appreciated.

Carrie Fox:
Tell me what then, we're getting ready to wrap already, what is bringing you hope these days? As you think about the work you do, as you think about your life as a mom, what is bringing you hope?

Shilpi Chhotray:
Oh, so many things. I think what I love the most about creating this media platform with this group of advocates and creatives is that it is solutions focused. I spent many, many years being in the activist world, and I still very much consider myself an activist. I love all of my colleagues so deeply and dearly for insane amounts of respect for doing what they do. But it is really hard to be in the thick of the policy, the corporate campaigns, the grassroots community organizing. What I love about the media is we're literally just here as the infrastructure and the backbone to create spaces for people to tell their stories.
It's really, really fun doing the creative work. I've been historically for the last several years in the communications world, which is I think I've always been drawn to that creative outlet. But with this, it's exciting too because nobody's stories are exactly the same. Everyone's stories is so uniquely, oh, nobody has a monopoly on your voice. What happens is things get misconstructed and misconstrued and underrepresented and misrepresented in media when the stories are not told the way they deserve to be told. Really just being able to provide that platform and let people do their thing is exciting.
What I find really hopeful is that in all of these stories, and Carrie, you know this from listening to the podcast, it's not doom and gloom. People have solutions, like I talked about Sheshonda. Every single person has a solution. This is the vision we need to put all of our resources into and let those visions be optimized and actualized. There are scalable ways to not only protect the environment, but protect people and do it in a way that doesn't leave anybody behind. That gives me a lot of hope. I think also being a mom and just being immersed in more simpler ways of doing things with my son and remembering that life is pretty good, just enjoying time outside in nature.
Right now, he's in this exciting phase of developing vocabulary and reliving those little moments of just discovery and seeing things through his eyes has been really, really a joy for me. I do have a lot of hope for the future, and I do think People over Plastic is not at all the only group that is dedicated to this kind of work. I love seeing these especially BIPOC led platforms developing all over the world, because the more we have attention on the voices that are most impacted, the solutions and the scalability will come, but there needs to be a power building component to it.

Carrie Fox:
Last question. How can people support you and your work?

Shilpi Chhotray:
Visit peopleoverplastic.co not .com. We're cool like that. We're just .co. Listen to our podcast. We're three seasons in. We'll be releasing a fourth. If we're at a story salon near you, please come and hang out and get involved.

Carrie Fox:
Very cool. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for being with us. As noted, we're going to add some links to some of my favorite episodes and a few more ways that you can get involved with People over Plastic. Shilpi, I would love if you would consider it, maybe come back during season four, share some more stories with us. We would love to continue to elevate and share your awesome work.

Shilpi Chhotray:
That would be amazing. I'd love to do that. Thank you, Carrie.

Carrie Fox:
Thank you. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Mission Forward. Thanks for tuning in today. If you are stewing on what we discussed here today, or if you heard something that's going to stick with you, drop me a line at carrie@mission.partners and let me know what's got you thinking. If you have thoughts for where we should go in future shows, I would love to hear that too.
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