It’s too easy to peg someone just as a tree-planter and park-builder, Carter says.

Question: Does the media give the green movement a fair shake?

Majora Carter: I’d like to see a difference, sometimes, in the way media covers me, frankly, as an environmentalist. It’s real easy to peg me as a person who is just planting trees and doing parks. Which is great, and I love it, and I will look at some of the things I’m most proud of.

But there’s, also, a real economic agenda associated with it. And I think that the media is not so hip to really say, “Hey, oh, this is like a strategy to move people out of poverty. This is a real strategy that’s designed to do poverty alleviation and remediate the environment.”

And those are the kind of things that, you know, me and Van, in particular, are really interested in pushing.

On a whole, I think, we’ve gotten some tremendous support from really, really smart folks in the media. But at the same time, I think it’s like they don’t quite know what to do with us. I really believe that. But hopefully that will change, because I’m seeing signs of it.

Recorded on: March 17, 2008