Скачать или смотреть Heather McTeer Toney on Plastics, Wealth, Culture & Storytelling as a renewable resource

Black sustainability, climate justice, environmental racism petrochemicals, plastics, fast fashion and cultural stewardship are at the center of this conversation. This episode explores how Black lived experience reshapes sustainability beyond policy language into cultural memory, wisdom and justice-driven action.

In Episode 35 of Compost, Cotton & Cornrows, Dominique Drakeford sits with Heather McTeer Toney who is the executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, former mayor of Greenville, Mississippi and former EPA Regional Administrator to unpack how extraction-based industries shape our health, economies and definitions of wealth.

Together they explore how environmentalism shifts when grounded in community knowledge rather than institutional frameworks. From plastics in our bodies to polyester in our clothes, from beauty culture to agricultural legacies, Heather traces the throughline connecting plantation economies to modern petrochemical corridors and invites listeners to rethink convenience, consumption and power. This conversation challenges loud ideas of wealth and instead centers sustainability as care, responsibility and collective imagination.

At its core, this episode reminds us that storytelling is not decorative — it is infrastructure. It is strategy. It is renewable energy.