Makayla Comas, right, during her time with New York's Beyond Coal campaign.
As we contemplate the lineup of tomorrow’s frontline environmental justice leaders, we should all be hedging our bets on Makayla Comas. She has a Big Picture view of environmental issues, a vision of the meeting place – less of a pinpoint and more of an ocean – between climate change and racial injustice. The cause is quite personal for her. She has experienced firsthand the attempts at silencing so often heaped upon minority communities in the face of glaring discrimination; and yet, she is eminently capable of persevering in the midst of adversity. Her interests are more than intersectional. She believes climate degradation and racial injustice to be inextricably linked.
The child of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago, Comas grew up in a predominantly black, largely Caribbean community in Brooklyn. Her first encounters with unequal treatment came as a child, when she would accompany her mother to her job in Manhattan. She says she observed a clear divide between the island’s socioeconomics and her own – money was spent and represented in unfamiliar ways. The few years when she attended a private and mostly white school in Manhattan further immersed her in this unlike sphere, in which her otherness weighed heavily on her. “It was a real blow to my self-confidence, and for a while I really wanted to be white,” she recalls.
But education at her principally black high school renewed the pride she felt in her heritage. “My teachers taught me self-love,” Comas affirms. The disparity she’d engaged with, between Manhattan and her own, more accepting world, provided a firm grasp of environmental justice, an understanding of how discrimination manifested and why efforts to expose and counteract it were so vital.
Her activism got off to an invigorating start as a member of Global Kids Inc., a leadership program which encouraged her to speak out about the issues she valued. She met First Lady Michelle Obama through her work with the group. She also campaigned for environmental initiatives in public schools, one to install green roofs on school buildings.
With her passion for environmental justice emboldened, she joined the Class of 2018 at the State University of New York's College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY-ESF). The transition was a cultural jolt: “I had encountered bias before, but here, prejudice was openly displayed. It felt obvious when you were one of few minority students.” There was often outright racism, microaggressions, and blatant ignorance. This was exacerbated when the school decided to eliminate its multicultural department, leaving it to individual students and faculty to make minorities feel safe and welcome.
Her freshman year coincided with burgeoning national discussions on race and police brutality. On campus, she was a vocal proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and pinned the last words of black police shooting victims to her door. Often, she would return to her dorm to find them defaced.
SUNY-ESF is 13.7 percent minority students in its undergraduate department and 7.2 percent in its graduate department, and the majority of these students come from abroad, rather than from minority communities within the United States. In addition, the dropout rate for minority students is high, perhaps because of events like the one she described. “I have seen many of my friends leave,” laments Comas. Many students of color feel they aren’t welcome or don’t receive proper support from the administration. “Most professors don’t know how to discuss diversity,” she says.
This atmosphere of apathy catalyzed her involvement in SUNY-ESF’s multicultural club, The Baobab Society, where she is the community service chair, and has been tasked with speaking to the college’s president about diversity and inclusion. She runs up against the same problems in the arena of environmental studies. SUNY-ESF is heavily focused on science. Her major is the only one in the program that includes social science. When she speaks out on racial justice and civil rights in relation to the environment, the response from her peers is unsettling: “They call for scientific proof.”
“Many students speak about wanting to go to Mexico, to work in environmental engineering on behalf of indigenous people,” Comas says. “They don’t understand that there are environmental injustices right here, in America,” – enough crises like that in Flint, Michigan, to keep an environmental engineer occupied for a lifetime.
A division between Comas and many of her classmates is their differing interpretations of the “environment.”
“I didn’t have the privilege of making visits to the Adirondacks or national parks growing up,” Comas remembers. Many of her contemporaries at SUNY-ESF hold a traditional notion of the “environment” as untouched nature, the great outdoors.
Comas is far more familiar with green spaces and structures within cities. For her, the environment is composed of people – their placement within a social landscape, the ways in which this results from discrimination and engenders harm. She mentions the South Bronx and Asthma Alley. “When I think of the environment, I don’t think of national parks, I think of New York City,” Comas confides. “SUNY-ESF doesn’t define the environment broadly enough.”
In her view, it is high time universities incorporate areas like these alongside undeveloped green landscapes in the study of the environment. Humans and wildlife have historically been brutalized to the same extent, and in many of the same ways.
The College of Environmental Science and Forestry is located near the south side of Syracuse – adjacent to Interstate 81, which acts as a geographical barrier dividing different socioeconomic groups. The community on the other side of the freeway, largely black and low-income, faces disproportionate environmental burdens. Comas hopes to do environmental justice work there through The Baobab Society.
Her official interaction with the Sierra Club began last summer, when she interned with Daniel Sherrell, lead organizer of New York City’s Beyond Coal campaign. “I went into the work knowing I wanted to organize,” Comas articulates. “I love the grassroots component of it, the interactions I got to have with people, and the way it was active, rather than sitting at a desk all day. I worked on events attended by Sierra Club President Aaron Mair, and I got to act as a Club representative, going into minority communities and asking what they needed from us.”
Back at her job as a residential assistant, Comas maintains a focus on diversity. She naturally identifies with the distinctive experience of minority students. “It’s discouraging,” she acknowledges. She aims to get Mair to speak during their social justice week in April, which will focus on the social aspects of the environmental movement. “He might help connect the dots for people in a place of privilege, those who don’t see the whole picture,” she hopes.
She may be battling for her own interdisciplinary education, but she is simultaneously paving the way for the minority students who will attend SUNY-ESF after she graduates. Fostering diversity and understanding provides a fuller, healthier learning experience for all. It is a move that will leave its own legacy.
Comas plans to embark on a capstone trip to Cuba before she finishes college. “Many Cubans are light-skinned, and often these Afro-Latino communities are overlooked,” she explains. “I want to work on defining environmental justice there, and engaging with this dynamic.”
Regardless of where she travels, her passion for environmental justice will remain a reflection of her own life story, her experiences growing up and the time she’s spent at SUNY-ESF. The pursuit is challenging, as there’s so much to tackle. But Makayla Comas shows no signs of letting up in her fight for a more just world.