 work ranges from community activism to environmental policy and design and pedagogy, and for the past 20 years or so, Matt has dedicated himself to creating and managing networks that transform systems for a sustainable, just, fair and hopeful future. Matt is currently the executive director of the Breathe Collaborative, a clearing house for information on air quality in northeast US. Prior to that, Matt has served as program director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, where he created Pittsburgh's Sustainable Business Network. Matt has been teaching sustainability and environmental policy at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University since 2008, and I first met Matt when he was my professor for a class on community sustainable development. And then he also became my mentor as part of the Urban Land Institute competition, where we've made it to the final round. Matt has published multiple peer reviewed articles on sustainability, design and education and has co-othered the book called Ethical and Environmental Challenges to Engineering. So you can guess that he is an engineer, his background includes a PhD and a master's in system engineering, as well as a bachelor's in aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia. Matt, I'm super delighted to have you with us today. I'm so inspired by work and I hope our students, I'm happy that our students will have the opportunity to become inspired as well today. And with this maybe Rim, would we enable Matt to share his screen? Thank you. Can you see that? Great. Thank you, Professor Lola. I really appreciate being invited to talk to the architecture school at Columbia University. It's quite an honor to be invited to give this talk, so I appreciate it very much. But I, the only real request that I have is for people to not be shy about asking questions. So I have the chat up and can follow, follow that, whoops, I think we lost my screen there. There we go. There we go. Okay. I have a question, you know, you can feel free to type it in the chat and, you know, I'll take them. We have time at the end for it, but I also can take some questions as we go along. So what I wanted to talk, my talk is stories and sustainable community development because part of this story is my own journey in learning about this, this field that's emerged now about resilient and sustainable communities, cities, and, and cultures. And it really has been a journey of discovery for myself because these things didn't exist 25 years ago. So I want to tell a little bit about my own journey and story and interweave it with some of the work that I've done. And then, you know, we'll talk about some of that as well too. So as Professor Lola said, I am the director of the Breathe project. We are a clearinghouse of public health and science information to address the poor air quality that continues to exist in the greater Pittsburgh region and the Ohio Valley Appalachian region. And I'll talk more about that in a second. And I also, as Professor Lola said, teach classes in sustainable community development and environmental policy at Heinz College. This is an image from the 1950s of Pittsburgh. You can see downtown Pittsburgh here, and you can see the riverbank of the Mon River. This happens to be a U.S. steel site that made pipe and sites like this lined both sides of the river valley, extending about 40 miles upriver of the Mon River, which is the most heavily industrialized place in southwestern Pennsylvania and really post-World War II, almost the most heavily industrialized zone in North America. And part of my being drawn to this was that I grew up in a period where I did see scenes like this when I was very young. But I also saw how these scenes changed very quickly from being... So this is an aerial view that's just across the river from the image I just showed you where there was a coke plant. Coke is where they bake coal to drive off impurities, use the coke gas as fuel, and then the carbon from it is used in steelmaking. And so this is a major coal production, a coal-coking operation. And that by the early 1990s, it was basically abandoned facilities. And the period of time from about 1985 to about 1995, most of this industry disappeared. The unemployment rate was in the high 30%, particularly in the Mon Valley. And many people were displaced from Pittsburgh. And Pittsburgh was left with a toxic legacy of abandoned brownfield sites that span the river for miles. And so in 2004 there, you can see where they kind of cleared off a lot from that site. And so the sustainability journey for me is partially from living through a period of time that involves essentially a cultural collapse and industrial collapse and a change in way of life that left the toxic legacy. Here is a picture of more recent times where you can see downtown Pittsburgh. You can see this building where the University of Pittsburgh is. And then the Koch works, they've removed everything except for the scaffolding. And they're trying to redevelop this site, which is essentially a 450-acre site where that Koch works was. And so part of my coming to this was my undergraduate education was in aerospace engineering, but I also was very interested in the history of invention and history of technology and worked on a number of projects to study both the social structures of how innovation happens and the cognitive structures for how innovation happens by studying how inventors do their work. And I did a lot of project work with Thomas Edison and the competitive environment that he was in for various inventions. And in fact, my first job before graduate school was at Rutgers University working for the Edison National Historic Site in trying to understand more about how research labs function and how social innovation followed technological innovation and vice versa. Part of that work is what drove me to graduate school. So after working in the defense industry for a while in large-scale systems, my graduate work, my project idea was to study structures of how innovation happens in complex systems. And I did this at the University of Virginia in systems engineering. And on a whim, I was told to go have a meeting with the person depicted in the lower right-hand corner there, who happened to be the Dean of the Architecture School of the University of Virginia at the time. His name is William McDonough. He's now world famous after writing several books on sustainable design and so on. But at that time, really, he was just starting out. And I met with him about this idea of creating things that go into buildings, products that go into buildings and designing them in ways so that they don't unleash harms on human health or the environment. And so my graduate work was in this model of how this idea of sustainability could be used as a driver of innovation in industrial processes. And, you know, I was motivated by this to see if something like this could be brought back to Pittsburgh, my home, to try to heal some of the things that existed there. And so this project, I had published a number of studies on this, on how the manufacturing in this textile mill located in Switzerland that was essentially going to disappear because of competitive pressures, much like what happened in Pittsburgh, except they used the environment as this differentiator, built a new market and were able to thrive and win all sorts of awards for that work. You know, at this time in 1993, 1994, the idea of a green product itself was a novel concept and having it be part of the manufacturing system was also quite new and exciting. And so that's what propelled me into the sustainability work. And so I moved back to Pittsburgh and got interested in well, actually, before we jump back to Pittsburgh, I also continued looking at other models of innovation and went to a really inspiring talk in the year 2000, when I was finishing my PhD by a historian of technology. His name is Tom Hughes. He's now deceased. He worked at the University of Pennsylvania studying systems of innovation as well. And he asked at a meeting of historians and engineers in the year 2000, this really, this question looking back over the prior century of what would be the greatest invention of the 20th century. And what, you know, people responded with things you might expect like space travel, rockets, computers, mass manufacturing of automobiles, refrigeration, generation of vaccines to respond to disease, penicillin. And Tom Hughes gave this really provocative answer to me that was really what was invented in the 20th century. The greatest invention was the ability to build and manage large scale research and development systems. And that's, that's kind of a mouthful. But really what he was saying is that the ability out of which our culture enabled the ability to solve lots of scientific and technical problems simultaneously and therefore enable the construction of many complex systems after World War II is really what changed the world. There were two key pieces to this. One was being able to be on top of multiple development projects, likely was exemplified by the Atlas rocket program, where they had to figure out how to invent combustion, how to invent the structures of rockets, stability and attitude control systems, the telemetry and the tracking systems and so on. All of those needed to be solved at the same time. And that's a management coordination. But it's only possible when you pair that up with information technology. So on the right is project whirlwind, which was the first computer really that you could program all electronically and have it be practical. This used, the key innovation here was these boards that you see here are memory boards where there were little ceramic donuts at the intersections of different wires and that would hold magnetic charges in strings of 32 corresponding to a 32-bit computer system. Prior to that, they were using punched cards, paper tape, vacuum tubes that would break all the time. So this really became the first practical, programmable, large scale computer system. You can see it occupied an entire room, probably had less computing power than the phones in our pockets that we have. But these things enabled the construction of many large scale systems that were unleashed on the world as a result of that. So this is the internet, a map of the nodes of the internet. Large scale construction processes that enabled the construction of many highways. The space program itself and all of the defense industries incumbent upon that. This is showing Project Sage, the early warning system that was critical during the Cold War that monitored in the case of nuclear attack and nuclear technology as well as well. So if you look at the 20th century, because these capabilities were unleashed, our world completely changed. It coincided with the expansion of cities into suburban areas, mass manufacturing automobiles and its infrastructure, the way mass housing was manufactured and distributed. And it really shaped our cities, it shaped our suburban communities, and it shaped the way work happened itself, it shaped universities, and it really was a transformative event. This is a photograph of a ring road around Beijing from a couple of years ago. These ideas have now spread worldwide. These capabilities now exist on every continent and are becoming supersized. So you can see the impact here. This is a depiction of a traffic jam that lasted for 57 days in Beijing in the year 2015, which also highlights in some ways these systems, they are fragile and if they go into certain modes of operation and can cause problems. We're experiencing that currently with the pandemic as well too, that the fragility of many of our systems are revealed because of the presence of a virus that these systems really were not ever designed to be robust during. And these systems have grown and one of the key things they've resulted in is mass urbanization. That Rome was the first million person city in the Western hemisphere. It took 1800 years for London to reach that level. We have over 414 of them today in the world and within the next 20 years, that number will more than double. And these systems have huge metabolisms. And so we're seeing things like 50 to 150 species per day being lost, 18,000 to 55,000 species per year. So, you know, the scale of these systems are hard to contemplate sometimes. So I like the artwork of Chris Jordan to try to capture some of that. And so this one called light bulbs is a depiction of, what is it? It's 426,000 light bulbs, which is the number of kilowatt hours that are wasted per minute in the United States. And this one is called packing peanuts that it's 166,000 peanuts, which is the number of overnight packages that are moved around per hour in the United States. And then this one is cell phones. This one is 300, sorry, 424,000 cell phones, which is the number that are discarded in the United States every day. This one is containers that reflect the number of containers that are offloaded on the shores of the US every second. So these systems are huge and have huge impacts. And so that inspired me to try to work at scale. And so I built a couple of programs in Pittsburgh to try to get businesses, more businesses adopting sustainable technology. So I'm just going to go through this quickly. This is a program that ran for five years. And it was to try to inspire companies to take action to save money and save energy and water. You know, we marketed this at one point, we had about 112 different businesses participating. They're of all different scale and sizes and so on. So we're part of this and, you know, we track their actions. Some of them were related to equity. Some of them were related to energy efficiency, water mitigation and so on. And so it resulted in, you know, tons of landfill waste reduced in one year this was 436 tons of landfill waste increased in diversion rate. We saved electricity 112 million kilowatt hours. Over those four years that's enough for about the power of the homes of 10% of the city of Pittsburgh, and valued at around $9 million. If you include the social cost of carbon, you're up to about $10.1 million in savings from that the CO2 that was reduced. The savings enough to fill our stadium 93 feet deep. And then air quality savings as well too. And we have problems with particles in the region. And so that's, this is a good thing to track how many pounds were kept out. So we have boards from recite made from recycled materials, you know, to different businesses that participated in the region. And, you know, tracked how well some businesses performed over multiple years where they reduced, you know, their energy use 6570% and so on. But what this competition never really addressed were issues that are called material issues. Material issues go beyond just operational issues. They go to what the product is that that company makes or what that key services that they produce. And there are sustainability issues associated with that. And the global reporting initiative requires what are now known as materiality assessments that reflect the interests of the, the ability of that business to perform, as well as how what the impact is on various stakeholders. So, there's always now happening a materiality assessment of how businesses do their work. And you can see that there are these maps that are produced on different environmental social and governance related issues of different scales and different priorities. Well, we did this and incorporated that into our work and launched a program called CEO for Sustainabilities in Pittsburgh. And what we found was that there were some common topics that multiple businesses throughout our region needed to identify it as key topics. And one of those topics here this is just showing the Bloomberg terminal for how they track some of these things. What we found was that air quality emerged as a regional problem that the air quality in Pittsburgh, multiple businesses found were material for the success of their future as well as the success of our region. And so that's why we launched the brief project. It emerged out of this need to address the material lagging nature of our region's inability to have high quality air. It leads to shorter lives. It leads to misery. It leads to unpleasant community experiences. It leads to an ability to attract talent and retain talent. It leads to a bad reputation for the region. And so that's why we launched brief project. The collaborative is the collection of 42 organizations working together to address air quality in southwestern Pennsylvania. We've aligned our work with the UN development goals so that by addressing some of these air quality and human health issues, it maps on to the ability to meet the sustainable development goals which our city has adopted as a framework for us. So I just want to talk a little bit about air quality now. We still have a very serious air quality problem and adding to it only makes things worse. So some statistics the American Long Association gives us straight Fs for particles and ozone and it's been like that for a long time. The air quality and the air quality index that's rated, you know, green for good yellow for moderates up through red has really been unchanged about two thirds of the time we have not good air in the greater Pittsburgh region. The biggest change for 2020 the preliminary data there is that it's about half the time the air was not good so with people not driving restaurants being shut down and so on. It's improved our air quality, a little bit, not as much as you might think and it's as industrial sources which continue to operate are still problematic. These next set of charts show us how lagging the Pittsburgh region is these are all of the air monitors in the United States and registering whether or not they're complying with the annual average requirements of the US EPA is clean air act for particles PM 2.5 that's 2.5 microns and you can see back in the year 2000 to 2002, most of the country was not meeting that standard, which it happens to be 12 micrograms of particles per cubic meter of air. And we're just going to march forward in time here a bit. So, 2008 you can see some of the monitors coming into compliance. This is by the year 2009. This is up through 2012 now you can see the bulk of the monitors changing. You can see New York's air getting better during this period of time. This is by the year 2015. Now you're at the year 2018. And you can see most of the country now has meeting that standard. And there's one red dot here in Southwestern Pennsylvania outside of California really is where the air is still a problem and so that's another reason why we have to mobilize. And in fact this is a hyper local map that shows the percentile ranking of the monitors in our region with one monitor being ranked at the third percentile that means the air is worse than 97% of the country for particles in the Monogahala Valley I showed you earlier the slide of the river of the Mon Valley. There are still some steel plants that are operating there and cook works that cause pollution problems. This is again showing the air quality index for the different days over multiple years and showing that it really hasn't changed very much 2020 it's gotten a little better but it's still you know 50% not good. These are some electron microscope images of particles that the scale at the bottom is five microns. So these are about half that size. If you think about it about 30 of these fit across the width of human hair. And when you inhale them they go they bypass your lungs defense systems and go straight into your bloodstream and then they can accumulate in tissue and as a result our air has continues to have problems here. If you rank us on a national scale on the average of air in our region. We're at the 11th percentile whereas New York's air comes in at about the 50th percentile so it shows you how far we have to come to to address this issue. And I'm going to skip this. This just based this is a fancy chart that just basically says that every any time you can decrease air pollution it results in saving lives there's no floor to the reduction of that level the more you reduce the more lives you save. And this is showing that our air and mainly comes from industrial sources, unlike other parts of the country where mobile sources make up a lot of our air pollution. So as a result of the particles, we have higher cancer risks, they they're kind that you can see downtown Pittsburgh, the Mon River, this is the Mon Valley where there's still a lot of these industrial operations and this is Neville Island another concentration of industrial zones and they have higher cancer risks that far exceed the the national average the entire county actually is higher than the cancer risks for the country and then this breaks it down by neighborhood showing the percentile. And most of our county is in the 95th to 100th percentile for cancer risk from air toxics as a result of, you know, these pollution problems. And, you know, we've got 1.2 million people in the county the whole the whole Pittsburgh region has about 4 million people, and there are people with different risks that are more vulnerable to air pollution, particularly during coven where we know that that particles result in poor health outcomes to the community. And this this is showing some concentration maps of where the river value valleys and a lot of environmental justice communities are where pollution tends to be the worst. This big red spot here is in that Mon Valley region that identified earlier. So part of our challenge has been that because these particles, you don't really see them. People don't see smoke coming out of smokestacks in Pittsburgh anymore. And so the one of the challenges is just educating people about this problem of air quality that we have. One of the ways we we did that was work with our partners at the create lab at Carnegie Mellon to create an app called smell PGH, which is a crowd source app that can be downloaded for free and anytime anyone would smell a bad smell from air pollution. You can record that on and describe it, rate it, and it gets geocoded on a map. And the circles are the EPA monitors that the data is plugged into. And then it's possible to see other people noticing that smells are pretty bad and the data that's been collected there's been about 40,000 of these reports since this is launched. And there's a strong correlation with smells and air pollution. Your nose is a pretty good monitor. The create lab has now launched this to something that's called smell my city so it can be used anywhere in the world now. And it's been very useful for getting people engaged about awareness about air pollution. And so this is a series of dates. In November that show, you know, a large number of really smelly smell large number of smell reports and red monitors showing that there were emissions of air pollution on those days. This is an image of one of our biggest existing challenges to our era the clerics and Coke works. And I'm going to share with you a video of an event that happened in on Christmas Eve of 2018. Let's see I'm going to put this in my browser and then share that with you so that you can see that. I hope folks can see that. So this is this morning 4am on Christmas Eve. And this is an explosion at that Coke works that removed the entire pollution control system from the operation of this plant. The width of that fireball that you see there is about three football fields long. We recorded on another tool that we have deployed called breathe cams. These are pointed at the region's most polluting facilities where we record their activity 24 hours a day seven days a week. And so our breathe cams captured this explosion I'll play it one more time so that people can see it but these are available for free on our website and people can go if they smell something that's bad. They can go and look to see whether or not there are emissions happening at plants like this. Well this was a very unusual situation with the scale and which this occurred. And so the ability for this Coke works to run any of its pollution control system, and yet they continue to operate the plant in our local air regulator, which resides with our county health department really refuse to shut them down because of the political influence that exists between these legacy industries and and with the community. And so this resulted in an egregious environmental justice event that shortly followed from that I mean we've, we've had issues with this plant, many, many times over many years. This was done by us steel. But this was one of the worst things that I think anyone has seen. So, we noticed, we work with asthma specialists, and what was found very shortly after that so that explosion happened on Christmas Eve, 2018, and by January 15 of 2019. We're already watching the, the, the large numbers of asthma, uncontrolled asthma events and lung fun deep lung functioning decreases occurring in the community of Claritin, where people live adjacent to that plant. And this is again from our cameras that that that gas once that pollution control was taken offline us steel was piping that gas to open flares up on the hillside. This is from across the river about a mile to a mile and a half away from the site so there's a flare here, and then some more flares here I'll zoom in on this. So, just to give you an idea of the scale. This is about five railroad cars long with where they were just burning untreated poking gas, openly in the atmosphere, and they did this for 101 days. So, because action wasn't being taken to shut that plant down, we organize the community to demand that us steel hot idle that that plant and so by the 22nd of January, we've had we held several rallies organizing the community to demand that us stop dumping pollution in on the community. They're about 140,000 people that live within five miles of this coke works. There were, you know, elected officials that were brought into this. And that we had lots of media coverage on this resulted in the state government holding a state government public hearing in the city of Clarkton. And so this is a video. So the state representatives and senators are seated at this table. And this is where the testifiers were sitting. I happen to be sitting right here. Okay, you can't see me I'll show me in a second. What happened this was in the city of Clarkton Hall. You'll notice that there are a lot of people in here in these orange suits. So us steel paid 200 of their employees to go into this room and occupy all of the space to intimidate everybody. And you'll notice, if you look around this room. This community has about 40% of residents are African American residents. And if you look around this room you see, there's really only one African American person sitting here she happens to be a city council person for the city of Clarkton. And this was all done to intimidate so here's the US steel team, basically saying that they can't do anything that they can't shut the plant down, because it will cause more emission harms than if they tried to shut it down that if they just keep it running and burning the flare. What you also can't see is out these doors. There's about an additional 300 community residents mostly African American residents who were trying to get in here and have their voices heard, but it didn't happen. This is my test of testifying before the committee there's a video that's available to watch where we documented how illegal this really is that for them to continue to operate was really grossly out of line. And this is just turning it around the other side. One of the state representative summer Lee, African American woman. The steel workers when she was trying to ask questions, the steel workers were heckling her and making really out of line racist comments during that period of time. And other state reps like this person here. He was a former US steel employee. Now he's installed in state government. This gentleman as well. And so, you know this has been a political uphill battle and in fact, our lieutenant governor who has made national news in the last week about his announcement that he's running for our US Senate seat next year. He actually acted as a cheerleader for US steel at this event to try to deflect some of the political heat that was going on here. So this just goes to show you. And so there have been, I think three federal lawsuits that have been filed over this and they're currently taking testimony on that for you for us deal we believe that the, the, they could be two, I think a hundred million dollars or more because of it being a hundred dollar a hundred, what is a hundred thousand dollars a day per incident over at least a hundred days. It could be some of their fines for this now we'll see how fast it proceeds through the court system. And what this is leading up to is we still have serious air quality problem, and that gives you a flavor of some of our work to push back on that on our existing air quality problems and sources. We also have campaigns on what has emerged also in our region which is additional threats to our air shed from new sources from the discovery of the ability to frack for for natural gas in our region is surrounded by that. So what has happened and this is an image about 30 miles from downtown Pittsburgh along the Ohio River in a town called Manaca, Pennsylvania is where Shell has decided to build an ethane cracker plant that will use the natural gas. This is a almost a 500 acre site, and it is a massive project that has gotten massive subsidies from our state because of corruption. And so we are also organizing community members to speak out about this threat to our air shed and I'll talk about some of the specifics of that in a second and actually maybe I should just pause there because I think we may be running out of time. I can just show their, you know, the different parts of this industry with compressor stations, frack wells, impoundments. These are cryogenic facilities and the shell plant and it's all designed to make those little pellets that they the industry believes they can sell for people. It's also expansion of rail traffic. Right through the heart of the city of Pittsburgh this Pittsburgh line, they're planning on tripling the number of trains going right through the center of the city, putting about 250,000 people at risk. From the railments and explosions, and so on. So, you know, we can talk more about the impacts of this industry, but I think maybe I'll pause there because it gives you an idea of, you know, sustainability operationalize in our region addressing core material issues that impact the health of every single person in Southwestern Pennsylvania. And you know I'm doing this because I want to see the vision of sustainability take hold the landscapes to heal and for us to not go back to doing things the way that we had done them in the past. I'll quickly jump ahead, you know, to this key point that I wanted to make. These are all impacts that we could come back to but you know this is, this was the largest steelworks in North America and the town of homestead along the modern river. You know, we had bet on a high volume, low margin commodity business that left the toxic legacy in the past, and we should know better, and we know that clean energy jobs are a much better employment prospect for the region, and so on. And that's kind of where what our advocacy is on now is trying to shift our region's narrative and leadership away from the toxicity that we seem to have trouble shaking. So I'll pause there, and then leave time for some question and answers, we can certainly jump back to more information and so on so thank you. Thank you, Matt. This is truly inspirational and so important, and the activist work together with your engineering and sustainability knowledge is, is critical to address these kinds of inequities right that happen. I never envisioned becoming an activist. I never thought that that would be what I would be doing but I also never thought I would be teaching sustainable community development. You know, all of these things that my career has followed are things that have just emerged through the, through the immersion in doing the work about what needs to be done, including being here today hopefully trying to get more people interested in this type of work. And I would also assume through their interaction with the community that you have because in your class the community's development. You bring realistic projects from the field you connect students with stakeholders and community champions to produce real work or real contribution design contribution for those communities and I think that's that's that's really transformative and it was for me as a, as a PhD student. I want to open maybe the room for questions from the, from students from the crowd and if not I have several questions I would like to engage a discussion with but maybe if you're free to open your mics big freely comment asks no this is really an open this place for discussion with with Matt. One of the questions that I had relates to to to the original nature of the work because you're showing the work around Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania and, and my question is how is the work applicable to places like New York City to to other locations that you showed that difference of the 10th percentile cleanliness of Pittsburgh versus the 50th percentile, but but still the we all understand today that it is a regional problem that the problem is a problem of community and neighborhoods that are receive the gift of having a plant in their neighborhood so so how do we address that you know across region. The center point of all of this of this whole story and in some of the sustainable community development class work that we do is always the communities needs, it always comes from people in the community, essentially wanting to set their own course that they want to become a healthier place, they want to see their children in schools that are not being polluted, or that, you know we're abandoned, or we're part of an unsustainable financial model 30 years ago but the investments haven't been there, or they live in homes that were built with lead paint. So really it's centered on health as a foundation, because what some of the things we found is that unhealthy situations, they become intergenerational in harming people. You know, in the city of Clariton, we talked with so many people who have lost family members from cancer and respiratory disease and cardiac disease, and that was resulted in such a disruption that in and of itself, it is a burden on people that live there. And that's on top of other burdens that include, you know, racist housing zoning redlining that has occurred there that includes underinvestment, lack of grocery stores, many of the same stories in community justice that you know you read about. So it really is foundational with starting with a community's needs and building out from there we happen to have a stacking up of multiple communities where air pollution is such a big issue that needs to be addressed at scale. I have another question here by Sergio, Sergio do would you like to open your mic and ask the question. So it looks like he's saying, how do you balance equitable ethical design and environmental sustain environmental design, and so on so. Good question. And for many years, the framing of sustainability was on the three or the people planet profit model where, you know, it's a balance of environment equity and economy. Well, what we've learned, I think is that that has the the the problem with that model is you always have to start with a business case. The existing economic system in the past has always been given first billing and equity has always been pushed to the side, or said well we'll come to that once all the environmental issues are fixed. You know, 20 years ago was how that was framed. Now we've turned it all around. You have to begin with with equity and health as a foundation, because none of the other things matter we've seen that with the pandemic right. If you can't have access to health care, or a safe place from a health perspective that none of the other things matter and, by the way, none of those other things end up working. They're all stacked up against people who who happened to not be fortunate enough to sit on the side of the benefits of a lot of these systems. So, in what we're learning is that our economic system fundamentally doesn't work at all now. Some of the things that we've learned about the petrochemical industry, which is, you know, we're fighting in our region, is that the whole business model is messed up. They have lost, in the last 10 years, 300, over $300 billion in losses and have generated no net jobs for any place where they've operated over the last decade. So all the crap about the fracking revolution and all the good it's done, it's done only harms no benefits at all and that negative. So, so you have to start from the foundations of what makes what what is the ability for people to live in healthy communities. And then the environment is a key piece of that, because if you're, you know, living in pollution, or don't have access to food. And, you know, that's not sustainable either. So it's health, equity, voice, and then environment, and then the economy emerges from there. The economy is something that gets produced when those things are aligned and it gets communities out from being paternalized, or made to be dependent upon these other sources like large manufacturing companies that are multi nationals that come in and strip the life out of communities and leave them empty that need to be cleaned up 30 years down the line. So that answers your question. That's, that's, that's really interesting. One of one of the things that I was wondering during your presentation, Matt was the, the cameras of the, the, the breathe project and how you capture that those fumes or that fire that caught up and neutralized all the pollution. Or recording or recording systems. If there was not that camera there. Would, would that event not be covered by the media or reported by the plant. No, no, so so what curiously what happened was our health department, which is our air regulator. We posted on Facebook on Christmas Eve, that there was a fire at the US steel Claire and Coke works. No one was hurt. The fires under control, and everything. You know, we're looking into the situation. And that's actually all that existed for about 10 days. And then we started getting these, you know, we didn't even know because it was Christmas holiday. I wasn't watching those cameras over that period of time so we didn't even know. And it was the reports of children showing up at asthma clinics when school started that we knew something was wrong. Then we started seeing the EPA monitoring network where there were exceedances of sulfur dioxide limits, and particles. And hydrogen sulfide which is a byproduct of poking, and we started collecting this data, the health department waited until January 9. So that's almost two weeks later to even let the public know that there was an issue, and they issued an order for people to stay indoors, and that order that order stood until May of that year. There was no other proactive measures to protect people's health, other than telling people that they have to stay inside, and they didn't do anything for that to that company. They hadn't they the enforcement order that they put together hadn't been issued until the end of February, and that ultimately was made moot because the company was going to appeal it. And they said that they would have everything back up online by May, which is what happened. So we have this company that was not held to account the community had we so you know we learned of the data that told us to go look at the cameras. When we saw that it was like oh my goodness. And so then all the media picked that up it actually became a national story. As a result of that. And we've had many other incidents like this so you know I can share some of those too but on average we're getting these eruption events that happen, you know, every couple of days at these facilities that we have these cameras. And now because of the grassroots connection, many people in the communities now know how to use these cameras. And so they collect that, and they posted on Twitter, or on Facebook, or Instagram, and now people are mobilizing and raising and it drives the regulators crazy, because they really aren't interested in doing enforcement, we are needing to build a political upswell to essentially replace our county executive and our county council, so that a board of health that actually cares about the health of people can be installed, you know, New York is fortunate because you have competent people that run such things in your city where health is valued. And I will just say to your earlier question about New York, you know, New York did a lot to clean up its air by by focusing on heating systems around New York, and making them a lot cleaner. And your air quality has improved a lot as a result of those initiatives and in some ways it's an inspiring case for what can be done when public officials recognize the issue and mobilize and do something about it. Yeah, although there are still pockets of problems around the city, but I agree that living in Pittsburgh there were many more days I woke up and smelling the pollution it was more it was more evident although not seen like the skies were blue, but the smell is bad. Exactly. I think your work is as an important reminder that this is not only that this is not happening only in and around Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania but around in and around others major cities and small towns around the US. And oftentimes in, in design we kind of go to a place that is less connected to to those critical problems that are there in the field and we need to remember that. So that's why I think it's, it's an important reminder for students to to remember that these things still happen. This is this inequity this health and pollution problems still exist. Yeah, it's not only something that happened 10 or 20 years ago, it's still there still happening. Yeah. So what I want to share with everyone. I want to share my screen for this. So this is your let me share this. So remember I showed you that that Coke work superstructure at the beginning. This is that site. This is that superstructure was there. It's now has the largest solar array in North America that the well building standard, and all the highest lead standards, and the various public health standards. The most strident ones are being used to define the redevelopment of this site, and it's also being reconnected there's the housing the residential part of the site, which is really what we're worker housing for people who worked at a site like this. The communities being stitched back together again and healed. And there's a lot of work on why air quality is important is that that once these public spaces get developed and designed. People will want to be outside, because it's a beautiful riverfront location now, but the air quality if it's bad is a problem so we're pushing. This is a beach head into the Mon Valley that the Clareton Coke works is about six miles up river from here and the pollution comes right through this valley. And so design this this redesign is very inspiring for how this whole region can be transformed So it's really these things happening together, which is designing new things that are inspirational to the highest standards connected to communities and addressing the material issues that are holding us back. And, you know, my work has been on different parts of that dimension over the past 25 years now I'm on charging hard on addressing these material issues, but it's so that a place like this can thrive and be very successful. Yeah, this is second. Certainly the next phase, waterfront development I've seen in for Pittsburgh because there were several phases of how waterfront remediation and redevelopment has occurred in Pittsburgh right there. That's right. Today, it has evolved from making, you know, big box retail to parking lot and now this mixed use. Yeah, yeah, exactly so the early on I showed you some smoke stacks with Pittsburgh in the background. So that has become a mixed use development area. So that former steel facility is, and that was done well to stitch the neighborhood in with that design, creating a town square a sense of place. It's a very successful mixed use development whereas some of these other brownfield sites that were done earlier. I don't know if you can see well on this side of the river. They're, they're essentially big box type office park buildings that were done in the early, the late 1980s and early 1990s so you know no residential just parking lots and buildings corporate campuses that were there only were accessed by car. So, you know, sort of like version 1.0 with a much more vibrant and active and successful brownfield across the river. This Hazelwood green site happens to be the very last large brownfield site within the city of Pittsburgh borders, and they're really doing everything here. So that this would this will become as it's build out and notice they didn't develop this quickly. They're doing it in phases. It will include aspects of residential, as well as commercial and any industrial be light industrial but it's mostly meant to be commercial special universities and so on at this site so this is a very if you want to read about this particular project it's a it's a fairly inspiring story for all the standards and processes that are here and you can see the infrastructure that they put into place. They're capturing all the storm water, and so on. Matt, thank you so much for sharing your work with us today. I think that's okay. I would share your email with students. So they could reach out to you with additional questions since their project this semester relates to waterfront development so it might be insightful for them to contact you. I'm very happy to do that. You know if this talk was to activists for folks. I understand. I do think it's important for people to know that that is something really the past four years there's been no federal enforcement of any environmental policy. It's really the community activists are the frontline of protection, and it's why some of this work was really necessary to do. Being able to do the design work to good standards and doing it with community needs at the center, the ability to continue doing that work is great and I think we're going to see more of that opportunity as this next generation heals some of the wounds that have been created over the past four years. The big difference now is social justice environmental justice and equity are really central, and it's taken a long time for us to get to where that is the first thing that people need to look at an environment comes in line with that and then economics third in line. So yeah I would welcome any questions. I'm happy to share resources with folks and look forward to seeing you all as your careers evolve and you all end up in places like me that you don't expect doing interesting work. Thank you. Thank you so much Matt. Thank you. Next time in person. Yes, that would be great. I would post pandemic a trip to New York City sounds great. And so good luck all