Podcasting for Voices of Color | Beware Black Carbon

Juleyka Lantigua-Williams likes to speed in her red Mazda, and the 43-year-old media veteran has long had a clear vision of where she’s headed. What fuels her is a desire to bring others along as she establishes fresh paths to places in the media landscape that others can’t yet envision.

“I like … being the person who makes sure that we get there,” she says over the chatter of a New York City coffee shop. Throughout Lantigua-Williams’ different roles in journalism — staff writer, managing editor, podcast producer and now CEO, to name a few — she’s been driven by a single directive: to amplify voices at the margins.

In the early morning of June 25, Egyptian police stormed the home of former lawmaker Zyad El-Elaimy and dragged him away in front of his family. A founding member of the secular Socialist Democratic Party, he was one of eight people arrested across the country that day. They were all charged with plotting against the state and having ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, which the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al Sisi describes as a terrorist organization.

The arrests are part of a new pattern unfolding across the Middle East. During the Cold War, autocratic dictators and monarchs in the region used the fight against communism to gain Western support even as they pursued repressive policies at home. Saudi Arabia, for instance, poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan to aid the U.S in defeating the Soviet Union and its puppet regime in Kabul, while also funding extremist madrasas across South Asia and Southeast Asia. When the U.S. launched its “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks, the region’s governments were passive partners — they helped America but didn’t want to draw too much attention to their security partnership.

In the year 1952, London disappeared from view. It was called the Great Smog, the worst air pollution the U.K. had ever seen. It killed thousands of people, shuttered above-ground public transport and sparked an unprecedented push for clean-air legislation in a country known for its toxic pea-soup fog caused by the airborne pollution associated with coal.

Air pollution is still a problem, not just in cities from Paris to Beijing but across the globe. And one of the main culprits is black carbon, particles in the air that arise from burning forests, diesel engines and coal pollution. But black carbon isn’t just a problem for those near forest fires or diesel-choked highways. According to the U.N.’s Climate & Clean Air Coalition, black carbon's warming effect is as much as 1,500 times more intense than that of carbon dioxide.