Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., explained Sunday that a “core component” of her Green New Deal legislation is ending “colonial” attitudes that dominate community gardens.

“What I love too is growing plants that are culturally familiar to the community. It’s so important,” the freshman congresswoman said in an Instagram video while exploring a Bronx community garden.

“So that’s really how you do it right. That is such a core component of the Green New Deal is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context, and it’s an area that we get the most pushback on because people say, ‘Why do you need to do that? That’s too hard,’” Ocasio-Cortez said in another Instagram video of her walking the streets of New York after leaving the community garden.

“But when you really think about it — when someone says that it’s ‘too hard’ to do a green space that grows Yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something — what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements because they come with the colonial lens on them,” Ocasio-Cortez said.





Ocasio-Cortez said she was visiting the community garden to help form a connection from her own D.C. community garden and her Bronx district.

In February, she said that the fight for the Green New Deal was directly tied to justice in “indigenous communities.”

"There is no justice and there is no combating climate change without addressing what has happened to indigenous communities," Ocasio-Cortez said . "That means that there is no fixing our economy without addressing the racial wealth gap."

Ocasio-Cortez frequently updates her Instagram following on the growth of her plants in her D.C. community garden.

In April, she asked her Twitter following for gardening tips.

