Green For All

I usually enjoy Tavis Smiley's PBS program, but I haven't been able to watch it much lately. Last night I managed to see a thought provoking interview that touched on issues I thought might be of interest to other frequenters of the blog (especially journalists that specialize in environmental issues like Elissa does).

One of Smiley's guest was an activist and writer named Van Jones. Jones is championing a group he helped create called Green For All, which combines environmentalism with advocacy for the poor and urban social justice movements. Their goal is to encourage the development of a "green" economy that lifts people - especially people from disadvantaged urban communities - out of poverty.

Here are a few comments from Jones that I found the most engaging:

"Part of the thing is the whole way the environmental movement has been framed has been wrong for our community. We're supposed to cry about polar bears and stuff like that, and if Pooky don't have a job, then Pooky might get shot today. I can't cry about a polar bear dying when Pooky is dying."

"If we teach our young people to put up solar panels, they're on their way to becoming electrical engineers, electricians, they can join unions. Those are green pathways out of poverty."

"We don't want eco-apartheid, and that is the big danger as we begin to respond to global warming and these issues. We could wind up in a situation where we get hit first and worst on everything negative, and then benefit last and least on everything positive. Dr. King would have stood against that."

We begin to say..."We can fight poverty and pollution at the same time; you can save the polar bears and Pooky."

"Dr. King was for civil rights. He was also anti-poverty. He was also anti-war, and for peace. He bridged those issues. Now we have these issues, the environment's supposed to be over here, anti-poverty over here, justice over here.

Dr. King would say no. He would link those issues and he would say, "No, this is one agenda to lift America up, to lift up our most vulnerable, and also to make sure that we never have to fight another war for oil or resources ever again."

I was surprised that I was surprised by this guy. When you think about it, all of these things do relate closely to one another and could easily be components of a single, coherent movement. But in the press each of these movements seem to be discussed separately.

I fear that coverage of any of these movements is sometimes limited by the stereotypical roles in which activists are cast. Like relegating environmentalism to "hippie tree huggers," or relegating poverty issues to "naive" and "bleeding heart" rich white people with too much time on their hands, or relegating social and racial justice to senselessly angry black folk, or relegating the anti-war movement to unruly and holier-than-thou college potheads with Che Gueverra posters on their walls, or relegating gay rights activism to drag queens in San Francisco. And of course there isn't enough room here to even begin to lay out all of the stereotypes that hang over the heads of feminists.

But what if a single, plausible and hopeful movement brought all of these together? That (at least on the face of it) seems to be what Green For All is. Whether you agree with their politics or not, it still seems like a pretty cool story to me. Nice catch, Tavis.

~Geoffrey Dobbins
UCABJ, vice president