Green Jobs, Not Jails
by Joel Makower
The connection between social inequality and environmental destruction isn’t one made easily by most environmentalists. Sure, they may see a connection between a perceived lack of concern among politicians and corporations about both people and the planet. But that’s usually about it.
Van Jones tells another story. For him, the two are inextricably linked. “Both problems are reaching crisis points,†he writes in the Summer 2005 issue of Yes! magazine. “We act as if they are separate. But they are linked — economically, politically, and morally. The solutions and strategies for each must, therefore, be one.â€
By Maywa Montenegro
When California voters went to the polls in November, 2006, they had the chance to pass a historic measure, taxing the oil industry to pay for research on clean energy. Hollywood spent $40 million on a “yes” campaign, and it had big-name endorsements from Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Google’s Larry Page. But while Tinseltown lent star power, the oil industry placed ads in several black-owned newspapers showing an African-American woman looking horrified at gas prices as she refueled her car. Soon after, the leader of the NAACP came out against the proposition. It failed to pass.
For Van Jones, a 39-year-old civil-rights lawyer in Oakland, California, watching these events unfold was frustrating, but not surprising. What environmentalists fail to realize, he says, is that “for people who live in personal crisis, telling them about a planetary crisis is just demoralizing. You need to talk to these people about opportunity.”
In 1996, Jones co-founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights–a nonprofit organization designed to keep kids off the streets and out of jails. And today he is trumpeting an idea that’s disarmingly simple: Let’s funnel the coming wave of jobs in sustainable industries toward those who most need them, creating a “green-collar” job force that gives the working poor and minorities a chance to get ahead while also ensuring that this new economy has a labor force behind it. In 2005, Jones and his staff of 20 people launched a campaign for green-collar jobs. Two years later, they convinced the Oakland City Council to fund the first-ever Green Jobs Corps, which will begin training its first recruits later this year in fields like installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings, and laying green roofs.
The power of a solution that bridges economic and environmental development, explains Jones, is that it has the potential to unite traditionally disparate factions of the progressive movement. “For at least a generation, activists of all constituencies have believed they could fix their problems on their own,” he says. “But separatism won’t work. On the environmental side, you’ll end up leaving so many people out that they’ll be undoing all the good and undermining your efforts.” On the social-justice side, says Jones, boosting wages with the same old dirty jobs inevitably ends up hurting the poor, accelerating problems like cancer and asthma.
Jones grew up in rural west Tennessee and attended Yale Law School before settling in Oakland. He has spent as much time among Prius drivers as he has among those who ride the bus (and his fellow bus-riders were not there because public transportation limits carbon emissions). That’s given him a certain amount of credibility in making his case. “Among African-Americans, you have many who will ask you, ‘What do polar bears and hybrid cars have to do with my situation?’” says Jones. “And then, mainstream environmentalists will say, ‘What do prisons and failing schools have to do with the environment?’” Jones says he tries to point out ways they’re very closely related. “We talk about ‘disposability’–the idea that we have throw-away species and throw-away resources. We also think that we have throw-away children and throw-away neighborhoods.”
Now expanding its reach to the national level, the Ella Baker Center recently launched “Green for All,” a campaign aimed at securing $1 billion to lift 250,000 people out of poverty with employment in sustainable industries. It scored a major victory last December when Congress, as part of the omnibus energy bill, passed the Green Jobs Act of 2007, authorizing $125 million for a federal program, modeled on Oakland’s, that will train 30,000 workers in new trades like installing solar panels. And that may just be the beginning: Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have touted “green collar” initiatives as being key to the future economy.
As these victories turn increasing media attention to Jones, poster child of a new “black-green” movement, he’s trying to keep his head down. “Sure, everybody likes to get a standing ovation,” he says, “but I figured out a long time ago, nobody can eat your sound bite, and nobody can live in a house made out of newspaper clippings.”
Why Building Green Can Keep People Out of Jail
By Majora Carter
I live in the South Bronx. this small part of New York City receives more than 40 percent of the city’s commercial waste. It is home to two sewage plants and four power plants; 60,000 diesel trucks drive through each week. Some 50 percent of the residents live at or below the poverty line. The hospitalization rate for asthma is seven times the national average.
Unfortunately, race and class are reliable indicators of where one can find trees or waste facilities. We see this reality in many ways, from where good public schools and bad ones are found to sentencing disparities for possession of crack versus powder cocaine. Concentrating power plants, truck routes, chemical facilities and waste-processing plants among poor people with less clout results in dirty industrial design. And it happens because the decision makers don’t have to live amid their choices.
“Environmental justice†means no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens than any other. Achieving it serves many ends: cleaning up the air, water and soil improves the health and quality of life of local residents and lessens global pollution. If we fix “regional sacrifice zones†such as the South Bronx, we fix a lot of things.
Environmental justice can clean up social problems, too. The U.S. is home to only 5 percent of the world’s population, but it houses 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people—in the land of the “free.†A Columbia University study linked greater proximity to fossil-fuel exhaust with greater learning disabilities in children—making them better candidates for jail than higher education. Poverty also leads people to do things that land them in jail. A legitimate green economy can provide jobs that reduce these imbalances as well as clean the environment.
I founded Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx) in 2001 to prove that notion. We started by developing a new park where an illegal garbage dump had been. We then created the South Bronx Greenway, redesigning 11 miles of streets into a network that connects neighborhoods and rivers to one another. Our Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training program certifies formerly jobless and often incarcerated people in green-roof installation and maintenance, urban forestry, hazardous waste cleanup and, soon, in retrofitting our aging buildings for energy efficiency. We also work to get laws passed that fuel demand for these jobs. In 2007 we formed a green-roof installation business. And we are now collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the Fabrication Laboratory, a set of computers and fabrication machines that help local designers turn waste into new raw materials.
These and other SSBx programs improve the environment and produce local jobs. The fewer people living in poverty, the less likely they will be victim to the pernicious decision making that got us into the trouble we face today. As these efforts are replicated in other communities, less money will be needed for law enforcement and incarceration, making more money available for education and healthy economic development. Currently many politicians are “talking green,†but they are spending more on new prisons than on widespread green economic development.
You can help your elected officials understand the connection between their actions and societal outcomes with four short words: “green jobs, not jails.†It’s a recipe for success with multiple benefits. Major green trophy projects provide good ribbon-cutting ceremonies, but a well-supported environmentally conscious economic agenda, a Green New Deal, will keep dollars in our local economies, carbon out of the atmosphere and healthy families together.