The Ella Baker Center's Reclaim the Future campaign focuses on ensuring that jobs and job training are available for the poor and for people of color in the emerging green economy.

I spoke with Van at his office in Oakland on May 21. He had just returned from Washington D.C. where he testified before Congress about green collar jobs.

Green Options: The scope of your work and activism is extremely broad: civil rights, political activism, juvenile justice system reform… How does environmental activism fit in?

Van Jones: From my point of view, we have a legacy in Progressive politics in the last century of being very fragmented: single issue, sub-sub-sub-issue sometimes. We've worked harder and harder and gotten farther away from each other and from any real solutions. So, it's not about the environment fitting in.

I look at the world through certain lenses: race, class, gender, power. The environment is a lens: a way I look at the world. So I see the environment in everything. I see ecological perils and solutions in everything. It's not surprising that a society that has throwaway children and throwaway neighborhoods also has throwaway species and throwaway resources and throwaway continents. It's a throwaway mentality that we have.

What we do with people should be restorative. If somebody gets in trouble with the law, the goal should be a just outcome, and a just outcome should be one that leaves everybody else better off than they were before. That's not what we do. We have a retribution-based justice system. If somebody damages me, the system is going to damage them. You add damage to damage, and that's how we get justice. How do you know you have justice? Look, there's more damage! My view is that we need to have restorative justice where the victim has been made whole, the offender or the trespasser has been rehabilitated, and the community has been restored to some sense of wholeness. That's a much higher standard, but it's something to aim for.

I feel the same thing about the suicide economy that we're in. You take a bunch of living things, turn them into dead things, shrink wrap it, and that's your economic growth model. I think that's totally nuts. We should be restoring and replenishing the capacity of nature to take care of us. That should be how we grow: green growth. My hope is that someday we'll have restorative justice and we'll have restorative economics.

There's only one solution to all the problems, or to at least 80 percent of the problems we have in this country, and that's a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.

GO: You use the terms "eco-apocalypse", "eco-apartheid", and "eco-equity" to describe possible future societal outcomes from an environmental perspective. What do those terms mean to you?

VJ: Eco-apocalypse is the natural outcome of how we're living. You've got six billion people, soon to be nine billion people, and everybody's eager to ride around in an S.U.V. while chugging on a Slurpee, or they wish they were! And that's just not gonna work. The outcome of that kind of lifestyle and value system is eco-apocalypse.

Eco-apartheid is the danger that certain elites, certain ecological haves, begin to think they've solved the problem because they've solved it for themselves. But the problem is actually getting worse and worse everywhere else around them. The ecological have-nots not only continue to suffer morally and physically, but also, that particular moment [when the elites think they've solved the problem] just becomes a speed bump on the way to eco-apocalypse anyway.

To me, eco-equity is a way of talking about an ecologically sustainable society that is more just, more fair, more equal, and more inclusive than the one we have now.

GO: And that's why you created the Oakland Green Jobs Corps? What is your goal with that project?

VJ: We've created the process by which it's being born. We want to train up a bunch of urban youth in green enterprise. People are always telling me, "Oh Van, you just want to make these guys be the workers and the slaves. A green plantation!" But, you know, I'm a good southern Christian guy. I'm for work. It should be paid fairly and it should be safe and clean and it shouldn't be hurting the earth and everybody around you.

I want to see green career paths, where people get a chance to start at the bottom and then step up to the next rung on the ladder and then the next rung, and get a chance to become co-owners and co-investors and co-inventors. It has to start some place.

Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.

Our big problem in this country: everybody wants people to climb out of poverty themselves. I'm for that. But they want people to climb a six story ladder with four rungs on it. Lets put some rungs on this ladder, and lets make sure that ladder is pointing toward the green economy and not the grey economy.

GO: You had the opportunity to testify before Congress about green collar jobs just a few days ago. How did that opportunity come about, and what did you have to say?

VJ: It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'll put it in the top five. It was like a movie! You put your suit on and get your shoes polished and get in the cab to go over to the big building with high ceilings and marble floors. Then you sit in front of this little table with three other people. The Congresspeople all walk in, and they sit up there like they're gods. They give their speeches, and then it's your turn, and you get a chance to talk to people who, if they believe you, can vote to send hundreds of millions of dollars to your constituency. And… it was just great.

I got a chance to say everything I had to say. Representative [Edward] Markey and Representative Hilda Solis, their comments were… I was thinking, "We should put that on our website!" They were saying things we've been saying. That was really cool: to see people in powerful positions like that saying "green pathways out of poverty" and "green collar jobs". That's stuff that the Ella Baker Center was saying in 2004 and 2005 when it was really novel. People hadn't really thought about that before. Now we've gotten to a place where people in high office feel like they can say it in public and nobody's going to laugh. That's a big change.

The opportunity came [to testify] because we were just doing our work and somebody from [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi's office heard about it. They called us in and asked some questions. We were clearly being vetted in a way. The next time they called us over, the Speaker was actually there. We got a chance to be in a meeting with her, and then did a press conference. So, basically, we ended up with about $5 million worth of free lobbying just doing this work here in Oakland and believing in it, and because we're just a stone's throw from the Speaker's home office.

It was weird to me because it was like being back in high school civics. It was like, [sings] "I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill." An idea comes from the people, then a representative introduces it and it becomes law. I'm thinking, "This is starting to get corny!" And I'm right in the middle of it!

GO: Do you have any interest in someday running for office yourself?

VJ: No. No. Not at all. I'm totally excited and fascinated by politics and politicians. I listen to NPR and Rush Limbaugh. I'm a big political junkie. Thus, I know better than to run for office. [Laughs]

GO: What are the most important things that individuals and individual businesses can do to ensure that green collar jobs and eco-equity become realities?

VJ: I wish it was easy. Just say, "Hire urban youth." I wish it was that easy, but it's not that easy. Our public schools and our foster care system and our juvenile court system have so failed a generation of urban youth that some of them are not job ready. We may as well be honest about that.

What is possible is to identify those community-based organizations that work with young people. Those community colleges. Go out of your way to find those helping themselves to get job ready. You probably cant do it by posting on your individual website, "We have a job." You're going to have to go out of your way a little bit to identify community-based organizations or churches and say, "Look, if you have any young people who are job ready or close to it, let me know." It does take extra work. You do have to go out of your way. But every community has reputable community centers, reputable pastors, who can help you navigate that and help you find people who will do a good job.

If you want to go a step beyond that, every county has some kind of a workforce investment board or has job training available. Usually it's through the community colleges and vocational schools. Go to the local community college and say to them, listen, this is what we're doing: if you train people in solar installation or in some other particular thing I'm doing, I will hire three or four people in the next year from your program. That's all you have to say to a community college. They will turn on a dime if they believe they can get their graduates jobs.

Unfortunately, it's the polluters and the despoilers and the big-box stores that dictate what a kid can learn in a community college. It's just one section of the business community, frankly the worst section, in industries that are mature enough that can actually dictate, "We want XYZ employees." Most eco-entrepreneurs, they're hiring their dorm buddies to do vocational work, because they're so disconnected from traditional blue collar communities.

So, minimally, reach out to those community groups that are reputable. And it may take you a few times. Don't give up based on the first setback. You may hire somebody that doesn't work out. It's okay to hire, it's okay to fire, and it's okay to try to hire again. That success story is one hire away. You don't give up because this one didn't work out. You don't do that for anyone else. You never say as a business person, "Well, I'm never going to hire another college graduate! That one was a fool!"

GO: You named the Ella Baker Center after an "unsung civil rights heroine." Who are some of the Ella Bakers of the environmental movement?

VJ: You gotta start with Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered by Shell and Nigerian activists. You can never honor him enough in terms of the commitment he made to the Ogoni people and his willingness to work across so many different boundaries. He put the Ogoni people on the map and Nigeria on the map and Shell on the map. And the price he paid [was] being murdered by the government with the duplicity of big corporate America.

Vivian Chang here in Oakland's Chinatown. About to become a mom, in her thirties, never seeks the spotlight. But, you go over to an event at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, there are nine different Asian nationalities there. She's doing the real work.

I love Juliet Ellis at Urban Habitat. She's just so smart and fast and able to deal with these big white bankers and also able to deal with these low-income organizers, and is impressive within herself all the time.

Majora Carter in the South Bronx, who's becoming a sung hero! [Laughs] She got the MacArthur [Fellowship], but she should get the MacArthur and the Nobel Prize and whatever else they've got.

We're really lucky to have such a strong and growing environmental movement in the country. I love Billy Parish with Energy Action. He's willing to try to figure out how to get all those wonderful white kids working together, and he's wanting to figure out how to connect with other struggles. I don't know if he's sung or unsung, but I'd add him to my list. Keep it diverse. [Laughs]

But, Julia Butterfly [Hill] is always at the top of my list. She's sung certainly well enough by now, but that's my girl. Julia Butterfly, in my life, will always be my number one through ten.

3. Eco-equity: Essentially, eco-equity means we need each other. It’s not about charity, guilt trips, or accusations. The overriding message of this imperative is that our children’s children won’t be here if we don’t figure this thing out. Relying on “a free market evacuation plan” is not a viable solution for society as a whole. A “sink or swim” mentality doesn’t work. See: Katrina.“We must reject sink or swim in an age of floods; stand together, be together, thrive together.”

Equal access and opportunity to the best of the green economy is essential for the challenges we face as a society. What is the best agenda to pursue? A green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Given the complexity of these issues, how can green advocates explain them all in a short period of time? A rhetorical device: “The Fourth Quadrant.” (The rest of this explanation really needs some version of Van’s Powerpoint slide to make sense. Until we can get the actual diagram from Van's people, I took the liberaty of drawing it out on a napkin for you. High tech, I know…)On a basic level, people understand the spectrums of ‘gray’ moving to ‘green’ (environmental problems, moving to solutions), and rich to poor, but rarely do they think about where these two intersect. If you plot these on a crossing axis and draw a box around the four endpoints, it creates four quadrants. The altruism afforded by affluence defines the top left quadrant. It is predominantly this type of person who has the time and resources to care about environmental problems that don’t directly affect their daily lives. They are the most active supporters of polar bears, the rainforest, and other such external problems. Are the people who can afford to wrong to focus on these problems? Of course not. When keystone species in ecosystems disappear, we’re next. This line of reasoning may be selfish, but it’s as good a justification for altruism as any. We need people to take up these causes.How, then, do poor people think about abstract environmental problems? Quite simply, they don’t. The bottom left quadrant of this diagram represents the practical environmental concerns of marginalized communities: industrial pollution and the health problems it causes, rising energy prices, and many more issues. It’s not hard to see why polar bears don’t get a lot of traction in the barrio.But defining and raising awareness about environmental problems is only half the battle. In order to avoid disaster, we have to actively move towards solutions. The top right quadrant is defined by the intersection of affluence and green solutions. This includes people who can afford hybrids, carbon offsets, solar panels on their vacation home, and boutique organic products. These people often see green as an investment opportunity.Are they wrong to take this view? Once again, of course not. It is essential for the people with capital to invest in helping the earth with their disposable income. But what about the fourth quadrant? What is the meaning of the green economy for the poor? Until now, this last quadrant has too often been undefined (at best) and ignored (at worst). These people have been locked out of the material benefits of the pollution-based industrial economy. If we are serious about tackling the social and environmental challenges of our times, green collar jobs for the underprivileged and opportunities for community health improvement are the only way forward.So, how does this work in practical terms? If you put up solar panels, you’re on your way to a professional job with union benefits. This is a ‘green collar’ route out of poverty. When you learn how to double pane glass to weatherproof a home or install bamboo flooring, you’re beginning down a path to a career that is sustainable on both personal and social levels. Jobs like these are the first step on ladder towards ownership, entrepreneurship, and empowerment. This is the true win-win of the emerging green economy—but only if we make it happen. (After explaining the Fourth Quadrant, Van closed with the beginnings of a success story. His work on creating a green job corps model in Oakland has become a model for Nancy Pelosi’s Clean Energy Jobs Bill. How did he pitch it to Pelosi? For this and his closing remarks, I’ll let Van’s words speak for themselves; during this part of the speech, I was typing furiously while the audience clapped)

“People have only told poor youth what not to do, never said ‘stand with me, and be at the center of this movement.’ If you do that, Nancy Pelosi, you will change America.”“We can build a real movement again, across the lines of race and class. All of us have been lonely and isolated and frustrated. No one joined the movement to go it alone. We have the opportunity now to move forward and build a coalition greater than the New Deal, but we need to get the government on the side of the problem solvers in our new economy, not the problem makers. And when that happens, it won’t be because of bitching and moaning.” “We want America to lead the world in clean and green solutions, bring a multiracial country together and leads the world to something beautiful again. And when we do that, we won’t be taking America back, we’ll be taking it forward.

Is this too long for you to read? Or did you read the whole thing straight through and want to see more? Either way, this YouTube video is for you.

Unthinking consumer/industrial society has increasingly been put on trial already, and as it grows, the green movement will face the same challenge. We will accomplish what we know is right, but as movement moves from margin to center, the only question is:

Who are we going to take with us and who to leave behind?

We have both a moral and a political obligation to not to reserve the benefits of a green transition for the affluent who put solar panels on their vacation home; we need to build an economy to lift people out of poverty, and we should be judged on those moral goals.

Communities form Newark to Oakland need jobs and hope, and everything out there (waves hand in direction of GF exhibitions) means new jobs, new services, new products, and new opportunities. We need to stand together and expand this green coalition to include a wider variety of people:

“We can save the polar bears and we can save the black kids too!” But how?

I wasn’t always an environmentalist. I worked in social justice. In my work, I came across a contradiction: if Pookie sells drugs, he goes to jail, but if he comes home and gets a job at a polluting factory, we call that a success story. Should people come back from self-destructive activities add to the destruction of our society and our environment? People need dignified, hopeful, helpful, powerful work, and we can’t accept anything less for our children if we’re going to build a future together. This contradiction set me on a path to find something I could believe in, a single standard or justice that reflects economic, social, and environmental needs simultaneously.

After this introduction, Van had the crowd pumped and ready for… a Powerpoint. I was a bit taken aback, but I think you’ll see it ended up fitting in well.

Van: Whenever I show this, I say this is “the power point that Al Gore would give if he were black.” (Laughter from crowd. We’ll work on getting our readers access to the powerpoint)

The Third Wave of Environmentalism

We are entering what I call the “third wave” of environmentalism. What were the first two waves? Glad you asked. (What a pedagogical trickster Mr. Jones is!)

The first wave, conservation, refers to the roots the current environmental movement has in the principles of conservation, from the Native Americans to Roosevelt. Natives were the original conservationists, fully populating a continent (no matter what people tell you about it being wide open), while leaving forests that would let a squirrel go branch to branch from the east coast to the Mississippi River without touching the ground. After conquering the continent, the National Parks movement return those values of conserving the bounty of nature (what we have come to think of as the past) to the public sphere.

In sparking the second wave of environmentalism—regulating the excesses of industry—Rachel Carson and Silent Spring made An Inconvenient Truth look like like small potatoes. Her work made people realize that environmentalism isn’t just about critters and rivers, but about human beings: the effect of our industrial lifestyle on ourselves and our people. The resulting groundswell led to the Clean Air and Water Acts. Today, environmentalists consider that shot in the arm beautiful moment in American Democracy.

But there was a problem: the “second wave” was a movement of affluence. Too little attention was paid to race, class, income, and power. As a result, the white mainstream environmental movement appeared to the underprivileged to be conspiring with big industry, as the harmful effects of industry got pushed to margins of society.

In the 80s, an environmental justice movement began to respond. It’s message: regulate, but regulate fairly. We can’t ever forget that even best of intentions don’t mean much if we don’t include, reach out, and listen to the voices left behind.

The “third wave” is a fundamentally different phenomenon that the first two. We have reached a point where the imperative is to invest in the solutions of the future, the “new clean and green technologies” that are springing up as innovation responds to new challenges. Environmentalists are no longer just defining problems, but moving society towards solutions.

As in the first two waves, there are both affluent (Rooseveltian conservation) and those who are left behind (Native Americans). So, the question is, what is the meaning of this new wave for poor people and people of color? Is there an opportunity for them to be a part of this, or will the mistakes of the second wave be repeated?

Many underprivileged and people of color don’t even consider this a relevant question; they share the ebbing view that green is still small-time, and don’t feel a reason to act altruistically to get involved, considering the demands of daily survival.

The emerging reality is, green has gone mainstream: green celebrities are their own new trend, and Vanity Fair, Elle, and other mags are all shouting “green is the new black” in their annual “green issues.” You know something’s up when Al Gore is on the cover of Y Magazine. “He’s no Leonardo DiCaprio by any stretch of the imagination.”

But these admirable efforts to make green ‘cool’ already obscure a vital issue. How many people of color are in all those recycled pages? Something is already off with this new wave, even at the pop cultural level.

Companies aren’t stupid. Growth in demand for environmental action has led to an explosion in ‘greenvertising,’ where polluters try to pretend they’re greener than you. Most of these ad campaigns are farcical, but they at least reflect the awareness that there is a rapidly growing demand for green products and services.

These companies see the numbers. The ‘LOHAS’ (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) market is huge: susatainable energy: $76B/year; alternative healthcare: $35B/year, personal development: $10B/year. Overall, these markets are a $230 billion part of US economy.

The Cleantech sector reached #6 on the list of venture capital (VC) investment in 2005. This stunned observers, until 2006 came around and it jumped again to #3, ahead of information technology (IT). Now people are speculating that it’s heading to #1 next year. VC investment in the sector is projected to grow from $40B to $170B in the next few years.

This is great news: people want to be a part of the green solution. The bad news: LOHAS, Cleantech, and “green” in general constitute the most racially segregated parts of the US economy.

The question is, who is going to receive the benefits of those investments? What does this all mean for the future? Where do we go from here?

Stay tuned for Part II of Van Jones on Green Collar Jobs and Our Shared Future. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to post it soon.