Yesterday, I had a chance to leave our booth in Liam and Noelle’s capable hands to head over to the main stage to hear Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center speak about “green collar” jobs as an avenue to social justice. The following is my lightly edited notes from his speech. I would have just taken a video and posted it via YouTube, but Green Festival sustains itself in part through the sales of speaker recordings, so my indirect account is probably the best you who couldn’t join us are going to get. For the most part, I’ll paraphrase or quote Van, and throw a few comments in there when I feel like it.

Van: Those of you in audience have been working hard, for years, decades even, hoping that someday the country would wake up and do something about the dangers that face us. Thanks to everyone who have paved the way for the explosion of the green movement; welcome to your year. Finally, discourse in this country is turning the corner in the direction of sanity. It’s one thing when movement is on the fringe, marginalized by the powers that be, who benefit from the status quo. But, when the movement grows in strength, it is a new and different day, with particular consequences for the movement itself.

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.

Photo by Mike Magda
As a rule, I avoid all things LA. The traffic, the sprawl–it’s an intimidating place, and it certainly doesn’t seem very environmentally conscious. Then again, life thrives in the most inhospitable environments; challenges spur innovation. Where better than the city with more roads and freeways than any other to introduce the next generation in transportation?

Phoenix Motorcars is doing its part. Last night, the company held a major event to celebrate the launch of its first line, an all-electric sport utility truck (SUT)–appropriately enough–at LA’s famed Peterson Automotive Museum.

Company engineers were offering up test drives all evening, and I was lucky enough to be one of the first in line to get behind the wheel. All I can say is: wow. This was my first time driving an electric, so I didn’t push it too hard, but test-drive-mate J. Karen Thomas (of Who Killed the Electric Car?) had no reservations about seeing what the truck could do. As she hit the accelerator (and I reached in vain for a seatbelt), all I heard was a slight whirring sound, which quickly faded to silence. Awesome.

While all 500 SUTs Phoenix plans to produce this year are already spoken for by high-profile supporters and corporate fleets, the company will introduce an SUV version later this year, and expand its production capabilities to make thousands of these beauties available in 2008.

Phoenix CEO Dan Elliot (who showed off his SUT to President Bush recently) was hell-bent on creating an all-electric vehicle that could meet the daily needs of a wider range of users, “from the grocery store to the hardware store.”

The Phoenix SUTIt’s obvious that the truck was specifically designed to undercut all of the traditional knocks on electric vehicles: it fits 5 easily, has 1,000 lb payload capacity, and cruises at 95 mph on the freeway. It still only has a range of 130 miles per charge (which runs around $3), but the company is aggressively pursuing partnerships to set up high-powered charging stations that can flash-charge the vehicle in 10 minutes or less. Reps from multiple companies who want to make this happen explained to me that these stations could be fed from on-site renewable resources, with grid-connected or fossil backups to ensure reliability.

So, someone remind me again why we’re spending billions in California on developing one “hydrogen highway” when we could be making “electric highways” the new standard in transportation, using technology that exists today? There must be some powerful interests at work here…

Despite the threat that electric vehicle (EV) technology poses to the auto and oil industries, the public holds a trump card. As long as it was GM making and then aborting the EV prematurely, they could control the technology’s public image. But as companies like Phoenix and Tesla prove themselves in the market, the auto giants are going to have to adapt. Now that others are commercializing it, the power to control public perceptions about such new technology (as GM tried to do with the EV1) is quickly fading.

After last night’s event, it was clear that the electric vehicle is back, and this time, it’s here to stay. The technology is mature; all that’s left is to allow mass production to bring costs down. As that happens, the advantages of coupling transportation with our other energy needs is a no-brainer. First, it’s more efficient than internal combustion, meaning less energy gets wasted as heat, and more goes into pushing the vehicle. Also, it’s completely scalable, from the 3-wheel ZAP to performance sports cars that destroy the best muscle cars head to head.

But for me, the major advantage of EVs is that they allow us to decide where our fuel comes from. Even though your new electric SUT will be powered by the same dirty energy that powers the rest of our lives, going electric gives you options to do something about it. You could buy green power for your home with your savings on fuel and still come out ahead, or take the plunge and make your own power with a set of solar panels. As the event’s host and green activist Ed Begley, Jr. put it, “you can’t make gas on your roof.” It might not be right for everyone yet, but moving in this direction is the smart thing to do for families, for our oil-addicted country as a whole, and for the earth. It’s time.