When we left off with Part I, Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center was asking “who is going to receive the benefits of exploding investments in green industries? What does this all mean for the future? Where do we go from here?” In part II, I’ll outline Van’s vision for the answers to these questions. In the broadest sense, there are three possible future scenarios:1. Eco-apocalypse: This is the scenario relating to business as usual. If we do nothing, we face accelerating environmental catastrophe. It is the fear of these impacts that motivates most activists now.2. Eco-apartheid: This represents the current trend where the affluent use their considerable resources to find ways to mitigate the impacts of environmental damage on their own lives, while the poor and underprivileged are left without a way out. Depsite the progress that has been made, we find ourselves “already staring down the barrel” of eco-aparteid. So what? Well, allowing our society to go down that path would certainly be immoral, but besides that, it won’t work: eco-aparteid is just a speed bump on the way to eco-apocalypse. In order to work, the green economy has to include the majority of people, not just the majority of affluent people. Letting the rich fix their own problems is a quick fix, but not a sustainable solution. So what is the alternative?

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.

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.

It's nights like this I'm glad I moved to Berkeley to start Green Options. Although it was only a few hundred people packed into the First Congregational Church, authors Bill Mckibben and Michael Pollan were there to talk about the mid- to long-term fate of our way of life, and what we need to be doing now to minimize the disaster, and ensure a reasonable quality of life for future generations. I feel like this is a conversation that more people should hear about, no?

First off, I was impressed with the format Global Exchange came up with for the event. A short summary of McKibben's book, Deep Economy, a long, lively conversation between the two authors, and then a well-organized Q&A. Maximum variety, maximum information. Other book tours/speakers series take note. As such, I have a hunch that my paraphrased notes will give you more information, quicker, than me writing prose about the subjects these two covered. So, here goes:

McKibben's Introduction of Deep Economy

The book critiques the dominant paradigm of growth as the ultimate economic goal. A model that relies on growth can't continue. A quick check of what would happen if China and India continue at their current rates of growth shows that resources would collapse before they reached current American consumption. (He had detailed examples, but if you want them, read the book)

Despite what ads tell us, more widgets no longer make us happy. Economists have started to realize that 'utility' is no longer an entirely sufficient term, as more does not equal happier. Although more generally does = happier in underdeveloped countries, human satisfaction surveys have shown a 50-year decline in American 'happiness' despite increasing levels of consumption. And in western Europe, happiness levels have not declined, even though they have moderated their consumption.

Why?

There is a loss of social connection, supported in the data. Average numbers of close friends per person has dropped in the US; many other indicators. Again, I guess, read the book.

Solutions to both the problem of growth and the problem of lost social connection: smaller communities, utilizing local resources.

Example: the supermarket vs. the farmer's market. A duel. Which one fosters more community? Which one requires more energy to feed you?

Community: Sociologists who strolled many a supermarket and many a farmer's market and tallied their results found that there was a ten-fold difference in the level of interaction between shoppers. (I have to agree with Bill here. And besides, my degree in Sociology compels me to dwclare it valid science)

Energy: On average, food eaten from a supermarket takes 5 to 15 times more energy to get a given amount of calories in your stomach than a local farmer's market.

Winner: Farmer's market, on both counts. (I'm not saying I'm a good enough cook to get all my food there, but why buy produce that's been sitting in a plane and then a truck when I can get local stuff picked that morning?)

Dialogue between Bill McKibben and Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma

(Warning: the following is even more heavily edited and paraphrased than the last section)

MP: This is fine to tell a culture that already has so much, but what about all the people around the world who are striving to achieve the consumptive example we've set? Can we just tell them not to want stuff? What do we do?

BM: Our chief export is the image of the American Dream through TV and film, but there simply aren't enough resources to accomodate the demand. Going back to the topic of food, there are lots of innovative, sustainable practices that are more productive. One problem is that we've confused 2 kinds of productivity, yield/$ invested and yield/acre. The industrial food economy relies exclusively on the prices of inputs, and aims to maximize yield/$. Small farms that produce a variety of crops and animals can yield more per acre than vast monoculture tracts, without degrading the soil or polluting watersheds. (This is a big deal, people)

MP: But don't we need industrialization of food to maximize efficiency as the world's population continues to rise?

BM: If that growth in efficiency could be sustained forever, that's one thing, but history shows that gains are always temporary, lead to more problems, and require more chemicals, more inputs, to keep pushing yields up. Working with the uniqueness of local ecosystems, rather than trying to destroy them, keeps giving good yields year after year, no matter what the price of natural gas-fueled fertilizer is. It's not like eating localy is some crazy idea: "it's worth remembering that 50 years ago everyone ate locally, and 90% of people worldwide still do."

MP: There's talk of another revolution in agriculture, this time based around genetically modified organisms (GMOs) instead of chemicals.

BM: The metrics by which we measure success need to change. We're so convinced that the ends we puruse are correct just because they're possible. To frame a push for sustainability or organic farming as giving up modernity is wrong. It's more a question of trajectory: what course we choose, what we invest in as a society, and how we lead the world. China and India could follow either the European or American model of development, and if they all decide they want to drive their Hummers to the suburbs, it's game over. (Note: his actual quote was "…Plan A isn't possible. If that's all we can think of, we're going to drive off a cliff.")

What, no more?

This is long enough already, so I'll spare you the Q&A (unless the comments explode with requests), but there is one last thing. Bill McKibben, as a writer and professor in rural Vermont, has close ties to his community, and strongly believes that community action is the only way to create enough pressure (well, at least until the frequency of disasters and weather weirdness increases) to compel government to act in the interest of our society. He's using the power of the internet to build a National Day of Climate Action, to be held on April 14th at hundreds of rallies across the country. If you want to get involved (there are over 950 events currently planned), go to the Step It Up 2007 website at stepitup07.org.

Thursday I attended the birth of what sponsors Yahoo! and AC Nielsen hope will be a grassroots movement to upgrade incandescent light bulbs to a new generation of CFL bulbs on a national scale, saving billions of dollars in the process. A grassroots campaign with corporate sponsors? Weird.

GO Contributor Michael d’Estries (who moonlights with us from Ecorazzi and GroovyGreen) was Johnny on the spot with a Thursday morning post about the launch and features of the website itself, but I thought the event for the launch deserved a little more coverage, so I put together a play by play run-down of the action, with my thoughts added in. If you were there, chime in with a comment with anything I forgot. If you weren't, share your reactions. More after the jump…

Thursday’s launch was the second such event held for the 18seconds organization: Las Vegas previously hosted a pre-launch brainstorming session among many of the same stakeholders. Officially, that "summit" was sponsored by Wal-Mart.

I have to say that I’m still not inclined to shop at Wal-Mart if I can help it (I understand that there are compelling reasons why people do), but you have to give credit to Wal-Mart’s VP for Sustainability Andy Ruben. Jeff, our Editor, interviewed Andy right when Greenoptions.com launched earlier this month about their pilot program to reduce the ecological footprint of their stores.

Another Inconvenient Truth

Right or wrong, the truth of the matter is that small, incremental steps like greening their big-boxes, leveraging online social networks (MySpace users, that means you: lobby Tom!), and supporting a compact fluorescent campaign like 18seconds.org have to be the starting point for creating a tide of public sentiment.

Steps like these are realistically all some of the largest corporations can be badgered into doing without public pressure, a law, or (oh no!) regulation to make them take major action. You can’t entirely blame huge companies when their reaction time to new concepts is found wanting; that’s what startups are for, so they can get bought by big companies and implemented on a wider scale. I think of it as federalism for the corporate world. (Maybe Joe Biden has a point?)

At the same time, it is nice to see unlikely bedfellows trying to force incandescent light bulb makers out of business. Thursday’s launch–which also included a lengthy brainstorming component–was hosted by Yahoo! and featured key figures from across the political, NGO, and business spectrum (plus me and Nick Aster from TreeHugger).

Motivational Speeches

Speakers included environmental guru and former Sierra club President Adam Werbach, all the way to Paul Dickerson, appointed by the CEO of our nation as the COO of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (was there always a COO there?). Oh well—that $1.5 billion budget has enabled many of the technologies that might just save us, right?

Dickerson received a warm welcome from the crowd, assuring everyone that although it won’t cater to demands of the liberal left and reasonable middle and just acknowledge that humans are a cause of climate change, the Bush administration firmly supports the 18seconds.org project. Well, he didn’t say all of that: Dick Cheney supplied the first half. Paul stayed on message, emphasizing that sustainability is a business strategy, useful for reasons of environmental respect, national security, and economic security. And no one in the room could disagree.

Werbach, on the other hand, viewed his time to speak as an opportunity to give context to the 18seconds.org project as an intersection between grassroots green movements and technological change in how we light dark places. (Did you know that whales would all be extinct now if oil from the ground hadn’t dropped in price? Thank you, Standard Oil!)

A common theme in the speeches of Werbach and many other speakers was that CFL technology is a great example of the state of a particular art at a tipping point in readiness for mass commercialization. But Werbach seemed more concerned with the CFL’s ability to create a simple mental frame for how to introduce larger principles of sustainability—to get the ball rolling, so to speak. After he spoke, the term “gateway bulb” was used several more times.

An Inconvenient Truth producer Lawrence Bender used a similar metaphor, calling the CFL a “Trojan horse” into the public consciousness, putting people on the lookout for new technologies that cost less over time but perform just as well when upgraded now. In the case of CFL's, a slight price premium gets you a longer lasting bulb, and saves you 10-20x it's original price over its lifetime.

The enthusiastic speeches are more fun to talk about, but there also were plenty of in-depth speeches addressing the issues that remain for CFL’s, such as how to recycle them, how to ensure quality standards as the industry and technology matures further, and how to best spread 18seconds.org's message. (Am I doing a good job with this post?)

The Nitty Gritty

After a quick website demonstration and some discussion about how to divide stakeholders into brainstorming groups… we broke for lunch. I won’t go into details on the brainstorming session, but I did come out of it with one basic message: there are obstacles to overcome, but those that used to be deal-breakers have largely been solved.

For example, a former Microsoft executive commented to me that with an off-white or tan lamp shade, he’s even converted to CFL’s for reading. Nit-picky or not, he hit the nail on the head: consumers don’t want new light bulbs to mean different light.

I personally came away with another lesson. If everyday people believe that their lives are too busy and filled with daily minutiae that they can just leave the thinking about environmental impact to the people who do it for a living and expect the world to be fine, then Houston, we have a problem. To me, that makes about as much sense as leaving politics solely to politicians and expecting that arrangement to work out to the benefit of society. Alas, one can only do so much. Thank you, internet, for empowering grassroots movements.

Which brings me back to: 18seconds.org.

Comments tip jar: which established star in the green business world or green leader in the regular business world do you want to see interviewed next on GreenOptions.com?