The global economic downturn could provide the opportunity to fight two separate crises. Climate change is obvious, as this gives us an excuse to conserve and practice some self-restraint in the interest of our own bare pockets, but you don’t have many people suggesting that from a recession might emerge the solution to inner-city poverty.
Van Jones, author of Green Collar Economy and founder of Green For All, a “national organization dedicated to building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty” sees the Green revolution as not only an environmental one, but a social one as well.
Jones has called the current environmental movement “eco-apartheid” for being marketed toward and only accessible to a demographic that is “nearly ninety percent white, mostly college-educated, higher-income, and over thirty-five.” The environmental movement has largely left out the underprivileged underclass of America’s inner cities, it has to end, and the solution in the future is to invest to “Green the Ghetto“.
His solution is to get eco-solutions in the hands of people hurting the most from the recession. Wind-power, solar and green manufacturing could be the answer to shift the ghetto from a cycle of violence and imprisonment to energy self-sufficiency and economic self-dependence:
“I don’t want to offend anybody. I might be too radical for you. Are you with me?” he asked.
“Just being real,” a young woman called out.
“They can now put up wind turbines—almost like a windmill, but this is not your mama’s windmill, it’s like a big jet engine sitting up there—and make power,” Jones said. “Somebody’s going to make a billion dollars deploying that technology. I think it should be you.
“They have this thing called solar panels,” he continued. “A solar panel is a piece of glass almost. Right now wealthy people can put that on their homes. And it costs money to put it up there, but once it’s up the sunlight hits it and it turns it into electricity and powers the house. So you’re paying electricity bills, but somebody else is kicking it. Somebody’s going to make a million dollars figuring out a way to get those solar panels made and deployed in our hoods. I think it should be you.”
After he was through, Jones made his way out into the nearly empty downtown. “That was my street rap,” he told me. “You get to hear my élite rap later on.”
Areas with little economic opportunity already could both limit the cost of living by providing heat and electricity, but could also put abandoned warehouses, factories and stores to work supplying a new economy. Not only that, but most inner-city neighborhoods are already walkable communities with self contained, if only dysfunctional local economies. Rather than funneling money out of the ghetto for goods, services and resources, these communities have a wonderful opportunity for resilience that a history of racial and economic discrimination has limited.
Jones is taking the “green ghetto” plan to the powers that be in the United States and hopes to secure investment in the coming slump. He’s already got U.S. House Leader Nanci Pelosi on-board with a provisional bill that ended up in legislation called the “Energy Independence and Security Act” signed into law in December of 2007 that allocated twenty-five million dollars for training in green jobs for low income people. One hopes that Barack Obama takes this several steps further and makes this the central element of his upcoming stimulus package.
The most important element of Jones’ effort, however, is to propose environmentalism as not only the “right thing to do” for natural ecology, but human ecology as well. The green movement and the social democratic-movement have butted heads in the past over the conflict between good paying manufacturing jobs and their part in environmental degradation. However, the new paradigm integrates the two. We want healthy, economically secure human communities to live alongside healthy natural communities. Green jobs and decentralizing power sources could be the solution needed to bring the two together.
Photo courtesy OurFuture.org.
