President Obama today named activist and author Van Jones — an African American — as his Special Advisor on Green Jobs. Perhaps no one is more qualified to dole out stimulus funds for green jobs than Jones — especially now, as more and more people are impacted by a deteriorating environment and a failing economy. The founder of “Green For All,” an environmental group
dedicated to bringing green jobs to the disadvantaged, and the author
of “The Green Collar Economy,” Jones has devoted himself to lifting people out of poverty through environmental action. His emphasis has been on environmental justice.
“We don’t want to be first and worst with all the toxins and all the
negative effects of global warming, and then benefit last and least
from all the breakthroughs in solar, wind energy, organic food, all the
positives. We want an equal share, an equitable share, of the work
wealth and the benefits of the transition to a green economy,” he told Mother Jones in 2008.
Coincidentally, a New York Times story published this week talked about the lack of diversity in environmental organizations.
The need for racial diversity has been a persistent issue in the
environmental movement: In 1990, leaders of civil rights and minority
groups wrote an open letter that accused the 10 biggest environmental
organizations of “racist” hiring practices.Richard Moore, one
of the letter’s signers, said the public indictment was set off by
several cases in which the groups had pushed for protection of lands at
the expense of minority rural communities.
Quoted in the story is Marcelo Bonta, a diversity consultant in Portland, Oregon, who said that when he worked for environmental groups, he felt a need to conform to the mostly white, over-40 crowd. “It’s the tyranny of fleece,” he told the NYT. “I always felt I had to dress down.”
With Jones directing green jobs, African American Lisa Jackson at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency, Chinese American Steven Chu as energy secretary and Hispanic Americans Ken Salazar as interior secretary and Hilda Solis as labor secretary, cultural barriers may be disappearing — and maybe, along with them, the other barriers to working together to improve the environment.
Or as Jones puts it, “The reality is that there are either going to be a whole lot more green jobs or we’re going to have a dead planet.”
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