The New Environmentalists: How to Make the Green Movement Less White

I like this. It doesn't even pretend to not be racially charged and biased. Instead of using cryptic language such as, "how to get minorities more involved with the environmental movement", you just come right out and say, "we need to make it LESS WHITE."

I like that level of honesty. Bravo.

I propose a two pronged attack.

1. Continue posting articles about how to make this or that "less white." Hopefully this will drive whites away from your causes, thereby increasing the % of non-whites.
2. Convince minorities to spend their time and money on environmentalism. In order to do this you will need to alter the economy to the point where more minorities have the excess time and money to spend on said environmentalism. So, you need to raise their wages and convince them to have less children. I.E. you need to "darken" the white eco-yuppies that infest all major American cities.

Again, bravo for your honesty.

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The idea that environmentalism is for middle-class, tree-hugging, owl-kissing hippies who are out-of-touch with "real" issues that affect blacks and the working man is just another myth the system uses to divide and conquer the masses. And it seems to work.

But as the author suggests, if you live in the hood, or have a blue collar job where you're exposed to enviro-hazards and contribute to environmental destruction every day, you should know better.

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This article underlies the problem with the American psychic. Who is going to benefit from the new mean green machine? The government is going think more about economic solutions to pollution rather than solutions to pollution. The root cause of pollution is not economics so economic solutions will be more of the same money laundering schemes our government is best at. What are the root causes of pollution, what is required to eliminate these causes, and economically how can we get there at home and world wide. This is the thought process required too solve the pollution problem. However, who ever has the most political influence is going to benefit most from the new mean green machine. Some are going to get rich and some are going to feel good but the amount of co2 in the atmosphere will continue to increase. Will it make you feel better when they tell you that, “we reduced the rate of increase”? I guess a slow death is better than no death at all.

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It is simply a matter of priorities. Ethnic group differences are not primarily genetic: they are cultural and sociological. African Americans rarely are seen at classical music concerts and they are rarely involved in efforts to improve the environment, develop stronger empathy between humans and nature, or to look at the ecological good of the planet as a whole. African Americans are entitled to their priorities, but are not entitled to leadership positions in environmental organizations simply to provide some mythical racial balance that some ideologue thinks is acceptable.

We don't need any more affirmative action. People need to be judged by actions, not by the color of their skin, regardless of how the "diversity" of an organization is affected or not.

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the majority of environmental sins are committed by whites who have the luxury of deciding to conserve out of their plenty.

Poorer folks who don't have enough heat or cooled air to get comfortable probably see the green movement as a product of the spoiled white class, or worse, an attempt by those with the power and money to impose even more suffering on them.

I have an idea about how to make the Green movement more Black. Let the white middle class who are concerned about the environment take lessons from the way the poorer classes live, that is to say, without the thousand square feet per family member for housing, or the same number of bought-new cars as members in the family, or the continuous central air conditioning that runs once the temperature rises above 65 degrees, or the closet full of the latest cleaning products for every surface in the house, or the TV/DVD/game system and PC in every family member's bedroom.

While whites may not be overpopulating the planet right now, they consume way more than their share and more than they need.

Call me white and disgusted.

When will we realize that less is really more? I've discovered there is an elegance and luxury in doing with less, but I'm swimming upstream against a strong current.

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I know I'm thinking of Cesar Chavez who was more of a labor leader and civil rights activist, but he was also an animal rights activist and a vegan. He only had an eighth grade education and was a migrant worker, but he managed to find the time to fight and organize for the rights of animals and people.

Minorities and the poor, though they may be among the less educated and more time-strapped, still have pride and, what's more, probably a better can-do attitude than most of the rest of us who are better off financially, educationally. I think probably the best way to motivate these masses is by incorporating (much like environmental justice does) the ideas of the green movement into the labor, healthcare, education, and agricultural movements already in existence for these groups. The idea that the environment is not separate from any of these things and that minorities and the poor have just as much right to clean air, water, land, food as everybody else would probably charge a lot of people.

It doesn't have to be complicated, but the leaders of the existing groups for these populations are going to have to get educated themselves, and they're going to have to make the environment more of a priority in their speeches and in their policies.

Clean air, water, land, food. Just see if someone doesn't step up and fight once they're told these things are only for the people (and the "white" people at that) who can afford them.

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Perhaps the dearth of minorities in the green movement has to do with their systemic disenfranchisement and the debasement to which they're daily subjected to in the US. For example, some African Americans live in areas of extreme poverty where the city/state/gov has taken close to no precautions as regards waste management and in fact has given tax incentives to industry to set up near these areas (there is a correlation between pollution and a rise in asthma). African Americans haven't heard the greens campaigning to get the ghettos/barrios cleaned up which is why some may be suspicious of the movement. Likewise, it's an unspoken idea that Whites will change the world because, naturally (*cough*) they are the best suited.

If the movment is interested in more minorities then it must not, as is its wont, set the issues in a moral/political/ethical/environmental vacuum.

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Sounds like someone is afraid that events may take away their ability to label the white race as the devil in all things.

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I just want to point out that among the various groups under the umbrella of "minorities" or "people of color" are the native Americans, who have always been and still are among the most ecologically aware citizens.

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The African American Environmentalist Association has been around for years.

I am a career biologist in the regulatory field managing wetlands and waterways and much of my work is done to avoid, minimize and then mitigate environmental impacts. Some of the posts assume that many African Americans are low income and lack intelligence. Not! Many of us at all income levels are interested in the environment. We are ignored by the media, business and government.

Since the majority 'culture' has the most money and influence in America, the majority 'culture' has played the most damaging role in environmental degradation and therefore, should be most responsible in remediation. That does not mean that 'minorities' wish to be or should be left out in the financial and environmental benefits of remediation. My hope is that business does not use the green movement to 'muddy the waters' for tax benefits and phony clean whatever tradeoffs while continuing to cause harm to the environment.

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The ethical shopping-whole foods-carbon offsetting-organic farmers market-jetting crowd is big business and mainly an educated, affluent, and white one. Although I prefer eco-consumerism to any consumerism, it's just the latest trend in shopping (made fashionable by all sorts of trend-setters) and is about lifestyle more than the environment (and everyone knows, going organic and wearing hemp clothes screams money). But let's not kid ourselves here folks. Buying organic and going green isn't going to save the environment, but will sure make us all feel a little better about our latest purchases. There needs to be bigger shifts in industry practice, and tighter pollution regulations. The movement to go green largely ignores the poor and minorities because it is about who is going to buy into what (and when reaching for the wallet for that overpriced organic tomato, who has the money in America?). The environmental movement is largely white, and at times seemingly forgets communities of color but this is an on-going issue, and not one that will be fixed if minority communities also start demanding for whole food, organic crops, and carbon offsetting.

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Discuss.

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More than just a system that supports all living things, the Environment is alos a means of connection,of sharing, of communion. Think about it.
As soon as you wake up in the morning, you put your feet on the Earth, you are now connected to everything that walks,crawls,slithers or scampers across the Earth and calls it home. That series of Breaths you took while reading this put you in instant communion with all things that use air to live.
You shared a breath,Life itself with a great many beings. Your exhale fed all the beings that need your CO2 to live. The water you drank is made by the planet and shared with all Life, to sustain us and every living thing. The Environment is a Great Co-ordination between all life to keep all other living things....Living. Hense it's great importance.
We Humans have the greatest impact on the Environment. We don't just kick up a lot of dust,we also dump tons of chemicals into the air,upon the ground and in our goods. All these chemicals have a longer life cycle than we do. So we have created a dangerous situation for all who are yet to come.
To advance as a society and to be seen as an 'Advanced Civilization' we must recognize that a raincloud that has nothing in it other than the dust needed to gather the water vapor, is worth more than all the gold of the World. That pure fresh water is the only true 'Liquid Asset'. That soils that produce food organically is healthier than the treated soils of today.
When we got here in 1492,we encountered a People that kept the garden.
Where we came from we left grand piles of filth and waste. We brought that way of doing things with us,we now have vast dump sites to proclaim our victory over this land. We also have 44% of the fresh water undrinkable. Air quality that's so bad, you're given an early death sentence,no matter how healthy you live, just by breathing the air. Most soils are so poor they need chemicals that cause cancer put on them to make food grow.
Truth is this. It don't matter if you're President, Terrorist, Peacemaker, Anarchist, janitor or Bum, if the Environment isn't healthy neither are you! We're all the same....dead meat.
I for one see a massive employment oppurtunity in 'restoring' the environment. Many hectars of trees need to be planted. Energy farms of wind and solar need to be made. I think we have time to save the Environment and it can be NOW. Can you 'Think Outside the System'?

Draft Jeffrey7 for Prez....the only vote that counts

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Thanks for this important post.

This reminds me a great deal of the issues facing the wildlife conservation movement. For centuries the rich and affluent, ( primarily of European descent) traveled the globe and took great pride in going on safari hunts, buffalo hunts, and capturing wild animals for their zoos. Then when wildlife became endangered and scarce, the rich and affluent who now have a love for nature, took land from Native Americans, Africans and other poorer people of the world to make wildlife reserves. And when today's poor in the third world are caught poaching the wildlife advocates cry that they simply can't understand why "those" people can't respect nature. Those people being the same people whose very culture teaches a reverence for nature.

Now some people are asking why the Green Movement is so 'White".

Without a doubt, everyone has to be concerned about our global crisis. The Green Movement should not just be a "white movement". But the truth be told, it will be largely dependent on those who are the chief contributors to the problem to find the willingness in their hearts to make the sacrifices necessary to contribute to the solution.

In general, it is not the poor of any race or nationality that are driving luxury SUVs or eroding our ocean barriers with beach front real estate. It is not the poor who buy new cell phones, ipods and other electronics every 6 months and fill the landfills with electronic waste. Yet, sadly it is the poor, the minorities, the third world people around the globe who are already experiencing the tragic impact of global warming. They are our modern day canaries in the coal mine. Those that the world is willing to sacrifice before anything is done to correct the problem.

Whether it is the crisis in Sudan or the residents of the gulf coast, those that have the least protection, both physical and financial, will be devastated. It will be those that have done the least to contribute to the problem that will have little ability or means to participate in the solution. This is simply a reflection and consequence of man's inhumanity to man, his greed and in some respect policy of colonialization.

However the plight of those most at risk is complex. For example. the residents of New Orleans 9th ward could have been told that they had to move because that area was not safe but how and where would they have gone. Would anyone have been willingly to help them relocate to a safer area of New Orleans?

If Louisiana was getting their fair share of the energy revenues made from drilling off their shores the levees could have been improved long ago. But were the oil companies going to give up that money to help the poor? Were stockholders going to give up those dividends? Did anyone care about the poor in the gulf coast before Katrina?

How about the people of Sudan who were being devastated by drought long before anyone had heard of Darfur, or the millions that inhabit Bangledesh or the coastline of China.

I sadly suspect that the reason "An Inconvenient Truth" had such an impact on many in America is that Al Gore pointed out that parts of NYC could find itself underwater. That finally drove the point home.

For centuries Native Americans, Africans, Asians & Pacific Islanders tried to teach the world how to live in harmony with nature. No one was listening then -- so many have just stopped speaking.

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... just like it is now

Imagine a world in which wealthy people have clean air, fresh water, healthy food and no-cost energy, thanks to solar panels, organic agriculture and green technology. Meanwhile, poor neighborhoods continue to choke in the fumes of the last century's pollution-based industries.

What is the evidence (read trends, history, etc.) that this will not be the future? History teaches that the elites are already conspiring to create the future to look like it does today.... they have what is necessary, the rest of us don't.

I'm glad to hear this author at least trying to say something different. Poor is poor and the wealthy whites know that... their twist is to make the poor think that poor of-color is different than poor white... divide and conquer uber alles.

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This is a timely post. I started a site Spangy.com to provide free of charge marketing to innovative products, services and solutions in developing countries. The strategy is simple, focus on creating an international community of color first, rather than vying for the eyeballs that most people are trying to get; these eyeballs tend to come from the Bay area (SFO), Boston, NYC and other large cities, in many cases with similar perspectives and points of view.

The conversation is bigger than just "green", which is a start, but about economics and access. At spangy.com we advertise companies that develop fine writing paper out of elephant dung in Sri Lanka. Or visit this link 45-60. You will see companies like Global Water, headed by a black CEO.

These organizations don't have the financial resources to market and get the word out. They've done and continue to do the hard work of creating relevant solutions. Unfortunately, if a larger firm adopts my model with greater name recognition more of the affluent gain and the ones who have invested time, energy and put themselves out there do not.

What I tend to see is more of the same. People asking for donations and what we have done at spangy.com is flip the model and not ask for donations but through social networking. Imagine if Wal-Mart purchased edible cultery from India and only used this and not try to squeeze the margins down to zero. Or if Rupert Murdoch proclaims that Newscorp purchases ALL holiday cards and prints on paper from ecomaximus? This is real sustainability and creates wealth, helps the environment and gets the people involved. Right now, what you see are 'slick' campains from well-heeled people. In the next 18-24 months the question will be how have lives changed? The depth and breadth of impact? This is what we want to influence since the world's poorest pay more for EVERYTHING. These innovators should not have to pay for getting the word out for sound ideas and products that fill a need. Unfortunately, as a one-person site I have gotten tired because I don't have the unlimited resources to do the redesign, and "market" the site or have the big name brand recognition. Let me know if this makes sense to you?

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An essay by Daniel Brandt – written 14 years ago – is still apropos.  Here are a few excerpts:

Consider, too, the situation of African-Americans.  As soon as the ghettos erupted in the mid-1960s, Johnson's war on poverty began pouring funds on the flames.  This was followed with Nixon's "black capitalism," and by the early 1970s affirmative action was institutionalized by edict from above in both the public sector and in major private corporations that held government contracts.  But twenty years later only the politicians, pundits, and movie stars pretend that any of this is significant; it's the Jesse Jacksons and black personalities on television who justify what they've got by emphasizing how far we've come thanks to the civil rights struggle.  Meanwhile the young in the ghettos, and increasingly even on campuses, know that these front-office PR slots were filled long ago.  It's not a problem of inequality; for the next generation there's already a rough equality in anticipated misery.  The big problem is that opportunities are vanishing altogether, without regard to race, gender, or sexual orientation.

What's left of the left has yet to even acknowledge this, which makes the proponents of diversity seem irrelevant and even a bit suspicious.  It's as if the multiculturalists are protesting too much.  Trapped by the cognitive dissonance engendered by hard evidence and common sense, their words lash out reactively in an effort to justify themselves.  What else can they do?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The ruling elite are experts at manipulating their own interests; they know how to divide and conquer, which is why they continue to rule.  As inequality becomes increasingly obvious, those who are less equal begin to see society in terms of "us" and "them."  The dominant culture shades this definition by using the mass media to emphasize our differences at every opportunity.  Conventional wisdom becomes articulated within narrow parameters, which is another way of saying that the questions offered for public debate are rigged.

The objective is to define "us" and "them" in ways that do not threaten the established order.  Today everyone can see that there is more Balkanization on campus, and more racism in society, than there was when affirmative action began over twenty years ago.  And for twenty years now one can hardly get through the day without being reminded that race is something that matters, from TV sitcoms all the way down to common application forms (it would have been unthinkable to ask about one's race on an application form in the 1960s).  We are not fighting the system anymore, we're fighting each other.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The campus left speaks of equality, and then forgets about justice by ignoring economic and class distinctions.  This failure is so fundamental that multiculturalists should no longer be considered "leftists."  As long as they claim this description, some of us -- those who still feel that elites ought to be accountable -- are beginning to feel more comfortable as "populists."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Donna Shalala ... and her CFR and Trilateralist friends must laugh about this in private, knowing that their policies function like self-fulfilling prophecies.  They also know that any focus on racism and sexism to the exclusion of class analysis amounts to a cover-up of their own agenda.

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I think that is the key term in this article.
Where are the Black college kids?

When I visit my sons college campus-aside from the football term..I don't see many Black faces.

What we need is free college for ALL.
Poverty is the answer. What is the question?

I would imagine it is kind of hard to care about environmental issues when most of your food comes from whatever is at the food bank this week.

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I thank Van Jones for his insightful article. If you haven't yet, y'all should check out Color Lines magazine!!
I'm surprised he didn't mention one of the successes his own organization, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, is involved in. Maybe it hasn't worked out for some reason, hopefully that is not the case. So as not to reinvent the wheel, I will quote from my own brief blog post about it:
Progressive States Network tips the hat to Oakland’s City Council, who unanimously approved $250,000 as seed money to create the nation’s first Green Jobs Corps. The Green Jobs Corps will train "hard to employ" residents in areas such as bio-fuels manufacturing and solar panel installation, plus set them up with paid internships in renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.

How did this happen, you ask? Well, remember Enron and the California energy crisis? California sued the energy companies for their role in creating the mess, and once the Enron boys and the others had to stop laughing, they wound up paying cities around the state, with the money earmarked for energy-efficient projects. Oakland got more than $4 million.

The Oakland Apollo Alliance (part of the national Apollo Alliance) cooked up the idea for the job corps and worked to make it happen. It’s a coalition effort of labor unions, environmentalists, community-based organizations and green businesses, working together to create quality jobs in the new energy economy. It is run in Oakland by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW Local 595).

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