Bioneers to the Rescue

The annual Bioneers conference has a reputation for creative and deep thinking about sustainability and the environment, but during all my years as an environmental activist, I never managed to attend. On October 19-21, I finally made it to the conference in San Rafael, California. It was an opportunity to feel the pulse of the environmental movement today and reflect on how it has grown and changed since Bioneers began in 1990, the same year that I became a full-time environmental activist.

In 1990, I was working as a signature-gathering coordinator for a California forestry initiative that would have ended clear-cutting in California forests. I organized volunteers to hit the streets with petitions throughout the East Bay, and not just the street corners in Berkeley where signatures were as easy to gather as apples on the ground. Looking toward the election in the fall, I recruited the two housewives in working-class Freemont who would staff a table at the mall on Saturday, and the lone environmentalist in conservative Concord. But one day, at my table in Oakland, I was approached by an elderly black man with anger in his eyes.

"What are you doing, worrying about trees," he said, "when black people are still dying on the streets." The civil rights movement wasn't finished, he told me, and he couldn't understand why liberal whites had given up and turned their attention to frivolous things like trees. I had no idea how to respond, but later, a middle-aged black woman came by my table and told me how important it was to save forests. She shared her memories of her Louisiana home and the forests she had known there. A few weeks later, on Earth Day, we were invited to bring our petition to a church in the refinery town of Richmond, where the Rev. Jesse Jackson would speak.

Jackson's beautiful sermon wove together concern for the Earth, civil rights and justice. Afterwards, young black children came up to my table, where I had a picture of the redwoods, and asked me where that was. "Is that in Africa? Are there monkeys? Can I go there?" These children had never seen a redwood, even though the nearest grove stood barely a dozen miles away, just over the bridge, in Marin County. I wanted to do something about that, but I never did.

At the Bioneers conference, I heard from courageous people who have moved mountains to make the connection between environmentalism and civil rights. Van Jones, of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, is spearheading what he calls "social uplift" environmentalism. His Green for All campaign promotes training of inner city workers for green collar environmental jobs. One program, based in that same low-income town wedged in around giant petroleum refinery tanks where I saw Jesse Jackson speak 17 years ago, is called Solar Richmond. Solar Richmond just graduated its first class of underprivileged youth trained to be solar electric installers.

Van Jones wants to connect "the people who most need saving with the jobs that most need doing." But when he testified about green jobs before Congress recently, he was told that because it can cost up to $10,000 to get an inner city youth "job ready," his ideas were not cost effective. Van Jones wants us to think about how much it costs to deal with the social disruption of unemployment that leads to violence, drugs and prison. Green jobs are the future, he says, and we can't afford to leave anyone behind. We can no longer accept "throwaway" species like the polar bear, "throwaway" people like poor blacks, Latinos and Native Americans, or "throwaway" communities like Richmond, California.

Speaker Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx, another "throwaway" community. She described the difficulties of growing up in a community abandoned to garbage dumps, prisons and asphalt. But she did not abandon her community. She started Sustainable South Bronx, and has raised $30,000,000 to build the South Bronx Greenway and other green projects in her neighborhood. "My folks are from down South," she said; "they always used to talk about the crick -- that means the creek -- and how nice it was. That connection to nature is our birthright, but we have less access to green spaces than any other part of the city."