In an economic downturn long on loss and short on solutions, few buzzwords have traveled more rapidly from the margins to the mainstream than the term “green jobs.” It was just five years ago that civil rights activist Van Jones was burning out on the politics of protest working on juvenile justice issues in Oakland, California. Inspired by the grounded optimism of famed redwood tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, he began to take a more positive tack, using the term “green jobs” as shorthand for a proposal to address two longstanding challenges at once -- poverty and climate change. He proposed employing inner city youth to plant trees, install insulation and solar panels, clean up toxic waste sites and construct mass transit systems.
The mantra of “green jobs” is a compelling if still largely untested vision. Yet it now routinely pops up in President Obama’s major speeches and recently jumped the Atlantic when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for the creation of millions of new green jobs in the U.K. The U.S. stimulus package contains $500 million for the creation of thousands of green collar jobs weatherizing homes, retrofitting federal buildings with energy efficient devices. The U.K. pledges to create 400,000 green jobs in the next eight years cleaning up the environment and curbing pollution. And the White House recently announced Jones’ appointment as special adviser on “green jobs, enterprise and innovation.”
While Jones is one of its most articulate advocates, the idea of combining urban environmental renewal with re-employment and poverty eradication dates back more than a decade to small-scale experiments at both the state and federal level. Two Chicago-based programs launched in the early nineties have prospered with similar aims. Greencorps, sponsored by Chicago’s city government, provides horticultural instruction, materials and employment to inner city youth while Growing Home, a nonprofit organization, runs a network of community-supported farms ringing the city that serve a mostly low-income clientele.
Meanwhile, Majora Carter, a young artist who had grown up in the industrial squalor of New York’s South Bronx, went off to art school and returned to her roots only when she ran out of money. Walking her dog one day, she discovered that behind a phalanx of city dumps lay the still pristine Bronx River. With a vision, determination, and charisma to spare, she founded Sustainable South Bronx. Working with a team of low income minority activists and persuading reluctant politicians to come on board, they created the 1.4 acre Hunts Point Riverside Park, the first in what they hope will become a series of riverfront parks called the South Bronx Greenway.
These and other pilot projects offer what policy analysts call “proof of concept” for a strategy that if widely applied could transform not only low-income neighborhoods but the entire U.S. economy. But scaling up to a size and reach that would make a real difference at a national or international level is entirely another question. Van Jones himself admits that his first attempts to apply his idea in Oakland were costly failures. In 2004 Jones persuaded a foundation to grant his Ella Baker Center $215,000 to launch a green jobs project. “We called all these community meetings, did these retreats, and at the end of the day we had some great photographs, a couple of pamphlets, and not one job,” he told The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert. “It was a complete and utter failure.” Another $215,000 later, “we wasted it all again -- because we still didn’t know what we were doing.”
Such experiments have tempered Jones’ expectations. His strategy is elegantly simple: “Let’s connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done.” But its implementation is fraught with complications. In a downward spiraling economy that has thrown millions of skilled professionals out of work, arguing that we should spend precious employment funds on unskilled and chronically underemployed inner city youth might prove a hard sell. Moreover, such professionals are in a better position to work the system than those who’ve always been shut out of it. And one company’s green job is another’s greenwash. A “clean coal” company could argue that the jobs it generates sequestering coal-generated CO2 underground could make this cheapest energy source environmentally benign. But most environmentalists believe clean coal is a contradiction in terms and argue that a job created in that sector is more black than green. Jones isn’t fazed by the complications. “That’s why I like a term like green jobs,” says Van Jones. “It starts the conversation.”
Efficient as it might seem to alleviate poverty and pollution at the same time, it may prove challenging to optimize both objectives in one policy initiative. Jones compares the creation of a green collar economy that includes the chronically excluded to the construction decades ago of the Interstate highway system and the Internet. It’s true that those were system-changing innovations. But at the time they were sold not as social and environmental justice initiatives but as national security strategies, a proven winner even when the real reasons and benefits lie largely elsewhere.
But at the deepest level, Van Jones insists that like the economy, the environment is an issue for all of us, not just the favored few. If this economy doesn’t serve rich and poor alike, it’s not only morally bankrupt, it will sow the kind of anger and bitterness in inner cities that deprivation and desperation have produced abroad, with deadly consequences for domestic tranquility. And that’s a true issue of national security. “Some people say, `We can’t afford to do this,’” says Jones. “I say we can’t afford not to.”
