Bridging The Green Divide

Van Jones On Jobs, Jails, And Environmental Justice

Watching activist Van Jones deliver a speech is an unforgettable experience. Dressed in his trademark black turtleneck, black slacks, and black sport jacket, Jones can step up to a podium and disarm listeners with a potent mix of confidence and modesty. He speaks softly at first, but as he makes a point about racism or the environment, his voice rises and turns staccato. Afterward it’s common to hear observers liken him to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Trained as a lawyer, Jones has spent two decades fighting what he sees as an inefficient and prejudiced criminal-justice system. He defies easy categorization: attorney, human-rights advocate, political radical, environmentalist, churchgoing Christian — Jones is all of these. He can sit with two feet squarely on one side of an issue — rising juvenile prison populations, for example — and simultaneously intuit how others might see the same problem differently.

Recently Jones has been connecting two issues that have largely been seen as separate worlds: the abysmal conditions of U.S. inner cities and the need for a healthier planet. To stem global warming, Jones argues, the mainstream environmental movement must make itself relevant to low-income Americans; why should a single parent working two jobs care about greenhouse gases if there are far-more-immediate concerns at hand? Jones calls for the creation of a “green-collar” job corps that will train urban youth of color to retrofit U.S. cities so that they are environmentally sustainable. 

Jones grew up in rural Tennessee and attended the University of Tennessee, where he wrote for the campus newspaper and started an underground publication called The 14th Circle. He also helped found the New Alliance Project, a statewide African American newspaper, and the Third Eye, a Nashville alternative monthly. While interning one summer as a cub reporter in Shreveport, Louisiana, Jones attended a rap concert where police officers lined the streets and helicopters traversed the sky in anticipation of violence. Although the crowd was largely mild-mannered, the next day his own newspaper led with a story that highlighted every noise violation and misdemeanor; alongside the article was a map of the city marked with exploding-bomb icons. In Jones’s mind, the coverage promoted the image that black youth were violent, even when they were just attending a peaceful musical event.

Disillusioned with journalism, Jones enrolled at Yale Law School with the hope of reshaping the laws that perpetuated injustice. He arrived on campus with combat boots and a Black Panther Party badge on his backpack. In 1992 he spent a semester interning at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco. His internship coincided with the Rodney King trial: four white LA police officers had been caught on videotape beating King, an unarmed black motorist. When three of the four officers were declared not guilty, riots erupted in parts of LA, and spontaneous protests broke out across the country. Acting as a legal observer at the San Francisco demonstrations, Jones was arrested alongside hundreds of activists. In jail he met a broad cross section of young people fighting for change and was so impressed that, after finishing law school, he moved to San Francisco to be part of their movement. He went on to cofound the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (EBC), named for the civil-rights heroine. Their first office was a closet, literally; they pulled out the shelves and stuck a desk inside. Ten years later the EBC has twenty-four people on staff and a $1.7 million budget. Its mission is to promote democratic control of law-enforcement agencies and to advance alternatives to the incarceration of young people.

Over the years Jones’s anger has given way to a passionate yet practical approach to fostering change. He says he is willing to collaborate with anybody working toward the same ends, regardless of background or affiliation. Jones’s current campaign has been successful mostly because he is able to move between worlds, from Capitol Hill to inner-city streets. Due in large part to his efforts, the U.S. House of Representatives and the city of Oakland, California, have recently passed legislation mandating the creation of green-collar jobs.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Jones spoke out about the intersections of race, environmental injustice, and poverty revealed by the disaster. He cofounded colorofchange.org, an online community of four hundred thousand members that focuses specifically on African American issues. Jones’s first book, The Future Is Getting Restless, is due out later this year.

Jones lives in Oakland with his wife, Jana, and their three-year-old son, Cabral, named after African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral. I spoke with Jones on a hot summer day at the EBC in Oakland, in a back room where several people were using the copy machine. Despite being the center’s cofounder, Jones had a cramped office no bigger than the rest — too cramped for our meeting. Amid the bustle, he was focused and warm, his voice lilting the same way it does when he gives a speech to a packed conference hall.

Kupfer: What stake do people of color have in the environmental movement?

Jones: A big one. It’s the people of color who are disproportionately affected by bad food, bad air, and bad water. People of color are also disproportionately unable to escape the negative consequences of global warming. Look at Hurricane Katrina. People of color need equal protection from the worst environmental disasters and equal access to the best environmental technologies. We should be speaking out ourselves on these issues, because we are going to be hit first and hardest by everything negative, and we will benefit last and least from everything positive — unless everybody works to solve this problem.

Kupfer: What do you think are some of the primary lessons from Katrina?

Jones: One lesson is that the right wing’s ideology, which says that we don’t need government and we don’t need each other, is wrong. We’ve spent almost thirty years listening to them say that government is the problem, not the solution; that collectivism is inferior to individual strength and fortitude. We’ve heard for thirty years that people don’t need government: “Let them sink or swim.” Then everyone turned on the television one day and saw an American city underwater, and we saw people sink beneath that water as a direct consequence of that ideology. It wasn’t a deviation from what the right wing had been shouting about; it was an inevitable outcome of their policies of defunding government and stripping away essential services. A lot of those people in the floodwaters were hotel workers who scrubbed toilets and changed sheets for the tourists. But they weren’t unionized, so their wages were much lower than those of hotel workers in, say, Las Vegas, who are unionized. So when the hurricane hit three days ahead of payday, people didn’t have the money to leave. Even if they worked every day, they might not have a functioning car, a credit card, or money in the bank. And they were left to make do with a free-market evacuation plan.

That is the primary lesson of Katrina: In a flood, there is no room for an ideology that says, “Let your neighbor sink or swim.” We need a philosophy that says, “We are all in this together.” We are now entering an age of disasters, an age of storms, an age of perils. Rugged individualism isn’t going to cut it. Certainly we need individuals to be responsible and to contribute, but none of us can expect to be immune to the consequences of a few centuries’ worth of industrial pollution. As those bills start to come due, we are going to need each other. If we don’t retool our politics and our economy to reflect that, then I think we will continue to embarrass ourselves on the world stage with our response to crises.

Kupfer: Do you hold the Army Corps of Engineers culpable for not maintaining the levees?

Jones: Sure, but there has been a wholesale neglect of public infrastructure by both political parties. A bridge just fell in Minnesota. You are going to see more bridges and levees failing because we have put all our money into this warfare state. I think the Democratic Party is beginning, under pressure from its left wing and its grass roots, to take a different view. But even now, during the presidential campaign, you don’t hear a full-throated call for the sort of World War II–level mobilization that it’s going to take to avert ecological catastrophe. If you look at the scientific data on global warming, you can see that we can’t avoid a wholesale disaster unless we put this country back to work — putting up solar panels, weatherizing buildings, and constructing wind farms on a massive scale.

Even now the Democratic Party is bashful about calling for that kind of response. We can’t rely just on markets and technologies and consumer behavior. That sort of eco-elitism is a dead end. Eco-populism is a better model for dealing with these problems. We need a greater faith in communities, government action, voters, and work.

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