What can Green Jobs do for the Poor?

Some people have pointed to a disconnect between low-income populations and environmentalism.

I have a friend who always reminds me that brownfields efforts often mask gentrification. She sees other problems: in those defining moments in budget battles at legislatures across the country, left-leaning groups often end up competing against each other for a finite sum of political power. Do we fund open space, or do we redress inequality in schools?

This plays out in a lot of ways.  In the United States, it has much to do with priorities in African-American communities: people care first and foremost about achieving financial security.  When environmental concerns emerge (environmental justice), they are often the product of partnerships driven by both whites and African-Americans.  Climate change in Bangladesh threatens the entire nation’s very existence.  The rise of sea level portend the possibility that the entire country could soon be under water.

Too, there is a recognition among many developing nations that escaping from poverty is a struggle that will fail or succeed within the constraints of fuel choices. Many third-world countries only have wood, charcoal, or coal to burn – nuclear power, solar, or wind are abstractions.

What ties these examples of resistance is that in both cases, it is low-income people who would pay the most for new investment in a greener economy.  It might even be thought of as a regressive form of taxation.

Alternatively, consider how environmental emergencies often impact communities differently.  The Ninth Ward in New Orleans has still not been redeveloped after Katrina.  Some say its not about the response, but about the a priori long-term inequalities in housing and neighborhood type that systematically sort minorities inot more vulnerable locations.  It’s not about need, perhaps, so much as it is about wealth, according to authors Donna Shai.  Those homes burning in Santa Barbara are going to get more funding, and they will be rehabilitated, before we are done with restoring the low-income neighborhoods gutted by outlash surrounding the beating of Rodney King.

Van Jones, a leader in Green Jobs, is working to reverse this very dynamic by finding ways for employment policy to collaborate with the new green movement. He’s going against a long-term problem.  Too many proponents of environmentalism come from the same well-off and largely white background.

People who meet Jones come away with a sense of resilience against any obstacle.  Still, many profess some doubts about his ideas.  Robert Stavins summed it up:

“Let’s say I want to have a dinner party. It’s important that I cook dinner, and I’d also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, Well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I’m not going to get very clean and it’s not going to be a very good dinner.”

Right now, Jones is the Green Jobs Czar in the Obama administration.  Its hard to know what that means, but it certainly is a platform to realize change.

Those efforts are laudible, and I support them.  Then again, the context of the distribution of wealth in this world reminds us of the fissure between environmentalism and class.  We know we need to worry about our environment.  We know that our future economy will be fundamentally thwarted without natural resources. We have one billion hungry people in this world – today.  For many of them, it is not pollution that undermines life, but about finding any way out of crushing poverty.

~ by samsondoggie on May 16, 2009.