Van Jones is the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a non-profit organization working to find solutions to "America’s two biggest problems: social inequality and environmental destruction."
The Ella Baker Center's Reclaim the Future campaign focuses on ensuring that jobs and job training are available for the poor and for people of color in the emerging green economy.
I spoke with Van at his office in Oakland on May 21. He had just returned from Washington D.C. where he testified before Congress about green collar jobs.
Green Options: The scope of your work and activism is extremely broad: civil rights, political activism, juvenile justice system reform… How does environmental activism fit in?
Van Jones: From my point of view, we have a legacy in Progressive politics in the last century of being very fragmented: single issue, sub-sub-sub-issue sometimes. We've worked harder and harder and gotten farther away from each other and from any real solutions. So, it's not about the environment fitting in.
I look at the world through certain lenses: race, class, gender, power. The environment is a lens: a way I look at the world. So I see the environment in everything. I see ecological perils and solutions in everything. It's not surprising that a society that has throwaway children and throwaway neighborhoods also has throwaway species and throwaway resources and throwaway continents. It's a throwaway mentality that we have.
What we do with people should be restorative. If somebody gets in trouble with the law, the goal should be a just outcome, and a just outcome should be one that leaves everybody else better off than they were before. That's not what we do. We have a retribution-based justice system. If somebody damages me, the system is going to damage them. You add damage to damage, and that's how we get justice. How do you know you have justice? Look, there's more damage! My view is that we need to have restorative justice where the victim has been made whole, the offender or the trespasser has been rehabilitated, and the community has been restored to some sense of wholeness. That's a much higher standard, but it's something to aim for.
I feel the same thing about the suicide economy that we're in. You take a bunch of living things, turn them into dead things, shrink wrap it, and that's your economic growth model. I think that's totally nuts. We should be restoring and replenishing the capacity of nature to take care of us. That should be how we grow: green growth. My hope is that someday we'll have restorative justice and we'll have restorative economics.
There's only one solution to all the problems, or to at least 80 percent of the problems we have in this country, and that's a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.
GO: You use the terms "eco-apocalypse", "eco-apartheid", and "eco-equity" to describe possible future societal outcomes from an environmental perspective. What do those terms mean to you?
VJ: Eco-apocalypse is the natural outcome of how we're living. You've got six billion people, soon to be nine billion people, and everybody's eager to ride around in an S.U.V. while chugging on a Slurpee, or they wish they were! And that's just not gonna work. The outcome of that kind of lifestyle and value system is eco-apocalypse.
Eco-apartheid is the danger that certain elites, certain ecological haves, begin to think they've solved the problem because they've solved it for themselves. But the problem is actually getting worse and worse everywhere else around them. The ecological have-nots not only continue to suffer morally and physically, but also, that particular moment [when the elites think they've solved the problem] just becomes a speed bump on the way to eco-apocalypse anyway.
To me, eco-equity is a way of talking about an ecologically sustainable society that is more just, more fair, more equal, and more inclusive than the one we have now.
GO: And that's why you created the Oakland Green Jobs Corps? What is your goal with that project?
VJ: We've created the process by which it's being born. We want to train up a bunch of urban youth in green enterprise. People are always telling me, "Oh Van, you just want to make these guys be the workers and the slaves. A green plantation!" But, you know, I'm a good southern Christian guy. I'm for work. It should be paid fairly and it should be safe and clean and it shouldn't be hurting the earth and everybody around you.
I want to see green career paths, where people get a chance to start at the bottom and then step up to the next rung on the ladder and then the next rung, and get a chance to become co-owners and co-investors and co-inventors. It has to start some place.
Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.
Our big problem in this country: everybody wants people to climb out of poverty themselves. I'm for that. But they want people to climb a six story ladder with four rungs on it. Lets put some rungs on this ladder, and lets make sure that ladder is pointing toward the green economy and not the grey economy.
GO: You had the opportunity to testify before Congress about green collar jobs just a few days ago. How did that opportunity come about, and what did you have to say?
VJ: It was one of the happiest days of my life. I'll put it in the top five. It was like a movie! You put your suit on and get your shoes polished and get in the cab to go over to the big building with high ceilings and marble floors. Then you sit in front of this little table with three other people. The Congresspeople all walk in, and they sit up there like they're gods. They give their speeches, and then it's your turn, and you get a chance to talk to people who, if they believe you, can vote to send hundreds of millions of dollars to your constituency. And… it was just great.
I got a chance to say everything I had to say. Representative [Edward] Markey and Representative Hilda Solis, their comments were… I was thinking, "We should put that on our website!" They were saying things we've been saying. That was really cool: to see people in powerful positions like that saying "green pathways out of poverty" and "green collar jobs". That's stuff that the Ella Baker Center was saying in 2004 and 2005 when it was really novel. People hadn't really thought about that before. Now we've gotten to a place where people in high office feel like they can say it in public and nobody's going to laugh. That's a big change.
The opportunity came [to testify] because we were just doing our work and somebody from [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi's office heard about it. They called us in and asked some questions. We were clearly being vetted in a way. The next time they called us over, the Speaker was actually there. We got a chance to be in a meeting with her, and then did a press conference. So, basically, we ended up with about $5 million worth of free lobbying just doing this work here in Oakland and believing in it, and because we're just a stone's throw from the Speaker's home office.
It was weird to me because it was like being back in high school civics. It was like, [sings] "I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill." An idea comes from the people, then a representative introduces it and it becomes law. I'm thinking, "This is starting to get corny!" And I'm right in the middle of it!
GO: Do you have any interest in someday running for office yourself?
VJ: No. No. Not at all. I'm totally excited and fascinated by politics and politicians. I listen to NPR and Rush Limbaugh. I'm a big political junkie. Thus, I know better than to run for office. [Laughs]
GO: What are the most important things that individuals and individual businesses can do to ensure that green collar jobs and eco-equity become realities?
VJ: I wish it was easy. Just say, "Hire urban youth." I wish it was that easy, but it's not that easy. Our public schools and our foster care system and our juvenile court system have so failed a generation of urban youth that some of them are not job ready. We may as well be honest about that.
What is possible is to identify those community-based organizations that work with young people. Those community colleges. Go out of your way to find those helping themselves to get job ready. You probably cant do it by posting on your individual website, "We have a job." You're going to have to go out of your way a little bit to identify community-based organizations or churches and say, "Look, if you have any young people who are job ready or close to it, let me know." It does take extra work. You do have to go out of your way. But every community has reputable community centers, reputable pastors, who can help you navigate that and help you find people who will do a good job.
If you want to go a step beyond that, every county has some kind of a workforce investment board or has job training available. Usually it's through the community colleges and vocational schools. Go to the local community college and say to them, listen, this is what we're doing: if you train people in solar installation or in some other particular thing I'm doing, I will hire three or four people in the next year from your program. That's all you have to say to a community college. They will turn on a dime if they believe they can get their graduates jobs.
Unfortunately, it's the polluters and the despoilers and the big-box stores that dictate what a kid can learn in a community college. It's just one section of the business community, frankly the worst section, in industries that are mature enough that can actually dictate, "We want XYZ employees." Most eco-entrepreneurs, they're hiring their dorm buddies to do vocational work, because they're so disconnected from traditional blue collar communities.
So, minimally, reach out to those community groups that are reputable. And it may take you a few times. Don't give up based on the first setback. You may hire somebody that doesn't work out. It's okay to hire, it's okay to fire, and it's okay to try to hire again. That success story is one hire away. You don't give up because this one didn't work out. You don't do that for anyone else. You never say as a business person, "Well, I'm never going to hire another college graduate! That one was a fool!"
GO: You named the Ella Baker Center after an "unsung civil rights heroine." Who are some of the Ella Bakers of the environmental movement?
VJ: You gotta start with Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was murdered by Shell and Nigerian activists. You can never honor him enough in terms of the commitment he made to the Ogoni people and his willingness to work across so many different boundaries. He put the Ogoni people on the map and Nigeria on the map and Shell on the map. And the price he paid [was] being murdered by the government with the duplicity of big corporate America.
Vivian Chang here in Oakland's Chinatown. About to become a mom, in her thirties, never seeks the spotlight. But, you go over to an event at the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, there are nine different Asian nationalities there. She's doing the real work.
I love Juliet Ellis at Urban Habitat. She's just so smart and fast and able to deal with these big white bankers and also able to deal with these low-income organizers, and is impressive within herself all the time.
Majora Carter in the South Bronx, who's becoming a sung hero! [Laughs] She got the MacArthur [Fellowship], but she should get the MacArthur and the Nobel Prize and whatever else they've got.
We're really lucky to have such a strong and growing environmental movement in the country. I love Billy Parish with Energy Action. He's willing to try to figure out how to get all those wonderful white kids working together, and he's wanting to figure out how to connect with other struggles. I don't know if he's sung or unsung, but I'd add him to my list. Keep it diverse. [Laughs]
But, Julia Butterfly [Hill] is always at the top of my list. She's sung certainly well enough by now, but that's my girl. Julia Butterfly, in my life, will always be my number one through ten.
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