The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 3 of 3)
Mar.-Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
A paradigm shift needs to happen to move traditional progressive and Democratic politics away from a politics of limits and toward a politics of possibility. It’s hard because a lot of the people who are in charge of global warming policy today, from big environmental groups to members of Congress, came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when a politics of limits worked pretty well dealing with past environmental problems like smog in Los Angeles and river and lake pollution.
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Faced with a problem like global warming—which is centrally connected to economic growth, since energy is the lifeblood of the economy—those folks need to have a fundamentally different way of seeing the world. It’s not obvious to us that the baby boomers are going to be able to make that change or whether the change is actually going to have to be made by people who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s and have a far greater appreciation of complexity, globalization, and the challenges that the new energy economy is going to pose.
What advice do you have for emerging environmental justice leaders?
One of the natural and totally understandable tendencies among social-change agents is to reduce their focus to a set of things that they decide are manageable. They’d say: If I’m going to deal with childhood asthma, I just don’t have the capacity to deal with all of the causes, so I’m going to focus on the diesel buses because that’s all I have funding for and that’s what environmental foundations want to support.
The challenge for this new crop of progressive leaders—I wouldn’t call them environmental justice leaders, by the way—is to constantly maintain an eye on the big picture and seek ways to focus that don’t require reducing multiple causes to singular causes.
Van Jones has been working for some time on community development in Oakland, but he has said that it wasn’t until he started talking about “green” jobs that the media and others really started to listen.
There’s something very powerful about having civil rights leaders like Van and Majora stand up and say, “We want green for all.” [The clean-energy economy] can’t just benefit a few venture capitalists and help us white yuppies feel better about our consumption. It’s got to be more transformative than that.
To read the complete interview, visit www.utne.com/greenjustice.
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