Greening the Ghetto

The New Yorker
Jan. 12, 2009

Can a remedy serve for both global warming and poverty?
By Elizabeth Kolbert

This is an excerpt from Greening the Ghetto about Van Jones, founder and president of Green for All.

The modern environmental movement is sometimes said to have begun in the eighteen-nineties, when John Muir founded the Sierra Club, and sometimes in the nineteen-sixties, when Rachel Carson published “Silent Spring.” Muir and Carson saw themselves fighting narrow, private interests on behalf of the public in the broadest possible sense-all people, including those who had not been born. But stop by a meeting of any of the major environmental groups, and you will see that the broad American public has yet to join up. Chances are that most of the attendees will be white, and the few who aren’t will be affluent and middle-aged. A 2006 study commissioned by Earthjustic, a nonprofit environmental law group, found that the “ecological base”-defined as Americans who report the environment as being central to their concerns-is “nearly ninety percent white, mostly college-educated, higher-income, and over thirty-five.”

“Your goal has to be to get the greenest solutions to the poorest people,” Jones told me. “That’s the only goal that’s morally compelling enough to generate enough energy to pull this transition off. The challenge is making this an everybody movement, so your main icons are Joe Six-Pack-Joe the Plumber-becoming Joe the Solar guy, or that kid on the street corner putting down his handgun, picking up a caulk gun."