Two Takes on The Green Collar Economy   

A Vision Grounded in Beloved Community
Review by damali ayo

In The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones offers a much-needed labor-based solution to the problem of our declining economy. His piece-by-piece approach to creating a green-collar economy is the kind of simple and keenly proactive plan that rises above doomsday fear-mongering to create a positive trajectory for the nation. Jones supplants conversations of economic and environmental demise with an uplifting focus on community-building solutions.

Jones, the founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, offers a positive vision grounded in the notion of Beloved Community—a notion central to the nonviolence philosophy that bolstered the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. This, though not explicitly stated, forms the underpinnings of Jones’ approach to problem solving. His theories exemplify the radical belief that every person, animal, and thing is a part of a whole community and should be loved and welcomed for their contribution is something that unfortunately our country continues to struggle with. As we begin to realize the interdependence of planet and people, voices like Jones’ will resonate deeper as individuals awaken to the fact that to insure our continued survival we must realize that economy is community, and that is all inclusive, not merely our immediate family and friends.

Jones paints a picture of a “dual crisis” of steady economic decline and increased global warming. Jones makes it plain as he lays our situation out in clear and simple terms, in a way nearly anyone reading can understand it (though not everyone can afford this $26 hardcover book). He proposes we remedy this dual crisis in a “green new deal” type solution, simply put, that the right jobs can save both the planet and its people.

The book details the very real predicaments of both our economic and environmental conditions. Jones describes a planet at risk of self-destruction from global warming and a dire lack of jobs for everyone from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to people returning home from prison, a comparison not lost on those in either situation who often face similar economic factors in their lives.

People of color working in the green movement have long realized the connection between planet and people, but many others still need the point driven home or even illuminated for the first time. We must bridge the gaps between those who advocate for either people, profit, or planet in order to come up with one solution that serves this triple bottom line. Each branch of that trifecta needs to see the benefit of caring about the other two. Jones makes the critical point that a broad coalition needs to be involved in creating and implementing any solution in order for it to take hold.

The main weakness of the book is the set-up. Jones’ simple approach at times becomes cliché. He gives a cursory overview of history that romanticizes Native American relationship with the planet and he speeds through the next couple hundred years in a few pages. The shallow references to history that swim throughout the book may do more harm than good. People who are familiar with the history that has led us to our current situation will find his summary trite. Those who are resistant to accepting responsibility for our history, as Jones urges, will find his cursory glance full of assumptions and stale stereotypes. He would have done better to leave this part out or to create a second book which details the deep environmental commitment that residents of this land have had through the ages, even though it seems they were rarely listened to. That book too is needed as we need to remember that living green has long been a part of the way many people, and often people of color, have lived and led.

But once Jones moves toward his solutions the book sings. Jones paints a practical and optimistic view of our present future in ways that any person can understand and implement in their own lives. Far from suggesting we change our light bulbs, Jones puts forth a philosophical framework of food, waste, water, and transport that is much needed in order for a collective cultural shift to take place. Jones’ views are rooted deeply in his passion for our citizenry to finally awake to the need for both humanitarian and planetarian justice—both of which have been long forsaken by our mindset that a green future is decades off, rather than in our present actions. Jones correctly insists that “the future is now.”

Matt Nelson, senior editor of blackbrowngreen.com, contributes these thoughts:

“Van Jones' work is an asset in the cause of social justice for all. Many economically depressed areas have relied on the growth and the development of manufacturing and construction. Many Americans are now questioning the future of manufacturing and related trades and are calling for a new vision for the U.S. economy. Van Jones identifies the role that worker preparation and the changes in industry play in the economic and environmental stability of our communities and the far reaching impacts of a new generation of workers trained for the green economy.”

Anyone reading this book must recognize how tangible a viable solution to the “dual crisis” is. Jones makes it clear that the solution is literally at our fingertips. Everyone in the country from neighbor to legislator, to the new Executive can find something he or she can do within Jones’ solutions that will create a fundamental change in our situation. His suggestions are thorough without being too prescriptive. One can use this book as a skeleton from which a fully realized new green and equal United States can be constructed. Jones positions the United States where we belong on the leading edge of solutions not pollution. He challenges us once again to become the great nation we are rumored to be.

Jones’ clear and easy plan illuminates that it is only sheer will of individuals and the stubborn resistance of a single-bottom-line driven economy that stands in the way of progress. He suggests that sheer will of collective movement will overcome. Again we are reminded that people of color have long lived by the philosophies that will save our planet, but that few people have recognized this or put our experience to use in this movement. It is time for a green brown voice to be heard. Certainly Van Jones is the right person to emerge at the forefront of this conversation.

damali ayo is an artist and speaker and the author of How to Rent a Negro and the founder of blackbrowngreen.com.

A Vision of Practical Revolution
Review by Nichola Torbett

Van Jones’s book is so pragmatic, so linked to the familiar everyday realities of both physical labor and advocacy work, that one can easily miss just how transformative this approach is. This is actually quite a big deal! By linking together painfully high gas prices; loss of jobs and opportunity; increasing poverty, homelessness, and hunger; increasing levels of crime, some of it violent; and the expansion of our prison systems, Jones makes visible the common root of these forms of suffering: a focus on the expedient pursuit of narrow self-interest in the form of money, power, and personal comfort. Even the environmental movement, as much good as it has done, has fallen into this trap to some degree, failing to reach outside its own mostly white, relatively privileged framework to see the suffering of people of color and others living in poverty and to consider how environmental proposals affect those communities. This blindness on the part of the environmental movement has opened the door for polluters to forge an alliance with people living in poverty, using slogans like “Stop the War on the Poor” to convince them that environmental protections will result in higher fuel prices and fewer jobs.

Jones is asking all of us to step outside the narrowness of our own perspectives, to allow our hearts to be broken by the plight of the African-American man who can’t support his family and by the polar bears who can no longer survive their migratory swims. He is asking us to move from special interest advocacy into solidarity with all living things, creating a movement that bridges all of our conventional divides—race, gender, class, sexual orientation, ability—in recognition that our salvation is going to have to be communal rather than private and individual. Either we struggle for the survival of all life, or we are all going down. This is what it means to live in a profoundly interconnected universe.

As the founder of a new training academy for people who want to make this shift from self-interest rooted in identity politics to solidarity rooted in fierce love, I am most interested in how we can build the massive cross-cultural movement that will be necessary to achieve a green collar economy. Jones is not naïve about the barriers to cross-cultural organizing—blindness (often but not always unintentional) among people who are part of the dominant white middle- and upper-class culture and understandable resentment, distrust, and divisiveness among people of color and white working class people who have been overlooked too many times—nor does he underestimate the inner work that such a move from self-interest to solidarity will require. Jones is clear that the “opposition” we are fighting against dwells to some degree inside us. The spiritual work—whether it takes place in faith communities or in organizations like our newly formed Seminary of the Street—will be to attend to the inner work that is necessary to be effective in the outer work. We need to be intentional about forming real, messy, honest relationships with people across lines of difference, about learning to love those whose lives look different than ours, about using our own suffering to connect with the suffering of all human beings and of the planet. At First Congregational Church of Oakland and in the Seminary of the Street, we call this work “interculturalism”—deep authentic engagement with each other across differences, with a willingness to interrogate relationships of power and domination, with a openness to being changed by each other, and with an unshakeable faith that what is needed for the flourishing of life will be preserved as the dross is burned away.

If I were going to quibble with Jones at all, I would question him about his assertion that we can’t yet move away from the concept of “growth,” which appears in the name of his proposed coalition, “The Green Growth Alliance.” Jones is pragmatic here, as well, acknowledging that we will someday have to abandon our trajectory of consuming ever more resources and producing ever more stuff, but arguing that at this time, in order to mobilize the kind of coalition needed to achieve this green economic agenda—a coalition that needs the support of the business community--we need to focus on “smart, minimum demands.”

I would counter that, in order to build effective organizations and movements across lines of difference, we will have to confront our egos, our desires to “grow” our own personal spheres of influence, status, and comfort. This will be a vital part of rooting out the desire to dominate and control, which most of us have internalized from our culture. Anyone who has been part of a social change organization knows that this impulse can destroy solidarity and derail efforts at real change.

But ultimately I don’t want to slow Jones down in order to argue about this point. The movement he is calling for will, of necessity, end up challenging unbridled growth by coaxing us out of narrow self-interest. It is our task as movement participants to do that inner work ourselves and then to develop the discourse that honors our interdependence and the need for solidarity with all suffering beings, rather than reinforcing an outdated individualistic model.

Instead of arguing, I want to celebrate this exceptionally detailed road map to transformative change—celebrate and then get to work alongside Jones and his Green Growth Alliance, making sure that we do the inner work that builds capacity to work together effectively.

Nichola Torbett is the founding director of Seminary of the Street (www.seminaryofthestreet.org), a nonprofit educational institute for the spiritual formation of social change agents. She is also a member of First Congregational Church of Oakland, pastored by Reverend Lynice Pinkard, who recently wrote about Prop. 8 for Tikkun.