Green Jobs Czar: Wants to Focus on Creating Jobs; Told Newsweek He Can't Define What Green Job Is

Putting two at-risk entities together—the environment and inner-city kids—activist Van Jones has come up with a plan to save both. And now that he’s got some friends in high places, his ideas are about to take off.

In yellow construction helmets, Jones and two trainees have just hoisted a solar panel into place and secured it with power tools. And they do so over and over, as a camera crew from Dan Rather’s HDNet television program keeps asking for retakes

Princeton political science professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell put it succinctly.

“Green is the new black,” she said, suggesting that the environmental movement will help put money in people’s pockets and be a particular boon to African Americans.

“Budgets are being cut everywhere, and the one place where there is a lot of political will is these green initiatives,” she said, noting that members of the Congressional Black Caucus “see that one way to get appropriations is not to pitch them as black or brown or traditional civil rights issues, but to pitch them as green.”

Jones heartily embraces that notion, saying that the environmental movement can be harnessed to boost economic prosperity and cure urban ills.

“There should be a moral principal that says, let’s green the ghetto first...and give the young people standing on the corner the opportunity to put down those hand guns and pick up some caulking guns,” Jones said in an appearance in Philadelphia last February with vice president Joe Biden.

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His best-selling manifesto, The Green Collar Economy, came out in October. It broadcasts his goal of bringing environmental principles to the rescue of urban communities. His theory of economic empowerment is not, as he says, some “eco-chic thing or eco-freak thing for those of us who live close to Berkeley.” His organization, Green for All, advocates for green-worker training, counsels local governments on how to set and meet energy-saving goals, and mentors leaders in poor communities to become front-runners in this emerging economic field. He thinks the unemployed during this downturn could be paid by the government to put their communities’ houses in ecological order. Green workers could turn roofs into solar fields and fix leaks in windows, doors, and poorly insulated walls.

“Our vision is that people will be able to be continually up-skilled: from laborer to installer to licensed electrician,” says Jones, who believes, with his characteristic optimism, that as workers climb the job ladder, they might discover new applications for existing technology. “Tilt the panel this way or that way, and you could conceivably come up with a real breakthrough and start your own company,” he explains. “Managers, then owners, then inventors.” The most important job a person gets is their first job, says Jones, noting that many folks without employment history can’t get hired, even for positions where the company will have to train all its recruits. “It’s like Jack and the beanstalk,” he says. “We just want people to get in on the ground floor to grow with the industry.” In one of Jones’s favorite sayings, inner-city kids would realize the real ways to get rich if they would “put down the handgun and pick up a caulk gun.”

Launched at the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative, Green for All has a $5 million annual budget and a staff of more than 30, and a growing list of foundation grants and individual donations. Although Green for All is officially a little more than a year old, Jones’ involvement in environmental causes has its roots in his work at a nonprofit group that he co-founded in 1996, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Green for All partners with groups in other cities—a green-job-corps group in Pittsburgh, another in Atlanta, and one in Newark—some of which have been around longer and some of which began with different missions, but all now laboring toward the Green for All objective of a surge in new workers creating a surge in cleaner, more sustainable energy practices.

His green conversion was gradual, and his new personal interests didn’t immediately translate to professional success. He knew his enthusiasm for hybrids would not spread quickly in poor neighborhoods: “No one’s ever going to say, ‘Yeah, pimp my Prius.’” Still, his Marin soul-searching had given Jones a vague idea of “green-jobs-not-jails,” and his course was charted after he attended a workshop featuring Julia Butterfly Hill, a legend in the eco-community for having sat on a platform atop a redwood tree, protesting the clear-cutting of old-growth forests. “She was there not for two days, not for two weeks, but for two years!” Jones says, his eyes wide in disbelief. He was amazed not just by her commitment but also by her sense of peace, which enabled her to befriend hostile loggers whose company tried to literally force her to fall from the upper boughs with the blasts of air from their helicopters, and there were months when the winds of El Niño might have done it first.

“I wanna be like that!” he recalls saying to himself. “I was very good at calling people out— ‘You suck!’—and Julia was good at calling people up.” He befriended Hill, and together they realized that forces in the economy were clear-cutting inner-city kids in much the same way they were clear-cutting old-growth forests.

He advised House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the creation of a clean energy jobs bill, which passed the House and became law in 2007. Its principal sponsor, Hilda Solis, was President Obama’s top choice for Secretary of Labor, and the Jones agenda is moving forward faster than he could push it on his own, with green-worker training an important part of the Obama stimulus package. The new administration, in its opening weeks, requested a staggering $500 million for these programs, which could train as many as 120,000 workers. At press time, Congress was still negotiating the final number, but the green-collar movement, in all its permutations, is likely to see some of its most industrious dreams come true.

At an activist confab held in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Jones quickly warms up the crowd. “How many of you people made a fool of yourself on election night? Crying all over the place, flying snot everywhere, traumatizing your children?” With a practiced ear, he lets the laughter build and then pushes it with what his 4-year-old son—he has an 8-month-old son, too—asked that night: “Mama, what is history and why does it make Daddy cry?”
If Jones began his green quest by communicating with outsider radicals like Hill, he’s now solidly on the inside. Brainiacs in the environmental community, überlobbyists in Washington, Al Gore and other heavy hitters are not only supporting Jones but asking him what’s next and what they can give him to get there. “He really understands that there is a lot of work that needs to be done and that there are a lot of folks who need work. He’s been able to figure out how to connect those twin needs,” says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Jones acknowledges that his race provides more opportunities for his voice to be heard. “I’m just a friendly black guy,” he says, and does an old-white-man voice, “Let’s put him on the board.” His new contacts have taken him to familiar left-leaning places—for instance, a Ben & Jerry’s–sponsored get-together—and then to some more unexpected ones, like the Arctic trek the Aspen Institute and the National Geographic Society organized that had him gabbing with Jimmy Carter, Tom Daschle, Ted Turner, and executives from Google, Monsanto, and DuPont.

Today the country is moving toward the ideas Jones has planted. He realizes there’s a lot of communal goodwill for his goals right now and—he’s learned this the hard way—a lot of conflict ahead too. But he’s clear about what he wants: hundreds of thousands of green-collar workers trained and deployed, returning energy to the power companies’ grids, and finding roles for workers and investors in poor communities—all as this green economy recharges the nation’s gross domestic product. “I’ll work with anybody to get that,” he says. “And I’ll work against anybody to get that.”

http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200904-omag-van-jones/2

TIME Magazine named him an environmental hero in 2008

As an advocate for disadvantaged people and the environment, Van helped to pass America’s first “green job training” legislation: the Green Jobs Act, which George W. Bush signed into law as a part of the 2007 Energy Bill

Jones was well-known in the green set. Ebony Magazine dubbed him an “eco warrior,” and Time named him one of its “environmental heroes.” His book “The Green Collar Economy” (Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote the foreword)

As a young and eager lawyer with a knack for sound bites, Jones was on the front lines of major police brutality cases and launched the high profile “Books Not Bars” campaign to shut down California’s youth prisons. He finally migrated to the environmental movement, founding Green for All in 2007.

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