It ain't easy being Rainbow GREEN
Don't quite know what to make of this -- they are very much playing the race-card here but they are also promoting kids to get to trade school and learn to work with Green Technology.
From the
Seattle Times:
Overwhelmingly white, the green movement is reaching for the rainbow
"What's a nice black guy like me doing in a movement like this?"
Van Jones strides the stage at the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center, a charismatic lawyer who grew up in rural Tennessee, graduated from Yale Law, and founded the Ella Baker Center for jobs and justice in Oakland.
Tall, 39, his pate shaved, he cuts a striking silhouette in a black turtleneck and blazer, but it's his daring message that electrifies the crowd. He's in Seattle to talk about "The Unbearable Whiteness of Green" and how the environmental movement needs to include people of color and the poor if there's any hope of slowing global warming.
Hmmm... "people of color" and "THE POOR(tm)" in the same sentence. Sounds like the race-card to me. Poverty doesn't come from race, it comes from sitting on your butt not doing anything. Lack of education and a lack of motivation are the two culprits. Sure, times can deal you a hard blow but when that happens, you hunker down, live as cheaply as possible (no cell phone, no cable TV, etc...) and dig yourself out. Jen and I have both done this at points in our lives. When I first moved to Seattle, I didn't budget carefully and was not able to find a decent job. I worked in a restaurant and lived in an unheated garage for six months ($25/mo rent and it had electricity. Was able to use the bathroom and kitchen of the house.) I got enough to move into shared housing, bought a fixer-upper that the previous owner had botched and sold it five years later for enough money to buy the house I lived in for 15 years before moving up here.
Poverty is not an institution, it is something you do and get out of as soon as possible.
But back to the story:
In Jones' eyes, the first wave of environmentalism, led by Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir, focused on preserving the nation's natural beauty in parks. The second wave, led by Rachel Carson of "Silent Spring," concentrated on federal regulation of toxics. The third wave, he says, is about investment. Initially, that meant individual consumer choice: hybrid cars, organic food, energy-efficient light bulbs. Now, it's evolved into major public spending and community-wide action.
Jones' grand vision? Think New Deal and civil-rights movement combined with a clean-green industrial revolution. The nation needs to train masses of "green-collar" workers to conduct energy audits, weatherize and retrofit buildings, install solar panels and maintain hybrid vehicles, wind farms and bio-fuel factories. The icing? Wiring buildings and installing solar panels can't be outsourced.
"Brother," Jones says, "put down that hand gun and pick up this caulk gun."
I agree with him here -- we had an energy audit at the store. it was free and there were some specific suggestions and there were rebates available to implement those suggestions. We did these, it cost us about $3,000 but our electric bill went from close to $1K/month down to about $700/month. We run some large coolers and freezers and our primary HVAC is an electric heat pump which is a lot more efficient than either the Propane or Electric Heat that present themselves as our other options.
It generally takes a couple days to a week or two to get our "energy people" (Whatcom Refrigeration - awesome people) out to do non-critical work -- they are swamped. More qualified people in the field would help a lot.
One last excerpt from the article:
SOUNDS GOOD, in theory.
In reality, once you step outside the middle-class mainstream, the meaning of "environment" shape-shifts as much as water morphing from ice to gas. The natural-fibers crowd may think of Earth as a blue-green orb with a capital E. Immigrants and the poor struggle with more down-to-earth issues: toxics at work and home, safety on the streets. Sometimes it seems like we're living on different planets.
For us, says director Ticiang Diangson of Seattle Public Utilities' environmental-justice/service-equity division, the environment "is really about our daily lives, here and now, whether my kid is sick because he's breathing something that's not agreeing with him, whether we have a roof over our heads that's not infested with mold, how we can get to our two or three jobs to hopefully make ends meet."
To pull a quote out of context: "my kid is sick because he's breathing something that's not agreeing with him"
What are you feeding the kid, does the kid get out and play and exercise? There are a lot of environmental factors in play here and to single out "breathing something" is to ignore a lot of other things that contribute...
I agree with the overall ideas in the article -- there are a lot of people who are looking for work in the wrong places and training should be made available. Training in HVAC, construction, welding, mechanics and machining; these will guarantee high-paying jobs that last a lifetime. American corporations need people. I took some welding and some CNC machining classes at our local trade school and there are recruiters there all the time.
An interesting read to say the least.
Posted by DaveH at March 14, 2008 10:41 PM