The Future of Cities:
How Sprawl and Racism are Intertwined

By Kevin  Danaher and Shannon Biggs and Jason Mark,
PoliPoint Press Posted on October 23, 2007,
Printed on November 5, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/65404/

The following conversation with  Van Jones is an excerpt from the new book Building the Green Economy:
Success Stories from the Grassroots (PoliPointPress, 2007) by Kevin  Danaher, Shannon Biggs, and Jason Mark. You can read more about the book
here.

  Van Jones is a passionate civil rights and human rights advocate. He
 combines practical solutions to problems of social inequality and
 environmental destruction, focusing on green economic opportunities for
 urban America. Jones grew up in rural Tennessee, graduated from Yale Law
 School, and works and lives in Oakland, California. He is the Co-Founder
 and President of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which seeks to
 replace the U.S. incarceration industry with community-based
 solutions.

  Q. For the first time in human history, more than 50 percent of
people now live in urban areas. Where does the city fit in your conception
of environmental sustainability?

VJ: Cities have the capacity to sink or save the planet. The future
of all humanity, and most species and systems, will be determined by
what we choose to do with cities. The idea that the environment is about
critters and creeks is a thing of the past. We have to be thinking about
these things in terms of consumption and disposal processes of
mega-cities.

Q. Sprawl has a negative impact not only on farmland and open space
but on life in urban areas. How did this pattern of sprawl and
gentrification develop? Who wins and loses?

VJ: Sprawl is a response to racial fear and anxiety on the part of
white elites. The 'burbs were designed as a vehicle to get away from
people of color, investing more in the white infrastructure as they moved
away from the city, and the neighborhoods where people of color live.
The other side of that is the disinvestment for the communities that
remain behind; the money follows the new suburban development. Those that
remain in the inner city continue to lose in this scenario.

Q. You've talked about cities and land use as issues that interest
many groups: the suburbanites, environmentalists, and inner-city
residents. If both environmentalists and inner-city residents have an interest
in stopping sprawl, what's preventing them from working together?

VJ: Racism. It is the reason that people move away from each other.
People don't want to talk about why people call this a "good"
neighborhood or that one a "bad" neighborhood, but often it has to do with the
race of the people that live there. White people divorce themselves from
the bad neighborhoods and move to the suburbs. The black community has
a lot of built-up feelings about our history, about the racism we
experience. There is some healing that needs to take place there, so these
communities have some issues, and don't want to work with each other,
necessarily. There are a lot of feelings there.

Q. Many environmentalists genuinely want to work with other
communities to address these issues of common interest. What is thwarting those
efforts?

VJ: Those folks often speak about working together through "outreach"
-- outreach in the sense of "outreaching to" these people or those
people. Outreaching to the black community: "Well, we outreached to them
so 'they' could hear our agenda and get onboard with what we are
saying." This, as opposed to saying "let's go make some friends," building
relationships, creating relationships. Figuring things out from a place
where everyone's views are included. Relationships are give and take,
mutual aid and help. Outreaching is the white thing, it's about bringing
folks into what you are doing, and does not necessarily convey
understanding.

Q. What is the effect of the prison industrial complex (especially
juvenile prisons) on communities, particularly communities of color, and
how does that system impede progress toward a green city revolution?
VJ: The incarceration industry is the new Jim Crow; you don't have to
call him the "N word" if you just call him a felon. There are the same
amount of drug problems in the 'burbs that there are in the inner
city, but in the 'burbs the white kids get counseling, they don't go to
prison. Generally speaking, they only call the police in the 'hood. The
system has responded with compassion to white kids.
Again, the new Jim Crow is incarceration. This is the barrier that
separates people from the lives they want to live. You go to the back of
the line as a felon. You lose your voting rights, can't get a good job,
you're denied student loans. It is devastating. We spend less money on
public schools than on locking people up; it's far easier to go to
prison than to get a scholarship.

This distorts economic development. The current economic strategy is
to take poor black kids, put them in jail in rural areas, and give poor
white kids jobs as guards in that prison. That is the economic
strategy. Rural towns can't compete with industry, farms are all going away,
so prison is an economic boon for rural communities. Come on, we can't
come up with a better strategy than that? In California, for example,
nearly 10 percent of the state budget goes to the prison system, and that
could grow to 15 percent or even higher. When you lock up a state
budget like that, where is the money to retrofit buildings for energy
efficiency?

California is supposed to be a leader in terms of being clean and
energy efficient. So now, put these two together. If you take guards and
prisoners and send them all home, then give them green city jobs
instead. We could be retrofitting urban America instead of lives laying to
waste. Send them home with good work, with a mission, and real job skills,
and provide them with opportunity.

We can have a Gulag or a green economy. But we can't have both. If we
train former prisoners and guards to put up solar panels, they are
already on their way to becoming electrical engineers. If we train them to
double pane glass, they are on their way to be a glazer: a good union
job and green path out of poverty. Bamboo, it's so different than
timber, you can cut it and it grows back quickly. If we can train folks to
do the green thing, they can then walk to the front of the line in an
economy based on green jobs instead of an economy from pollution-based
jobs. That is where these issues connect. What we need is a green wave
that can lift all boats, that can lift folks out of poverty.

Q. How important is it to nurture efforts at grassroots democracy?
How can larger groups -- national groups -- help without taking over?

VJ: It's all got to come together, but it's not easy. The national
groups don't mean to take over and the local groups can sometimes be
schizophrenic: They want and need the help from the big players, but can
also resent it. The national groups can find that having the grassroots
connections gives their work legitimacy-it's sexy these days to have the
grassroots contacts, sexy and cool-but they also have some contempt
for the grassroots groups at the same time. Everyone just has to figure
it out, make it work. Case by case.

Q. You have said that "We are the heroes we've been waiting for." Can
you discuss what "going local" means in terms of creating big change?
VJ: I believe it's a both/and. I believe in both "bottom up" and "top
down." Focusing on the local is great, but you need federal government
on your side to make the big changes; we learned that in the civil
rights movement. The federal government has got to be provoked into
action. The local economy can't solve the problems by itself, and some
problems are too big to solve by local action alone.

Change is bottom up and top down. The grassroots have to push, and
the top needs to push. It's sort of an inside-outside strategy. Everybody
is going to have to do some work. There is no magic answer, no silver
bullet. It's going to be a group effort, cross-organizational. We need
to share and play well with others; be flexible and learn from each
other. The big change is going to take 20, 30, 40 years. Hopefully, in
terms of ecological collapse, we'll get it together enough in the next 10
years to buy us the time we need to do the work that will take longer.

But we're going to have to do it together.

© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/65404/