Modeshift

Thank God, it’s over. The radical right is retreating back to the dank, dark, fetid corner from which it sprang 30 years ago. The wreckage they’ve wrought has left a nation unable to govern, an economy that will be wobbly for years, a president drained of credibility, and a capable nation doubting its own creativity and strength.

But if there’s one enduring value to the meltdown in leadership in Washington and the financial markets in New York it’s this: The cynical, hypocritical, dangerous ideology of the right has been exposed for the fraud it is. Though it involves money and credit and financial transactions I know nothing about, the credit crunch seems like the natural disasters I periodically reported on over the years.

Like a flood, a torrent of history and economics has drowned institutions that seemed untouchable only a year ago. Like fire, the financial crisis has raced through the White House and both houses of Congress, through the Fed and the Treasury, burning through the old forest of lies and making way for new leadership, new values, new goals. Like a category 5 hurricane, the foolishness of stripping away oversight, and removing sound management has blown through the bank accounts of the rich, and torn through the pension assets of the working class.

We all are paying a price. But our sympathies should lie only with those who steadfastly warned of the mess and resisted the right wing’s manifest lies.

In the 1990s I learned that it was absolute silliness to be sympathetic with the right. At the time the Michigan Land Use Institute, the organization I founded, was battling toe to toe with the free market governor, John Engler, his allies in the energy industry, and a group of movement ideologues who’d taken over the state Department of Environmental Quality. The issues were safety, environmental security, and fairness. Engler had essentially unbridled the natural gas industry, made millions of acres available for them to drill new wells, ignored environmental safeguards, bullied local governments that complained, and privately negotiated an agreement that led the industry to reduce royalty payments to thousands of families even as the value of gas increased. They did this all under the banner of the “free market,” deregulation, property rights, government-has-no-business-being-involved-in-business messaging that had brought Reagan and his acolytes, Engler among them, to power.

The gas industry’s behavior caused a furor in Montmorency, Otsego, and Antrim counties. I received five to ten calls a day from working people who’d been pushed around, or whose drinking wells had been damaged, or whose livestock had been injured by oil company trucks, or whose royalty checks had unexpectedly declined. They asked for help and we provided a lot of expertise in how to respond. But after a while I got accustomed to asking the callers who they voted for. And invariably they told me John Engler. I’d have to explain to them there really wasn’t much more we could do. They’d voted for the one-sided, anti-consumer, anti-environment, industry insider conduct that was now knocking them around.

It’s been hard to make that case with working people. But it’s true. The Crandall Canyon mine collapse in Utah that killed six miners and three rescuers in 2007 can be directly traced to the disinterest and disinvestment in regulating mine safety, the result of Republican ideology. The mine was located in a red county, and miners and the families of those who died had essentially voted for the hands off practices that contributed to their deaths.

Same with the chemical plant and refinery explosions that killed workers in Texas and the Deep South over the last 25 years. The weakening of work safety rules, the lack of enforcement, the disinterest in protecting people in dangerous jobs is a hallmark of Republican government, and has been so for nearly 30 years. But the installations that exploded were located in red counties. The men and women who died were red voters. Their families supported the Republican way of government that contributed to the deaths of those they loved.

The link between Republican values and personal disaster just hasn’t broken through until September 2008. Now there is no mistaking the consequences of a government narrative, aimed at working families, that substituted distractions — abortions and guns and gays — for the hard work of sound policy and careful fiscal management. With clever words designed to foster false resentments, Republicans masterfully fooled people into thinking that they shared something with the rich; that tax cuts, deregulation, property rights, and smaller government would actually make their lives better. Mix in racism, sexism, anti-semitism, and an abiding willingness to lie. It was a powerful witch-promoting brew.

Now it’s done. The cleansing will be painful. But at least we know that what lies ahead will be different and better.

Listen up kids. This stuff just doesn’t happen but once in a lifetime. 

Century-old billion dollar financial institutions crumbling in a matter of days. Nearly $100 billion bailouts decided in closed session by a tiny group of government bankers. An American political party tossing out the central tenets of the free-market, deregulatory, anti-tax, anti-government ideology that fostered its political ascendancy for nearly 30 years and is now backing a $700 billion taxpayer-financed government takeover of much of the rest of the financial industry. A weak and foolish president again appearing on a national broadcast to make the case for passage of the measure, equivalent to a declaration of war to prevent economic collapse, and basing it on unproven assertions of calamity if the bailout measure is not quickly approved. A hardened Vietnam-era war hero running for president who, days before it is scheduled to occur, calls for canceling the first presidential debate of a close and heated campaign. Why? To rush back to Washington, he says, to work with a Senate he has barely visited over the last year, to colleagues of both parties who are well aware of his disinterest and meager knowledge of economic theory and don’t need his help. And an African American candidate for president whose measured response — that candidates for president should be able to do several things at once, and that now is the time for the nation to hear from the men who could be president — provides convincing evidence of his ability to lead and, with public opinion polls showing a decided tilt in his direction, seems on the way to winning the White House in November. If and when that occurs, it would be one of the five greatest achievements in the history of the United States. 

One more thought. Why are Democrats in Congress so ready to embrace a $700 billion or $1 trillion bailout of America’s financial institutions on the basis of thin evidence they don’t fully understand? And why are they bending again to the threats and fears and illogic and gamemanship from an administration that did precisely the same thing six years ago in starting a deadly, expensive, and unnecessary war? Does anybody on Capitol Hill remember WMD? Does anybody on Capitol Hill consider that everything this administration has touched has turned to you know what — from 9/11, to Iraq, to Katrina, to the mortgage mess, to the financial collapse, to the corruption of K Street, to the hypocrisy of anti-gay ideologues who turned out to be gay.   

The narrative that the Bush administration has written here is that without this massive infusion of capital, America faces a depression. Isn’t that essentially the same story the White House told about Saddam and Iraq? Unless we attack and remove those weapons of mass destruction, they claimed, we’re all doomed. 

Now we have the same president, the same White House, making the case for a kind of financial WMD. The fundamental question that Congress needs to answer, and then explain to the rest of us, is whether a financial weapon of mass destruction lies at the bottom of this banking mess, or whether it’s something else. The second question they need to answer, and then explain to the rest of us, is whether the plan the administration promotes will work?

Congress this week took up legislation to decide America’s energy future.  The question in Washington is the same as it is in the presidential campaign - “drill baby drill” or a policy that promotes real solutions, a plan for a reasoned future that invests in clean energy and good jobs.

The Apollo Alliance is pushing back against drilling proposals that won’t solve our energy crisis and promoting a much better one that will, The New Apollo Program. The New Apollo Program is a comprehensive national economic development strategy to scale up and accelerate development of the clean energy sector and create millions of green-collar jobs.

In pursuit of those goals, this week we published a careful analysis that compares the proposals in The New Apollo Program with those put forward in Barack Obama’s New Energy For America Plan, and John McCain’s The Lexington Project.

We also sent an email alert to you and thousands of our other supporters urging you to help alert Congress that more domestic drilling is no solution to the energy, economic, security, and climate crises buffeting the nation. Please make your views known, and pass the alert onto friends and family.

And today we are in Newark, New Jersey for the first of the two-day Newark’s Green Future Summit, which the Apollo Alliance and Mayor Cory A. Booker (pix right with Phil Angelides) organized with the help of a number of other national and local organizations.

The idea of the summit, which was nearly a year in the making, was twofold. First, to bring Newark’s diverse talent and experience together with leaders from other communities to develop a roadmap for sustainable development. And second, to support the city in developing green urban initiatives - integrating green buildings into energy-efficient neighborhoods, developing new parks, fostering business development in clean energy that produces green-collar jobs, greening the Newark port - that create jobs, increase community welfare, and expand economic opportunity.

The Alliance’s work to help organize Newark’s Green Future Summit is a feature of The New Apollo Program. The program’s entire focus is reducing pollution, increasing efficiency, providing good jobs, and expanding opportunity for all. “Newark is a model of how older industrial cities can take the lead in moving this country toward a future of clean energy and good jobs,” said Apollo Co-Director Kate Gordon, who spent countless hours helping to plan and organize the event and is a summit speaker. Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides and President Jerome Ringo also are speaking here.

Thanks so much for being a part. The question I’d like you to consider for next week’s online Feedback feature is how are people where you live responding to calls for a national energy strategy that promotes clean energy and jobs, or the competing “drill baby drill?” What strategy and message reaches people in this great moment to choose?

Last November Senator Hillary Clinton delivered a major policy speech in Iowa, during which she described her clean energy and jobs proposal. Three months later, in a speech in Seattle, Senator Barack Obama outlined his clean energy plan. Every week now, in many of their public appearances, both Democratic presidential candidates mention the millions of “green-collar jobs” they anticipate from an energy strategy that stresses clean renewable sources and moves the nation away from a carbon (read that oil and gas and coal) energy economy.

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, who’s assured action on global climate change if he’s elected president, also gingerly notes the need for what he calls “alternative” sources of energy. His policy platform is decent. But he’s under enormous pressure from the Republican governors of carbon energy producing states to refrain from addressing either issue.

There’s good reason for such attention to clean energy and jobs in the campaign. Both concerns attach no partisanship. And evidence of the transition at the grassroots, among the tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in the clean and green energy sector, in city governments, in specific metropolitan regions is emerging. The clear outlines of the new green economy are becoming clearer by the week:

1. Three times as many miles of new light rail and commuter rail transit have built in the U.S. since 1992 than miles of new divided super highway.

2. Texas, with nearly 4,400 windmills, is the largest generator of electricity from wind in the U.S.

3. Pacific Gas and Electric has reached agreement with BrightSource to build three solar-powered electric generating stations in California’s Mojave Desert that could eventually produce 900 megawatts of power, or equivalent to the largest coal-burning power plants in the country. An agreement is in negotiation between BrightSource and the state trade unions to build and maintain the plant with high-paying union workers

4. Ford and General Motors have joined Honda, Toyota and other vehicle manufacturers in designing and building fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, and Google has vowed to promote the market for 100 mpg plug-in hybrids.

5. Since 2004, according to Governor Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania has attracted 3,500 new high-paying manufacturing jobs to its new clean energy industrial sector. Iowa counts 1,800 clean energy jobs.

6. The Imperium biofuels plant in Grays Harbor, Washington was constructed by some 300 union workers in 2006 at a cost of $60 million. It is the largest biofuels refinery (see pix) in the country and is focusing its business strategy on developing bio jet fuel.

7. The strongest housing markets in the nation are now in metropolitan neighborhoods, and downtowns with good rapid transit.San Francisco, for instance, is the only city in the Bay Area that experienced a rise in private home prices since last year. The distant suburbs, meanwhile, are experiencing the sharpest drop in home prices.

8. The number of homes sold in Richmond, Walnut Creek, Corte Madera, and other distant San Francisco suburbs have fallen 50 to 66 percent, and prices have tumbled 30 to 40 percent in a year. These trends are consistent with the experiences of other major metropolitan regions on both coasts, the South, and the Middle West.

The University of Michigan Center for Sustainability Systems just posted this very good online interactive primer on how we use resources. This is a clear and concise check on our excessive use of resources, and a strong way to get kids engaged. It’s also a keen deployment of design and online interactivity. Nice work Michigan. 

SAN FRANCISCO — A couple of people I know out here in the Bay Area attended one of the San Francisco fundraisers more than a week ago, during which Barack Obama talked about white working class Americans in Pennsylvania and the Midwest who “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

The comment attracted no attention at all among the liberal, well-heeled Democratic donors gathered in the  handsome homes near the Pacific where Senator Obama posed for pictures with guests. The reason is that Senator Obama, taking a page from the Republican handbook, was speaking in shorthand. Guns, religion, and “antipathy,” an Ivy League word meant to describe racial fear and prejudice, form the contours of a certain kind of voter that utterly baffles wealthy liberals. A voter that puts his or her economic interests second to moral, social, and cultural interests.

San Francisco and its suburbs, after all, are a great showcase of the value of public interest idealism and investment. Decisions to tear down an urban freeway and replace it with modern rapid transit have helped spur billions of dollars in new housing and business construction. The great universities here, funded all or in part with public money, produce an astonishing assortment of well-educated and qualified job applicants. The digital revolution continues apace. Environmental protections and land use policies have cleaned the air and water and surrounded the region with a green belt of mountains, forests, and scenic open spaces. Salaries are high. Housing is higher. Opportunity is everywhere.  People embrace the notion that government has a role to play in ensuring prosperity.

Senator Obama talked a lot in San Francisco about his economic plan and especially the energy strategy he’s fashioned with the help of the Apollo Alliance, where I now work. It calls for 25 percent of U.S. electricity to come from renewable sources by 2025, and for 30 percent of the federal government’s electricity to come from renewables by 2020. He also proposed investing $150 billion over 10 years in renewable energy and biofuels, efficiency, and developing technology to burn coal more efficiently and with far less carbon pollution.

It’s an economic development strategy that will produce millions of new green-collar jobs to replace those high-paying manufacturing jobs lost in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.

But there are all these other voters in California and elsewhere, people not nearly as well-off, many who’ve been displaced, who aren’t listening. They’ve allied themselves with the wealthy to form a Republican governing coalition that has ruled America since 1980. And though they support certain liberal ideas — mass transit, open space conservation, clean air and water, Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment compensation come quickly to mind — most would never vote for a Democrat, regardless of whether his economic and energy strategy made sense.

Some of my friends and most of my wife’s family from northern Michigan fall into this camp. They’re lovely people. The ideas and candidates they support for state and national office just don’t make much sense to me.

It’s those voters that Senator Obama characterized as “bitter” and clinging. I’m not sure he used the right words. “Resigned” is how I’d put it. Regardless, though, neither he nor Senator Hilary Clinton are likely to get more than a smattering of their votes. It’s not that he’s African American or she’s a woman. It’s that they’re Democrats and those bitter, clinging, resigned white working class voters don’t cast their ballots for the  Donkey party.

Nearly 13 years ago, in a first floor conference room of the Park Place Hotel in Traverse City, Marty Lagina and Frank Mortel sat side by side across a large wooden table, glowering at me through narrowed eyes. Lagina (with wife Olivia above) was the founder and chief executive of Terra Energy, an independent that had grown to become the most active driller and one of the largest producers of natural gas in Michigan. The aptly named Mortel, who looked and dressed in the dark suits of an undertaker, was chairman of the Michigan Oil and Gas Association, the state energy industry’s trade group. I was a 39-year-old journalist and advocate, the executive director of the brand new Michigan Land Use Institute, a Benzonia based non-profit with 3 staffers and an irregular newsletter, The MCLUC Reporter.

Our publication — circulation 400, printed on a photocopier, collated, stapled, addressed, and mailed by hand — had discovered and was busily publishing a series of probing original articles about a little-known agreement in Michigan’s energy patch between the industry and the Republican-led state government. The pact sharply increased the number of production expenses that producers could write off before paying state royalties. It was negotiated without any Legislative oversight, and was quietly netting natural gas producers about $8 million annually. The same amount was being drained from the state treasury and a popular state trust fund to preserve natural lands. We also discovered that the industry was applying the “post production cost” formula to reduce royalty payments to its private leaseholders, moms and pops who’d leased their mineral rights and were expecting healthy monthly royalty checks. In some cases families received bills from natural gas producers, arguing that the leaseholder owed the company money.

The MCLUC Reporter articles caused a stir and eventually led to an investigation by the Democratic state attorney general, formal audits by the state Department of Natural Resources, an end to the revenue drain from the Natural Resources Trust Fund, lawsuits by the state to recover millions more from natural gas producers, counter suits by some companies, and changes in the law and regulations for managing Michigan’s energy industry.

On that day, early in the unfolding scandal, Lagina and Mortel were after one objective. Halting the reporting. They accused me of hyping an insignificant agreement, getting my facts wrong, having a vendetta against the industry, partisanship, and general unprofessional behavior. They believed the oil and gas industry was essential to Michigan’s economy, provided good jobs, and royalty income for owners of mineral rights. They were tired of defending themselves.

Lagina said it was personal. He’d graduated from Michigan Tech in the late 1970s, and worked as a petroleum engineer for Amoco before founding Terra Energy in 1981. He’d earned a law degree at the University of Michigan in 1982. He was a Michigander, proud of his success and his industry’s value to the American way.

I politely thanked him for the feedback, and asked for assistance and collaboration in improving the industry’s environmental practices. He declined. A few months later, Lagina sold Terra Energy to CMS Energy for $62.6 million. He became an entrepreneur, opened a successful brewery restaurant on Front Street in Traverse City, got involved in a winery, took a long sabbatical in England, contributed to various civic projects. Every now and then his name was mentioned in one gathering or another I attended.

Last month, Lagina and I connected again over energy. This time it was much more comfortable. Reason: We’re working in the same field. He’s founder and chief executive of a renewable energy company called Heritage Sustainable Energy, which is building a $300 million, 12,000-acre wind farm in northern Michigan. Though our conversation started with some old complaints about my ability as a journalist, we gradually moved to the issue at hand: The promise of replacing carbon-based polluting fuels. Lagina said he was committed to the enterprise as a businessman, investor, and as a citizen of northern Michigan. He’s also got an interest in an electric vehicle company in Traverse City.

“I’ve always viewed myself as being in the energy industry,” he told me. “At this point, with all that’s going on, wind makes a lot more sense.”

A few closing thoughts. The shift by former oil and gas industry executives to renewable energy investments is gaining momentum. T. Boone Pickens, for instance, told the New York Times earlier this year that he is planning to raise over $10 billion to build windmills in Texas, the largest wind-producing state. Market conditions are pushing investment capital to wind, solar, conservation, efficiency, and other clean energy practices.

The second point is the influence of Traverse City on its residents. Lagina is among the increasing number of people I know in northern Michigan pursuing much different lives than those they led prior to arriving here. I start with myself, a national journalist turned activist turned non-profit executive in the 15 years that I’ve lived near Traverse City. The director Michael Moore, a gadfly Academy Award winner, whose career was distinguished by aggravating people from the time he left Flint, through his days at Mother Jones in San Francisco, to telling off the president on national television. He arrives in Traverse City, puts charm and collaboration to work to found a film festival and a gorgeous remodeled old movie theater on Front Street.

Ray Minervini built Hooters restaurants in new suburbs before taking control of the old state hospital in Traverse City in the late 1990s and turning it into the Village at Grand Traverse Commons, one of the largest historic restorations in the country and a national showcase of sprawl-fighting new urbanist design. And Marty Lagina, a petroleum engineer who earned his first fortune in the carbon-based energy industry in northern Michigan, and is trying to earn his second in the clean energy sector. What a place we call home.

SAN FRANCISCO — Since late March I’ve been living in a one-room cottage behind an old Craftsman-style home in Berkeley, and commuting to downtown San Francisco. It’s not your typical daily trip. But as gas prices rise, congestion mounts, and family incomes fall, it may well become a new kind of commuting norm in the United States. Of course it may not, too. This being San Francisco. And the weather is just unbelievably good most of the year.

But this is how it goes. I am a casual carpooler. Every morning I stand on line in front of the Safeway on Claremont Street, about six minutes walk from my house. Usually there are other people there, too, along with a line of cars and drivers waiting to pick up other casual commuters, two or three at a time. The goal in all of this is to save time and money for driver and passengers. Crossing the tragically congested San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on a weekday morning can take over an hour because of the longest toll lines I’ve ever seen. The cost also is $4.00.

But cars with three or more passengers zip through in the free carpool lanes. I save the $3.30 it would cost to ride the BART from the Rockridge Station to Embarcadero.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks now and it’s just a marvel of ingenuity, convenience, and overcoming the fear of the stranger, which has gripped our country for 40 years or so. I’ve ridden with two student artists at San Francisco State, a manager of high rise buildings in San Francisco, a graphic designer, and a developer of affordable housing. I’ve had the chance to check out a two-seat Mercedes, a brand new Volvo, a Land Rover and any number of Toyota Prius’s. Nobody, and I mean nobody, drives an American car here. One of the guys I rode with is an engineer who gave me a lead on an apartment in Oakland, which turned out to be too expensive. Another told me about a hot graphic designer, who is as good as advertised and may fit into our publication schedule at the Apollo Alliance, where I work.

Drivers dispatch their passengers in San Francisco at the corner of Fremont and Howard, which is a couple of blocks from the Embarcadero along magnificent San Francisco Bay. In 1991, two years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, San Francisco demolished the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, replacing it with a palm-lined boulevard. An active lightrail line now runs in the median, passing gardens and parks and thousands of new units of housing, and swanky bars, the Giants baseball stadium, and all the other centers of human commerce that blossomed in what had been the shadows of a loud, dangerous, transportation eyesore.

If I walk, with the sun rising over the bay, it takes about 25 minutes. When I ride the Muni train to 4th Street, a block from my Townsend Street office, it takes about 10 minutes and costs $1.50. Total commute time: 45 minutes to an hour. Going home, I take the Muni to the Embarcadero BART station. BART takes me to the Rockridge Station, and I walk the 12 minutes up College Avenue and Claremont, stopping by the Safeway to get something for dinner. Travel cost: $4.80. Travel time: 45 minutes. Total expense saved from not having to own or drive a car: At least $1,000 a month, after taxes.

Two weeks ago, at the Take Back America conference in Washington, Majora Carter took a moment to explain the motivation behind The Dream Reborn, a celebration this weekend in Memphis that honors the life and marks the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.

“The work now is solutions-based,” said Carter, who founded and directs Sustainable South Bronx, a seven-year-old non-profit environmental and economic development organization in New York. “We’re applying our knowledge, our research, our advocacy to places to help people participate in this new economy.

“We are on the cusp of something so huge,” she added. “We’re activating the green economy to transfer wealth and the capacity to participate to include poor people. We’re reaching across the traditional lines. It’s a very big change and a very big opportunity for everybody.”

The Dream Reborn is not likely to attract the media — mainstream and new — that it deserves. But in the view of this environmental journalist and advocate, the conference is a happening for environmentalism, the social justice community, and the nation. The reason: it brings together the leaders and activists from the newly energized sectors of progressive America — greens, social justice, business, labor, government — around principles and values that have attained new cultural and economic salience in the United States.

Those, of course, are justice, and peace, and freedom, and equality. The legacy of Dr. King. Carter and her colleague, Van Jones, the head of Green For All, the conference sponsor, have found a new path to 21st century relevance for Dr. King’s vision in the clean energy economy, in environmentalism, in the emerging industrial sector tied to efficiency, pollution prevention, renewable energy, and halting global climate change. The Dream Reborn is the latest in a series of high-profile gatherings around the nation this year that are pointing to the development of a new governing coalition based not on exploitation of natural and human capital — the economic principle of the 20th century — but on conservation and collaboration and reason. These will be the generators of millions of new green-collar jobs.

Bill McKibben, in a new piece for The Nation, wrote: “There are people starting to think along these lines: the Green for All campaign has been pushing for a billion-dollar commitment for a quarter-million green jobs of just this kind, designed to pull people out of poverty.” He added: “Were King still alive he’d be fighting to take on the twin scourges of global warming and global inequity with a massive new public works campaign.”

Van Jones described the conference’s purpose this way in an interview: “I wanted to get people together, on the 40th anniversary of his death, around the idea of Dr. King’s dream. Many were not around during his life. He’s been gone longer than he lived. I wanted to introduce a new generation to Dr. King’s dream. His message was uplifting the people. The new message is uplifting the people and the planet, too.”

One of the leaders speaking this weekend to 1,000 people — the conference sold out this week — is my colleague Jerome Ringo, the president of the Apollo Alliance, who spent part of his career in a Louisiana petrochemical plant and has spent two decades making the case that environmentalism and social justice are tied together.

Other presenters are Winona LaDuke (Honor the Earth), Malia Lazu (The Gathering for Justice), LaDonna Redmond (Institute for Community Resource Development), Mary Ann Hitt (Appalachian Voices), Reverend Yearwood (Hip Hop Caucus), Adrienne Maree Brown (Ruckus Society), Tony Anderson (Morehouse College Student Leader), Ian Kim (Oakland Green Jobs Corps), and Rinku Sen (Applied Research Center).

WASHINGTON — Last week in Pittsburgh, Van Jones, the 39-year-old founder of Green For All and one of the people who introduced the idea of “green-collar jobs” to both Democratic presidential candidates, brought more than 600 veteran union and environmental organizers to an awed hush. His address on the potential of the green energy economy to produce millions of jobs and a pathway out of poverty for disadvantaged inner city residents was a tour de force in mixing statistical analysis of global climate change, projections of industrial revenue in the developing wind and solar industries, and social justice metaphor and emotion.

Today, during the Take Back America conference here, an even larger audience heard from Majora Carter (see pix), the executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, a seven-year-old green advocacy and economic development group that has produced a new riverside park, promoted and installed green roofs, developed a state of the art green-collar job training program, and generated new jobs and hope in a Congressional district that is the poorest in the nation. “We went from here,” said Carter, her arms spread to the two screens displaying pictures of garbage dumps, incinerators, and refuse-strewn lots in her neighborhood, “to here.” The PowerPoint switched to a shot of the inviting, green, Hunt’s Point Riverside Park along the Bronx River.

The two presentations struck me as seminal. Never in my experience in the environmental community, a personal history that stretches back to the first Earth Day in 1970, has there been two young leaders as incandescent as Carter and Jones. And never in the history of modern American environmentalism have the two most exciting and important leaders been African American. Environmentalism has gained something it never earned before: soul and street cred.

After her talk, which was received with a standing ovation, Carter told me, “The work now is solutions-based. We’re applying our knowledge, our research, our advocacy to places to help people participate in this new economy. We are on the cusp of something so huge.”

When I asked her what she meant, Carter said, “We’re activating the green economy to transfer wealth and the capacity to participate to include poor people. We’re reaching across the traditional lines. It’s a very big change and a very big opportunity for everybody.”

It helps in image-conscious America that Carter and Jones are uncommonly beautiful and stylish. It also helps that they can communicate in whatever realm they need to. Carter was raised in the South Bronx, and has said in interviews that she knows the streets, and that her childhood included instances of abuse. Yet she also was educated at Wesleyan, where she received her degree in 1988, and later earned a Masters at NYU in 1997. In 2005 the MacArthur Foundation awarded her one of its “genius” awards.

Jones was raised in Jackson, Tennessee, attended the University of Tennessee in Martin, and Yale Law School. He is well-known in the San Francisco Bay Area for challenging police practices. His environmental roots are firmly planted in the same soil as Carter’s. Both see the emerging green energy economy as a way to revive job prospects in low-income neighborhoods abandoned by most American employers. In retrofitting buildings to be more energy efficient, in manufacturing solar energy systems, in installing green roofs and new parks lie solutions to joblessness, national security, and climate change. Theirs is not an environmentalism meant to point fingers. Instead it’s an environmentalism intended to wrap eager arms around capitalist opportunity.

Such a different message. Things change. So do leaders. These two have arrived at the perfect moment.