Sheryll Cashin.

Photo: Institute on Race & Poverty.

Like the environmental movement, the civil-rights movement has become too focused on litigation, says Cashin. While legal rights are essential, she says, the most important cause of segregation and poverty in America is the simple fact that even after 50 years of legally enforced integration in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, poor people and people of color still live in spatially isolated communities. Space is the problem. But it could be the solution too.

With information and mapping tools now widely available and accessible online, communities can put all their concerns on the same map. Some are doing just that, and coming up with new solutions for integration and the environment. But to truly integrate what Cashin calls our “life space,” more environmental, civil-rights, education, and economic development organizations need to break out of their own boundaries to integrate the tools and organizing needed to bring people together in a common space.

Cashin spoke to Grist from her home in Shepherd Park, an integrated neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

Students approach a newly integrated Tennessee high school in 1956.

Photo: Library of Congress.

People tend to think of the civil-rights movement as one of the great success stories of American history. And yet integration has failed. Why?

The chief gains of the civil-rights movement were that we delegitimated discrimination. The vast majority of Americans now believe that no one should be limited in their access to anything based on race. But the unfinished business of the civil-rights movement is actually ordering our society in a way where people really do have opportunities, so that the vision of an egalitarian society is actually true for people in their daily lives.

The reason it’s not true for people in their daily lives is that we’ve not yet made the advances to date that we should have in housing. We haven’t really opened up our life space to racial and economic integration. There’s a lot of intentional policies, both historic and current, that encourage segregation, exclusion, and homogeneity, instead of integration, heterogeneity, and inclusion. My initial impulse in writing this book was to give up on the integrationist ideal because it is too hard.

What’s so hard?

The hardest question, in my view, is this business of opening up neighborhoods and schools and institutions in a truly inclusive way.

Some of the issues that you see as important — affordable housing, for instance — involve development. Doesn’t this often conflict with environmental goals?

The existing pattern of development, the way the physical space of America is being developed, is in conflict with the goals and aspirations of environmentalism. Frankly, in brutal terms, a lot of what drives sprawled, leapfrog development is white families who want to have this elusive American dream, of a poverty-free, good-school existence, where [their] kids will be free of crime.

I’m not saying people are racist when they make these choices, but I think an increasingly diverse American society, with people who are different, creates fear in a lot of people. And our policies reflect that fear. And sprawl development leads to more people in the car, more auto gas emissions, more eating up of open space and land. And if you are a person who is concerned with sprawl, and if you are a person who is concerned with auto emissions, I think you need to understand that fundamental issues of race relations in this country are part of — not all of, but part of — the impediments to you getting saner public policies adopted. And I think you need to begin to look for allies beyond the environmental community to get you to 51 percent in any policymaking realm, because after all, you’re not going to succeed in your policy agenda until you get to 51 percent.

In an increasingly diverse world, we’re rapidly moving toward the day when we’re going to be a majority-minority America like California and Hawaii are today. If you don’t have the skill sets and the empathy to identify other communities with some potentially common goals and build those coalitions, you’re going to continue to be marginal. You’re going to continue to lose battles. And I’ve got to say, I’m not an active member of the environmental movement. But I consider myself an environmentalist. You know, I care, I recycle, I try not to overuse energy, all those things. But from my perspective, everything I see, the environmentalists are losing. And they’re losing badly. Am I wrong about that?

I don’t think so. So much of your argument seems to come back to schools, and environmentalists traditionally have paid little attention to education. Is there a case for environmentalists getting involved in educational equity and education reform?

Yes. Here’s where the intersection is: much of what fuels suburban sprawl and white flight is the chase for quality schools. There’s a book called The Two-Income Trap that shows there has been a run-up in bankruptcies because two-income families with children have been engaging in these bidding wars to get into the most expensive house they can afford. That fuels this outward development. If we could create more stable racially and economically diverse communities, there would be much less pressure on outward development.

You write that GIS [Geographic Information Systems] is one of the most powerful tools to help people in communities visualize and understand their communities and envision solutions. Could you describe why?

The real expert on this is Myron Orfield, who was a state representative and senator in Minnesota. He got the state to pay for a GIS study to look at where public infrastructure investments were going. They found this general pattern of the favored quarter. Often there will be a quadrant that is overwhelmingly white and affluent that is getting a disproportionate share of public dollars that fuel growth. And middle-income people are actually subsidizing it. And the central city was subsidizing it.

He was able to form a coalition, once he could put the data together, that transcended boundaries of race and class to work together around these interests. They realized [all] of us are in the same boat. They formed a majority in the state legislature. And they passed a series of progressive laws, including a regional authority that had strong powers over land use. It helps a lot when you put objective facts on the table.

If you could set up the perfect mapping tool for communities to grapple with these questions — say a Google Earth that could focus on your community and include all the information you needed to identify problems, ask questions, and brainstorm solutions in a spatially specific environment — what would it look like?

It’s not for me to tell a community what they should be mapping, although I have some ideas. But if you want to build a groundswell, to get hundreds of thousands of people involved, then involve them in identifying the issues that they care about and think ought to be tracked. In Seattle, they track not just school quality and testing, but salmon spawns, and what the salmon population is, air quality, number of units of affordable housing. All of these give you a clear, objective sense of how your community is doing, and you can use that information to bring in allies.

You write about some communities that are already doing this. Which ones inspire you?

Chattanooga, Seattle, a number of communities do this. What inspired me generally was that people who care about sustainable development have been empowered through this. Individuals and organizations found power and allies through this and interconnections. And they relate them back to public policy choices. And that inspires me. Individuals feel powerless to change anything. And if you’re sitting at home, you are powerless. There are mechanisms for making a difference, but you’re going to have to find allies, and find or build institutions or coalitions.

You live in a neighborhood that the Washington Post has described as “fairly well-integrated.” What’s so great about Shepherd Park?

It’s not a perfect community. It is stably integrated. You have mostly whites and blacks living together. It’s integrated down to the neighborhood block level. We are close in to the city. I get to work in 20 to 30 minutes. I can walk from where I am to restaurants and take public transportation to the gym and movies. I live in a beautiful home. The neighborhood is pretty stable. There’s some crime, but not a lot. There are people who are affluent and not affluent. And the public school — I don’t have kids yet, but I’m working on it — it’s a good public school. It could be better. But it’s solid. It works for the kids. And it shows you can live in a diverse society.

How could it be better?

More of the families who are in this neighborhood could send their kids to the public school. In the book, I analogize community to being in a marriage. A marriage is work. You have to work at communication and negotiate differences. It takes people who are committed to moving across boundaries of their race and class.

You were born and raised in Huntsville, Ala. You dedicate The Failures of Integration to your parents, who were political activists. What kind of imagined community did they see for you?

They imagined the community that they created for themselves. My parents were activists, but also members of the Unitarian church, although both became Baptists later. I grew up in a household where the most fascinating people would come through. My parents lived a very diverse life, with friends from a lot of different realms. They modeled for me how they wanted to be in the world. These were two people with very strong black identities. They wanted me to value who I was as a black person and value black institutions, but also not cut myself off from exciting, interesting things.

What would you imagine for your children?

Basically the same. I would like my kids to be able to have a broad array of choices, in terms of living, in terms of schools. I’d like them to go to institutions that actively cultivate diversity, where everyone’s included, so it’s a true community of humanity. It may sound idealistic, but that’s what I hope for.

Say anything.

Uncle Sam wants you … to cooperate on conservation. Not only that, he’s willing to listen. At least that’s what he says.

Earlier this week, St. Louis hosted the White House Conference on Cooperative Conservation. The invitation-only event was modeled after Teddy Roosevelt’s 1908 Governors’ Conference, which brought all the country’s governors, Supreme Court justices, cabinet members, and other national leaders to the White House to make conservation a national priority.

The purpose this time around was to celebrate what Interior Secretary Gale Norton called a new chapter, built on the four C’s: “communication, consultation, and cooperation, in the name of conservation.”

In a videotaped message, President Bush reminded the assembled “conservationalists” that Roosevelt — who established, among other things, the first national wildlife refuge, the U.S. Forest Service, and 23 national parks and monuments — “called conservation a patriotic duty.” Although he didn’t show up at his own White House conference on conservation, this president eagerly took credit for improving the environment too. “Our air is cleaner, water purer, and land better protected than four years ago,” he told the crowd. But then he turned modest. “Not all wisdom is found in the nation’s capital,” he said with that sly grin of his. “Local communities have the best ideas about how to use air, land, and water. All we have to do is listen.”

Ah.

The three-day conference brought together around one thousand attendees who were ready to talk. They were more or less evenly divided between federal officials working for environmental, land-management, and wildlife agencies; state and local officials; representatives of nonprofit conservation organizations; and private landowners and businesspeople. “Business attire,” it had said on the invitation, and it was mostly a pretty tightly wound, buttoned-down, suit-and-tie crowd, with a few rowdy cowboy boots and 10-gallon hats thrown in. They gathered at the America’s Center, a typical convention hall that could be anywhere, but is, in fact, in the center of America, just blocks from the Gateway Arch on the muddy Mississippi.

Federal officials announced precious little in the way of new initiatives over the course of the event. Norton said they would be developing cooperative conservation legislation to submit to Congress, but couldn’t say much about what it would be, because, well, it too would be the result of collaboration. And let’s not forget consultation and communication. And what was that fourth C? Oh yeah, conservation. Or was it cooperation?

But at a plenary session on the last day of the conference — after Norton and other cabinet members had been called back to Washington, D.C., to coordinate the emergency response to Hurricane Katrina — federal officials issued an intriguing invitation. They asked for input on the proposed legislation (or, rather, the non-proposal for legislation), and anything else that could help the federal government better cooperate with citizens on conservation.

Now, I know some of you are rolling your eyes and saying, “Yeah, right.” More than a few folks at the conference did the same thing — though surreptitiously, not wanting to attract undue attention from the young staffers monitoring the scene, BlackBerries in hand and earbuds in place. (It was hard to tell the aides-de-camp from the service secret at this shindig.)

But suspend your cynicism for a moment — in the name of cooperation, for goodness’ sake! — and presume that they meant it. Then presume that suggestions should come not just from the select few who were invited to participate in the White House’s version of cooperative conservation, but from all the citizens of this great democracy of ours. Here’s what the federales said they want to hear. If you can interpret it, you’ll find ways to reach them at the end.

Flowers, power.

Lynn Scarlett, the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget in the Interior Department and Norton’s guru of cooperative conservation, invoked Mao Zedong’s dictum to “let a thousand flowers bloom.” She said she wants to hear what works best at the grassroots. “I think the greatest gift you can give is something you’re already giving,” she told the gathering. “My greatest concern is that we will get so entranced, we will muck it up in Washington by trying to shoehorn it into a one-size-fits-all.”

In his own poetic plea, Marcus Peacock, the deputy administrator for the U.S. EPA, combined Mao and The Carpenters. “It’s a fertile field,” he said. “We’ve only just begun. I go with the thousand flowers. I’d like specific ideas of where that could be pursued, right now.” Well, that leaves things pretty wide open. What could the EPA be doing better to cooperate in protecting and cleaning up the environment in your community? How about “white lace and promises”?

No frilly talk from Conrad Lautenbacher Jr., a retired vice admiral in the U.S. Navy and administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The military-minded “Connie,” as his colleagues called him, didn’t seem too pleased with the idea of letting a thousand flowers bloom. “This has started a stampede of messages to come to government,” he said. “I sit back and hear a cacophony. If we can have a coherent national voice, we can do better.” The vice admiral thinks “we have a good setup” already for cooperative conservation. He wants suggestions for a unifying national voice and vision. Any ideas?

Speaking of military minds, Alex Beehler, an assistant deputy undersecretary at the Department of Defense, said he wants to hear “specific ideas and opportunities” for expanding conservation buffer zones around military bases. The military is flush these days, unlike most other agencies, and eager to work with conservation organizations, communities, and landowners to expand no-growth zones around its installations and training grounds using conservation easements, acquisitions, and other tools. Is there a base in your area? Would you like to cooperate with the military to defend nature? They’re looking for a few good ideas.

The references to thousands of blossoms proved all too much for Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department’s undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, and the man in charge of the Forest Service. “I’m a little alarmed at the number of people in a Republican administration quoting Mao,” he said. While the audience laughed, Jim Connaughton — panel moderator, conference host, and chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality — reminded him: “It is a red book.”

Rey said he wanted some good news. “I’d like to hear when an employee is doing a good job,” he said. “Lord knows I hear the opposite.” The current generation of federal land managers “is being asked to do something different than they were trained to do,” he added. In a joke that left itself open to multiple interpretations, he said, “It’s like replacing the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall with elephants from Safari Land three days before Christmas.”

OK, then, that really opens the door. Are there federal employees you know who are doing a good job for conservation? How about it? Can we get a positive feedback loop going? And anybody know any terpsichorean techniques for repurposing pachyderms?

It seems at least some in the Grand Old Party have realized they need to learn how to dance with conservationists. So have at it. I know there are plenty of people out there doing a lot of fancy footwork to improve our environment.

Just a word of caution: Don’t be surprised if your toes get a little tender.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Lynn Scarlett: Department of the Interior, 1849 C St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20240, 202.208.3100

Marcus Peacock: EPA, Ariel Rios Building, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20460, 202.272.0167

Conrad Lautenbacher Jr.: emailE=(‘conrad.c.lautenbacher@’ + ‘noaa.gov’) document.write(‘<a href=”mailto:’ + emailE + ‘” mce_href=”mailto:’ + emailE + ‘”>’ + emailE + ‘</a>’)

Alex Beehler: emailE=(‘Alex.Beehler@’ + ‘osd.mil’) document.write(‘<a href=”mailto:’ + emailE + ‘” mce_href=”mailto:’ + emailE + ‘”>’ + emailE + ‘</a>’)

Mark Rey: emailE=(‘Mark.Rey@’ + ‘usda.gov’) document.write(‘<a href=”mailto:’ + emailE + ‘” mce_href=”mailto:’ + emailE + ‘”>’ + emailE + ‘</a>’) , 202.720.7173

The Council on Environmental Quality said it would accept suggestions on its website. CEQ can also be contacted at 722 Jackson Pl. NW, Washington, D.C. 20503, 202.395.5750.

There are 39 groups listed as partners in the Campaign to Make Poverty History. Not one of them is a conservation or environmental organization.

It’s a shame, not just for the leaders of the conservation and environmental movements, but also for conservation and the environment. The changes happening now will shape the future of the poorest regions of the world, many of which are home to the earth’s greatest biodiversity — as well as its most desperate people.

People used to talk about conservation and development. For a while, it seemed development advocates would do anything to hitch their projects to conservation. Not anymore. Now conservationists fret that they’ve dropped off the A-list.

I recently attended a conference on “Conservation Incentives That Work for People on the Land.” When I heard Walter Reid, the director of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and Carter Roberts, the new president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund U.S., complain that conservation was not getting adequate attention — even from such sympathetic types as Jeffrey Sachs, author of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time — I wondered whether there might be a new way back into the heart of the development dialogue. Not through conservation, but through something the development community has put at the center of its own agenda: governance.

These days, governance is the key word in international development, from multilateral agencies to governments and NGOs. When the finance ministers of the Group of Eight (G8), a coalition of the world’s leading industrialized nations, agreed to cancel $40 billion of debt owed by 18 of the world’s poorest countries, they tied the debt relief to good government practices, improvements in health and education, and elimination of poverty.

Once again, the environment was not on the agenda, despite the fact that maintenance of ecosystem services such as clean water is a critical concern in poor countries and despite the fact that good governance is essential for conservation. In a study published in Nature, researchers found that poorly governed countries tend to lose biodiversity faster as corruption rises. Higher corruption correlated with loss of forest cover and, in Africa, with declines in elephant and black rhino populations.

Good governance — which starts with free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and property rights — needs to be pushed further to embrace conservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity through good laws, adequate administration, and practical incentives that work for people on the land.

I am sure there are many conservationists and environmentalists among the more than 3 million people wearing white “Make Poverty History” wristbands worldwide, and the more than 2 million people who sent text messages on their mobile phones trying to get tickets to the Live8 global series of concerts this summer. It’s not too late for them to get the message to leaders of conservation and environmental organizations, too.

Conservationists can sit on the sidelines while history is made. Or get back in the game.