Here’s a quick rundown of some of the answers I found. (We’ll have more in-depth coverage of the conference in a few days.) Pay close attention, because I’m gonna go through this stuff quickly — and in reverse order.

First up: Why green jobs now? Here’s Van Jones: “One of the reasons that it’s possible to imagine a new economy now is because as much fervor as there is from the grassroots, there’s also change afoot in the broader society.” Most people today recognize that climate change is more than just an environmental problem. Bracken Hendricks, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, went so far as to call it “the biggest human rights crisis in the world.” Various efforts to slow climate change are creating thousands of jobs. Jones, Hendricks, and their colleagues say these new green jobs will help pull thousands of people out of poverty.

Next: How do we create green jobs?

By working very, very, very hard. Just do it. That’s the message Ojibwe Nation member and Honor the Earth Fund program director Winona LaDuke laid down: “I’m gonna outlaw the word ‘should,’” she said. “People are tired of ideas. People are tired of talk. At some point, you gotta do it. And conveniently enough, the Ojibwe language is comprised of 8,000 verbs. We are the getting-shit-done people.”

Last one: What are green jobs? Here are five of the projects I found particularly interesting. This list is anything but comprehensive. It’s just a taste. To keep things moving, I’ve described each project in 10 words.

• Sustainable South Bronx: Majora Carter, desperation, new green jobs, environmental justice, trend setter.
• Richmond BUILD: City-run, at-risk residents, installing solar, learning a craft, making dough.
• ReBuilders Source: Employee-owned cooperative, recycling building materials, big warehouse, garbage into goods.
• Institute for Community Resource Development: Chicago, rebuilding the food system, urban grocery stores and gardens.
• Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District: Jersey; drugs, crime, and pollution then; mixed-income, mixed-use neighborhood now.

Projects this amazing can excite and inspire. They can also overwhelm. Worried that whatever you’re working on can’t achieve the success these things did? Stop worrying. It can. Just buckle down and make it happen.

A couple blocks away, another sort of commemoration was going on. There was chanting. A man played a drum and a choir sang. There was lots and lots and lots of clapping.

Several hundred people had gathered in a conference room to kick off The Dream Reborn, a weekend-long event designed to ignite discussion and collaboration among leaders of the green jobs movement.

Green jobs have gotten a lot of attention lately, but in case you haven’t caught the buzz, here’s the idea: Green industries, including everything from solar panel manufacture to community garden construction, are creating thousands of new jobs. The green jobs movement is helping poor people find those jobs and use them to break out of poverty.

Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx and a leading voice in the movement, explained it like this: “America must be green for all. We believe that the transitional green economy should be used to move people out of poverty, so our country can finally set the example on how to treat people with dignity and protect the earth at the same daggone time!”

Not long after she said that, Carter told us all to stand up and chant with her: “Green jobs not jails, parks not prisons, we won’t stop till everybody listens.”

The conference was organized by a group called Green for All, founded last year by Van Jones, a long-time human rights activist who started the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., in 1996. Green for All has a radical goal: to raise a billion dollars for green-collar job training, and in doing so, to pull 250,000 Americans out of poverty.

When Jones and his colleagues took the podium yesterday, they quoted King over and over again, explaining that he died in Memphis not only while protesting racial discrimination, but while speaking out against injustice in labor practices. It wasn’t just about race that day. It was about poverty, and that’s a problem that’s as pressing today as it ever has been.

More than a thousand people have come to Memphis this weekend to figure out how to use green jobs to end poverty in this country. Exactly how they’ll do it isn’t quite clear. Yesterday felt a lot like a warm-up; it was as if all of us were in a giant huddle before a big game. The singing, the chanting, the clapping. Some people hugged each other. Others cried.

At the end of the day, Jones stepped to the podium. “Stand up everybody,” he said. “We need a power clap! Come on!” And the clapping rose, faster and faster and faster, to a crescendo of shouting and cheering.

On a day when millions remembered an end, this group was also celebrating a beginning.

Today, things get serious. People will break out into nearly 20 workshops. But before that, Jones will pull everybody together to address a question: Why green jobs now? I’m looking forward to the answer. It’s game time — and I’ll have a half-time report for you tonight.

[Editor's note: Read Walters' second report from the Dream Reborn conference.]