Then in 2005, at age 20, Bryant was arrested for selling crack cocaine. And that, he says, saved his life.

“The truth is, I had too much time on my hands and there were pressures,” he says. “I was coming of age where everyone around me expected me to take care of myself. If someone had come to me with a job or vocational school training, I would have done that. But at the time, none of those options came to me. At that time the option was to sell drugs.”

Jail made his choices clear: Become another black, male, drug-dealing statistic, or follow the rules, stay clean, stop dealing, and go back to school. After two years of passing drug tests and a year at junior college, Bryant was accepted to Atlanta’s Morehouse College, alma mater of Martin Luther King. And then his options multiplied.

He majored in African American studies, picked up Van Jones’s best-selling book, The Green Collar Economy, and had an epiphany: If the environmental movement is an extension of the civil rights movement, as Jones argues, why wasn’t environmentalism penetrating the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)?

“No one was talking about it from the leadership down to my level, so I decided to talk about it,” says Bryant, who started the on-campus group Green the Block. A longtime hip-hop musician, he wrote a song called the “Dream Reborn” and made a music video to go with it:

His fellow students dug it. They came to Green the Block’s workshops. They learned about global warming, environmental justice, and obesity. They saw — many for the first time — that they didn’t need to be white, wearing wool, and waving petitions to call themselves environmentalists.

“For a lot of African Americans or Latinos, going green or being environmentally conscious is a white thing, and that was one of the biggest challenges,” says Bryant. “That myth doesn’t encourage people to get involved with the movement.”

But a hip-hop concert and small workshops led by people who look like them? That was enough to get his fellow students talking about global warming.

“The students I was reaching are going to be leaders in the African American community,” says Bryant. “This culture — the African American one, hip-hop — is so robust that I knew if we could mesh their energy with the environmental movement, we could popularize the idea of sustainability.”

Bryant says his job was to convince the student leaders that they already knew about sustainability (their ancestors were hunters and foragers) and ecological awareness. Then he urged them to pursue environmental careers.

“The reality is, people of color are going to be the majority populations in this country,” he says. “How will the sustainability movement be sustainable if we don’t increase the numbers of people of color in the movement? That’s why HBCUs are important.”

In a behind-the-scenes video about his music, Bryant is more direct: “We need more cats from the hood to step into these positions. We are going to be locked out of this new economy just like we was locked out of the old economy.”

After graduating from Morehouse, Bryant worked for several years at the Oakland-based group Green for All before being awarded a “black male achievement” fellowship at Echoing Green, which provides start-up capital, technical assistance, and mentorship over 18 months to help fellows launch and build organizations.

Bryant, now 28, and fellow Morehouse graduate John Jordan, 23, are building an environmental program called Fight for Light. By offering a three-year stipend and student loan reduction at the fellowship’s completion, Fight for Light aims to cultivate the next generation of African American environmental leaders from HBCU campuses.

“Students are coming to HBCU campuses who don’t know about climate change or the greenhouse effect,” says Bryant. “It’s not that they’re not smart. It’s that no one has taught them about this. And as far as the jobs and opportunities go, students who are not exposed to these concepts and networks are not going to be in the game. At all.”

Green for All’s Julien Mocine-McQueen is confident Fight for Light will ultimately become a feeder organization for top environmental groups, policy centers, and schools.

“He’s been asking since he was a student, ‘how do we use the environmental movement to leverage opportunities?’” says Mocine-McQueen. “Markese is someone whose work is beyond him in the sense that others will adopt his methods.”

Asked about the President Obama’s commitment to the green economy, particularly since Jones stepped down from his post as the White House green jobs czar, Bryant replies, “When Van Jones resigned as a result of political pressures, it made me want to push back harder.

“I believe Obama has made the largest investment in green jobs of any U.S. president, but I don’t think he’s followed that up with enough leadership,” he says, adding, “if Obama wasn’t getting a lot of pushback from the GOP, we would be much further along.”

Boston is infamous for its aggressive, rude, and reckless drivers. Its streets are notoriously narrow, crowded, and pockmarked with potholes. Any Bostonian worth his salt will tell you that traffic lights are nothing but impediments to vehicular progress, and speed limits are just cash-collecting scams invented by government agencies. Beantown residents are masters at running yellow lights — and those that were recently yellow.

Enter into the chaos a woman whose mission is to shoehorn a space for bikes and pedestrians into the Boston streetscape. Her main tools? Civility and kindness — uncommon methods for these parts.

Her name is Jackie Douglas, and she’s executive director of the nonprofit LivableStreets. In the past few years she, her staff, and a band of volunteers convinced officials to install bike lanes on the Boston University Bridge and strong-armed the state of Massachusetts to incorporate pedestrian needs during a $3 million bridge-building initiative, among other things. And she’s done it all with a friendly, non-confrontational approach.

“You have to work really closely behind the scenes with decisionmakers and engineers,” Douglas says of her work. “And sometimes that means you need to publicly oppose certain initiatives. But you also must come out and show support when things are going well.”

During the discussions surrounding Boston’s bridges, Douglas attended scores of lengthy public meetings. Rather than rousing a crowd to storm the meeting and lambast public officials, Douglas did most of her work ahead of time. Before the meeting, an army of volunteer bike ambassadors surveyed more than 1,500 people, collecting a lengthy list of reasons why residents wanted better bridges. Then, Douglas compiled them onto a scroll that became her prop when she commandeered the mic and began reading.

The approach took a lot of the anger out of a process that might otherwise have been ugly, and showed decisionmakers that there was solid public support for bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

During the redesign of the Longfellow Bridge — one of the most iconic in the Boston area — critics argued against merging pedestrian access with vehicles. Douglas gradually changed their minds by scouring the globe for examples of shared bike/pedestrian paths on bridges from around the world. Ultimately, she led a process that got buy-in for a bridge redesign that is “truly multi-modal.”

Jeff Rosenblum, LivableStreets founder and board member, credits Douglas’ easygoing persistence for those wins. “Success depends on strong relationships and on earning technical credibility and respect,” says Rosenblum. “Jackie nurtures relationships and builds consensus.”

Her friends in Boston aren’t the only ones to notice. Douglas’ work won her the 2011 National Advocacy Award from the Alliance for Biking & Walking, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit.

Douglas has also pushed for better cooperation between government agencies, particularly the state departments of transportation, economic development, and public health. It’s an approach that was pioneered under former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and has since been emulated on the federal level under Obama.

“If you want people to change how they get around in transportation, you have to change land use,” says Douglas. “Right now we have transportation departments with zero control over land use and planning, which is how an office park gets built 100 miles outside the city.”

Under the state’s Healthy Transportation Compact, state agencies are now working to draw connections between people-centered streets and human health. Right now, they’re establishing common goals. Then they’ll identify the regulations that need to be changed and incentives that can help promote smart growth.

Rest assured that Douglas will be sitting in many of those meetings. While the LivableStreets ambassadors ponder the organization’s goals and mission during their three-hour weekly stint, Douglas has set up systems to leverage their work, stay organized, and solidify LivableStreets’s reputation as an effective, easy-to-work-with group.

But doesn’t she ever get the teensiest bit agitated by all the bureaucratic red tape? Well, yes.

“I have very little patience,” says Douglas. “If things don’t happen quickly enough, that makes me mad. But I have stamina to see things through. It’s a subtle difference. But I’m determined. I’ll stick around till it’s done.”

It’s one thing to pour money into your shmancy new gazillion-dollar, net-zero eco bungalow. It’s quite another to bring that design — and the underlying philosophy that “green is good” — to the multitudes of urban dwellers who are more familiar with subway schedules than they are with LEED certification or the Home Energy Rating System.

That’s where Gita Nanden comes in. The Brooklyn-based architect and co-founder of Thread Collective wants to take green building beyond the pages of Dwell magazine and into the realm of housing projects and urban farms.

“We don’t want to be the progenitors of gentrification,” says Nanden, whose firm recently completed construction on its new green office building, located in Brooklyn’s transitioning Bushwick neighborhood. Rather, she and her partners want to design eco-friendly buildings and spaces that are as likely to house people on welfare as they are to house upper middle class professionals.

Before we go any further, though, a disclaimer: “We still do high-end design at our firm, and we love that,” says Nanden.

Noted. Also worth noting is Thread Collective’s commitment to working with nonprofits and government agencies to incorporate sustainable design into public places like parks and community centers — all as a way of drawing people into the process of creating a better city. The natural entry point for that goal, says Nanden, is through urban agriculture.

“People love food,” she says. “Whether it’s social networking at a community garden or eating at a farm-to-table dinner, urban farms are a way for people to come together. So the architecture component needs to support that. Public spaces need to help filter urban agriculture into the urban fabric, so the food component isn’t relegated to people’s backyards.”

By way of example, Nanden and her partners have designed a 7,000-square-foot Red Hook Center on Sustainability and Culture, a project at Added Value, a 3.5-acre community farm in the Red Hook neighborhood. The center, which will begin to rise next spring, will be blatantly green, with interpretive signs explaining all the eco bells and whistles, which will be exposed for all to see. For instance, the solar systems will not be placed on the roof. Rather, they’ll double as shade canopies. The roof will be built out of shipping palettes.

Added Value farm has long been a community draw in Red Hook, Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhood, where the average annual income is about $20,000. Many of the residents in the nearby housing project avail themselves of the farm’s established job training program — and help grow some of their own food. “The farm is a hub, and it embodies sustainable principles like healthy food and nutrition,” she says. The new center will “act like a self-guided museum; people will learn more about urban agriculture, storm water harvesting, and bio remediation” — cleaning up the dirt and water with the help of microorganisms.

Nanden hopes that the new Center will be a catalyst for similar sustainable building projects throughout New York’s five boroughs. (She and her partners contributed to the research and writing of the recently released Five Boroughs Farm report, a “road map” for New York City’s urban farms.)

But in the meantime, the community has more pressing concerns. Hurricane Sandy hit Red Hook hard, pummeling homes and businesses and cutting power to residents for weeks. The deluge also submerged Added Value farm under three feet of water.

Soil tests indicate there isn’t long-term damage to the growing grounds at Added Value as a result of the hurricane, she says. Still, the farm is in need of serious clean up and operators are soliciting donations and asking for volunteers to help with the work. With a little luck — and a lot of elbow grease — they’ll be ready to put seeds in the ground come spring, when crews plan to break ground on the new community center.

Five years ago, artist, educator, and community organizer Zakiya Harris was at the top of her game. After years of reaching out to disenfranchised communities through her hip hop band, FIYAWATA, the Oakland, Calif.-based activist co-founded Grind for the Green (G4G), a nonprofit designed to engage young people of color in the environmental movement using hip hop, art, and cultural programs. In 2008, she became the first African American regional director of the San Francisco Green Festival, an annual expo on all things sustainable in the Bay Area, from a green careers resource center to vegan cooking demonstrations. In rapid succession, she earned a multitude of accolades (including being named “one to watch” by Grist).

Then the bottom fell out of the economy. Like thousands of other nonprofit organizations, G4G watched its funding tank. Harris eliminated a successful job-training program, cut back on events, and faced a bleak and broke future.

Rather than wilt, Harris, who signs her emails “Forever Forward” and quotes Nelson Mandela on her voicemail — “It only seems impossible until it’s done” — did what she does best: She hustled. To lessen G4G’s reliance on government and foundation grants, she acquired a solar trailer — a bunch of solar panels on a trailer that generate enough power to run solar-powered hip hop concerts and more — that she then rented out, along with electronic billboard space on the trailer. (Prices start at $10,000 for a three-month campaign.)

In 2010, Harris co-founded Earthseed Consulting, which partnered with Toyota on the carmaker’s Green Initiative. In addition to traveling to the deep South to give workshops on environmental job opportunities to African American colleges, Harris and her business partners helped integrate an environmental curriculum into the San Francisco Unified School District, produced an original urban green living television series, and trained youth to produce the Bay Area’s largest solar-powered hip hop music festival. (Yes, there are several of them.)

“This is a population that’s being left out of the environmental conversation,” Zakiya says. “I’m telling them, ‘You are an environmentalist whether you realize it or not.’ How many of them know someone with diabetes or cancer? How many live in an area with pollution or poverty? How many care about those issues? All of them. That’s environmentalism. If they care about an issue, they can find a way to change it, improve it. But no one’s helping them connect the dots.”

Most recently, Harris is working to launch Hub Oakland, an offshoot of the international Hub network, whose mission is to “facilitate the creation of sustainable impact through collaboration.” Harris and a team of mainly women have secured a 13,000-square-foot building with 20 permanent offices, workspace, an art gallery, a commercial kitchen, and a range of programming and workshops intended to give a leg up to aspiring entrepreneurs. The center, slated to open this December, is designed to be a “place of convergence,” says Harris, where green tech entrepreneurs, holistic practitioners, artists, and musicians work alongside one another.

As examples of the kind of enterprise she wants to spark, she points to Back to the Roots, a company that recycles coffee grounds to make high-end mushroom kits sold at Whole Foods and had $8 million in sales last year, and to Terra Cycle, which transforms used Capri Sun packets into purses, backpacks, and wallets. “Those people are literally making wealth out of waste,” she says.

“Zakiya is fierce, with a lot of passion and energy,” says Galen Peterson, co-director of United Roots Oakland, a green art/media center for young people, and a longtime collaborator with Harris. “She always makes sure that communities that are overlooked — poor, black communities — are not only involved, but are brought in a culturally relevant way.”

Along with practical training, those who avail themselves of Hub Oakland’s resources will get a healthy dose of Harris’s gritty optimism. No one is more situated to dominate the environmental field than inner city communities of color, she says. “The urban, hip hop scene sets the trend for cool,” says Harris. “Once we decide to make something a movement, we’ve got the platform.”

The trick, she concedes, is convincing the hip hop generation that they are in the driver’s seat.

“I can’t go into poor, inner city communities talking about, ‘Woe is me, the polar caps are melting.’ They tell me, ‘We already got problems, drama, and issues.’ So I focus on the positive. I show them they can create their own path.

“I believe in the people, the Earth,” Harris says. “I believe in the people’s ability to turn this around.”

“I was on the outside,” says Kearsley, who lives in Bellingham, Wash. “I’d be asking, ‘Do we need a 2012 Honda Civic? What’s wrong with the 2011 Civic? Do we need more phones? What are the resources going into this? Where are they coming from? Who is this action hurting?’ A lot of the dialog stopped at ‘make it look cool,’ and I wanted to know more.”

Then, after graduation, someone lent Kearsley a 1,200-page tome that changed his life: Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. As he read about a school of design devoted to creating productive, regenerative landscapes and resilient systems that “support life in all of its forms,” he knew he’d found his calling.

Seven years later, he owns not one, but two businesses — one focusing on permaculture design in his hometown, another consulting internationally. Along the way, he’s spearheaded the construction of Bellingham’s community garden, consulted on an eco-village in Costa Rica, and recently returned from Peru where he and a business partner shared permaculture principles with Amazon natives.

We caught up with Kearsley on a recent rainy day to talk about the relationship between ethics and food, intelligent design as he sees it (hint, it has nothing to do with God or Darwinism), and what goes well with venison.

Q. What, exactly, is permaculture?

A. Permaculture is a perspective, not a prescription. It’s how we address problems. My work consists of streamlining things and making more elegant sites and systems that not only meet the needs of the people but also improve the overall ecological health.

Q. Sounds vague … how do you pay the bills?

A. I design landscapes, but unlike a traditional landscape designer, I design systems to save energy and use minimal resources.

Q. For instance?

A. The conventional approach to turning an existing landscape into a garden is to haul out everything that’s there before starting. My business partner and I use a technique called “sheet mulch,” where we smother existing grass with cardboard, manure, straw, and mulch, and build the landscape on that. We’re using waste and cardboard to accomplish what would have been an intensive task of taking away sod or other plants, and we’re leaving the soil biology in its place.

Q. Spreading manure on a garden isn’t exactly rocket science, is it?

A. But creating the garden to operate as a system in conjunction with other systems — like using a rotating cast of animals to work the land in succession before planting — is. Permaculture is more than one specific technique. In every job, we minimize the use of fossil fuels required to build that landscape.

Recently, a client’s garden had a wet spot, and the traditional approach would have been to drain the whole thing and fill it above the water level. That would have required a lot of heavy equipment using a lot of resources to force the land into our notion of how it should be. Instead of that, we decided it made the most sense to expand the existing wet spot and making it a seasonal pond.

Q. That sounds like the path of least resistance. Is that permaculture?

A. Again, permaculture is as much a philosophy as it is a practice. The pond example isn’t radical in terms of land use, but it is out of the box in terms of business. We would have made more money with the traditional solution.

Q. Do you often make business decisions that cost you money?

A. I want to empower clients to maintain and even install their own gardens. I’m literally teaching myself out of thousands of dollars of work, but the bigger goal is to get more people in the community involved.

Q. Sounds great until you can’t pay your mortgage.

A. There are so many yards and so many gardens to take care of that I doubt we would ever have to find a new line of work. If we did, we would become shepherds or carpenters or something.

Q. Permaculture is a matter of “intelligent design,” right? Can you expand on that thought?

A. During school I was using the design process to create poster graphics, children’s toys, sandals, tape dispensers, and digital cameras. I found myself asking, “Why do we need another (insert new product here)?” “Why aren’t we solving (insert economic/ecological problem here)?” After graduating, my focus was to use my design process to develop practical solutions to real problems facing the planet, people, and the processes that direct our lives. It seemed like the intelligent application of the problem-solving/design skill set.

Q. Do you take issue with technology? My iPhone is elegant and useful.

A. I appreciate “appropriate technology” in the sense of the appropriate use of technology and also technology that can be appropriated — something you could fix or even improve. What’s important is not the technology itself but how it is being used. If you take a bulldozer or a tractor, it could be used to destroy a forest or to set up planting systems to grow orchards.

A lot of modern product design is constantly trying to push a new product across the shelf without questioning the value or need for that product. Most Americans replace their cell phone every year. When I consider the amount of resources that’s taking up, I can’t help but ask, “Who gave us that right?” My computer is seven years old and it still performs the functions I need it to.

Q. Permaculture started in the ’70s as a response to the “Green Revolution,” but it isn’t a particularly new concept, is it?

A. No. When you look at indigenous cultures from around the world, they’ve been doing the permaculture thing for as long as they’ve been people. The alternative is a culture that doesn’t last long.

Q. There are a lot of indigenous cultures that haven’t lasted.

A. Exactly my point. When your systems are out of balance, eventually it won’t last.

Q. Your consulting company, Terra Phoenix, just finished a job working with natives in the Amazon. What did you teach them about permaculture they didn’t already know?

A. One of the big issues with the local communities is that water systems full of pathogens are making people really sick. With a few pieces of technology and design principles — separating gray water from streams and keeping pollution and contaminants outside the watershed, introducing a slow sand filter — we taught them how to improve their system and stay healthier.

Q. Would you describe yourself as an environmentalist?

A. Probably, but I don’t fit into the usual definition. I like chainsaws, hunting, and eating meat. On Orcas Island [Ed. note: Kearsley learned the ropes at Bullocks Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island, Wash.], the deer would come into the fruit groves and it wasn’t unheard of for one of them to end up on a dinner plate near a pile of plums.

Q. How can your philosophy of community and agriculture be extrapolated to an urban environment, where people are “farming” tiny garden plots and vacant lots in the middle of the concrete jungle?

A. In so many cities there are square miles of land that are being neglected or even oppressed, and there’s an opportunity to come together and transform that land from hubs of unsavory activity into a community asset. But on an individual level, people can grow food in their windowsills. Even if it’s just herbs, growing your own food is something everyone should experience.

Q. Give me one example of how an urban farmer could integrate permaculture.

A. Easy: house plants and worm bins. Almost half of what’s thrown away is compostable. I have a worm factory 360. Worms eat garbage and give rich fertilizer for plants, all in a contained system.

At first blush, Alison Gannett’s sacrifices in the name of fighting global climate change don’t seem all that sacrificial. In 2001, the world champion extreme freeskier gave up helicopter skiing. She sold her snowmobile in 2005. Several years ago, she rejected a lucrative contract with Crocs because of the shoe company’s questionable environmental practices. (She kept her contract with the more sustainable Keen Footwear.) Just recently she turned down a photo shoot in the Alps because the flight over the pond was too much for her carbon footprint to bear.

Go ahead, roll your eyes. (Oh muffin … no heliskiing??) Then take note: Gannett walks the walk when it comes to living green. She and her husband grow their own food on an earth-friendly farm, and she’s battled to bring sustainable eats to residents in her rural corner of Colorado. Gannett has also leveraged her personal experience into a business that helps individuals and corporations — including a few of her athletic sponsors — reduce their energy consumption by up to 50 percent.

Hers is a story of how a fun hog became a climate activist in order to protect the thing she loves most: winter.

Gannett delivers roughly 250 keynote addresses each year (many, it should be noted, via Skype — no air travel required). Her talks start with a jaw-dropping slideshow of her exploits shredding some of the world’s most extreme slopes. Then she extolls all things winter. Just when you think she’s going to bro down and brag about bagging some sick peak in Alaska, she drops the hammer.

“I’m here because I want to save our snow,” Gannett says. “And what is snow? Water. And water is one of the most precious and endangered resources.”

Alison jumping cliff in Colorado. (Photo by Dave Wright.)

That’s when Gannett shifts into energy wonk mode. Specifically, she talks about how to analyze your (or your organization’s) energy consumption and carbon emissions. Then she offers strategies to reduce carbon footprints and save money.

Some of her solutions you’ve heard before: “LED light bulbs are a slam dunk,” Gannett says. “Now they’re available and affordable at places like Home Depot, and each bulb can save $130, and is 79 percent more efficient than a standard bulb.”

She tells homeowners to call their local utility company for a free blower-door test and infrared scan, and to use the results to do their own caulking and foaming, which reduces the need for energy-intensive air conditioning and heating.

“Alison takes what can be a terribly complex subject and simplifies it in a 75-minute presentation,” says Sam Mix, outdoor marketing manager at Osprey Packs, one of her sponsors. “She makes a convincing case that small, individual actions can make a big difference.”

But don’t expect to hear Gannett encouraging organizations to plaster their roofs with solar panels or buy every employee a Prius. Those are expensive actions that, she argues, don’t always translate into a lower carbon footprint. (She built her own plug-in electric SUV in 2005, but when she ran the numbers, realized the vehicle and its solar charger massively increased her carbon footprint.) And she’s convinced that most people will only change their habits when there’s a financial incentive.

“I want to write a book called I Don’t Give a Shit About Climate Change,” Gannett says. “Companies can be more profitable by reducing waste and reducing energy use. Period.”

In truth, Gannett really, really gives a shit about climate change. It’s that concern that inspired the jet setting pro skier to start the Office for Resource Efficiency in 2004 with the goal of improving energy and resource efficiency in homes and businesses around her then-hometown of Crested Butte, Colo. In 2006, she helped launch a nonprofit called the Save Our Snow Foundation, which consults with large corporations, including Keen and Osprey, on how to reduce resource consumption.

In 2009, after uncovering some ugly truths about industrial organic agriculture — particularly the lax regulations governing the industry and the amount of energy consumed to grow and ship certified organic food to places like Crested Butte — Gannett started an online farmers market called localfarmsfirst.org for farmers within 100 miles of the Gunnison Valley. The next year, she relocated to a rural homestead, where she and her husband grow a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, and meat — all by following an integrated farming model and without using pesticides.

All this has given Gannett even more fodder for her speaking events.

“I can use that as an inspirational platform,” she says. “That’s a lot better than being preachy — that’s just not an effective way to change human behavior.”