Articles by Van Jones

Accept more poison to get less carbon? Kill this crazy idea NOW

With an increase in industry’s toxic pollutants, will this be the fate of our water sources? In exchange for cutting their carbon emissions, power plants want to undermine the EPA and get permission to increase other kinds of dangerous pollution. They even want the go-ahead to dump more sulfur and deadly mercury into our air […]

A message from Van Jones

Van Jones sent this message out to friends and supporters on Tuesday, Sept. 15. Dear Friends: My family and I want to thank everyone for the outpouring of love and support that we have received over the past week or so. I resigned from the White House on Sept. 6, and I have remained silent […]

It’s time to build the green-collar economy

This post originally ran on Wonk Room. —– At best, the federal government’s bail out of Wall Street will help the U.S. economy — which is already in a ditch — avoid a total meltdown. Fine. Now we need a plan to jumpstart the economy and actually get America moving again. In my new book, […]

Forty years gone: MLK’s dream today would be colored green

The following are my introductory remarks to the Dream Reborn conference, beginning today and running through the weekend in Memphis, Tenn.

Forty years ago today, on April 4, 1968, a sniper assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King had come to Memphis, Tennessee, to aid striking sanitation workers. The preeminent civil rights leader of his time, he was only 39 years old.

Four decades have passed since that fateful day. As of this month, Dr. King has been gone from us longer than he was ever here. As we pass this milestone in history, we gather in Memphis to remind ourselves and the world that a bullet killed the dreamer -- but not the dream.

Dr. King had a vision of an America as good as its promise, and a world at peace with itself. That vision lives on in the hearts of hundreds of millions, including two generations of adults and a rising generation of teenagers, all of whom have been born since Dr. King's passing.

The time has come for us to step forward. We must take full responsibility to advance the cause of justice, opportunity, and peace in a new century.

And yet it must be said that we are stepping onto history's stage at a frightening time -- a time of global warming and global war. A time when "the market" is free and the people are not. A time of mass incarceration of people and mass extinction of species. A time of no rules for the rich and no rights for the poor. A time of increasing profits for the few and decreasing options for the many. A time of buyouts and bailouts for the powerful and convictions and evictions for the powerless.

And yet, inside the United States, the tide has begun to turn.