environmental justice

Van Jones has helped push equity to the center of the green discussion

Back in March of this year, I interviewed Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif. He was excited because House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had adopted his "green-collar jobs" language and agreed to craft legislation around it. In August, such legislation was introduced in the House. Now things are taking off like crazy. […]

Los Angeles City Council OKs a peak-hour bus-only lane

An update from me and my colleague Francisca Porchas of the Labor/Community Strategy Center:

For the first time in L.A., the car capital of the world, a bus-centered public-transportation system has been given priority over the auto -- a big victory for environmental justice and the reduction of auto-based air toxins and greenhouse gases.

On Aug. 15, the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union secured an important environmental and public-health victory at the Los Angeles City Council: the approval of a $27 million project to implement peak-hour bus-only lanes on Wilshire Boulevard. The Wilshire bus-only lane would run from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica and would operate during rush hour, 7-9 a.m. and 4-7 p.m. Wilshire Boulevard has the largest transit ridership in the county with over 90,000 boardings a day. The bus-only lane is expected to reduce travel time by 20 percent for current transit users and would attract new riders to public transportation.

A perspective from Eric Mann

A Latina woman addresses the board of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). She is part of a crowd of 1,500 people opposing the agency's proposed bus-fare increases. She holds her 3-year-old child up to the board and says, "What would you like me to do? Take the clothes off his back or the food out of his mouth?"

L.A., with 10 million people and 7 million cars on the road, is the freeway capital of the U.S. For more than 14 years, the MTA on one side and the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union (BRU) on the other have been fighting over the future of L.A.'s public transportation -- a fight with important implications for the future of the environmental movement. The heavyweight bout has grown more high-profile this year. Despite massive opposition, on May 24, 2007, the MTA board of directors voted to raise the daily bus fare from $3 to $5 a day and the cost of a monthly bus pass from $52 to $62 a month. This is just the first step in a draconian trajectory that will, if not stopped, push the monthly bus pass to $75 and then $90, force many low-income people off the buses, and compel people to use or buy old cars instead of taking public transit. These policies will increase toxic air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions, and make the bus riders poorer while making rail contractors richer.

The fight over the fare hikes has become a cause célèbre. The Bus Riders Union and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are in state court trying to reverse the fare hikes on environmental grounds. The BRU is also in front of the federal courts asking for a five-year extension of a federal civil-rights consent decree controlling MTA actions. Dozens of BRU organizers are on the buses, talking to thousands of bus riders, holding community meetings to plan our next countermove. The fight to reverse those fare increases, buy more buses, and stop future money-sucking rail projects is far from over. This dramatic expansion in the breadth and impact of the environmental movement in L.A. could be a model for urban coalitions throughout the U.S.

Another reason the well-off do well

Here's a story that tracks with older reporting (such as from Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly) about the pernicious social consequences of lead.

Boy, there's a superhero quartet we could really use: Environmental Justice Crusaders, a band with superhuman powers to counteract our pervasive (and worsening) racial and economic segregation that puts the people on the bottom of the socio-economic divide into the places where the better off folks dump their environmental insults.

Check it out

On Friday, Bill Moyers profiles E.O. Wilson on the latest edition of “Bill Moyers Journal.” (The show is his new spot on PBS that started airing in late April, and happens to have the same name as his old show that stopped running in 1981.) Moyers talks to Wilson about subjects ranging from his work […]

Antonio Diaz, environmental-justice advocate, answers questions

Antonio Diaz. With what environmental organization are you affiliated? I work with a San Francisco-based grassroots environmental-justice organization called PODER: People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights. I’m the organization’s director. What does your organization do? PODER works with Latino immigrant families in San Francisco to organize on environmental- and economic-justice issues affecting them, […]

What a nice idea

If Gandhi were around today, I think he would be less reasonable and tractable about the climate crisis; instead, he would challenge the moral integrity of so-called western civilization. The galvanizing march to the salt flats (the famous "Salt March") would be a tour of threatened island nations: Inuit seeking redress for loss of habitat, mountain people facing bewildering change, deluges in Bangladesh, landslides in the Philippines, and masses of people in the Indus-Ganges-Yangtze river basins facing an uncertain future over water supplies. It would be a march to bear witness to the moral wrongness that pervades the fossil-fuel civilization. It would not, my fellow environmentalists, be the image of a stranded polar bear, regardless of how signatory a phenomena.

Who knew?

Maybe some of you are not going to believe this, but a trend seems to be developing wherein some progressives seem to think that the issue of global warming is grabbing the "spotlight." For instance, in "Why is peak oil politically incorrect?" Ugo Bardi compares the number of online searches that global warming receives versus peak oil, using Google's admittedly new "Trends" system. The number of searches for global warming is rising rapidly, while peak oil lists along. But as an editor comments at the end of the article,"But if you think that's all very depressing -- do the comparison with 'Paris Hilton' and then cry."

Exactly. If the civil rights movement had enjoyed the "publicity" and public passion that global warming currently does, we'd still have segregated bathrooms in the South. Which brings us to the second, admittedly amorphous problem, best exemplified currently by that fascinating phenomenon, left-wing climate deniers.

David F. Noble, a historian of technology (his book Forces of Production is a classic), does a good job in " The Corporate Climate Coup" of showing the history of how large corporations are trying to use the global warming issue for marketing purposes, but somehow global warming activists seem to have accumulated some collective guilt as a result -- am I missing some billboards or something?

A hearing in the House shows promise

Hooray! Hooray! Finally!

Yesterday, some House Democrats finally "connected the dots" on ways to solve two of the nation's biggest problems: failing American job security and global climate security.

By addressing both issues simultaneously, these congressional leaders may re-energize the anti-poverty movement -- and transform the debate on global warming.

U.S. Representatives Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) both sit on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed the committee. Markey is the chair.

Yesterday the Select Committee held a special hearing, entitled: "Economic Impacts of Global Warming: Green Collar Jobs."

(I was happy to provide testimony [PDF] at the hearing, along with Elsa Barboza [PDF] of SCOPE in Los Angeles and Jerome Ringo [PDF] of the Apollo Alliance.)

At the special hearing, Congresswoman Solis addressed the importance of using green collar jobs both as a way to curb global warming and as a pathway out of poverty.