Thursday, June 30, 2011

Van Jones: Bridging the Green Divide

This morning I came across an interview with Jan Jones from 2008 in The Sun magazine. There's a huge amount of fantastic stuff here, but this paragraph particularly resonated:

A lot of wealthy, educated people wanted to take action as a result of Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, but most low-income people and people of color I know had no interest in seeing the movie in the first place. They already have enough problems. They don’t need new crises to worry about. Around here we say that the people who already have a lot of opportunities are the ones who need to hear about the crises. So if you have a house and a car and a college degree, then, yes, you should hear about global warming, or peak oil, or dying species. But poor and low-income people need to hear about opportunities. They need to hear about the expected reduction in asthma rates when we reduce greenhouse gases. They need to hear about the wealth and health benefits of moving to a sustainable economy. Otherwise you are just telling people who are already having a bad day that they should have a worse one.
Here's the full interview: http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/387/bridging_the_green_divide

How can those of us interested in clean energy on the San Juan Islands bridge this divide?

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