Bridging the Gap

Published March 6, 2007

By Kesha Ram

When I found out that Van Jones, my modern-day hero, was actually going to be in the state of Vermont at the end of February, I frantically embarked on a mission to get him to make a stop at UVM.

If you were blessed with the opportunity to see Van speak last Wednesday, you may know what I’m talking about when I call him a hero.

He is the founder and director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, California, an organization that works toward racial and economic justice through environmental protection. One of his most innovative endeavors has been coordinating green-collar jobs for former felons and disadvantaged youth.

I first saw Van speak at the Bioneers Conference in California in 2003. At the time, I was trying to start a recycling program at my high school of 5,000 in Los Angeles. I had fallen prey to the most despairing of the environmental movement: the doom and gloomers. I constantly thought, “Saving the world would be so much easier if there weren’t all these people screwing things up.”

That’s where Van stepped in. At a conference of people coming mostly from the mainstream environmental movement, he showed me why I needed to alter this well-trodden path. While most of our keynote speakers were talking about biodiversity, he was talking about cultural diversity. Where they illustrated the need to save large tracts of wilderness and endangered species, he took us straight into the heart of the inner city where young people were being lost to juvenile incarceration. Many of the speakers were anguishing over life under Bush, but Van was laying out plans to build the economic infrastructure for alternative energy.

He reminded me who I was as a person of color, and why I had to understand my peers rather than dismiss them. He showed me that all-important connection: how we treat our fellow human beings is vital to our realistic ability to protect the environment. If we see others as an obstacle rather than incorporating them into our vision of an ideal future, our mission as environmentalists will fail. Vice versa, it should now be clear to the social justice community that, with island nations already submerged due to global warming, environmental problems represent issues of equity, too.

This is an important lesson for the student body of UVM, where environmental activists and social justice activists are pushing separate agendas. However vital their contributions may be, they fail to intersect and build their potential. As Van Jones would say, “There is a light at the crossroads.” I’ll see you there.

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