Environmental activists say their plight is less dire than the GOP’s. Greens confront need for diversity

The Republican Party isn’t the only political force that has a diversity problem.

Environmental activists say their own movement needs to step up its game if it wants to play much bigger in Washington.


The green movement dreams of pushing major bills through Congress on the scale of President Barack Obama's health care reform law and the immigration overhaul expected to begin next year.

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But those issues enjoy something the green movement does not: wide and deep support across key Democratic groups, including Latinos and African-Americans.

“You should fish where the fish are biting,” said Van Jones, the former green jobs adviser to Obama. “All causes that want longevity need to look to influence the emerging majority, which will be a nonwhite majority.”

The greens say their plight is less dire than the GOP’s, insisting that diversity exists in environmentalism, especially at the local level. It's nationally that environmental organizations — and the face they present to the country — too often drive the perception that green issues are the purview of white liberals.

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Some activists think the problem is already hurting their causes.

Just look at the issues that have caught traction during Obama’s presidency versus those that haven’t, said Daniel Kessler, spokesman for 350.org, the climate activist group that staged mass sit-ins and arrests outside the White House last year to protest the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

“We’ve seen stuff move over the last couple years since Obama’s been elected, where you had a broad rainbow of people come together and you have seen legislation move,” Kessler said. “The health care bill comes to mind. I think immigration reform, in this coming year, will be another example of a diverse set of people getting together, primarily led by the immigrant community in this country — Hispanic Americans. I think we’re going to see progress there too. But the climate bill didn’t have that kind of support behind it, and it crashed and burned.”

People have offered many reasons why the cap-and-trade bill died in 2010. But opponents’ message that the legislation would close plants and wipe out jobs undoubtedly hurt, supporters say.

“The opposition said, ‘This is going to hurt low-income communities of color,’ and it created a case of divide and conquer,” said Vien Truong, director of environmental equity at the Greenlining Institute, a California-based think tank.

Longer term, it's been four decades since Congress passed landmark environmental protection bills like the 1972 Clean Water Act and 22 years since the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments — and addressing problems like climate change will require legislation with the same wide-reaching effects. Many activists say there’s no chance of a climate bill passing Congress unless they get support from more people within communities of color.

“If we’re going to be successful, we need to reflect the population,” said Adrianna Quintero, founder of Voces Verdes, a coalition of Latino environmental leaders.

That means green groups need to change, she said.

“They need to diversify their leadership, the membership and their staff at all levels,” Quintero said. “But mostly, the vision needs to look toward a world that looks more diverse, that takes into account cultural nuances and different life experiences.”

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Right now, the images people see when environmental causes rise to the top of the national agenda often have one thing in common: They’re white images.

Rising leaders such as Bill McKibben, the 350.org founder who was named one of Time’s “People Who Mattered” in 2011 — white. Eco-celebrities such as Mark Ruffalo and Daryl Hannah — white. Leaders of the big environmental organizations, such as Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune — also, for the most part, white. (On the other hand, Sierra Club President Allison Chin, who serves on the group’s board of directors, is the first person of color to hold the top post in the 120-year-old organization.)

Changing the way the movement speaks to communities of color about environmental issues might prove paramount to engaging people who wouldn’t normally characterize themselves as green voters, said Jorge Madrid, a policy fellow at the Environmental Defense Fund.

“[Traditionally] I think the environmental movement wasn’t telling the entire story,” Madrid said. “They were focusing on issues that I think were in the purview of more well-to-do wealthy folks who have time to worry about wetlands and oceans. Now there’s a bigger focus on the public health narrative. This is something that makes it very real for communities of color.”

On the other hand, Jones says, minority communities care about clean air, water and open spaces, too.

During this year’s election, Latino voters in four swing states told the Natural Resources Defense Council that they supported candidates who wanted stronger EPA standards, more initiatives for renewable energy and higher fuel efficiency standards. The Congressional Black Caucus is one of the greenest voting blocs in Washington, Jones said, pointing to the caucus’s overwhelming support of the Markey-Waxman climate bill, which passed the House in 2009 before failing in the Senate.

“I think there’s a myth out there that African-Americans and Latinos don’t care or don’t vote the right way on environmental issues,” Jones said. “But we’re seeing a lot more engagement and good polling numbers.”

And signs of diversity are increasing.

The top three environmental leaders in the Obama administration — Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson — are people of color. Jackson has made a priority of “ environmental justice,” the effort to ensure that poor and minority communities enjoy the same protections as affluent white ones — or as she put it last year, addressing the fact “there are still communities in this country where there’s a disproportionate collection of smokestacks and tailpipes.”

On the Keystone issue, the Indigenous Environmental Network was among the first and most vocal protesters against the pipeline project because the construction would directly affect indigenous communities in Canada. In California, environmental groups say they galvanized support from minority communities, which are disproportionately affected by air pollution, to defeat Proposition 23, the 2010 initiative that would have repealed many of the state’s environmental policies.

Supporters of California’s cap-and-trade program likewise say they stressed its importance to reducing pollution and asthma rates in minority communities in Los Angeles.

On the local level, groups such as Green For All work to bring green jobs to minority communities, and Voces Verdes seeks to add Latino voices to the environmental conversation.

Environmentalists can’t ignore the importance of engaging minority communities anymore, said Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green for All.

“It’s not a question of doing something extra,” she said. “It’s a question of survival.”

Coalitions among environmental groups and the NAACP and Hip Hop Caucus, a youth social issue initiative, have sought to unite for issues of air quality, green jobs and other rights. In February, the Sierra Club, 350.org and the Hip Hop Caucus are partnering for a Presidents Day rally against the Keystone pipeline.

“It just adds so much value to the conversations,” said Chin, the Sierra Club president. “Any partnership requires getting to know one another. It’s about spending some time where you share common ground and common goals. And part of that is going to be understanding where you may not have strong agreement or aligned values but then agreeing to focus on the shared ground. And that is how we approach it.”

While the collaborations are a good start, diversity and inclusion can’t just be tactics to gain a political victory, said Quintero of Voces Verdes.

“It simply can’t be, ‘We’ll talk to you when we need you,’” said Quintero, who is also a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There needs to be a give and take.”

Stuart Strahl, a conservationist and president of the Chicago Zoological Society, agreed that diversity is not simply a matter of “we need to talk to people of color and engage them in our cause.” Instead, he said, “we need to find out how we can develop a common cause with all constituents.

“You have people talking to you and telling you that they want to save the birds, bugs and bunnies, but what about us? Why are we not part of the equation?” Strahl said. “You have to make them part of the equation.”

The message hits home, he added, when he thinks about an Earth Day event the zoo held in partnership with a community center on the South Side of Chicago. A 5-year-old girl, tasked with making a poster about what conservation meant to her, made a poster that read, “Clean up after yourself and stop killing people.”

“That is a distinct message about what conservation means to her and kids in her community,” Strahl said.

Another need: making it clear that green causes are “our struggle together,” said Truong, from the Greenlining Institute.

“You can’t see this as, ‘It’s their issue, it’s their problem, it’s their community, and we’re going to do some charity there,’” she said. “I think people see through that. We have to see it where our fates are interlocked and linked. If we don’t green up the areas hit most by pollution, don’t attack ground zero of where the toxins are, then the rest of the country has no hope.”

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 7:32 a.m. on Dec. 28, 2012.