Is the green movement finally becoming less overwhelmingly white?

When Nikki Silvestri, executive director of Green for All in Oakland, California, was growing up, she struggled with the idea that she had to choose between fighting for the environment and fighting for “my people” – in other words, combating social problems traditionally considered to be key African American issues, like police brutality.
After all, while the environment has historically been considered a white issue, plenty of studies – such as this 2010 research from Yale and George Mason universities (pdf) – have found that ethnic minorities are likely to be among the hardest hit by climate change. It’s increasingly clear that the environment is a social-justice issue.
“There is the assumption that folks have the day-to-day survival mode to deal with and whale-saving just ain’t our shit,” Silvestri said, speaking at SXSW Eco in Austin, Texas, on Monday. “It couldn’t be more wrong.”

There’s still a long way to go: a University of Michigan survey in May found that leaders of environmental groups are overwhelmingly white males, with ethnic minorities occupying fewer than 12% of leadership positions.

But things have been changing in a big way, Silvestri said. She pointed to last month’s People’s Climate March in New York, in which the lead marchers were people of color, as one example.
“I’ve been able to see all of these people of color really take on environmentalism and take on this issue as their own,” Silvestri said at the conference. “It’s been beautiful and it’s been trying.”

In a survey of African Americans, Latin Americans and Asians in swing states, Green for All found that the majority of respondents said they actively sought out news and information about the environment.

According to the survey, 75% of people of color think carbon emissions standards will create, not kill, jobs in the long-term, even though 50% think we will lose jobs in the short-term, Silvestri said. Meanwhile, 70% of the respondents said they would vote differently on a candidate who held a bad position on climate change.

The findings echo a Pew Research Center survey last month found that nonwhites are 20% more likely than whites to think climate change should be a top priority for the government, and 2010 research from Yale and George Mason universities (pdf), which also found that ethnic minorities “were often the strongest supporters of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even when informed that some of these policies would entail individual costs”.

What can be done to bring more people of color into the environmental movement? “Do not reinvent the wheel,” she said.

When her organization aimed to get people of color involved in the sharing economy, it didn’t try to create a sharing platform on Android. Instead, it turned to a network that already fosters sharing inside the African American communities – the churches, she said.

She reminded the audience that people who are in breakdown mode – struggling to make ends meet – need some lightness in their lives too.

“I often think one of the reasons we don’t have civil disobedience now is because we don’t have a soundtrack,” she said. “The role of music and song is to confront things that can’t be confronted directly. Sometimes you have to go around the side or the back.”

Race and poverty turned out to be hot topics at the conference this week. Here’s what other presenters and attendees had to say:

Lina Constantinovici, CEO of StartupNectar

Ecosystems’ resilience depends on diversity within an ecosystem. In many of our human systems we’ve had essentially monocultures, to use that metaphor. … There’s essentially a monoculture, by and large, right now.

So I’m really passionate about solutions that are currently ending up on the cutting room floor because they’re coming from those who don’t fit the narrowly defined segment of the population that has access to participating to providing value to the world with their solutions. That’s a lot of what our work is about, designing a model that, like in nature, is not a one-size-fits-all model and involves our thinking about what incubation means, what entrepreneurship means in its earliest stages, and how we actually support the solutions that the world most needs.

I recently had a talk with a friend who has been a VC [venture capitalist] for a couple of decades and he’s really concerned that the way venture funding is structured, for example, it is not funding the solutions that the world most needs. So diversity involves access to participation but also funding structures and some of the structures that enables a solution to actually come to market.

Robert D Bullard, dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University

When we talk about communities on the front line, we talk about climate vulnerability and we talk about social vulnerability. We know what happened after Hurricane Katrina, but the communities that were vulnerable during the storm and after the flood, these communities were vulnerable before because of policies, because of land use decisions, because of housing patterns, because of other kinds of policies that were put in place. Social vulnerability involves basic provisions of health care … accessibility to lifelines, which is goods, services, emergency response, etc.

So we talk about Katrina, and we talk about what happened, we talk about the flooding, we talk about the policies, we talk about rising water: this is not theory. So when we begin to formulate policies and strategies for addressing these many complexities we have to bring the environmental justice, climate justice frame. The environment is where we live, work, play, learn, worship. When we talk about sustainability, we have to address these equity issues.”

John Katovich, founder of the Katovich & Kassan Law Group and Cutting Edge Capital

The wealth concentration is rising, the gap is increasing, and the individuals who make up the 99% are at a greater disadvantage as ever before. This means the loss of democracy and the loss of social justice. It’s easy to blame greed, hubris, bank collapse or lax regulation as the problem. But that’s really not the problem.

The problem is we are existing in an economy that is set up to create bubbles and more troubles, and it’s doomed to fail. The system is actually working normally. And that is what modern economists are starting to prove.

We, as a society, are locked in a devil’s economy that was built on carbon. The fundamental part of it is by accepting the notion – the myth – of shareholder primacy. This myth allow us as companies to begin to just strive for unrestricted growth and much less regulation and shareholders pressure companies to believe that is their only option.

Talk on Twitter also picked up on similar themes:

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