Green ≠ white only

I didn’t anticipate just how long the line would be to get into the San Francisco Green Festival yesterday, but I was still able to catch some of Paul Hawken’s talk. (I recently finished The Ecology of Commerce, and I’m awed by how eloquently he writes about the relationship between business and the environment.)

Hawken ended his speech by saying that the key to the environmental movement’s success is community, and that “there can be no green movement until there is a brown movement, a yellow movement, a red movement, a copper movement.”

That made me think immediately of a new site that recently came to my attention: Black Brown Green is focused on integrating people of color with the environmental movement (while not excluding whites). There are still a couple of holes in the site—it plans to announce itself formally to the public on Dec. 1—but it promises to be a good resource for tips on how to make our daily lives more sustainable, discussion forums, and articles and videos about green issues as they relate to people of color.

Comments

[MichaelK]

thanks for the tip to black brown green. Have you heard about WiserEarth.org? Paul Hawken came up with the idea, its a tool and directory of more than 100,000 social and environmental justice orgs that anyone can edit. I think it could do more to integrate people of color, so I'd be interested in seeing what other sites are doing. WiserEarth is organized by this taxonomy of "areas of focus" such as alternative energy, workers rights, human rights monitoring, ethnic equality and democracy and voting. There's also an Interactive Map feature that you can use to find organizations in a specific city or zip code. Check it out and let me know what you think...

[Bronwyn Ximm]

I have heard of Wiser Earth, but it kinda fell off my radar a while back, and I hadn't visited the site for a while. Thanks for reminding me of its existence -- I just joined (wow, there are a lot of areas of focus!). Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember hearing about Wiser Business around the same time, but now the site isn't loading. Thanksgiving Day overload, perhaps?