Green Jobs & The Black Community

In a recent speech to the National Association of Black Journalists, US EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson addresses the changing role of environmentalism in our country, and how it's everyone's responsibility to do their part.

One of my African American colleagues told me about how, every year as winter was coming, his grandmother would get up on a chair and put up plastic sheeting over the windows.

She didn’t say she was “greening her home.”

She didn’t say she was “weatherizing the house.”

She didn’t call herself an “environmentalist.”

From her perspective, she was just keeping out the cold and saving money on the oil bill.
But the issues that we label “environmentalism” were an important part of her life.

This disconnect is a significant challenge. But it’s also one of our greatest opportunities.

Read the entire speech.