What is one thing – just one – you can agree on with someone on the opposite side of the political divide? The late General Colin Powell once told me, “Figure that out and you can get a lot done. And as you win one victory together, you might just discover along the way that there’s something else you agree on.” Our nation seems utterly divided. Many of the wounds that have been torn open in these last few election cycles are real and painful. But too much focus has been placed on further tearing open those wounds rather than…
Author: Ben Jealous
If you are reading this indoors, there is a good chance there are hundreds of invisible plastic particles floating around in the room you are in. There is also a good chance you may be breathing some of them in. And we are not just breathing in plastic pollution. We are eating it and drinking it. To add insult to injury, much of that plastic pollution came from items like plastic water bottles that consumers thought would be recycled. The world’s largest producer of plastic polymers for single-use plastics is ExxonMobil. Right now, Attorney General Rob Bonta of California of…
“Made in the USA” is a tagline that should apply to every major piece of the clean energy economy. It is within our grasp. But we need to bust some myths. This week, clean energy and sustainability leaders from around the country got to tour the site of a new Qcells solar panel factory in Cartersville, Georgia. Once the new facility is up and running, Qcells will maintain the first fully integrated solar supply chain in the US – all right there in Georgia. Not far from Cartersville, the Qcells plant in Dalton, Georgia has already shown how good-paying clean…
By Ben Jealous When we see a 75-year-old white man out in the woods with a group of Black and brown kids from low-income neighborhoods, teaching them about nature, few of us assume he is there because that is where he feels most comfortable. Probably even fewer of us assume many of those kids look just like the ones he grew up with in public housing projects more than 60 years ago. Rocky Milburn grew up as one of the few white kids in a mostly Black public housing development in southern Indiana. His family was very poor. They were…
By Ben Jealous What if the answer to undoing the harm wrought by the demise of America’s manufacturing sector was right in front of us? An economic boom waiting to happen, to rebuild communities and revitalize our beaten-down working class… And, this time, without the rampant industrial pollution that fuels climate change and sickens our people… It is not too good to be true. But we must seize the moment if we do not want it to pass us by. Last week, I visited the Qcells solar panel plant in Georgia. It is the largest facility of its kind in…
By Ben JealousEven Ron DeSantis had to admit, when pressed at a CNN townhall, January 6 was a bad day for America. Invariably, following this past week’s anniversary of the insurrection, we’re forced to ask ourselves: Will we ever be able to pull this country back together again? It’s a reasonable question. The fissures run deep. For the answer to that big, terrible question, I turn to the history books. And to the history of our country that was long kept out of those books. In the wake of the Civil War, America was still a tinder keg. In 1867,…
By Ben Jealous Lower Richland County, South Carolina is a place with rich history. The region, which sits on wetlands and a floodplain forest fed by the Congaree River, was an established agricultural center dating back more than 300 years. It’s home to Congaree National Park and other important sites that are central to the experiences of the African Americans and Indigenous people who have lived on the land over the centuries. Despite Congress’s establishment of the Congaree Swamp National Monument in 1976 and that land’s subsequent designation as a national park in 2003, much of Lower Richland has been…
By Ben Jealous This month’s election results should be a wakeup call to any politician who had been unsure of Americans’ desire for robust climate action and support for a green economy. In states and counties that are red, blue, and everywhere in between, voters favored forward-looking candidates who embraced both the need for and the economic benefits of aggressive climate action. As much of the reporting on this election cycle has already pointed out, reproductive freedom was clearly a heavy driver of Democratic performance on Election Day. That shouldn’t overshadow the fact that, in marquee races, well-funded attacks against…
By Ben Jealous Nicknames like the Motor City and Motown make clear that the auto industry built Detroit. Cars did a lot to give the neighborhoods in and around the 48217 zip code on the city’s southwest side their nickname too — Michigan’s most polluted zip code. A Ford plant, a U.S. Steel mill and, most prominently, a Marathon Oil refinery that’s the only one in the state and one of the nation’s largest have fouled the air for decades in what locals call the Tri-Cities. In all, the Environmental Protection Agency monitors more than four dozen polluters in the…
By Ben Jealous The odds are high that you will never see a Sonoran Pronghorn. About the size of a goat, the pronghorns are so elusive that their nickname is “the desert ghost.” Adding to the challenge, they’re only found in the United States in a small part of the Southwest, they’ve been endangered since before we had an Endangered Species Act, and they’re the fastest land animal in North America clocking speeds up to 60 miles per hour. So it would be easy for the short-sighted to overlook the pronghorns – out of sight, out of mind after all.…