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…
Author: Ben Jealous
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.…
By Ben Jealous At the heart of the story that President Biden preserved last week by creating our newest national monument are a mother and son, Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till. That’s especially moving for me because so much of my understanding of what the Tills endured and why their story remains essential today comes from my own mom’s experiences. Like Emmett, she was in her early teens in 1955 and growing up in West Baltimore. The ritual he was taking part in by traveling from Chicago to Mississippi that summer was a universal one for Black kids living in…
A growing chorus in Washington equates weaning our country off energy from killer fossil fuels to relying more heavily on new nuclear power plants. The same debates are happening in state capitals from Richmond to Raleigh, Springfield to Sacramento. This chorus distracts from the real work ahead of ensuring clean, renewable, affordable energy for every community. The risk of nuclear energy is an easy dividing line. To opponents, names like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are all the evidence we need that a catastrophic event is unavoidable and unacceptable. For supporters, those events are a sign that disasters are…
Tatum is an East Texas town of about 1,300 people, closer to Shreveport than Dallas. It’s on the north shore of Martin Lake. Across the water sits a coal-fired power plant named after the lake that happens to be the single largest sulfur dioxide polluter in the United States. Paulette Goree, who has lived in the area her entire life, gets a daily reminder of the Martin Lake Power Plant. “I use a personal air monitor every day to figure out if I should spend much time outdoors.” She thinks the air pollution contributed to the deaths of family members…
Thirty years ago, my university suspended me for leading a protest against a research lab that the school wanted to put in the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated. The plans ignored both that history and the neighbors in Harlem who would be exposed to risks from biomedical and environmental waste. I spent months crisscrossing the country speaking out against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for the Student Environmental Action Coalition. Our message was simple – killing jobs and the environment were far too high a price to pay to boost regional trade. They called us Chicken…