Shovel-Ready is quickly becoming one of the darling terms of 2009 as it becomes a proxy for projects that will quickly create jobs and economic growth. Most of the Shovel-Ready projects that are being discussed are massive in scale, and many of them will still take months to start after being given the green light.

Recently, Oakland based Van Jones, president of Green For All, testified before congress in support of a variety of green jobs, including the fields of construction, renewable power, green transportation, and manufacturing.

Conspicuously absent from his presentation before congress was any discussion of food. There is a reference to Biofuels, but no discussion about food being one of the primary areas through which we could create change.

I am not criticizing the suggestions that Van Jones is making. Indeed, if his proposals are adopted in full it will signal a significant shift in the landscape of green technology, energy, and manufacturing in this country. But I am suggesting that we take these proposals one step further.

What we are all looking for with this stimulus plan, after all, is a plan that will quickly create jobs all across the country while at the same time protecting and improving the health of the people involved and the environment in which they live. The typical Shovel-Ready project that is being suggested might do one or two of those, like the repair and reconstruction of our failing transportation infrastructure.

The question is, can we create a project that does all of these things? Yes We Can. The solution is Agriculture Supported Communities.

We are all familiar with the CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture – farms that look to the urban and suburban districts to buy shares of their produce, a portion of which is often delivered each week directly to people’s homes or other central pickup location. This has been an amazingly successful model, to the point where many established CSA’s have a long waiting list of potential customers.

Agriculture Supported Communities (ASC’s) turns this model around. It places the agriculture (in potentially in the form of small backyard and community gardens) in the community, and creates a business model within which local people and businesses could benefit. One possibility would be that some people could be directly employed by the stimulus programs to run these gardens, while other people could buy shares of the produce with their labor and donation of land. The remaining vegetables could be sold to local businesses bringing money back into the program.

There are many forms that this could take, but the bottom line is that they wouldn’t be in direct competition with the current, large-scale agricultural system we currently have – they would serve communities and areas that are poorly served by our present model.

Secondary benefits of a project like this are many, including getting people outside and connected with the land and food they use to nourish their bodies. The health implications of such a program should not be underestimated, as well, as people would increasingly eat the whole foods they had a hand in growing.

So, let’s open up our hearts and minds to this greater possibility, one in which the new green economy is driven by clean cars and wind energy, by also by the produce grown in our own communities. Now that’s Shovel-Ready.
Photo: you can count on me

Van Jones was at the First Congregational Church in Oakland last Tuesday, ostensibly to talk about his green-for-all campaign, the subject of his recent bestseller The Green Collar Economy. But seeing as how he was back home, in the heart of his own congregation and community, he reveled in the show he put on and it was like we all had backstage passes. With his wife and two children in the audience and surrounded by old friends, including Ada de Leon (who read some of her poetry) and Alice Walker (who didn’t), he took us from bouts of hilarity to sober reflection and back again with memories of how this extended East Bay family had braved the last few decades and especially the last eight years.  “Barack Obama didn’t create this movement,” he said at one point, “this movement created the opportunity for Barack Obama!” He noted that joy over the Obama victory was twinned with outrage over the passage of Prop 8, adding that it “has an expiration date,” since voters 35 and younger overwhelmingly opposed it. But no one in this group is going to sit by passively and wait for justice to be served up to them.

Jones eventually got around to his green stump speech, proposing to create jobs and address myriad environmental problems by essentially retrofitting the country – “weatherize millions of buildings; use clean, non-toxic insulation; double-pane that glass; tighten the energy envelope. Put Detroit back to work, not making SUVs but wind turbines. Now we get a chance to bail out the people and the planet.” He pointed out Bobby Seale, who was standing in the back: “He was doing a green job when we didn’t know what to call it.” I think he was referring to Seale’s environmental renovation youth jobs project and not the barbecuing.

The book includes access to healthy food, particularly in urban areas, as among the big issues in need of a new form of coalition-building. Jones highlights the work of Brahm Ahmadi at the People’s Grocery in Oakland and two Chicago-based activists, LaDonna Redmond at the Institute for Community Resource Development and Orrin Williams of the Center for Urban Transformation, and concludes that “The political and economic ramifications of localized food systems operating in harmony with nature can be as lucrative as it is beautiful.”

Jones gave us the back-story on the making of The Green Collar Economy, which, as we were reminded several times, was on sale in the lobby. (I already had my signed copy, with a smiley face.) Probably everyone in the audience had been tapped in Team Green’s viral marketing push – pretty much everyone I know got an email asking us to buy the book and spread the word; they had also set up an easy way for you to buy a copy and have it sent directly to your elected official of choice. Given that Jones is a well-known intellectual and activist who’s been amply graced with mainstream media coverage, I’d assumed this was merely the extra effort of the diligent scribe to combat the standard ineptitude of publishing PR departments. But it turned out that his team had in fact taken a page from Obama’s book – organizing an extraordinarily efficient, Net-based workaround of the system. “Nobody wanted this book,” he said. No one would come out and say so, he quickly added. “Publishers are always very polite. They show you a lot of teeth” – he bared his in an enormous grimace of a smile. But bottom line: “ ‘Black people don’t buy green books, and white people don’t buy black books, so nobody is going to buy his book.’ ” He said he’d told his agent, “ ‘I have two words for anyone who talks that way: Ba…rack.’ We sent out email to you, our friends – ‘Can you help me?’ – and you said, Yes.” He estimated that the virtual network had sent five million emails. The book debuted at No. 12 on The New York Times bestseller list – and is hanging in there, at No. 34 [as of Sunday]. The publisher, HarperOne, now compares The Green Collar Economy to Silent Spring – I wonder if the PR folks are referring to the fact that Rachel Carson had a hell of a time finding a publisher for her book.

Danny Glover (along with Congresswoman Barbara Lee) had opened the evening, reading Langston Hughes’ 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again”, a riveting performance in its own right. I had noticed Jones standing offstage, scribbling notes as he listened to the stanzas unfold. Maybe it was then that he jotted down one of his own best lines. “America is back,” he said in closing, “for the very first time.”