Environmental and Social Justice Pioneer Honored at Ella Baker Center Event
Carl Anthony, honored at Thursday's Ella Baker benefit and celebration
If you want to find the guy who was the catalyst of numerous social equity and environmental justice organizations and initiatives, he’ll be at Ella Baker Center tonight. Carl Anthony will be receiving a Breakthrough Visionary Award—and for good reason.
Carl Anthony is a household name among many circles fighting for more sustainable cities and communities. Seventy years old and still thriving, Anthony has been a heavyweight in the movement for decades, even before the term ‘environmental justice’ was even coined. There is hardly a Bay Area environmental or social justice organization he hasn’t been involved with or influenced in some way, ranging from Earth Island Institute, where he served as President throughout much of the 1990s to Urban Habitat, which he co-founded, then served as its Executive Director for 12 years. Both of those organizations themselves have incubated more than a handful of other projects.
Anthony's work extends far beyond any particular post, but here are just a few of the other hats he has worn through the years: Chair of the Berkeley Planning Commission, co-founder of Oakland’s Earth house Leadership Center, co-chair of the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development, and founding editor with Luke Cole of Race, Poverty and Environment Journal, the only social and environmental justice periodical in the country, as a project of Urban Habitat. In 1993, then-congressman Ron Dellums appointed Anthony chairman of the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission which was charged with transforming obsolete military bases into productive sites, including five in Alameda County.
Prior to his position as Ford Foundation Senior Fellow in the Dept. of Geography at UC-Berkeley, Anthony was Acting Director of the Community and Resource Development Unit at the Ford Foundation, where he directed the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative and the Regional Equity Demonstration. His newest initiative, with Paloma Pavel, is called Breakthrough Communities. The corresponding book, called Breakthrough: Stories and Strategies for Sustainable Metropolitan Communities, was recently released by MIT Press. The book showcases successful sustainability models around the nation, ranging from labor, civil rights, and environmental justice projects, but all putting social justice at the center.
His vision over the course of several decades has been shaped by many personalities and in the course of our conversation everybody from David Brower and Karl Linn to Malcolm X and Thomas Berry came up. His father was also mentioned, who was an African-American farmer and part of a farmers' collective. Trained as an architect and planner, Anthony cut his social justice teeth in the community design movement of the 1960’s as a young professional in Harlem. He worked with the Architecture Renewal Community in Harlem (ARCH), which designed and built neighborhood commons projects.
The key question that has driven Anthony and continues to preoccupy him is how we can make that great shift toward sustainability in our cities. Speaking with Anthony about these issues, he says, “Sustainability has to be about both ecological integrity and social justice, the two are inseparable.”
Asked what he sees as the biggest opportunities, the most promising signs in terms of fulfilling that vision of sustainability, he says, “Oakland has a chance to lead the whole society, to be that successful model linking environmental sanity with social equity. We have a chance to help ourselves and teach the rest of the country.”
He says is seeing more links between environmentalists and social justice work than ever before, something he says have been far too isolated. He is encouraged by the fact that organizations like the Ella Baker Center get it, with programs like Green Jobs Corp and prison re-entry initiatives.
“One of the great things about what the Ella Baker center is doing is it has shown positive, practical ways of doing things better.”
Anthony applauded that ‘green’ is in but he lamented that too often it is divorced from the issue of social equity and that we are often too oriented towards a quick technological fix. “We’ve got to get that equity thing down or it just won’t work.”
He also emphasized the importance of land and soil and said he was encouraged by the scaling up of urban agriculture projects. “It’s important for people to understand where food comes from and to learn to grow food. We’ve been cut off from a lot of the knowledge.”
Among the themes that Anthony emphasized over and over were building cross-sector alliances and what he calls ‘intergenerational consciousness.’
“There’s a deep history people don’t talk about, that people don’t know about,” he told me, linking post-civil war land reform efforts to the civil rights struggle and that movement to the emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 80’s.
He describes the emerging regional-equity movement as this generation’s civil-rights movement, and puts it into the context of the last 100 years’ struggles for social justice.
“It’s a continuum, you know. You put your foot in the water for a bit and the water continues to flow.”
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