Even though their philosophies might not seem congruent at first, the idea of an environmentally sustainable, "green" hip hop movement really isn't so out there. At their hearts both climate justice and hip hop embrace a grassroots model for change.  From the climate justice movement's emphasis on international=local to hip hop's sell it out of the trunk promotions strategy, both movements stay connected to their communities as a way to build strong,  sustainable practices.

According to local MC and promoter Ambessa Cantave, aka Ambessa the Articulate, hip hop has always placed some emphasis on health and consciouness, even if those ideas have often been overshadowed by more materialistic concerns as presented by mainstream rappers. Grind for the Green, the eco-friendly music seminar and workshop series Cantave cofounded in 2007 with partner Zakiya Harris, attempts to shift the focus back to some of these original sustainability goals

GGFG's yearly workshop and competition combines nuts and bolts of the music industry-marketing, stage shows and production with sustainable business practices including recycling, composting and reducing your carbon footprint. Each year the conference culminates in the world's only solar powered hip hop concert at Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco.  This year's show featured guest appearances by Talib Kweli and dead prez.  There are several year round projects in the works that combine hip hop beat with green themes.

This week, OL caught up with Ambessa to ask him a few questions about the green movement, hip hop and what the two could learn from each other. 

What are you working on now for Grind for the Green? 

Right now we have a team of youth and we're training them to give presentations and research different ways the sustainability movement can be relevant to people of color and inner city communities. In the Spring and Fall of 2010, we plan to go to a lot of schools. We're also putting out two green projects.  One will be a completely sustainable digital download we're releasing for Earth Day in April 2010. The second we're doing in conjunction with the Green Youth Media Center, and it tackles the whole issue of bringing hip hop into the sustainability movement.

We're also working with a major label to get several of the Bay Area artists together to endorse the movement. They'll be learning about sustainability themselves and they'll be donating their celebrity to the cause to give us a broader reach. Then we're releasing an actuall CD with the profits. The profits will  go to support free informational workshops and trainings for people of color. And we're talking to organizations and a list of corporations in the hopes that they'll provide subsidies that will enable folks to be able to afford some of this natural, organic food.  

I see some clear similarities between hip hop and the green movement but also some contradictions. Can you talk a little about how the two intersect.

Well hip hop, before it got mainstreamed and before it got co-opted by the dominant culture, was always a platform for educating people of color, and particularly Africans. Through hip hop you had 5 Percenters, the Nation of Islam, Rastas, Buddhists, Kemetic (scientists), and just a whole bunch of teachers being able to communicate with the greater masses on how to live and how to survive.

This whole green thing is nothing new. Our people have always been close to nature, so hip hop always spoke to everything from vegetarianism via KRS-1 and then later dead prez, down to environmentalism with The Jungle Brothers, on an album called Done by the Forces of Nature, where they were talking about how nothing was natural and how everything was made with chemicals. Even Mos Def, dropping "New World Water" and Erykah Badu and "Appletree," show how there's always been a message that urged people to look towards things that were natural.

Hip Hop has always made it a point to educate, so how it intersects now is that a lot of people who were justice oriented, artists like Talib Kweli and dead prez, that have spoken about things like sweatshops and exploitation and poverty, which are all eco issues, have decided to use their platform to bring a message of sustainability to what we love. So now you have artists like Speech (of Arrested Development), who has a permaculture garden in his back yard and dead prez who're doing a project with DJ Green Lantern using recycled materials for all the CDs and packaging. 

One of the criticisms has been around scalability and adapting green and eco conscious ideas to a practical level.  Are there things that environmental activists and the green movement can learn from inner city and low income communities, and what issues need to be considered by the larger movement

I'll start off by quoting Van Jones and say that you can't green the world without greening the cities, and you can't green the cities without greening the 'hood, and you can't green the 'hood without providing people who live in those 'hoods the resources, the information and the education for them to do it themselves.

It couldn't be any clearer than that, it really couldn't and it behooves the larger green movement to adopt some of our practices because by virtue of survival we had to learn how to make something out of nothing. We had to preserve and conserve and really do things from a sustainable standpoint. We know how to save for tomorrow.  We know how to prolong the little that we have. Just as our Caribbean brothers and sisters know how to function without running water, our ' hoods know how to function with very limited resources. So if you open the floodgate of resources that are available to that would allow you to live a sustainable lifestyle, then we'll show you the sustainable methods that we have had to develop out of necessity.  

What are your personal suggestions on how to live a more sustainable, environmentally friendly life?

Think back for a minute to stories from your grandparents or in war times when it wasn't this huge toxic society and how people survived. When you look at the peak periods of creativity, productivity and industriousness throughout history what were the people eating, how were the people living, what were there values like?  

True sustainability is unconditional love. That's a quote from Rev. Eloise Oliver of the East Bay Church of Religious Sciences.  When you start to really treat things with respect and when we really take time with the land and work to preserve it and understand mother nature and father sky then you really move closer to understanding what sustainability is. It's not about trying to get a roof full of solar panels or getting the newest iPhone that reduces radiation, it's about putting the iPhone down and jumping on your bike and visiting the people in your community.

We have to stop wasting and moving so fast and trying to become a society of robots. We can't keep taking the earth for granted. We can't keep taking humanity and speaking from your heart for granted because the more we do that the more we miss the mark.