When we think of the green movement, using hip-hop theater as a community-organizing tool may be the last thing to come to mind. But after the EPA struck down a California law raising statewide emissions standards in 2007, Bay Area performer, director and educator Marc Bamuthi Joseph was moved to action.

Frustrated by the lack of brown voices in the sustainable-energy struggle, he launched a series of eco-festivals, called Life Is Living, in urban parks around the U.S. The recipient of the Rockefeller Fellowship, recognizing the country's 50 "greatest living artists," Bamuthi was also recently named one of America's Top Young Innovators in the Arts and Sciences by Smithsonian magazine.

Bamuthi says that "going green" is a phrase abused by corporations, whereas "sustaining life" is universally accessible. That's the theory behind Life Is Living: Pair under-resourced communities with green-action agencies to create dialogue around living healthier lives. The result? red, black and GREEN: a blues (rbGb), a multimedia ensemble performance incorporating the voices of hundreds of community members, which will premiere in San Francisco in October and then tour throughout the U.S. in 2012.

Between meetings and dropping his son off at school, Bamuthi chatted with The Root. We challenged him to explain why Michelle Obama, Spike Lee and the EPA should see his show, and asked about the dreaded "r" word: race.

The Root: On your site, LifeIsLiving.org, you're quoted as saying, "My work changes, but philosophically my goals do not." What are your goals for Life Is Living?

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: At heart I'm a 10th-grade English teacher. Inside the classroom, our primary purpose isn't to force-feed information or to manufacture a certain kind of human being. It's to be expansive and to create as many different points of access as possible. So the ultimate goal of [my approach to] the arts is to create and foster environments for social change. More than learning, the goal is to create and conduct safe spaces for growth.