culture

What do you get when you combine phat beats and positive rhymes with organic food and alternative energy? Zakiya Harris’ music festival and environmental workshop, Grind for the Green (G4G). Harris has used hip-hop music to encourage young people in the San Francisco Bay area to adopt a more eco-friendly lifestyle. African-American and Hispanic youth,…

The green movement is about more than celebrities driving hybrid cars and building green homes. It’s about everyday people around the country doing grassroots work to reshape their streets, blocks, neighborhoods and cities. Through strategies ranging from hip-hop to children’s television to beekeeping—yes, beekeeping!—these 10 community leaders are making the green movement accessible, fun and…

In honor of Earth Day, The Root is going deep on the ties between black people and the earth. We dig in to everything from Michelle Obama’s potential impact on farming to how to plant gardens on housing project rooftops to creating green jobs in black neighborhoods. Guest writers Majora Carter, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins and Sen. John Kerry…

When Karen Monahan became a community organizer for the Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM) in 2006, the notion of green jobs hadn’t yet made its way to the mainstream imagination. Monahan says working in a green industry in Minnesota, where there wasn’t a real green movement, was still very much a new idea.   By…

Kandi Mossett grew up running wild among the spectacular peaks and valleys of the North Dakota Badlands. She remembers spending most of her childhood days on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation swimming and climbing with friends. “I guess that’s probably why I’ve had this passion for doing something outdoors,” Mossett, 29, says.  But among the…

The opportunity we’ve been waiting for is finally here. African Americans have the chance to get on the ground floor of an economic surge that could give our communities the foundation for long-term health, peace and prosperity. And it looks like something we’ve been doing for a very, very long time—it just hasn’t been recognized.…

As a kid growing up in Hobbs, N.M., 27-year-old Juan Reynosa saw the firsthand effects of heavy industry on his local community. “Just growing up there as a child, I saw the mismanagement of these oil industries.” In Hobbs, the smell of gas always filled the air, as a constant reminder that the small town…

When LaDonna Redmond found out, nearly 10 years ago, that her then 1-year-old son had several serious food allergies, she set out to find a healthy diet that would not trigger his allergies. At the time, she knew nothing, and cared nothing, about going green. “It wasn’t that I ignored the environment,” she says. “I…

On Mother’s Day in 2007, Tony Anderson installed a compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) in his grandmother’s home. The small change was so meaningful, he says, that he and a fellow Morehouse student Marcus Penny decided they should start changing light bulbs all over Atlanta. They began visiting the homes of low-income families, replacing the…

Daniell Washington is a self-proclaimed water baby. Born and raised in Miami, she’s loved the ocean since she was 6 years old. Now, at 22, she has made it her mission to persuade school-aged kids to love the ocean the way she does. Through seaside scavenger hunts and boat trips to find sharks, Washington wants…