Van Jones: "I'm Bad! I'm Slick!"

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Solar Skills: Jones, in Richmond, California, with newly trained solar-panel installers Kenyon Roy and Angela Greene | photograph by Chris Mcpherson

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Oakland environmental activist Van Jones and his message of hope. | photograph by Chris Mcpherson

The cheering would begin soon enough. Dressed in a slim-cut gray suit and green tie, Van Jones ascended to the stage grinning and blowing kisses to the crowd. Jones, 39, a 6-foot-1-inch Yale Law grad, was appearing at a summit in San Francisco called "Advancing a New Energy Economy in California." The city's charismatic mayor, Gavin Newsom, was among the presenters, along with corporate bigwigs such as PG&E chief executive Peter Darbee. But no one would outshine Jones.

"What is considered green is usually for the eco-elite," he preached to the assembled solar entrepreneurs, environmental activists, and community leaders (including more than a dozen black clergymen). "But if we are actually going to meet the challenge of global warming, we are going to have to weatherize millions of homes and install millions of solar panels. That's millions of new jobs. We need to connect the people who most need the work with the work that most needs to be done." It's one of his favorite themes: the need to expand the green movement beyond "lifestyle environmentalists," with their hybrid cars and other eco-status symbols. The audience cheered. "Van Jones, he's a rock star," says Tim Rainey, director of economic development at the California Labor Federation.

But Jones is not just a performer. More than any other single figure, he has ushered the phrase "green-collar jobs" into the political lexicon -- and economic reality. Last year, Jones led a coalition of business, labor, and environmental groups that persuaded the Oakland City Council to provide $250,000 in seed money for the country's first green-collar-jobs corps, which will train low-income youth in the renewable-energy, organic-food, and green-construction industries. The organization he founded and heads, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, also helped draft the Pathways out of Poverty legislation for the federal Green Jobs Act of 2007, which pledged $125 million to train 35,000 people a year in green-collar jobs. And in February, Jones launched Green for All, a national advocacy organization whose goal is to procure $1 billion in federal funding by 2012 for green-collar programs, and lift as many as 250,000 Americans out of poverty. "We speak for the least empowered folks, the people who didn't finish high school, the people with criminal convictions, the victims of Hurricane Katrina," Jones says.

A self-described "bridge builder, catalyst, and evangelist," Jones is of the Martin Luther King oral tradition. "We dream of rust-belt cities blossoming as Silicon Valleys of green capital ... of dying blue-collar towns blooming as green-collar meccas," he said in remarks to the House Select Committee on Energy and Global Warming last year. Comparisons with Barack Obama are inevitable. But Jones says, "The person I'm really patterning my life after is Ralph Nader." Not Nader the election spoiler, but Nader the lifelong consumer advocate, whose policy triumphs include the creation of OSHA and the EPA. "Hey," Jones says, "Nader got more legislation passed than almost any president."

"TOTALLY LEFT OUT"

Jones is balancing on the roof of a hilltop duplex in the hardscrabble East Bay suburb of Richmond, California. "It takes all kinds of people to build a green economy," he says. "From the PhDs to the PhDudes." Mount Tamalpais juts up on the horizon, not far beyond the smokestacks of a nearby Chevron oil refinery. Jones is wearing stonewashed jeans and a button-down wool shirt -- his "proletarian" outfit, as he calls it. He has come roofside to check out two graduates of a local nonprofit program that trains low-income workers to mount photovoltaic panels. The installers, including 47-year-old Angela Greene, who says she "fell on extremely hard times" after the printing company she worked for shut down, are cracking up listening to Jones, and he takes the cue to keep the momentum going: "From the PhDs to the PhDudes -- I just made that up! I'm bad! I'm slick! That's what makes me the spokesperson!"

Jones doesn't lack for confidence. But he is careful to point out that he didn't invent the phrase "green-collar jobs" -- Alan Durning, the director of the Sightline Institute in Seattle, wrote a book by that name in 1999 -- and he didn't set out to be an eco-evangelist, either. He was "nerdly" and bullied as a child in rural Tennessee, the son of a junior high school assistant principal. After attending the University of Tennessee, he went on to Yale Law (where he says he was "radicalized politically with my dreadlocks and Black Panther book bag") and eventually landed a job with San Francisco civil rights attorney Eva Paterson, the legendary founder of the Equal Justice Society. In 1997, he set out on his own, founding the Ella Baker Center, to litigate against police brutality and for prison reform. Five years in, needing respite from endless "funerals, prisons, and court cases coming out the wrong way," he started attending spirituality retreats in nearby Marin County, where solar panels were sprouting like trees. "There was a green economy growing right across from Oakland," he remembers, "and we were totally left out of it." The idea to link the green movement with issues of race and class came to him as an epiphany.