December 11, 2008

Going Green, Part II

Posted by Kristia Castrillo at 9:22AM

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Photos courtesy of Grind for the Green

(This post originally appeared on FobbDeep)

**Read the first part of this series.

Dear Young Gifted Black and Brown Folks, and their ill White allies,

Recently I’ve had the opportunity to get trained on Green Building, Permaculture, and hella other shit through work. Over the past weeks, coming home from these discussions I’ve then had the task of translating what these words actually mean to me. The official idea of permaculture in short is to take lessons from our ancestors and how they lived, combine it with our present-day technologies and find a realistic way for people to thrive. Permaculture also encourages a critique of trade laws, labor practices…But really yo, that ain’t the bottom line. You want more than just cleaner air, you have to go to a far bigger word - Revolution. But that’s for another day.

One of the most incredible parts of permaculture to me is the big picture. If I give into a craving and I buy some red licorice, I am not just doing horrible damage to my brain (sugar), my blood sugar levels (corn syrup), and risking cancer (red 40 food coloring). I’m also using up plastic, paper, water, and other resources needed to make the candy and the packaging. Then whatever waste comes out of my body from that food - that same poison is going into the ocean and soil. And guess where that ends up - in the crops that someone else is going to eat. Crazy, right?

But beyond some candy I might eat, let’s get to whole way of life that permaculture is about. It’s really not that new of an idea. In the Philippines we make bags out of candy wrappers, houses out of scrap metal, and kitchenware from tin cans. While sitting on the train I thought to myself:

• How can I live like recent immigrants do? How did Mom and Lola use resources when they first got here and were livin in somebody’s basement in Daly City?
• How do I live like a Filipino in the Philippines, even though I am now a Filipino in the States?

Everything I’ve learned about sustainability, I learned from my life in Manila. Granted I was born in San Francisco and was inundated with “Recycle, Reduce, Reuse” songs with dancing dinosaurs, but really it was in Manila that I saw this in practice. Sustainability means more than reusing plastics and eating free-range eggs. It means a huge cultural shift where we act communally again. In the Philippines, I learned to share everything. I learned that nothing was ever just yours. This is how big families work, this is how things work in the majority of any Black-Brown country today.

In a hyphy post-college lifestyle, how do I make that happen? So I only buy used clothes when I do allow myself to shop, I get maximum use out of every object. I piss roomates and guests off with my buckets of post-shower water to be used to flush the toilet…

This is all good, but how do I encourage a bunch of MTV-cracked out youth and 20-somethings to stop using machines more than they need, to carpool to the club, to revolutionize their diets, to spend more time in nature than on Myspace, to realize how crazy it is that none of us know wind directions…I could go on forever. Do I run around telling every bar and club to get solar panels? Do I convince bgirls and bboys that the new fly shit is Manila hemp fitteds?

Really instead of serving up a list of things you can do again, I wanna see us go further. There is no doubt in my mind that if older high school youth and young adults go hardcore on this, middle school youngstunnas will follow and continue our work. I also think that in line with Obama, green job initiatives, and the increasing mainstream coverage of environmental issues, we are at a critical point for young Black and Brown folks to get aggressive about redefining and translating these topics for our communities.

We need to transform our youth culture so it works hand-in-hand with the idea of sustaining ourselves. The world does not have enough resources and capacity to produce new Nikes for you, your children, and your grandchildren. We will run out. We need to devalue greed, extravagance, and bling. Being a clean, well-kept young melanated person is fly and we need to teach that by example. Fly without $50 newly-manufactured t-shirts, without corn-syrup soda, without new everything in new packaging all the time. That right there is totally tangible! The only reason our 12-year-old students want a fitted with the sticker is cause their big sister in high school got it like that, and so does her boyfriend. And they started doin' it cause they saw it on TV and cause their 25-year-old cousin started doin' it.

Revolution is something you do, make and discuss everyday. Transformative culture, homes. Let’s make it happen.