College of Built Environments at the University of Washington.
Overwhelmingly white, the green movement is reaching for the rainbow.
Monday March 2008Pacific Northwest Magazine reports on the evolution of the green movement - to be a force of change it needs to include people of color and the poor. And while Washington Governor Christine Gregoire issued an executive order calling for 25,000 jobs in clean energy by 2020, asthma rates in the International District's Chinatown are 254 percent higher than anywhere in the city. Working to be part of the solution, WILD (Wilderness Inner-City Leadership Development), a program dedicated to working on urban environmental projects by bringing young people and elders together, ranked their primary concern as public safety. The community only has three open spaces, and even these are not used because they are not safe. WILD is working with UW CAUP's Landscape Architecture program to redesign a children's park in Chinatown. As long as popular summer night markets and festivals draw in visitors, the parks remain reasonably safe, but the rest of the year when there is no programming, the parks stay empty, children kept away for fear of vagrants and drug users that otherwise frequent these public spaces. WILD has also identified it's secondary concern: air quality. Surrounded by three freeways, these neighborhoods are inundated with fumes and "black soot." Alon Bassok, a phD candidate in CAUP's UDP program, and an instructor, has had his studio class do a study on these neighborhoods, entitled "Breathing Room," which warns that "close proximity to freeway exhaust could put the neighborhood's 4,200 residents at increased risk of asthma, bronchitis, cardiac ischemia, lung cancer and childhood leukemia."
To read more about the diversification of the green movement, please visit Pacific Northwest Magazine online.