I have to admit some confusion at first about what sustainability and hip-hop music have in common before a Hip Hop Expo in Baker Center on Saturday, but soon learned that the connection is undeniable.

When arriving at the B.E.A.T.S. expo (Building Education Through the Arts and Transforming Society), I signed up for a workshop entitled “Hip Hop and Media Organizing Against Displacement,” not really knowing what to expect. The workshop was hosted by Invincible, an Israeli-born female rapper who learned to speak English by listening to hip-hop music.

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The 15 or so of us introduced ourselves to one another, and formed two conspicuously distinct groups – black on one side, white on the other.

Invincible (born Ilana Weaver) showed a “docu-music video” called “Locusts” that she made with rapper Finale about gentrification in Detroit neighborhoods. The video mixes interviews with people who lost their homes with her performing in front of decaying industrial landscapes.

One woman she talked to had been in her house one morning, when she suddenly felt a violent shake and realized a wrecking ball was tearing through the walls. Her home was being demolished with her still inside it to make room for one of the upscale “luxury homes” that are showing up in some of the poorest urban neighborhoods as a result of gentrification.

After the video, we paired off with strangers and interviewed each other about how to change our communities, and shared our favorite quotes with the class. Although we were initially divided, the interviews allowed us to talk to the people on the other side of the room when we probably would not have otherwise.

“These stories aren’t going to be told anywhere else,” said Invincible, who uses the same activity to teach children in Detroit about how to make their own independent media.
“The workshop was so practical and so empowering,” said Leah Vincent, an international studies graduate student and my interviewee during the workshop. “Hip-hop is a movement; it’s a culture and action, and so is sustainability. All of this is to bring it together to be holistic and to be able to give future generations a better Earth than what we have now.”

After the workshop, we ate lunch on tables with centerpieces made from recycled hip-hop records and listened to keynote speaker Majora Carter, an award-winning environmental justice activist. Carter is transforming her community in the South Bronx from what was literally a garbage dump into an area full of green spaces. She created an organization called Sustainable South Bronx to facilitate “green-collar” jobs in a community with a 25 percent unemployment rate, and wrote a $1.25 million federal transportation and planning grant to start build an 11-mile network of pedestrian paths called “greenways” that lead to the Bronx River.

Carter shared the statistic that while the United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the world’s incarcerated people. Statistically higher jail rates and high fossil-fuel emissions go hand in hand, she said, arguing that the poor air quality in urban areas is a form of “environmental racism.” Her initiatives to “green the ghetto,” as she calls it, extend beyond just cleaning up an urban area to making sure that young people stay out of jail.

After her speech, Carter hosted a brief discussion with Athens residents about some of the problems facing Appalachia. She noted that the region is second only to the rainforest in terms of biodiversity, and said that the job-creation argument for mountaintop-removal mining doesn’t hold water.

“It’s a false choice,” said Carter. “That was put there by people who say ‘you stupid people don’t know any better.’”

Although unsure about the connection between hip-hop and sustainability at first, I learned that both movements are about organizing communities to work together, and about resourceful people using whatever tools they have available to promote social justice. Often people separate problems in the city from problems in rural areas, but in reality environmental issues apply to everyone.

 “Environmentally speaking, we have to make that connection [between the urban and the rural] and understand that we’re all one in making a difference,” said Ayanna Jordan, an education professor and director of Upward Bound, a pre-college access program for Southern Ohio high-school students. “Mountaintop removal and what’s happening in a lot of inner cities is the same thing. We need to actually come together to alleviate that,” she said.

Photos by Julie Van Wegener.

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