School of Sustainability

Carl Anthony, who joined race and environment into one argument

Carl Anthony, born in 1939, died this year, and the obituaries record a life spent making a single point with unusual patience: that what is done to poor communities and communities of colour and what is done to the land are the same act, and no environmental plan that treats them separately deserves the name. When he arrived at architecture school at Columbia, he was the only African-American student in the place.

He went west, to a professorship at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design, and co-founded an Oakland architecture firm, Anthony, Fleming & Assoc. David Brower appointed him to the board of Earth Island Institute. With Karl Linn he started the Urban Habitat Program, which set out to bring up leaders of many backgrounds inside the environmental justice movement. With Luke Cole he produced Race, Poverty and the Environment, a quarterly journal that gave that argument somewhere to live between conferences.

In the early 2000s he ran the Ford Foundation's Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative in New York, steering serious money towards equitable urban programmes, then came home to California and co-founded Breakthrough Communities in Oakland to carry the same work on locally. His list of seats is long - the Berkeley Planning Commission, the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the President's Council on Sustainable Development. His 2017 book, The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, sets out both the analysis and the life behind it.

Bioneers' remembrance places him among four lost figures. Gloria Steinem, who spoke at their 2011 conference, is remembered less for the biography than for how she worked: listening to critics until some became allies, refusing to abandon the long game after defeats. Peter Buckley, lawyer turned entrepreneur turned philanthropist, poured his energy and money into the David Brower Center, pushed past the highest green-building standards, and stayed its president until he died. Wendell Berry never spoke at Bioneers, but his way of seeing runs under everything they publish.

Bioneers · Read the source