Image by Mika Baumeister.
Talk a walk through the Los Angeles’ Arts District, and you’ll learn that there’s nothing contradictory about trying to save the world and living a luxury lifestyle. Start your tour with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), which proudly displays a banner stating: “the future begins here.”
LACI is “a non- profit organization creating an inclusive green economy” and run “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs.” They are also supported by a “community” that includes not only the City of Los Angeles but also BMW, Wells Fargo, United Airlines, and JPMorgan Chase.
Across the street, there’s Urth Caffé, a high-end chain offering 100 percent organic and locally sourced goods. Nearby art galleries and boutiques sell handcrafted natural products and upcycled accoutrements.
The Arts District offers the dream of the “sustainability class”—a growing class of do-gooders, with disposable income and high education, for whom green consumption and innovation go hand in hand. But something doesn’t feel right. Can they really save the world one locally sourced ayurvedic turmeric latté or EV charging station at a time? 
In fact, luxury and sustainability are fundamentally at odds. The richest 10%— including anyone who earns over $120,000 per year—are responsible for 50% of the world’s carbon emissions. This doesn’t even factor in their investments, which include stocks in some of the world’s most polluting industries. Not only that, but people who have green lifestyles tend to have a higher environmental footprint, since it is income, not attitudes, that is the biggest predictor for carbon emissions.
The sustainability class isn’t just about lifestyle choices. It’s also about innovation: being at the edge of the curve, advancing the newest green tech. A quick scan of the start-ups and companies LACI supports will give you an idea of what “innovation” looks like, with quirky names like Dyrt, Planette, Emissionless, Shoponomik, and Galora—“the airbnb for homegrown foods”. LACI promises sustainability that is edgy, smart, and, most importantly, profitable. The products these companies offer, like EV vehicles, green cryptocurrencies, and household waste reduction apps, are rarely in reach of the world’s poorest 50%, who together emit just 11% of the world’s carbon emissions. But perhaps that was never the intent anyway.
Whether it’s about lifestyle or tech innovation, the solutions on offer in the Arts District are essentially the same. At their heart, they promise one idea: that you can keep living your fancy lifestyle as long as you invest in the right products and services. Put another way, those with money can be sustainable, while it remains out of reach of ordinary people.
In fact, the future on offer by the sustainability class is not sustainable at all. Or, rather, it only promises to sustain the present order of things – which all indicators suggest is hurling towards ecological breakdown, with unthinkable consequences for life as we know it.
Lucky for us, a different kind of environmentalism is not far away. Just across the river from the Arts District is the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights. At first sight, it might not look very sustainable. The area is cluttered with car garages, cheap diners, dollar stores, and messy backyard gardens.
But here, residents, led by the Union de Vecinos (union of neighbors), have been building a very different vision of sustainability, which is ultimately more inclusive. They are less interested in bike lanes, the new metro line, or EV charging stations. They have, for decades, focused their efforts on fighting for social housing, tenant rights, clean water, and against police profiling. What brings these disparate campaigns together, explains organizer Leo Vilchis Sr., is “to make the social life here flourish.” For instance, by screening films, painting murals, throwing block parties, and helping struggling renters, they bring people together and teach the community how to organize.
While this may not look like environmentalism at first, it ends up making big wins that cut across class divides. For example, residents from the neighboring city of Maywood asked for the support of the Union de Vecinos in fighting a private water companies who provided contaminated water to residents. They began to build connections between residents and ran their own candidates, increasing community participation in elections 10 times. Eventually, they won control over city council and made the water companies public.
Or, to take a smaller example: organizers of the Union de Vecinos told us that they aren’t against planting more trees to increase shade, but, when they do, they also install benches so that elderly can use them, also slowing down traffic and increasing connections in the community.
In each situation, the Union de Vecinos starts by building relationships, then organizing for what people need in their daily lives. Vilchis explains that environmentalism follows from community power: “We want to support each other— convivir (conviviality, living together) … create community. When we develop community relations, we will inevitably be involved in politics, sociology, and ecology.”
Mike Davis, one of Los Angeles’ most famous historians, once said that “the cornerstone of the low-carbon city, far more than any particular design or technology, is the priority given to public affluence over private wealth.” Protecting neighborhoods from being sold to the highest bidder—like Union de Vecinos does—is environmentalism. Organizing renters to fight nebulous real estate conglomerates is climate action. Organizing a workplace, taking over city council, and putting utilities in public control—these are all ecological.
We don’t need another “AirBnB for homegrown foods.” What we need is more conviviality that brings people together in our communities and breaks down class divides—what you might call solidarity. The future begins, not in places like the Arts District, but across the river, in Boyle Heights.
Listen to Vijay and Aaron discuss their new book The Sustainability Class on CounterPunch Radio.
