NEWARK, New Jersey — Phil Angelides, the chairman of the Apollo Alliance, issued a call to arms on Friday morning at Newark’s Green Future Summit (see pix above, with Mayor Booker below), a two-day event in New Jersey’s largest city. “The nation is looking to Newark to set an example about how to build a green economy, about how to set a clean energy example, about how to put people back to work,” he declared.

Moments later Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker declared himself to be “an Apollo advocate,” a “green go-getter,” and explained how “in partnership with the Apollo Alliance everything we are trying to do can be supercharged if we have a green consciousness and a green agenda.”

“As Phil works to bring a green consciousness to the national agenda,” Booker continued, “we want to be on the front lines of that fight. We want to create more green jobs. We want a green economy that can create safer spaces for our children, that can deal with prison re-entry, that can respond to the really epidemic rates of asthma. Those things can be solved if we have a green consciousness and a green agenda.”

This is formidable and rare stuff in policy making and civic partnership, even in these times of collaboration. The four year-old Apollo Alliance, a national nonprofit focused on clean energy and good jobs, and a 342-year-old post-industrial East Coast city climbing out of eight decades of economic dissipation. The work at the two-day Newark’s Green Future Summit, which took Apollo, Newark, and a number of other players a year to plan and organize, concludes this afternoon when Booker returns to the summit to announce which ideas discussed this weekend he wants to pursue.

Those ideas — park development, green building, neighborhood redesign, green-collar worker training, greening major industries including Newark’s massive port, new master planning and zoning — have been implemented in other cities episodically with significant economic results.

Boston, for instance, buried its highways and built the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a grand boulevard that is attracting thousands of new housing units. Denver residents voted to raise their sales tax in 2004 to generate $5-plus billion to build 150 mile of light rail, heavy commuter rail, and bus rapid transit. Chicago planted trees, and green roofs, and invested in clean energy businesses. New York has PlanNYC, one of the greenest and most energy efficient master planning tools in the world.

These and other ideas have proved to be factors in generating more jobs, raising median incomes, attracting new businesses, and increasing urban populations. Cities are turning out to be the most important economic engines in the United States. And a generation after the definition of “sustainability” largely focused on a home in the woods surrounded by clear waters and wildlife, sustainability now means something else: A clean, green city that provides good job, recreational, housing, and education opportunities close to home in a safe and familiar urban neighborhood.

In a carbon-constrained world where energy prices are soaring, that cabin in the woods doesn’t make nearly as much sense as it once did. The Apollo Alliance understood that in 2004 with the New Energy For America report, the first substantive study to define the various national and global crises — energy, economic, climate, and security — as the biggest market opportunity of all time. We have to build and invent and invest our way out of this mess, the Alliance’s founders declared. Four years later, the Alliance has published The New Apollo Program, a comprehensive investment strategy to accelerate and scale up the clean energy, good jobs economy. Many of the policy approaches and ideas discussed this weekend at Newark’s Green Future Summit are contained in The New Apollo Program, particularly the recommendations on promoting open space and park development, new community designs, and green-collar job training.

A last point. What makes Newark’s commitment to a clean energy economy so interesting and promising is that the city has the opportunity to implement its green economic strategy comprehensively. Other cities did so piece by piece, learning which facets — energy efficiency, neighborhood redesign, transportation improvements, others — made sense. And its decision to seek the Apollo Alliance’s expertise just enhances the credibility of a distinctive organization that like few others can display its considerable capacities to strengthen a community’s work while also influencing thinking and policy choices at the national level.

– Keith Schneider

NEWARK, New Jersey — Newark’s Green Future Summit opened yesterday with Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides, Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker, and other speakers making the case for installing clean energy principles to generate jobs in this upward-looking city. The issues discussed here are complex and often emotionally charged. The flow of information about jobs, building practices, labor, wages, zoning, resource recovery, clean energy and the rest requires careful attention. This is the nit and grit of urban economic development, but with a new foundation laid on environmental economics.

One of the techniques used here to help attendees establish a conference narrative is a communications platform called graphic facilitation. A young Chicago-based artist, 34-year-old Brandy Agerbeck, (see pix above) has spent nearly every hour of the conference standing on her feet, colored felt marker in hand, drawing and writing on a landscape-size stretch of white paper.

Brandy, whose work is timed to start and finish with each panel discussion, begins with a blank paper canvas. When she finishes, 60 minutes later, the canvas is a colorful display of pictures and language, arrows and boxes and circles, color-coded.  One idea links to the next, and priorities are conveyed by graphic attention and dimension. It’s a tremendously adept way to communicate big ideas that aren’t easy.

I had a chance to sit down with Brandy at the end of the day and learned more about her and graphic facilitation. Brandy told me she was raised in a Minneapolis suburb, educated at Grinnell College in Iowa where she studied art and printmaking. Graphic facilitation was founded on the West Coast 30 years ago, Brandy said, and gained credibility largely because of the work The Grove, a consulting firm in San Francisco that specializes in “visual planning and organization change.” Most American graphic facilitators still practice their craft on the West Coast, where they helped form a trade group, the International Forum of Visual Practitioners.

Brandy is one of nine graphic facilitators in the Midwest, she says, and has been in practice for 12 years. Three years ago she developed a curriculum and also began teaching the craft. 

Congress this week took up legislation to decide America’s energy future.  The question in Washington is the same as it is in the presidential campaign - “drill baby drill” or a policy that promotes real solutions, a plan for a reasoned future that invests in clean energy and good jobs.

The Apollo Alliance is pushing back against drilling proposals that won’t solve our energy crisis and promoting a much better one that will, our own The New Apollo Program. The New Apollo Program is a comprehensive national economic development strategy to scale up and accelerate development of the clean energy sector and create millions of green-collar jobs.

In pursuit of those goals, this week we published a careful analysis that compares the proposals in The New Apollo Program with those put forward in Barack Obama’s New Energy For America Plan, and John McCain’s The Lexington Project.

We also sent an email alert to you and thousands of our other supporters urging you to help alert Congress that more domestic drilling is no solution to the energy, economic, security, and climate crises buffeting the nation. Please make your views known, and pass the alert onto friends and family.

And today we are in Newark, New Jersey for the first of the two-day Newark’s Green Future Summit, which the Apollo Alliance and Mayor Cory A. Booker (pix right with Phil Angelides) organized with the help of a number of other national and local organizations.

The idea of the summit, which was nearly a year in the making, was twofold. First, to bring Newark’s diverse talent and experience together with leaders from other communities to develop a roadmap for sustainable development. And second, to support the city in developing green urban initiatives - integrating green buildings into energy-efficient neighborhoods, developing new parks, fostering business development in clean energy that produces green-collar jobs, greening the Newark port - that create jobs, increase community welfare, and expand economic opportunity.

The Alliance’s work to help organize Newark’s Green Future Summit is a feature of The New Apollo Program. The program’s entire focus is reducing pollution, increasing efficiency, providing good jobs, and expanding opportunity for all. “Newark is a model of how older industrial cities can take the lead in moving this country toward a future of clean energy and good jobs,” said Apollo Co-Director Kate Gordon, who spent countless hours helping to plan and organize the event and is a summit speaker. Apollo Chairman Phil Angelides and President Jerome Ringo also are speaking here.

Thanks so much for being a part. The question I’d like you to consider for next week’s online Feedback feature is how are people where you live responding to calls for a national energy strategy that promotes clean energy and jobs, or the competing “drill baby drill?” What strategy and message reaches people in this great moment to choose?

– Keith Schneider