Photography by Todd Plitt ellabakercenter.org

Now that sustainability is finally recognized as more than just a white yuppie thing or a silly dork trend, the Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, founded by the ever-visionary Van Jones, has launched a new campaign called “Green for All”. It aims high — a national movement designed to secure $1 billion in federal funding for “green collar” job training by 2012 — and it’s already making waves. The House of Representatives passed the Green Jobs Act of 2007 to help the ecological revolution reach neglected inner cities, and the city of Oakland set aside $250,000 to create a Green Job Corps. It’s about time: viable green jobs, from manufacturing biofuel and installing solar panels to weatherizing homes and maintaining wind farms, represent a new sector in the economy, and there’s plenty of chronically unemployed folks — laid-off workers from outsourced industries, urban youth, returning veterans, rehabilitated ex-cons — able to provide the human power to make “green” go.

Design by Chris Jacobs & Rolf Mohr

We know that stacking people in city apartments leaves a smaller ecological footprint than sprawling McMansions across suburbia. Imagine applying the same idea to growing food. Could metropolises transform from parasitic centers of consumption into hot spots of sustainable production? A team of Columbia University environmentalists is designing a “vertical farm” by combining greenhouse technology with high-rise food cultivation. The goal? To create a self-sustaining building capable of producing a year-round balanced diet for 50,000-plus urban dwellers. All crops — including fish and livestock — would be grown organically and ethically, solar panels would power 24-four-hour grow lights, and irrigation water would come from filtered sewage purified via a series of ponds filled with sludge-loving organisms.