The South Bronx has witnessed the birth of hip hop, Jennifer Lopez and Al Pacino. Now it has a front-row seat to an environmental renaissance, as the community turns injustice into economic empowerment. With the help of Sustainable South Bronx (SSB), a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the beleaguered neighborhood through environmental and economic sustainability, ordinary residents are becoming brownfield experts thanks to the Bronx Environmental Stewardship Training (B.E.S.T.) program.

Created in 2001 by SSB Executive Director Majora Carter to address the community’s brownfield and unemployment issues, B.E.S.T. is a 10- to 14-week crash course in stabilization, remediation and environmental justice. Trainees can become certified in hazardous materials handling, OSHA (students learn how to perform Phase 1 Assessments), first aid, and CPR.

Funded by Mitsubishi International Corp., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the Wildlife Conservation Fund, the program has sent scores of graduates into the green job industry. Several are working as entry-level brownfield professionals.

Dwaine Lee, project manager of B.E.S.T. and the Greenway Steward Initiative, was a college student working in the hospitality industry and teaching yoga when he heard about Carter’s program shortly after she’d been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Lee, himself a B.E.S.T graduate, joined the staff to work with program director Annette Williams in recruiting and training Bronx residents. He loves the work and the opportunity to pass on knowledge, he says.

“This is amazingly useful stuff, and the learning process is very exciting and interesting,” says Lee. “We have three cycles a year. There’s a 90 percent job placement rate, and lots of people go on to work with nonprofits or natural resource groups. Some decide to do hazardous waste, too.”

Plans to expand the training program to include additional curricula are currently underway, Lee adds.

Carter and SSB are working with several other organizations to push a green jobs initiative to the national forefront. Carter recently became chair of Green For All, a coalition of community organizations focused on re-creating the success of local programs like B.E.S.T, but on a larger scale.

The brainchild of community activist and attorney Van Jones, founder of the Ella Baker Center in Oakland, Calif., the campaign hopes to bring thousands of “green collar” jobs to blighted urban and rural communities.

Earlier this year, Jones and his organization worked with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.)—to pass the Green Jobs Act of 2007, which will provide over $120 million in funding to train 35,000 people a year in the “green collar” trades.

“Many of our issues stem from our environment being degraded, and we’ve got to make sure that the opportunities of this green economy flow back to our communities,” says Carter, addressing an attentive audience during a recent lecture at the Chicago Humanities Festival. “By putting dollars into community-supported infrastructure, and creating land use plans that benefit the majority of people first, educating happy and healthy people ... is a tremendous step on the road to sustainable social justice.”

Everyone is entitled to a green future, says Carter, and the time to break away from this “dirty economy” is now.