Laurie Mazur

African Americans have long spoken of the need to “make a way out of no way.” Born of painful necessity, the phrase reminds us that there is always room for constructive action. Read on to see how others are “making a way” in this challenging moment.

In 2022, contributors to the Island Press Urban Resilience Project dug into the details, devising concrete plans for collective action to build a fairer, greener future.

In this hopeful and frustrating year, contributors to the Island Press Urban Resilience Project celebrated our collective progress, while highlighting how far we have yet to go.

Today, Americans have sorted ourselves into communities defined by geography, demography, ideology— and opportunities to communicate across those divides are exceedingly rare. But the shared trauma of flooding offers an opening.

Green 2.0 was launched in 2014 as a working group of thought leaders at the intersection of environment and race. We commissioned a report that found that the mainstream environmental movement had failed to diversify their staff despite decades of promises to do so.

So we’re having to deal with completely new environmental conditions, and we will be changed by that. Can we imagine that? No. Can we try to imagine that we’re not just clobbering each other over the head or blowing each other up? I can imagine something different.