Carl C. Anthony is revered as a social and environmental justice leader. He was the founding director of Urban Habitat, one of the country’s first environmental justice organizations, known for pushing the mainstream environmental movement to confront issues of race and class. With colleague Luke Cole from the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, he edited and published the Race, Poverty and the Environment Journal, the first environmental justice periodical in the United States.
After leaving Urban Habitat to concentrate on writing a book, he was recruited to lead the Ford Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative. During his years at Ford, he became aware of potential pathways to economic and social equity for marginalized communities by treating the city, suburbs, and surrounding rural areas as an interdependent holistic system—the metropolitan region. Carl initiated the national Conversation on Regional Equity (CORE), a dialogue of national policy analysts and advocates for new metropolitan racial justice strategies.
Leaving Ford and returning to the West Coast, Carl teamed up with Dr. Paloma Pavel to create the Breakthrough Communities Project, dedicated to empowering grassroots communities in metropolitan regions and nurturing multiracial leadership. Carl and Paloma are producing a series of workshops on Climate Justice with low income communities of color in Sacramento, San Diego, and Sonoma, as they develop a toolkit for Building Healthy and Just Communities for All in California in an Age of Global Warming. Carl has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture and Planning and the UC Berkeley Colleges of Environmental Design and Natural Resources. In 1996, he was appointed Fellow at the Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He and Paloma currently serve as visiting faculty at UC Davis’s Center for Regional Change.