Hip-Hop Sustains - Cultural Evolution for a Sustainable Future

Hip-Hop Sustains - Cultural Evolution for a Sustainable Future, a new campaign initiated by Soul Survivors is an urgent response to a post-9/11 and post-Hurricane Katrina world. Our presentation will educate and engage participants in discussion around why a multi-disciplinary coalition approach is needed to achieve the strategic goals of ending poverty, environmental degradation and building a sustainable future.

Partners: Soul Survivors, 5th Element, Hip-Hop Media Lab, National hip-Hop Political Convention (NYC), Silicon Valley Debug, Youth United for Community Action

The ability to develop and fight for democratic, participatory and sustainable forms of media thereby overcoming the "green divide" is an integral part of SOUL SURVIVOR's mission. The participation of unemployed sectors of the working class and people of color communities in sustainable development projects barely registers in the corporate media coverage of environmental sustainability when and if they choose to cover these issues. Struggling for the modes and means of participatory media and media dissemination are critically intertwined, therefore media reform and evolutionary media development has been part of our strategic objectives.

We as humanity are facing conditions that are without precedent in history. The peaking of our current hydrocarbon fossil fuel based economy is coinciding with the devastating aftereffects of global warming patterns caused by CO2 emissions and the crisis of biodiversity loss due to corporate monoculture agriculture and the rapacious capitalist logic of never ending imperial hegemony. This conditional alignment is spawning a new period of extreme environmental impact and renewed warfare on the world stage with catastrophic consequences for poor and working peoples, peoples of the emerging nations. In the U.S. Hurricane Katrina and its continuing aftermath has become a bellweather, a sign of times to come and serves as an urgent warning for working people’s struggles throughout this country.

It is difficult to broach the subject of environmental sustainability with working Americans but we have found it our obligation to do so. As our world enters a new century working Americans are woefully unprepared to meet the environmental challenges ahead and the dire necessity of building a sustainable future. From the Pacific tsunami of 2004 and Hurricane Katrina, or “bizarre” weather patterns, we as a human race have begun to witness and experience the results of harsh environmental degradation upon modernized societies. As witnessed in the Gulf Region the average working citizen and the poor paid the most awful price when the hurricane struck.

While this is an issue that affects us all as a human race, everyday working peoples, the unemployed, the impoverished and the poor are the most impacted in crises situations because of their lack of access to resources, lack of limited state resources and lack of access to vital information. The consequences of an energy policy based on pollutant hydrocarbons and financial policies downsizing and fiscally constricting infrastructure expenditures are resulting in disasters and no doubt will result in more in the near future unless the structural root causes are properly addressed. It is a vicious intertwined cycle of national self-affliction.

It is at this historic juncture that Soul Survivors is launching “Hip-Hop Sustains” as a strategic project/campaign that lies at the “trinitarian” intersection of evolutionary culture, technology and transformative political economy. We have developed critical relations with Boston initiated Hip-Hop Media Lab and San Jose’s 5th Element, a women’s hip-hop collective. We form the first proximate concentric layer of project development and implementation to challenge the nexus of poverty and environmental degradation. Our multi-media presentation will educate the audience on the origins of our multi-disciplinary approach, building collaborative relationships toward strategic goals.

Soul Survivors is a founding coalition partner to the R.E.A.C.Hip-Hop Coalition (a NY based media justice org.) in their continuing struggle against Emmis and Hot '97. Soul Survivors has given media support to Hurricane Katrina evacuees in New York City as well as providing coalition assistance to organizations in New Orleans such as Common Ground Collective and the People’s Hurricane Relief and Oversight Committee. We understand the importance of media access for the working class before/during/after environmental disasters due to the failure of critical coverage – much of which is corporate dominated media – which is the difference between life and death for much of the poor.

Attending the conference will allow us to network with our immediate partners and new allies on a more nuanced level. This will give us the necessary synergy to develop a broader assessment, contextual contingencies and strategic orientation.

Our presenters are of diverse gender/race/class/orientation backgrounds and fields of work. Their empirical outlook will inform the course of presentation and challenge dominant and mainstream norms fundamentally. We will work hard to provide bi-lingual translation.

Part of our workshop is presentation based – and it will be dedicated towards a multi-media experience – via computer projection. We are definitely trying to educate those that are interested in joining a new project campaign. Our panelists and organizations while representing a diversity of experiences and regions will demonstrate the linkages that can be made in our every day lives.

Because we represent several different organizations we want a thorough q&a between the attendees and the panelists. The workshop will also be devised in a manner which tests and challenges people’s notions on sustainable development – up to date facts and trends. We do stress that the analytical presentation itself is pretty innovative theoretically as is the strategic relationship between our organizations in obtaining our goals.