The BobboSphere: Don't believe everything you think.

Last fall two environmentalists did a barnstorming tour together touting the advantages of solar and wind to politicians in three states. Nothing unusual about that except that one of them was the president of the United Steel Workers union and the other was the president of the Sierra Club.

A hardhat and backpacker together? Yep, economic crisis.....meet the environmental crisis.

As Steel Workers president Leo Gerard says,"We need to put an end to the lies, the myths, the hysteria, that say you can have either a clean environment or good jobs."You can have both, or you have neither."

Or as Sierra Club president Carl Pope put it,"Leo is about as different from me as anybody can be, except in the way he thinks."

Actually labor has been going green for a long time, albeit, fitfully, slowly and with little publicity. Unions have joined with community activists to battle toxic waste dumping, air and water pollution.

But unions are often caught between a lump of anthracite and a hard place. Burning coal contributes to global warming, but coal mining is the lifeblood of many hard hit rural communities where United Mine Workers jobs keep the economy going. Car exhaust is killing the planet, but think of all of the unionized auto worker jobs and what they contribute to local communities.Cutting Old Growth timber is an environmental disaster, but it's hard to tell unionized timber workers that when those may be the only decent paying jobs within a hundred miles.

Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers union is trying to balance the need for good paying jobs in coal country with the need to protect communities from wholesale mountain removal. He has also called for investment in technology that would make coal-fired energy plants more efficient and clean( a goal many environmentalists think is unrealistic).

Before his death in 1972, UAW president Walter Reuther called for fuel efficient cars when the Detroit auto barons wouldn't hear of it. Then Honda, Toyota and Nissan arrived on our shores and Detroit belately began to listen.

Judi Bari fought for an alliance between timber workers and Old Growth forest preservationists in rural Northern California. She had some success despite a 1991 assassination attempt that crippled her. Breast cancer took her life in 1997, but her legacy lives on.

Here in Illinois, one building contractor is investing heavily in an effort to build solar powered houses with union labor.

But the Labor-Green alliance is still a fragile tentative thing and we have a long ways to go. Here in Chicago, Estelle and I went to the Green Festival at a local convention center. 30,000 people poured into the cavernous halls of McCormick Place to hear speakers like.Amy Goodman,Greg Palast,Dennis Kucinich and Frances Moore Lappé while  browsing exhibits from green businesses and eco-organizations .

Chicago is a union town and the exhibits were put up with the help of union labor. But where were the union exhibits? Where were the union actvists who should have been there building bridges with environmentalists? Where the union organizers signing up members from among the many green businesses represented there?

Maybe my glasses were fogged that weekend, but I didn't see any of that.

In depressed Oakland California, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is leading the charge to create new good paying union jobs in the green economy.

Maybe we should have a Fred Hampton Center for Human Rights here in Chicagoland to add the color green to his dream of a working class rainbow coalition of all races.

Now would not be soon enough.