Anthony, Carl
Carl Anthony
Carl Anthony is co-founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project and Visiting Professor at the UC Davis Center for Regional Change. Anthony was the Acting Director of the Community and Resource Unit of the Ford Foundation. Anthony also was President of Earth Island Institute, an international environmental organization dedicated to protecting and conserving the biosphere. Anthony was appointed the Chair and Principal Administrative Officer of the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission by Congressman Ron Dellums in 1993.
Anthony, C. C. (2017). The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. NYU Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21pxmrf
Anthony, C. C. (2008). Forward. In Gottlieb, R., & Pavel, M.P., Breakthrough communities: Sustainability and justice in the next American metropolis, (pp. xii-xxi), Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Series, Series Editors, MIT Press.
Anthony, C. C. (2007). Forward. In Bullard, R., The Black metropolis in the Twenty-First Century: Race, power, and politics of place. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Anthony, C. C. (2005). “Funding Sustainable and Livable Communities: Carole Guyer, Pioneer in Philanthropy,” Annual Report, J.C. Penney Foundation.
Anthony, C.C. (2005). The Environmental Justice Movement: A Reflection and a Critique: An Activists Perspective. In. Pellow, D.N. & Brulle, R. J. (Eds.) Power, justice and the environment: A critical appraisal of the environmental justice movement. MIT Press, 2005.
Anthony, C. C. (2005, June 4). Just, Green and Beautiful. Yes! Magazine, Summer, 12-16. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/great-place/opinion/2005/06/04/just-gr…
Carl Anthony was born in 1939 to Louis Edward and Mildred Anthony in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Anthony was born in the Black Bottom neighborhood, a predominately African American neighborhood in West Philadelphia. Philadelphia has a rich history and tradition of urban planning. However, as Anthony noted, this tradition often neglects to address the needs of people of color and low-income areas. Thus, Anthony’s observations and interests led him to combine the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement with architecture and urban and community planning.
The community design movement that emerged in the 1960s blended ideas of design and environment. Anthony was attracted to this line of thinking, and in 1965 Anthony began working with the Architecture Renewal Community in Harlem (ARCH). The organization sought to address social and economic justice issues in Harlem. Among other things, Anthony and his colleagues worked on the Neighborhood Commons Project. This project focused on converting vacant lands into neighborhood commons by encouraging local residents to participate in creating these commons. Anthony obtained a professional degree in architecture from Columbia University in 1969 to better understand, develop, and implement such projects. However, by the late 1960s, Anthony found himself questioning the direction of the movement and his work. Anthony was awarded a William Kinne Fellowship when he graduated from Columbia University. The grant aims to enrich students’ education through traveling.
Consequently, he traveled to Africa to better understand the traditional architecture of indigenous Africans and how to incorporate it into his future work.
When Anthony went to Africa, he was also growing critical of traditional architectural approaches because he felt they often served the needs of the upper classes while ignoring those of the lower classes. Thus, by studying the history of architecture, African culture, and the environment, Anthony hoped to understand better and address the needs of people of color communities.
Upon his return from Africa in 1971, Anthony accepted a position to work at the University of California – Berkeley, College of Environmental Design as an assistant professor of architecture. He focused on green design at Berkeley, eventually becoming faculty at the University of California Berkeley- College of Natural Resources. However, Anthony felt that because he still maintained a strong interest in working on issues in the environments of poor communities, he got inadequate support from his colleagues, who showed little interest in this kind of work. After teaching at Berkeley for ten years, he left academia to work in architecture and planning in Oakland, California.
Anthony found that his contacts with communities declined as he became more engrossed in the architecture and planning work. At this juncture, he founded the Urban Habitat Program. This program seeks to promote environmental leadership in people of color communities to develop sustainable and just communities in the San Francisco Bay area. Anthony created the Race, Poverty, and Environment Journal with Luke Cole of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation. The journal addresses questions of environmental sustainability through the lens of race and poverty. This journal’s creation and publication are among the many highlights of Anthony’s career. From 1991 to 1998, Anthony was the President of Earth Island Institute and served as Executive Director until 2000. Earth Island Institute is an NGO working on the conservation, preservation, and restoration of the biosphere.
Anthony was a convener of the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Development, working on a livability compact for 100 jurisdictions in the Bay Area. He was Co-Chair of the Community Capital Investment Initiative, which raised $150 million double bottom line investment for brownfield cleanup, small business development, and smart growth in the region. From 1993 through 1995, Anthony served as Chair and Principal Administrative Officer of the East Bay Conversion and Reinvestment Commission created by Congressman Ronald V. Dellums to plan for the conversion of five military installations in Alameda County and as a national pilot project to guide federal policy in the conversion of several hundred military bases around the country.
Anthony next served as Acting Director of the Ford Foundation Community and Resource Development Unit, with a $39 million annual budget and supervisory responsibility for all the Foundation’s Program Officers in community development and environment and development. From 2002 to 2006, he directed the Foundation’s Regional Equity Demonstration. This cross-portfolio initiative seeks to demonstrate the power of metropolitan, and regional approaches for addressing issues of poverty and environment in five metropolitan regions across the United States: Camden, NJ; Detroit, MI; Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; and Richmond, CA. As a Program Officer, he was responsible for the Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative (SMCI), which seeks to build new leadership and tools to
promote economic competitiveness, ecological integrity, and social equity in the United States’s metropolitan regions. While at Ford Foundation, Anthony later took on the role of Director of the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative.
Anthony’s work has been influenced by several people who shaped his work and thinking. Anthony includes James Baldwin, Louis Mumford, Carl Linn, Christopher Alexander, Kevin Lynch, Sin VanDerRin, Myron Orfield, David Rusk, John Powell, and Thomas Berry as mentors and people who influenced him. In turn, Anthony has served as a mentor to others. He works hard to bring people of color into conservation. He has utilized his role as a faculty member, founder of Urban Habitat, and overseer of grants to influence and mentor the next generation’s leadership. Anthony advises those interested in the environmental field to recognize the right to have a relationship with place. However, Anthony also states, “Realize that the right to a relationship with place takes a lot of work, but it is necessary work. We need to lead the larger society to understand issues of environmental, racial, and social justice. We are responsible for what we know and for teaching it to others.”
Anthony has spent his career searching for ways to mobilize and solve social justice problems. He was drawn into the environmental field, not because of gloom and doom predictions about the future of the earth but rather by the promise and possibility for creativity and growth that he saw in the field. He has changed career paths as his thinking has led him in new, more productive directions. While he is disappointed that environmental justice has not gained more momentum and that the movement is full of unrealized promise, he has stuck with a career in the field because he has a sense that his work is his mission or raison d’etre. As a third-grade student in an integrated elementary school, Anthony participated in a science club where they learned about stars, dinosaurs, and William Penn. At that time, Anthony noticed the line of demarcation between his community and the community of white students. As an eight-year-old student, Anthony asked, “Why?” He has dedicated his career to understanding why the line exists and what we can do about it. He is driven by the sense of importance, and the challenge, to recreate relationships between people of color and the environment.
Anthony, C.C. (2021). Carl-Anthony-Curriculum-Vitae-2021.pdf. https://www.earthhousecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Carl-Anthony…
(n.d.). About Earth House. Earth House. Retrieved June 23, 2023, from https://www.earthhousecenter.org/about-earth-house/
Taylor, Dorceta (Ed.). 2005. The Paths We Thread: Profiles of the Careers of Minority Environmental Professionals. Minority Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment.