From the archive
13 Sep 2026
When Carl Anthony entered architecture school at Columbia, he was the only African-American student in the room. He died this year, after a working life that ran from that classroom through Berkeley, Oakland, New York and back again. From every position he held he kept noticing the same thing: the land that got poisoned and the people who got poor were usually the same people. Bioneers, where he spoke at least once, remembered him this autumn alongside Gloria Steinem, Peter Buckley and Wendell Berry.
The career, laid out, is a list of things built rather than posts held. He taught architecture at Berkeley's College of Environmental Design and co-founded a firm in Oakland. David Brower put him on the board of Earth Island Institute, and there, with Karl Linn, he started the Urban Habitat Program, which set out to cultivate multicultural leadership inside environmental justice work. With Luke Cole he produced Race, Poverty and the Environment, a quarterly journal that gave the young movement somewhere to think in print.
In the early 2000s he went east to run the Ford Foundation's Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative, which put him in charge of real money and let him fund the kinds of programmes he had been arguing for. Then he came home to California and co-founded Breakthrough Communities in Oakland, which extended that work. Along the way he sat on the bodies where land decisions actually get made: the Berkeley Planning Commission, the Presidio Council, the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, the President's Council on Sustainable Development.
Late in life he wrote down the whole argument in a book, The Earth, The City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race, part memoir and part case that the story of American cities and the story of American land cannot be told honestly without race in it. He was, by the account of those who worked alongside him, a mentor as much as an organiser, and a scholar as much as either.
A quarterly journal is how a scattered movement learns to think together, and it costs less than a single staff post. Print or digital, four issues a year, one editor, contributors paid something even if token. That is the whole machine.
Bioneers · Read the source