A parade of gentle, forceful and resonant sounds echo from the larger-than-life Japanese wooden Taiko drums, played by renowned Taiko drummer Koji Nakamura, commencing the “Whole Systems Healing” lecture series as presented by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing. The drums are being used to communicate spiritual values that resonate through the four corners of universe. This resonance represents the integration that the Center for Spirituality & Healing seeks to create in healthcare and communities. The keynote speaker for the evening is environmental advocate and author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, Van Jones.

Van Jones, perhaps drawing on his experience working with urban youth, engages the audience in fluctuations of humor and seriousness that allow him a comfortable, even intimate, presence at the University of Minnesota’s Ted Mann Concert Hall. He addresses the audience as a collective group that has fought for things like renewable energy and local foods while simultaneously battling against all things inefficient — including large buildings not unlike the one they occupy. The lecture seems to be intended for persons who are environmentally conscious and looking for motivation or a place to collaborate on environmental initiatives.

“I am not scared [of the economic situation], because from breakdowns come breakthroughs,” Van says solemnly. One can’t help but believe him—he tells the audience of his personal path into sustainability—beginning with his own breakdown from his work with urban youth. Repeatedly seeing young people in caskets (among other unsettling realities), led to his emotional degradation and subsequent reinvention through sustainability. In this practice, Jones found hope in creating jobs and optimism for individuals who sometimes had neither.

President Obama is referenced several times in Van Jones’ speech—he emphasizes that Obama’s passion and policy are the products of the beauty Obama sees in America’s citizens. It is the American peoples’ duty, Jones believes, to move forward and act on the environmental initiatives presented to them as individuals and as communities. Here, Van Jones references Obama’s stimulus plan, “One hundred to 150 billion dollars for sustainability,” which Van Jones estimates is, “Humanity’s biggest investment in green to date.” Jones declares that the investment cannot be made everywhere at once, and that the Minnesota will be one of the key places in showing the integration of “social justice and ecology, government and entrepreneurs, and social change and spirituality.”

Van Jones drives the audiences’ emotions and inspires their minds to act: “The reason you were born is to be fully expressed – right now.” Van is trying to spur action with his voice. He appears to be successful with affirmative shouts and supportive applause intermittently dispersed through his speech. He leaves the audience with some direction: “the seeds of ideas you’ve had in notebooks…the ideas you haven’t moved on, this is the moment to act them.”