What the World Needs Now is Climate Optimism, Says This Lifelong Advocate

“We believe in staying optimistic,” says environmental and civil rights advocate Daniel Blackman. “While everyone else has anxiety, there needs to be a North Star. While everyone else is afraid, someone needs to stand up.” 

The bold notion of “climate optimism” is the motivating commitment for Renaissance94, the nonprofit social impact consultancy Blackman founded last summer after years in government and community organizing. The name itself — inspired by the nine dots, four lines math problem — speaks to his knack for thinking beyond the conventional in pursuit of solutions that actually work. "It's based off an aptitude test to draw four lines connecting nine dots, and the whole concept is you have to draw outside of the box in order to be able to not move the pencil from the paper," Blackman says. "They did that based on measuring IQ, but we're not here to measure IQ. We're here to get people to think differently." 

Even as the incoming Donald Trump administration moves to roll back U.S. climate policies and cut funding to community groups, Blackman and Renaissance94 look to gather unlikely allies around what filmmaker Gregory Kallenberg coined as "the rational middle" — where ideological differences and political disputes are put to the side to identify areas of mutual opportunity around issues like climate resilience and community development. A week's worth of meetings on Blackman's calendar may include heads of state, community leaders and environmental activists alongside executives from fossil fuel companies. While acknowledging the approach may anger purists who feel actors with polluting pasts have no place at the climate action table, he argues that breaking down historical barriers is what's needed to finally realize systems change.

"We're not going to make everybody happy when we meet with the president or the CEO of an oil company. We're not going to make everyone happy when we meet with someone who is a Republican," he says. "But our job isn't to characterize people, it's to solve problems." For Blackman, it's the latest chapter in a life spent creating what his mentor, the late U.S. Congressman John Lewis, called "good trouble" in pursuit of environmental justice and community uplift. 

"The more I saw it, the more I found my voice there."

When Hurricane Katrina — the most damaging storm in United States history — hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, Blackman had recently graduated from the historically Black research university Clark Atlanta. As the U.S. Southeast rallied around New Orleans, he crossed paths with another young organizer, Van Jones, who co-founded the racial and environmental justice organizations Color of Change and Green for All in the wake of Katrina before becoming a regular commentator on CNN.

The meeting changed the trajectory of Blackman's life and kickstarted a decorated career in community advocacy. "At the time, I didn't see that many people of color, let alone Black men, who were doing anything related to the environment," remembers Blackman, a first-generation American whose family immigrated from Barbados. As he moved deeper into advocacy circles, he met civil rights visionaries such as John Lewis and Coretta Scott King, who later became his mentors, and traveled to Selma, Alabama, with Barack Obama before he was nominated to run for president in 2008. 

Seeing the South through their eyes forever altered his perspective and sharpened his view toward how environmental issues — from destructive storms to everyday injustices such as lack of access to clean water — shaped communities across generations. "Black and Brown communities and poor communities have always faced environmental challenges, but it wasn't until I drove throughout the southeast United States — in areas that had no water infrastructure, no broadband, contaminated water, boil-water advisories every other day — that I fully understood," Blackman said. "And the more I saw it, the more I found my voice there."

Making 'good trouble' for environmental justice 

Blackman worked with the southern offices of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Barack Obama administration and was later appointed as the southern regional administrator of the EPA under Joe Biden, becoming the first Black man to ever serve in the position. Ruffling feathers for the greater good fast became one of his favorite parts of the job.

"I pissed a lot of people off by going to meetings that they said regional administrators are not supposed to go to," he remembers. "One of the best parts of my job was getting yelled at. I would go into communities where they would say, 'We don't want you in our f--ing community. Y'all have made promises. We don't give a damn if you're a Democrat or a Republican.' I literally would go and get yelled at, and I would have my senior staff and my public affairs directors telling me, 'Sir, you don't need to be here.' And I said, 'I absolutely do.'"

Despite decades of pledges, promises and investments, more than 2 million Americans still lack access to clean drinking water, many of them in the Deep South communities Blackman visited in the early aughts and while serving in the EPA. In one of the most stark examples, the communities in central Alabama collectively referred to as the Black Belt have dealt with the impacts of aging sewer and sanitation systems for generations. The sparsely populated area, where nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, was not prioritized for municipal wastewater services, leaving most residents to rely on aging septic tanks — and around 90 percent of those tanks were functioning poorly in 2022. The result is raw human waste leeching through soils and groundwaters, fouling homes and communities and contaminating local water sources. 

"To this day, I'm in tears when I think about going to Lowndes County, Alabama, and smelling how one home smelled because of a ruptured septic tank," Blackman says of a visit to the Black Belt. "The woman had three kids, and every time it flooded, the waste would come into their yards. It would settle into the soil. You could only imagine on a hot summer day what they normalized. When I left, for about a month I couldn't get the smell of that community out of my mind — what those kids had to play in, what the mothers had to cook in, and what people on the hottest days and hottest nights had to endure and normalize to their children." 

While serving as regional administrator of the EPA, Blackman helped to channel $10 million in funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and American Rescue Plan Act to repair and expand the sewage system in Lowndes County, bringing services to hundreds of households long forgotten by national environmental policies. It's one of a string of community investments Biden's EPA put forward under the Justice40 Initiative, which aimed to direct 40 percent of the overall benefits of certain federal investments to historically disadvantaged communities that are underserved and overburdened by pollution. 

Blackman says seeing the impact of these projects firsthand helped him realize that pushing past challenges — from political disagreements to understandable distrust within underserved communities — to find agreement and a path forward can not only bring us closer to our environmental and climate goals, but can also truly change lives. 

Rallying unlikely allies in pursuit of climate resilience 

"When you look at the climate pollution reduction grants the Trump administration has recently rescinded, the folks who are going to suffer are frontline communities," Blackman says. With Renaissance94, he's looking to go beyond the federal government as the driving force for U.S. climate action at scale.

The organization leverages pop culture, sports, and entertainment to inspire climate conversations and rally philanthropic investments that help communities mitigate pollution and cope with the impacts of climate change. In its inaugural year, the organization joined the first North American Overheated session with musician Billie Eilish and her mother Maggie Baird’s food access organization Support+Feed, gathering more than 400 attendees in Atlanta and 370,000 online, and shared the stage with sustainability leaders from the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball at the 2024 Green Sports Alliance Summit.

Future plans include launching a fund to support nonprofits impacted by Trump's grant rollbacks, planting a million trees on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevards, Streets and Drives across the United States ahead of Dr. King's 100th birthday, and continuing to work with young voices like Billie to champion climate action. 

"The next generation of leaders are watching," Blackman says. "These young men and women are getting ready for the workforce. They're getting ready to stand on their beliefs. And they're growing up in a very dysfunctional time in our country. They believe in climate change, but they're going to be hit with a big bill when they graduate and they're going to be in debt. As much as they care about the climate, if we don't communicate and tell better stories, those climate activists, those advocates, those kids that want to take public transit instead of buying a car, their mindsets are going to be shifted because we didn't protect them." 

Though Blackman's past experiences taught him it's possible to change that trajectory, he knows the road ahead won't be easy. "If you look at the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, one of them says, 'We're well able to meet the needs of the present without compromising future generations' needs to meet our own.' When those future generations look back on this time, I want them to say there was an organization, Renaissance, that stood for something. It convened young people, it convened Democrats, it convened Republicans," he says. "I think what Renaissance stands for is where Dr. King left off and where every major movement and opportunity left off — where out of a great tragedy, we disburse." 

I spoke with Daniel in the first edition of "What the...?," an ongoing series of video interviews co-hosted with 3BL and featuring frank conversations about the state of the sustainability space. Our conversation quickly veered away from Trump and into how sustainability professionals can take ownership of what they've done wrong and what they need to do better to connect with communities around environmental and climate issues. You can watch it here.