The United States needs to create green-collar jobs and mobilize a new generation of social activists to ease the country’s environmental and social concerns, human rights activist and environmentalist Van Jones said yesterday at Tufts University.

Jones’s lecture honored the school’s 35-year-old urban environmental policy master’s program and highlighted the social movements that have shaped American environmental and poverty policy since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Jones is a co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and a pioneer in merging environmental and socio-economic concerns. Last year, he helped authorize Green Jobs Act, an initiative to promote eco-friendly job training programs, a program he said the government has not yet moved to fund and put into effect.

Jones said he champions the creation of a green economy that will lift people out of poverty.

“We must connect the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done,” Jones said. “What if those who were locked out of our pollution-based economy could be locked into a new, green economy?”

By training poor people for green-collar jobs, like installing solar panels and weathering buildings, they can find a “green pathway” out of poverty, he said. These are growing industries with unlimited potential that companies cannot export overseas, he said.

On April 4, 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Jones led his organization, Green for All, which strives to eliminate poverty by creating a green economy, in a call to action. More than 1,000 people went to Memphis with the message that King’s dream is not dead, Jones said.

“We have a new dream,” he said. “One of equal opportunity, which means equal access to the best of the green economy, and equal protection, which means no more Hurricane Katrinas, equal protection from the worst of global warming.”

Jones congratulated Tufts for pursuing green initiatives and said students should make their campus a showcase for a new kind of environmentalism.

“You will define youth mobilization for your generation, and we will change this country,” he said. “You will be the generation of Americans to do more than take America back from Bush, but to actually take America forward.”

Tufts urban environmental policy professor Sheldon Krimsky said planners must consider urban and environmental policies together.

“It is inconceivable that any urban policy doesn’t take into account environmental impact, or that environmental planning doesn’t take into account urban policy,” he said.

Simmons College student Justine Pattantyus said she found Jones’s message “uplifting.”

“To have someone like Van speak so eloquently really helps people connect,” she said.