Between and alone, 43 federally recognized tribes call the desert landscape home. However, their ways of life have been challenged by centuries of colonization and resource exploitation, resulting in large cities siphoning water from reservations; extractive industries ; and construction, , and even threatening cultural sites and ancient petroglyphs. Chaco Canyon, where Pueblo Action Alliance does much of its work, is unfortunately a nexus for many of these injustices.

Chaco Canyon is a 7.5-mile stretch in the Chaco Wash of northwest New Mexico. It drains into the San Juan River, a critical upstream sandstone formation for delivering water across the San Juan Basin. Specifically, the rincons, angular recesses in rock formations, in the canyon cliff faces divert rainfall to drought-stricken regions of the high desert, a function that directly impacts precipitation levels in an arid region with short growing seasons. About 1,000 years ago, Chaco Canyon also served as an enormous cultural hub for the Chacoans, ancestral Puebloans who quarried the canyon to build great houses that would serve as the political center of the ancient culture.

The houses were so great, in fact, that their sheer size would not be surpassed in North America until 19th-century American construction. It is estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 people dwelled within the region at its peak, harvesting beans, maize, and squash, and even engaging in a massive long-distance industry. Both practices continue in the contemporary Pueblos, which still exist in the arid Southwest desert.

The Greater Chaco region has such a historical, cultural, and even sacred significance to the Pueblos, Hopi, and Navajo that the region has been designated as the Chaco Culture National Historic Park. Not only is the site filled with sacred ceremonial kivas, partially or wholly underground chambers for performing religious rites, but also the entire region represents a fragile biodiversity and a climate prone to extreme weather from the El Niño–La Niña cycle.

Unfortunately, as with 85% of reservation lands in the United States, Chaco Canyon sits on resource-rich soil. Already, 91% of the public lands in the canyon are leased for oil and gas extraction. Between the sacredness of the site, its significance to the water basin and biodiversity, and water-intensive industries that intend to exploit it, there is little wonder why the anti-fossil fuel campaign found common cause with the (PAA) to oppose the issuing of more leases.

The Many Faces of Water Justice

For Indigenous peoples, water goes several steps further than just providing sustenance. Water became an issue for the Wampanoag, who have fought offshore wind turbines in Massachusetts that would hinder access to the tribe’s sacred sunrise practices. For the Winnemem Wintu of California, threatened to flood out cultural resources. Similarly, in the Pacific Northwest, salmon people, such as the Suquamish, have united to demand the removal of dams that interfere with salmon migration, critical to their traditional lifeways and beliefs. 

The safety of water-grown food and even ceremonial waters are also threatened by the existence of 532 Superfund sites in Indian Country alone, buried in layers of red tape that make cleanup more challenging than in areas not under Indian jurisdiction. The protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock were a stark reminder of how water, extractive industry, and treaty rights intersect. And in my own Ojibwe community in Minnesota, traditional manoomin, a native strain of wild rice, and fish harvesting are challenged not only by non-Indians unfamiliar with Indigenous harvesting rights, but also by the . The list goes on.

Especially in the Southwest, tribes have had to desperately fight for their rights to the water systems their ancestors used for years, but which now come to them in the form of hard-earned “paper rights”—essentially, promises on paper that often are not kept. The point is, water is necessary, and through a combination of red tape, contamination, lack of physical or spiritual access, scarcity due to climate change, or development on ancestral and archaeological sites, tribal communities are disproportionately affected. 

That’s why groups like the Pueblo Action Alliance have stepped up not just to protect Chaco Canyon, but also to develop a paradigm shift that integrates traditional Pueblo values into business.

Modeling a Pueblo Way of Life

Pueblo Action Alliance consists of about 10 individuals, the majority of whom are full-time and campaign with the concept of “rematriating” land, water, and general rights to the Pueblos of New Mexico. Drawing on principles that connect clear back to the Chacoan ancestors of Greater Chaco, the group’s director, Julia Fay Bernal, describes the alliance as a non-incorporated organization fiscally sponsored by a 503(c) that centers its entire structure around Pueblo values.

These values include prioritizing good stewardship of ancestral landscapes, maintaining a sliding pay scale that reflects need more than CV-based experience, and accommodating time off on a merit basis. Given that the Pueblo culture is so oriented around family, ceremony, and religious participation, Bernal says the attitude toward time off is “You don’t have to explain to me why you can’t come to work today.” It’s a model that represents trust and respect, standing in stark contrast to most standard Western attitudes of the 9–5 grind, and uniting the Pueblos in ways they hadn’t been since the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against Spanish rule.

The alliance also takes a unique approach by focusing on community education around issues impacting the region. The group follows relevant state and federal legislation, but, as Bernal describes, it “ultimately in terms of scope of work and capacity focuses on policy that impacts Pueblo lands, ancestral Pueblo territories, and what kind of strain it is having on water.”&�Բ�����;

The group ������’t just concerned with fracking in Chaco: Various extractive industries in the region are water-intensive in a water-scarce landscape and cause destruction to sacred spaces. Bernal cites the copper mine of Oak Flat as an example affecting the Apache, as well as broader concerns about lithium mining, mercury extraction, and proposed hydrogen hubs in the region, which are all water-intensive processes.

Pueblo Action Alliance has also partnered with its Navajo counterpart, Diné CARE (Citizens Against Ruining the Environment), to defend common ancestral lands, such as Chaco Canyon, and to rally against a shared legacy of uranium mining and water contamination. Rebecca Tsosie, a law professor at the University of Arizona, has written that tribal sovereignty, the trust doctrine the U.S. government holds with tribes, is “ … and embodies a clear duty to protect tribal lands.”&�Բ�����;These grassroots organizations center their work around this theory, striving to hold the federal government to its obligations to work with Native tribes to protect the environment, especially water resources. They lean strongly into the legal obligations of the United States to recognize tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, and the trust responsibility that exists between the federal government and tribal nations—an obligation to care for the general welfare of tribal communities.

Construction Models in Indian Country

The NDN Companies take a different approach than the Pueblo Action Alliance. In 2015, Shawna Newman founded her small environmental consulting firm, supported by the U.S. Small Business Administration, in Jacksonville, Florida, to work within the bounds of the contracting world, providing various environmental assessments, remediation, restoration, and even mixed marine construction services.

Newman, who is of Chickasaw and Choctaw descent, grew up near the Poarch Creek Reservation in Pensacola, Florida, and has a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the University of West Florida. She is engaged with Native youth in STEM education, the , and as a Board Member for the North Florida Land Trust. She describes her inspiration to create the NDN Companies as “a desire to provide environmental assistance and education throughout Indian Country.”&�Բ�����;

One unique aspect about the business, however, is the focus on tribal consultation. As an Indian-founded and woman-led organization, the NDN Companies help bridge the gap between the interests of the construction industry and the impacts it has on the environment, ancestral landscapes, and cultural resources; and it also keeps agencies from doing more than, in Newman’s words, just “checking a box” to meet regulatory requirements. Such work has led to NDN bringing cultural awareness training programs to individual companies, the Society of American Military Engineers, and even the U.S. Department of Defense. Her business incorporates elements of tribal water justice in a number of ways, including in projects that build coastal resilience and shoreline erosion protection.

Besides providing Native American sensitivity training to its clients, the company also helps businesses comply with the National Historic Preservation Act; offers ground-penetrating radar services; and helps with the identification, evaluation, and documentation of Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs), a designation by the National Park Service of important cultural resources and places. One recent example of the company’s work is when it was hired to provide consultation to the Caddo Nation Tribal Historic Preservation Officer on the , a hydroelectric initiative along the Sabine River in Texas and Louisiana. 

“This project involves working with the tribal communities that had once traveled through or settled along this man-made water body to help identify potential areas that need protection,” Newman says. “Protection meaning medicinal plants, artifacts or archaeological finds, and/or vegetation, such as the River Cane that has been utilized in ceremonies or traditional building materials.”&�Բ�����;The concern with such projects is to prevent damage by creating a management plan for the river authorities to follow. In Newman’s words, “We have been fortunate to help facilitate early conversations prior to any disturbances, and formulate a plan moving forward.”

Newman’s approach aligns with a growing method to include tribal representatives in the planning and management of construction projects. At Arizona State University, the annual Construction in Indian Country conference attracts students, faculty, and companies alike to recruit support from Arizona and New Mexico tribes.

The Ways Water Speaks

Whether advocating for clean drinking water on reservations contaminated by uranium extraction, or defending archaeological sites against construction that impacts local waterways, Indigenous communities are acutely aware of the need for water justice. Different models fit different approaches, depending on community values and the issue at hand. The Pueblo Action Alliance continues to focus on ancestral land issues, studying new legislation to evaluate its impact on water resources and then educating the Pueblo community to engage civically in the conversation. The NDN Companies, operating in the Southeast, where salt water intrusion is more of a concern than water scarcity, advocates for all tribes and interests across various sectors of the construction industry.

Both approaches draw attention to the unique ways in which tribes are impacted by extractive industries and infrastructure. They provide visibility to Indigenous peoples who have been stewards of ancestral landscapes, such as Chaco Canyon, since time immemorial. Most importantly, they challenge the historic norms of tribal consultation, giving voice to those who understand the sacredness of the tribes’ most precious resource.

This story has been supported by the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

The two of us have spent the past year protesting the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza, which is funded by the United States government. The day after the storm, as we surveyed the destruction all around us wrought by Hurricane Helene, we thought of the people of Gaza, whom the Israeli government has relentlessly bombed for the past year, destroying their homes, schools, markets, hospitals, places of worship, as well as crucial components of their water and food systems.��

We have always opposed the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza—one that began long before Oct. 7, 2023—but in observing the destruction in our own backyards and neighborhoods that day, we felt more committed than ever before to ensuring that our government stops sending the bombs that destroy life, land, and infrastructure in Palestine. In our grief, we committed to working toward the restoration of life from Asheville to Gaza.��

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. government has sent , including $3.8 billion from a supplemental appropriations act in April 2024. Meanwhile, a request from FEMA for an additional $9 billion for disaster relief efforts in the U.S. , a shortfall that limits recovery efforts in Western North Carolina and other areas hit by Hurricane Helene. The numbers tell the story: The U.S. government invests in death while neglecting the lives of people and our planet.

As Western North Carolina University professor Robert Clines wrote in in Mondoweiss: “The devastation from Hurricane Helene and Israel’s escalation in the Middle East may not seem connected. But they are linked through the United States’s commitment to mass militarization, imperial arrogance, exacerbation of climate change, and refusal to work toward a just global future.”

We and other Appalachian Jews are speaking up from the depths of climate devastation, demanding collective liberation now. Anti-Zionist Jews like us live in every corner of the United States and are essential activists and organizers in Southern struggles for environmental justice and collective liberation. Promoting Jewish safety means investing in life rather than death. It looks like fighting real antisemitism in communities that we love and protect, even when we’re cast out by pro-Zionist institutions, including our own religious congregations.

And that is why, on Oct. 6, 2024, we made the decision to still hold a tashlich action that we had been planning for months. Tashlich is a ritual that is part of the Jewish high holiday season and centers on atonement and repair. Out of necessity, we shifted the location from a riverfront park—as the riverbank was washed out and much of the surrounding area was coated in toxin-laden mud—to a bridge overlooking the French Broad River, a waterway so inundated by Hurricane Helene that its currents smashed buildings; carried away people, animals, and vehicles; and spread rocks and mud and trees on its banks for many miles.��

The two of us together and talked of teshuvah—repentance—contemplating how our country’s unwavering support for the Israeli apartheid regime makes all Americans complicit in the genocide of Palestinians. Rather than toss pebbles into the water, as is customary, we opted not to add to the debris lining the riverbed; instead, we placed them on the railing of the bridge, a choice that we later realized was reminiscent of the Jewish tradition of placing stones at gravesites to mark the occasion of visiting the deceased.��

In Asheville, we have begun the process of rebuilding from the hurricane. Gazans, on the other hand, cannot, because the Israeli military has not stopped dropping thousand-pound bombs on their land. that the Israeli military is even targeting aid workers—those who are instrumental to the process of survival. Between October and May, the Israeli military targeted at least eight convoys of aid workers. This is a horrid violation of international law and a devastating act of inhumanity.��

In mid-October, Israeli forces killed ��who were on their way to conduct repairs to Gaza’s water infrastructure, which is itself being destroyed by Israeli air strikes. Receiving news of such killings is always heartbreaking, but after spending the past three weeks contributing to here in Western North Carolina (along with other community-led efforts being coordinated by the and networks), a story like this hits even harder, as we imagine the horror of doing this already-challenging work of delivering aid and humanitarian efforts while under constant threat of state violence.

As we continue to rebuild and heal here in Western North Carolina, we recognize that the destruction we face is a fraction of what the people of Gaza endure daily. While we recover from a single storm, Gazans endure an unrelenting succession of human-made storms being driven by a genocidal war campaign, even as the people working toward recovery and crisis response are themselves being targeted as enemies in this war. 

We will continue to demand that our government stop funding the Israeli military, and to instead spend our tax dollars on repairing harms in Gaza, Asheville, and everywhere there is human suffering. 

After the internship is over, many parents are not entirely comfortable with their child announcing that they want to pursue an environmental career, thinking: Is that good and stable enough? Can you make enough money doing that? We need to send out the word that careers in natural resource management can be added to the list of good stable jobs. For too long, federal land management agencies were focused on one demographic: middle-class White males. But now those long-time White male rangers are retiring. The National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and other federal land management agencies are discovering all of this hidden talent among young people they never before considered. Of late, we have set our sights on another lily-white corner of the environmental world: the outdoor retailer industry. These companies have long been connected to federal land management agencies because they provide gear that outdoor enthusiasts and workers need when toiling outside in all kinds of conditions. If you look around at the workforce of these companies, you see the same homogeneity that plagued the federal agencies. Their demographics were a perfect mirror of each other, except one was private and one was public.

The retailers are driven by an added incentive that doesn’t enter into the federal agency picture: the profit motive. They are eager to sell their wares to large and growing demographics that they hadn’t yet connected with, namely communities of color. But it seems they hadn’t realized that if they wanted to sell to these communities, perhaps it might be helpful to employ some of their members. At least that’s me giving them the benefit of the doubt. It seems they hadn’t yet made this connection, though it’s always possible that they just weren’t interested in hiring members of these communities. I have to admit I am still stunned by how overwhelmingly White these companies are at this rather late date, closing in on 2020. We have been in discussions with their representatives about creating internships to include young people of color. Progress has been slow but steady. Some companies that are new to the scene, like Wylder Goods, inherently get it. Other more established ones, like The North Face, are starting to understand the economic and social benefits of diversity and inclusivity. It’s fascinating, because if you polled the executives from this industry, a vast majority of them would probably consider themselves to be politically liberal and aware. To use a popular term, they might consider themselves woke. But somehow they forgot to apply that liberalism to their workforce. I had an extremely unsettling experience when I attended a retreat for the Trust for Public Land out in Sonoma County, California. One early morning, a colleague and I decided to take a walk. In an attempt to get some exercise, we were briskly walking down the street from our hotel, enjoying the lovely surroundings, deep in conversation about our personal lives and our families. Out of nowhere, a white woman drove by in a Ford Element SUV (orange; I will never forget that color) and shouted, “Go home!” I was stunned. Napa Valley’s beauty instantly turned ugly and sinister. When I got back to the retreat and reported what had happened, my co-workers were somewhat surprised. But I needed to get out of there. I called my husband immediately because the plan was for him to meet me in Napa Valley for a mini-vacation. However, I wanted no part of the place, so I packed my bags and within a couple of hours was headed to the airport to fly back to Atlanta. I later told my colleagues that they need to think very hard about the kinds of places we go for our retreats in the future—and of course this area in Sonoma County should be snatched off the list immediately. Their response? Blah, blah, blah. A lot of lip service. But the point is that they now needed to start considering such issues so that someone like me could be as comfortable as they were. I know this part of the story gets really complicated. See, the trust has a great mission of conserving land for the public. In fact, I am appreciative of the trust, because I found them after working for the government, which I knew was not the answer for me. The national NGO really gave me my wings and perspective, and I will always be thankful. However, working for them and other environmental NGOs also emphasized the incredible polarity that exists in the conservation world. Particularly, I got a certain understanding of the White liberal world. Whenever things would get racially uncomfortable at the workplace, it would often be written off as an exaggerated aberration: “Surely you misunderstood his/her intention…” or “Let’s not lose sight of the issue at hand.”

I wanted to make sure that no young brown person in the future with an interest in an environmental field had to exist in this disconnected workplace.

It was very frustrating navigating the workplace environment because I knew race was always something people did not want to discuss. But, how could we ever move beyond the discomfort if no one was willing to talk about it? My most hated phrase was “Angelou, I don’t even see color—we all look the same.” Really? In short, I knew I needed to leave this work world so that I could actually breathe. Most importantly, I wanted to make sure that no young Brown person in the future with an interest in an environmental field had to exist in this disconnected workplace. But I know I can’t present an angry face to the world. I’ve spent too many years of my adult life observing the peril that angry Black women encounter in professional spaces. Often we encounter the same peril whether we’re angry or not. I can be literally melting inside from the angry heat I’m feeling, but I know I must keep it hidden. They don’t want to see Angry Angelou. She won’t help anybody. I know I have to present Smiling Angelou. She makes big moves. I can’t say to them, “You know what? It’s 2017 and everyone in this room is White! You don’t see a problem with that?” Even if I’m thinking that, it has to come out like this: “I understand that you looked up and realized you weren’t being as intentional about diversity as you needed to be and about having other perspectives around the table. OK, so let me help you be more representative of the world we all live in.” It reminds me of scenes from the television show Black-ish with Anthony Anderson and Tracee Ellis Ross. They do a great job of depicting the comfort that White characters have around each other at the advertising agency where Anthony’s character works—and the unease they have talking about anything related to race. It might be comedy, but for many African-Americans who work around White people, unfortunately those scenes are all too real. That’s what drives many of us out of corporate America and turns us into entrepreneurs—exhaustion, frustration, resignation. I was proud when a group of Greening Youth Foundation interns learned very early that they didn’t necessarily need corporate America. We had trained these young adults in our Urban Youth Corps to work in urban agriculture and landscape management, but when they finished the program, they couldn’t get jobs. Although this demographic was receiving incredible training and certifications in various areas, not many sectors had actual jobs waiting for them. So, in many cases, these young adults didn’t stop there; they created their own businesses. They said, “We have the skill set now, so why are we waiting to get hired?” There are reams of data showing that entrepreneurship among African-American women is flying off the charts. This feeling of us not being included or accepted is giving birth to wonderful new businesses. This excerpt is from Engage, Connect, Protect: Empowering Diverse Youth as Environmental Leaders by Angelou Ezeilo with Nick Chiles, forthcoming from , November 2019. It appears by permission of the author and publisher.

Western agronomists would have us believe that Triqui farming practices are irrelevant today.

I tried to convince Martinez that our farms had a lot in common. “Like you, we have marginal mountain soils and steep slopes, and we’ve worked for years to build up the fertility,” I explained.

Martinez finished his simple breakfast of fresh corn tortillas with black beans. Then he rose, donned his baseball cap and undersized school backpack, and took me out to see the land he cultivates. I quickly came to understand that my idea of “marginal soils” and “steep slopes” were naive, if not laughable. It was the height of the dry season and Martinez’s land was hard, brittle, and gray. The farm was literally etched into the mountainside, with a slope so severe that plowing with tractors or animals was impossible. Yet his storage room was full of maize, beans, dried chili, squash seeds, and fresh fruit that he’d grown right here.

When I asked how this was possible, Martinez explained that he simply farmed in the manner of his ancestors, the indigenous Triqui people.

Western agronomists would have us believe that Triqui farming practices are irrelevant today, but I thought they might be part of the solution to the nascent global food crisis. I spent the first half of 2015 in southern Mexico on a Fulbright fellowship to exchange ideas with indigenous farmers like Martinez on how get long-term high yields out of difficult farmland. I was fed up with our society’s obsession with corporate, industrial agriculture, which is flooding vulnerable communities with unhealthy food, destroying natural resources, and undermining the independent family farm.

What I learned gave me hope.

According to a by my favorite think tank, the World Resources Institute, the first thing to know about the impending food crisis is that the human population is expected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050. That’s a 37 percent increase from 2012, when it reached 7 billion. Even imagining massive redistribution of food resources, the world will need to produce 69 percent more calories by 2050 to feed all those people.

But agriculture already accounts for a nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions and 70 percent of freshwater use globally. So if we simply increased the scale of what we’re doing now, the ecological effects would be catastrophic. The report goes on to describe a “menu of solutions” that farmers can follow in the future to grow more food without using additional land, water, and fuel.

I had a hunch that rural farmers in Mexico were already modeling some of these practices and not being credited. While it was difficult to leave behind the daily responsibilities of tending the land, I knew that only grassroots farmer-to-farmer exchange could solve the world’s food crisis. So, with my husband and children at my side, I left behind our farm in New York and traversed the windy mountain roads of Oaxaca to trade ideas on how to feed our communities with dignity and take care of the earth at the same time.

What I learned gave me hope. Here are three items from WRI’s list of solutions that the farmers I met are already doing—and one that isn’t on their list but probably should be.

1. Farm like a forest

Not accounting for land covered by water, desert, or ice, about half of the planet is dedicated to pasture and croplands, according to WRI’s study. And the continued expansion of agricultural land is driving biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, an increase in “cropping intensity” could avert the need to clear an additional 62 million hectares for crops by 2050. That’s an area about the size of France. In other words, farmers need to start growing different plants one after another on the same land, as well as growing them closer together at the same time, a practice known as intercropping.

Planting different crops together minimizes soil erosion.

Oswaldo Flores, a Zapotec indigenous man from the village of Yaviche, explained how his community uses intercropping and agroforestry to grow more food without expanding into new lands.

“The forest pulls clouds from the sky so that they drop rain on the fields below,” Flores said, while showing me his shade-grown coffee farm.

The farm is a cafetal, a shady, multistory system with tall, purple-podded guajinicuiles and fruit trees forming the upper layer, coffee trees at the intermediate layer, and smaller food plants and vines (chiles, chives, chayotes) near the ground. The trees protect the plants below from high winds and cold temperatures, and their fallen leaves provide a natural compost that inhibits weed growth, adds fertility, and retains soil humidity. Guajinicuiles also fix nitrogen, making it available in organic form in the soil. This system of shade-grown coffee is almost equal to the native forest in terms of biodiversity, and maintains habitat for migratory birds.

At the edge of Flores’ cafetal, the vegetation transitioned to another complex and even more ancient intercropping system. The milpa is a Mesoamerican technology that integrates maize, beans, squash and other complementary food crops. While estimates of its age differ, it is at least 3,000 years old. The intercropped milpa system is multilayered, with maize in the upper canopy, beans in the intermediate story, and squash at the bottom. Bean plants fix atmospheric nitrogen and help reduce damage caused by the corn earworm pest (Helicoverpa sea). Squash plants inhibit weed growth with their dense network of thick, broad leaves and retain soil humidity. Natural chemicals (cucurbitacins) washed from the leaf surface act as a mild herbicide and pesticide.

Planting different crops together minimizes soil erosion because their roots form a dense network that holds soil in place. This system also tends to be very efficient, squeezing the maximum value out of every drop of water, ray of sunlight, and bit of nutrients in the soil. According to studies using the Land Equivalency Ratio—a way of measuring the productivity of agricultural land—intercropped fields often yield 40 to 50 percent more than monocropped ones.

H. Garrison Wilkes, professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, calls milpa “one of the most successful human inventions ever created.”

2. Eat low on the food chain

Aside from the detrimental health effects of getting our protein from animal products, it’s also highly inefficient. Poultry is the most efficient conventional source of meat, and still only converts 11 percent of its feed energy into human food. Beef cows convert only 1 percent and are major contributors of greenhouse gases. Shifting toward plant and insect-based protein sources is part of the sustainable food solution.

Amaranth is making a comeback in Brisa’s town.

“You have never tried chicatanas?” challenged Brisa Ochoa, as she served our family a salsa made of mashed ants in her hometown of Ayoquezco. During the first spring rains, the chicatana ant leaves its nest, only to be captured by eager residents who prize its sweet and tangy flavor. Mexico has 300 to 550 species of edible insects, more than any other country in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Among the most popular in Oaxaca are grasshoppers known as chapulines, served roasted and flavored with lime and chili, and maguey worms, served ground up and incorporated into a spicy salt. Insect protein takes some getting used to, but it’s healthier and more environmentally sustainable than livestock, boasting a feed conversion ratio of more than 50 percent.

While insect protein is important in rural Mexico, it mainly serves as flavoring for plant-based protein sources. Brisa served her salsa with beans on a fresh, warm corn tortilla resulting from an ancient process called nixtamalization. She used limestone and hot water to remove the hull from the maize, then ground up the kernels into the dough for tortillas.

Nixtamalization makes the protein in maize more bioavailable to the human body and increases its niacin content. When combined with beans, the nixtamalized corn offers a complete protein.

Brisa’s family also grows amaranth, a native Mesoamerican grain that has been cultivated in Mexico for at least 6,000 years. Nearly eradicated by the conquering Spaniards who feared its role in traditional religion, amaranth is making a comeback in Brisa’s town, thanks to her family’s breeding and sharing its seeds. Up until this trip to Mexico, I had only experienced amaranth as a “weed” invading my neat beds of vegetables and didn’t realize that its seeds are 13 to 15 percent protein, among the highest for any grain. Amaranth is also high in fiber, calcium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, zinc, folate, and vitamins A and C. Like beans, amaranth can be combined with maize to form a complete protein.

Brisa’s family does eat chicken, beef, and pork, but usually only on special occasions. Plant and insect protein are the basis of their healthful, affordable, and sustainable diet.

3. Restore health to damaged land

Cropland can expand at low environmental cost if the encroached lands do not have much natural potential to store carbon or support biodiversity. The arid Mixteca region of Oaxaca meets these criteria and has been termed an “ecological disaster zone” by the World Bank. Soil erosion and depletion has damaged about one million acres of cropland, and corn productivity rates have plummeted to the lowest in Mexico.

León Santos says he has seen yields increase fourfold.

Jesús León Santos, sustainable agriculture coordinator at CEDICAM, an indigenous farming organization in the Mixteca, blames Green Revolution farming technology for the environmental destruction. The Green Revolution of the 1960s was an U.S.-led international effort to push adoption of farm mechanization, hybrid seeds, and chemical fertilizers in order to increase yields.

León Santos is working to revive and enhance indigenous farming wisdom in order to restore the health of the soil and the productivity of the land.

The first step for León Santos and his farming community was to build trenches, stone walls, and terraces to stop the erosion of the remaining soils and to slow water runoff so aquifers can recharge. He stabilized these barriers with tenacious local vegetation, such as the sweet-smelling vetiver grass, which withstands drought, flooding, and mudslides.

Once stabilized, the barren hillsides were reforested with native tree species, like nitrogen-fixing alders (Alnus acumilata) and pines (Pinus oaxacana). The CEDICAM community saves its own native crop seed, using an in-the-field selection process that has persisted regionally since the pre-Columbian era. They preserve and exchange the best seeds of maize, beans, squash, chile, tomatillo, chayote, squash, sunflower, and prickly pear, as well as local specialties like cempoalxochitl, quintoniles, and huauzontle.

The farmers further improve the soil by planting and tilling in “cover crops,” which add nutrients and organic matter. Some native varieties are especially good for this, like the “frijol nescafe,” ( Mucuna deeringiana) a nitrogen-fixing bean that thrives in dry soil. Finally, farmers add compost and plant debris so that the land is finally ready to receive these carefully maintained crop seeds.

The use of erosion control barriers, intercropping, and seed saving are part of the knowledge León Santos inherited from his Zapotec ancestors. And it’s working. León Santos says he has seen yields increase fourfold after incorporating these ancient and modern sustainable growing techniques. The newly established vegetation sequesters atmospheric carbon and attracts biodiversity.

The art of transforming lands of low ecological productivity into thriving foodscapes is not unique to the Mixteca. León Santos reminded me that the Aztec Empire sustained itself on chinampas, intricate gardens built of vegetation and river muck, essentially artificial islands constructed in shallow lakes. Chinampas are widely considered the most productive form of agriculture ever invented, and are so fertile that they can yield four to seven harvests per year. Indigenous Mexicans have long-standing successes in positive ecological transformation.

4. Cultivate reverence for the planet

One essential element missing from the World Resource Institute’s otherwise thorough and brilliant “menu of solutions” for the global food crisis was the ethical perspective that co-evolved with best practices in environmental management. This ethic, known as convivencia, or “living together” with both our human and natural communities, is best summarized by Kiado Cruz, a Zapotec farmer from the Oaxacan town of Yagavila:

The ground beneath our feet is our Mother Nature, who has carried us and sustains us. As we work her, we do not profane her, rather we carry out our task as farmers in the context of the sacred. It is corn through which Mother Nature nourishes us. It is flesh of our flesh, because we are people of corn. So we have to collect it in a manner that shows the respect we owe both our soil and our brother corn.

It is with a similar sense of belonging and reverence that I placed corn seeds into our home soil upon return, establishing Soul Fire Farm’s first milpa, an ancient and intricate tangle of complementary sister crops bringing us one small step closer to a sustainable food future.

Today, the nonprofit Green America is trying to bring back victory gardens as a way to fight climate change.

That’s according to Jillian Semaan, food campaigns director at Green America, who added that the organization wants “to allow people to understand shifting garden practices towards regenerative agriculture and what it means for reversing climate change and sequestering carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it back into the soil.”

The organization is doing that through an educational video and a mapping project. Recently, more than 900 people added their gardens or farms to the Climate Victory Garden map that tracks U.S. agricultural activities that use regenerative practices.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change —and —that carbon sequestration accounts for a large portion of global agricultural mitigation potential. Globally, , according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. But a movement called regenerative agriculture is pushing for farming practices that improve, conserve, and build up soil (and soil carbon). Experts say that practices that increase soil carbon—known as carbon farming—.

Over the next two years, Green America plans to educate people on the benefits of regenerative agriculture through its Climate Victory Gardens campaign. It is producing videos that will explain regenerative practices, and staff members will attend conferences to encourage gardeners and farmers to join the movement. By 2020, it hopes to have at least 5,000 gardens and farms on its map.

In its recently released campaign video, Green America describes five ways to make “climate victory gardens” using regenerative practices—such as ditching chemicals, covering soil, and encouraging biodiversity.

In addition to helping reverse climate change, regenerative practices also produce .

“Soil health is so powerful, and we as a society, we as a people, need to understand what we’re putting in our bodies, and it all starts with the soil,” Semaan said. “It all starts with what we are about to eat, but we can’t have healthy food if we do not have healthy soil.”

This article was funded in part by a grant from the Surdna Foundation. 

Note: Green America’s president and CEO, Alisa Gravitz, is on the è������! Media board of directors.

In the case of the Tonawanda Seneca and the WNY STAMP (Western New York Science & Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park), you’d be wrong.��

WATCH: Robin Wall Kimmerer on why Indigenous communities oppose STAMP

I recently had the privilege of walking through the Big Woods with Tonawanda Seneca Nation citizens and fellow scientists, under a towering canopy of immense oaks, maples, and basswoods. On that lush summer day, thrushes, thrashers, and rare warblers sang above us as we traipsed through ferny glades, the earth soft with centuries of leaf fall and carpeted with wildflowers, more diverse than I’ve seen in many years of botanizing. So rich is this territory that Chief Kevin Jonathan calls it “one of the most important hunting and gathering areas for the entire Haudenosaunee Confederacy.”&�Բ�����;

Signs of wildlife were everywhere, and the deer eyed us warily as if to ask, “What kind of human are you?” That’s a good question. At night, the air rings with peepers calling, toads trilling, and the soft, low hoot of endangered short-eared owls. Listen hard and you might hear the ceremonial songs from the longhouse, songs of gratitude for the land that has cared for the Seneca people since time immemorial. 

“This land is our way of life,” said Chief Roger Hill as we waded into a clear, bright stream. “It is everything to our people; it’s all we have left.” Today, these precious lands are threatened, and both state and federal agencies are complicit in the destruction. When we walked through this old-growth forest to the edge of the reservation, the trees ended abruptly, and we were greeted by the looming presence of enormous reactor domes for the manufacture of hydrogen fuel. 

Bulldozers—subsidized by your tax dollars—are revving their engines and spewing stink into the flower-fragrant air to construct a proposed industrial park that could destroy it all. New York state has thousands of acres of industrial wastelands and abandoned developments that would be highly suitable for such a project. But instead the WNY STAMP project in Genesee County is being sited right on the border of the Tonawanda’s pristine Big Woods. While there is just one fully confirmed tenant so far, others may include distribution warehouses and industrial manufacturers. 

STAMP has been referred to as “land development,” but the more accurate term is “habitat destruction”—in one of the last unbroken landscapes in western New York. Yet STAMP is proposed in the heart of one of New York state’s most important conservation landscapes, surrounded by species-rich, federally and state-protected wildlife areas, including the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the Big Woods. Biological surveys, in addition to Indigenous knowledge, have revealed that the Big Woods is home to threatened species as well as a threatened culture. 

What kind of human thinks building a mega-industrial site here is a good idea? Many citizens of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation rely on the Big Woods for subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering of traditional medicines. It is a place where traditional lifeways are passed from generation to generation. The Seneca have been caring for this place in an unbroken line from before written history, in the face of uncountable threats from settler society. Today, families are fed from this beloved landscape, which keeps an ancient culture thriving. It is heart-wrenching to consider the irreparable cultural harm of building an industrial park on the Big Woods border. 

Chief Jonathan stated that if this project goes forward “we’ll have irreversible damage to our way of life.” Habitat destruction and environmental degradation related to industrial development at STAMP proceed step-by-step with the issuance of required government permits. This spring, United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) officials courageously admitted they had failed to consult with the Tonawanda, as required by law, before granting a permit for a pipeline through the Refuge for STAMP’s industrial wastewater. The agency ordered consultation with the Nation and an assessment of the environmental and cultural impacts of the STAMP pipeline project. 

This seeming victory for land and people was, however, short-lived. Days later, in a stunning reversal, USFWS overturned their own ruling, and in mid-July, heavy equipment rolled through ancestral Seneca territory to the edge of the Refuge and gouged into the earth as drilling for the wastewater pipeline began. 

Now, the Nation has learned that pipeline drilling caused a spill of hydraulic fracking fluid within the Refuge in mid-August, just days into construction. Incredibly, while this spill was reported to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), construction activities were allowed to continue. Another spill occurred in early September, at the same time that sinkholes began to appear along the pipeline route. The Nation was not notified of either spill until the local media reported on them. 

“If this construction continues, it would be an immense injustice to Mother Earth,” says Subchief Scott Logan, one of many Nation leaders and citizens who have spoken out in opposition to STAMP as a violation of their sovereign rights and their cultural covenant to care for the land. Construction activities have been temporarily halted within the Refuge and Orleans County, due not only to the spills and sinkholes but also to a temporary restraining order issued by a state court in a lawsuit filed by Orleans County, where the STAMP developer hopes to discharge the wastewater. 

This temporary pause is not enough. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation has demanded that the USFWS withdraw the right-of-way permit and conduct consultation and a full environmental review. To date, the USFWS has refused to do so. State and federal programs trumpet their commitment to “environmental justice” but fail to protect these traditional Haudenosaunee people and the remnants of their precious homelands. Officials with the power to temper this assault on the Tonawanda’s territory, culture, and environment instead fall in line to promote the steady march of industrialization and environmental destruction. 

What kind of leaders are they, and what kind of citizens are we? Will we perpetuate the shameful practices of the colonialist past—or take a stand for justice at last? Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and NYSDEC Commissioner Basil Seggos: Will you use your courage to reshape this age-old narrative of unjust taking from Indigenous nations? If the state and federal governments truly stand behind their commitments to environmental justice, then we should —for the Big Woods, and for Indigenous land justice.

“I’m really surprised so many people had reports today,” says the National Weather Service meteorologist based in Boulder, Colorado. “This is their most important observation—maybe of their whole time volunteering—and so they want to get it right.”

At 7 a.m. on Oct. 10, in the chaotic hours after the swept ashore, one citizen scientist in Daytona Beach Shores reported 15.8 inches of rain. Another near Lake Helen clocked 15.37 inches for a similar 24-hour period, and added in the notes section: “Lots of tree limbs down. Some roads are flooded due to lakes overflowing their banks.”

Observations like these are added to an internet database at 7 a.m. each day by volunteers with the nationwide Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network, or CoCoRaHS. The observations from 26,500 stations across the country contribute to National Weather Service flood warnings that may save lives by accounting for the variability of how much rain fell and where. Radar and satellites are not sophisticated enough to provide such down-to-the-backyard estimates.

In one such alert, for the St. Johns River in Florida’s Seminole County, forecasters more than an hour’s drive away, in the city of Melbourne, added CoCoRaHS rainfall totals to other on-the-ground observations, radar data, and river models. They estimated that runoff from Milton could cause the river to rise to 10.2 feet by the night of Oct. 14.

“The river is forecast to reach Minor Flood Stage later tonight, and will continue to climb through Moderate Flood, reaching Major Flood Stage later this weekend,” reads the alert Gimmestad pulls up on his screen. It cautioned many roads were “impassable, limiting access to homes.”

CoCoRaHS reports also help forecasters provide tornado, hail, fire, and other weather-related warnings in real time by allowing participants to log storm notes in the network’s computer system any time of day.

These observations—which provide input in up to half of such warnings—get routed to the nearest National Weather Service station, where they ring alarm bells. Meteorologists use them to caution people to take shelter or evacuate. Scientists also use CoCoRaHS data after storms have passed to refine computer models to better reflect precipitation variability.

Such life-saving weather data are vital as the United States suffered 28 climate and weather disasters each—the most such events ever recorded in a year. Storm warnings will become all the more important as a warmer atmosphere traps more moisture—leading to more recurrent and intense rainfall.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 calls for a breakup of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which houses the National Weather Service, saying that these federal agencies push climate propaganda. But shutting down these essential services could stymie the ability of forecasters to issue comprehensive weather warnings and protect people at risk during climate disasters. 

As the presidential election looms and global warming intensifies, CoCoRaHS precipitation records, which account for two-thirds of the observational data collected by federal agencies on how much it rained or snowed, are becoming even more indispensable. 

“It’s a huge value,” he adds. “Radar is really good at capturing the pattern, and CoCoRaHS observations give us the amounts, and so we put those together and it gives us a really nice map of how much it rained, hailed, or snowed.”&�Բ�����;

The Critical Role of Data Collection

Altogether, CoCoRaHS’s stations span all 50 states, Canada, the Bahamas, and several U.S. territories. The network comprises about 75 million measurements and growing. 

The effort emerged in the wake of a deadly 1998 flash flood in Fort Collins, Colorado, that caught many people by surprise. The network is now one among hundreds of citizen science projects nationwide whose data are helping researchers, identify, and catalog.

“CoCoRaHS changed the way we do weather forecasting,” says Ellen McCallie, program director in the Directorate for STEM Education at the U.S. National Science Foundation. The consistency and reliability of the data are helping improve National Weather Service precipitation predictions, she adds.

After CoCoRaHS volunteers watch a training video, they are assigned a station number. They install a National Weather Service–approved cylindrical plastic rain gauge, from which they measure precipitation and record the data online.

Network coordinators, who often work for state climate offices, urge volunteers to collect readings each morning, even if there’s no precipitation. These data are immediately visible on weather service maps. Each station is represented by a dot whose color reflects the amount of precipitation—red for more, blue for less. 

In addition to the vast public benefit CoCoRaHS provides, the citizen scientists who are the backbone of the network say they benefit personally from the work, too.

“It’s something to do every day at 7 a.m.,” says Noah Newman, the program’s education and outreach coordinator. “One volunteer working their way through Alcoholics Anonymous got their five-year [sobriety] chip thanks to CoCoRaHS, because they said no to going to the bars so they could get up to read their rain gauge.”&�Բ�����;        

Retired Montana State University scientist and faculty member Bill Locke recounted in an email how recording daily precipitation in the CoCoRaHS database has helped him cope with his depression in the 11 years since he signed on to be a part of the network. 

“From now until March I need to pull on Bean boots, a headlamp, and appropriate attire to trek to my gauge,” he wrote, adding that the plastic cylinder is about 82 feet away from his Montana home. In the winter, these duties often involve measuring and collecting snow from a board on the ground and swapping cylinders if the existing one is full. “It’s tough to go back to bed after all that!”

A People’s Climate Record

The CoCoRaHS network ������’t the only example of how citizen scientists contribute to the nation’s climate record. Federal agencies also rely on about 8,700 people who volunteer with the 134-year-old , or COOP.

These citizens collect temperature and precipitation data daily from National Weather Service equipment, and then report it electronically to the service. This on-the-ground grassroots system is smaller and not as geographically diverse as CoCoRaHS, says meteorologist Gimmestad.

“Instead of having official weather reporting stations that are 30 or 40 miles apart—so we might have one per county—with CoCoRaHS, we might have 10 or 50 stations in the county,” he says. “This way, we don’t have to use one point to represent a huge area, and so we know how rainfall was distributed around that county.”

Data from CoCoRaHS and COOP—together with observations from at the nation’s airports—account for about 80% of the precipitation numbers that federal scientists use to compile what’s known as the—a catalog of temperature and precipitation averages from 1991 to 2020. The 30-year retrospective is vital for the health of the nation’s economy because it’s a go-to resource for businesses. 

“The construction industry wants to know how many rainy days there will be at a location in which they are putting in a bid—and to learn how to design air conditioning and heating for buildings,” says Michael Palecki, the lead scientist on the project at the National Centers for Environmental Information. “People want to know what the weather is going to be like where they are looking to move, and, of course, agriculture is one of our biggest users.”

Tracking Hurricane Helene

Some 11 CoCoRaHS volunteers work in Palecki’s office in Asheville, North Carolina. The physical scientist, who had to remove a few trees from his property following Hurricane Helene, recounts how the region spent two weeks without power and remains without drinkable tap water.

When the air conditioning went down in the National Centers for Environmental Information’s computer room—a vast repository of weather data—temperatures soared to 120 degrees, requiring officials to shut down the system and delaying the publication of weather-related information nationwide.

The life-saving value of volunteer precipitation data was also evident in North Carolina as hardy CoCoRaHS participants tugged on rain gear to collect rainfall totals from their plastic gauges in the face of Helene’s “.”

One wrote in observation notes from Flat Springs on Sept. 28: “Absolutely catastrophic impacts from flooding, landslides, and high winds. Major roads impassable. Neighboring fire department … completely carried away by Elk River.”

The North Carolina State Climate Office relied in part on CoCoRaHS observations to determine where, and how much, rain fell. Four network volunteers in the western part of the state recorded totals from : 24.12 inches in Spruce Pine, 22.36 inches in Foscoe, and about 22 inches each at stations south of Black Mountain and Hendersonville.

Using a federal weather that categorizes the likelihood of extreme storm events, state weather officials rainfall produced by Helene likely qualifies it as a one-in-1,000-year storm.

“Yet another event of this magnitude within the state offers even more evidence that our climate is changing, and in extreme ways,” wrote Corey Davis, an assistant state climatologist, in an online summary of Helene’s formation and impacts.

Davis continued: “The rapid intensification of Helene over the Gulf, the amount of moisture available in its surrounding environment, and its manifestation as locally heavy—and in some cases, historically unheard of—rainfall amounts are all known side effects of a warmer atmosphere.”

The National Weather Service is currently updating this atlas, and in doing so, is relying “very extensively” on extreme precipitation data recorded by CoCoRaHS volunteers to determine where heavy rainfall was distributed over time, Palecki says.  

Understanding Science in Daily Life

One volunteer whose data will likely be reflected in this record is Matt Kelsch, a hydrometeorologist in Colorado who is also the Boulder County coordinator for CoCoRaHS. Kelsch has collected precipitation data for the network—or asked a house sitter to do it—without missing a day since June 2001.

His plastic rain gauge sits in his expansive backyard near his garden, which, on Oct. 10, is bone dry.

But it’s not always this way. Kelsch, who has an encyclopedic memory for notable water-related weather events, says the wettest year he recorded was 2013, when about 34 inches fell. And one of the “most impressive spells of snow” occurred in 2006, with 26 inches around Dec. 21, then 14 inches a week later, and 11 more inches seven days after that. 

For Kelsch, the value of CoCoRaHS lies in its ability to teach people of all ages to tune into the variability of precipitation in their own neighborhoods. Volunteering helps participants “improve their skills at estimating how much rain is falling,” he says.

“They can see when the storm is analyzed how much rain fell—their report was one of the dots that was used,” he adds. “CoCoRaHS, even though it’s simple, connects people with the science.”

“T������’s more to community resilience than the physical protection of properties,” Owens, who works with Louisiana’s state folklife program, told Grist.��

Radical change is already occurring. Louisiana’s coast is slowly being swallowed by the sea; the Southwest is drying out; Appalachia’s transition from coal has been no less disruptive than a recent battery of floods and storms. These crises, which are unfolding nationwide, interrupt not only infrastructure, but the rituals and remembrances that make up daily life.

The study of those rituals and remembrances may seem like an esoteric discipline, one relegated to exploring quaint superstitions of the past, or documenting old men in overalls playing homemade instruments. It’s true that those who study and preserve folklore don’t concern themselves with high art—that is, the sort of thing supported by networks of patronage and philanthropy and gallery exhibitions. Their mission is to record the culture of ordinary people: us. Our jokes, our songs, our spiritual practices, our celebrations, our recipes. Such things are the glue that holds society together, and as the climate changes our ways of life, Owens and her peers say, it’s important to pay attention to how culture adjusts.��

Doing that goes beyond the practical question of how people will carry their heritage into a world reshaped by climate change. It requires looking to tradition-bearers—the people within a community who are preserving its customs, songs, and stories and passing them on—for clues to how best to navigate this tumultuous time without losing generations of knowledge. In that way, folklorists across the country increasingly strive to help communities adapt to a new reality, understand how tradition shifts in times of crisis, and even inform climate policy. Folklore doesn’t seem like it would teach us how to adapt to a warming world, but even as it looks over our collective shoulder at the past, it can prepare us for a future that is in many ways already here.

In the coal towns of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, Emily Hilliard has written extensively on this idea, which she calls visionary folklore. She looks for ways to sustain culture as those who practice it experience incredible change so that they might “send traditions on to the future.” As climate disaster threatens to wipe away entire towns and ways of life—both literally, in the case of the communities lost to the floods that ravaged Kentucky in 2022, and figuratively through the loss of archives and museums to those inundations—she considers this continuity an essential part of retaining a sense of place and identity, two intangible feelings that help give life meaning.��

“Folklorists can help communities pass on these traditions,” she said.

Hilliard is a former West Virginia state folklorist who has, among other things, collected oral histories, songs, artwork, and legends for the West Virginia Folklife Program. It’s impossible to talk about climate in Appalachia without talking about coal, and the communities she has documented have a gnarled and thorny relationship with that industry, which has both sustained them and helped create the climate impacts they’re left to grapple with. 

People, Hilliard said, face a grave risk in “the way that climate disaster breaks up communities, so that communities may no longer be able to share food and music traditions.” Visionary folklore is, in part, about trying to restore, replace, and sustain these things, while finding ways to bulwark and adapt traditions for an uncertain future.

Climate change, like the coal industry that fostered it, threatens to rewrite some of the region’s cultural memory. Hilliard recalls members of the Scotts Run Museum in Osage, West Virginia, a place where town elders regularly play music, tell stories, and share meals, talking of rising floodwaters threatening their community gathering spaces. She sees collaboration with communities to preserve these important community resources as part of her life’s work.

As she strives to help communities sustain old traditions, Hilliard sees new ones emerging as coping strategies for a world in which foundations are shifting. As floods have repeatedly swept through Appalachia, she has seen communities come together to repair and replace family quilts, musical instruments, and other heirlooms and keepsakes, some of which were painstakingly crafted by hand and many of which have been handed down through generations. Community members in Scotts Run established “repair cafes” where people with various skills helped neighbors recover. Coal company towns’ often hardscrabble existence made such expertise necessary, and in an era of looming environmental destruction, those knowledge pathways allow people to simultaneously come together to grieve and to begin to rebuild their community. Such things are not limited to Appalachia, of course.

“T������ may exist beneficial practices and adaptations to crises within our historical and current practices,” said Kimi Eisele, a folklorist with the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona. Eisele, who is beginning a folklife project focused on climate change, manages Borderlore, a journal operated by the Southwest Folklife Alliance. It recently received a $150,000 grant to collect oral histories that amplify the environmental history and future of the Southwest through the eyes of Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and other historically excluded people.

In southern Arizona, where Eisele lives and works, triple-digit temperatures, aridity, and groundwater depletion present a dire threat to agriculture and even long-term human settlement. Many of the interviews Eisele and others have collected focus on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous traditions and how those traditions are changing. The Tohono O’odham, whose ancestral land is divided by the border with Mexico, have, for example, long relied on willow for basket-weaving, but as farms and groundwater diversion have lowered the water table, willows have dried up and died. Basket-weavers now use the hardier yucca plant. Climate change is also causing traditional adobe homes to crack and decay; Native architects are working to shore them up and explore how modern technology can preserve them, even as the structures provide a model for building cooler, more energy-efficient homes.��

The interviews describe adaptations made over millennia that still work—mind-boggling, perhaps, to a society that has managed to nearly deplete its resources in just a few hundred years. The Hopi, Tohono O’odham, Diné, and other peoples have weathered climate fluctuations, droughts, floods, and famine in the tens of thousands of years they’ve lived in the Southwest. Hopi farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson, who raises corn, believes that heritage provides essential tools for adapting to the climate crisis. He is working to ensure others learn to use them.

“As Hopis, we adjust to these environmental fluctuations,” Johnson told Eisele in an interview for the Climate Lore oral history series. “It’s part of our faith.” Even if this period of climate crisis is unprecedented and unpredictable, Johnson says, he feels prepared to bear it out.

Johnson is a dryland farmer, meaning he uses traditional farming methods that don’t require��irrigation. He relies on the annual monsoon to water his fields, and on what he knows of the land to prepare for the season ahead. In 2018, for example, he realized early on that a drought was intensifying because “biological indicators that usually appear in April weren’t there,” he told Eisele. “Plants weren’t greening up, so we knew the soil moisture wasn’t going to be there.” In response, he and other Hopi farmers planted only a quarter of their usual crop to avoid depleting the soil. What he describes as “bumper” years can take communities through leaner times—if everyone is careful and pays attention.��

“We’ve had a system in place to handle a lot of it. We plant enough to last three to five years,” Johnson told Eisele. “When you have everybody doing that, then you have to have a good supply to get through climatic changes.”&�Բ�����;

He hopes other farmers, particularly Native farmers, collaborate in practicing regenerative agriculture rather than relying on destructive groundwater withdrawal to maintain crops the desert simply can’t support. Eisele finds stories like Johnson’s invaluable in helping people everywhere adapt. “We are really looking at folklife as a tool for liberation,” she said.

Along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Maida Owens takes such work a step farther, trying to use folklore to shape public policy and make the world more welcoming toward those displaced by the climate crisis.

The Bayou State has been losing up to 35 square miles of coastland each year for the better part of a century. As erosion and rising seas have remade the state, entire communities have had to move. Climate migration, new to some parts of the world, is as much a fact of life for Louisianans as the changing of the tides.

Even as Louisiana has focused on reclaiming lost land and restoring coastal wetland, Owens has urged special attention to adaptation, teaching people in harm’s way how to adjust their ways of life without losing what’s most important to them. She works with the Bayou Culture Collaborative, which brings together tradition-bearers from impacted communities to talk “about the human dimension of coastal land loss” so residents, and their elected leaders, can better plan for the migration already afoot. Research has shown that when people make the difficult decision to pack up and leave, most of them go only a few miles.��

“People from all over the coast are starting to leave and move inland,” Owens said. In the parlance of her field, the places they leave behind are “sending communities”; where they’re headed, “receiving communities” await them. Owens has begun to convene meetings online and in receiving communities to discuss cultural sensitivity to help people prepare for their new neighbors, knowing that migration can exacerbate class and racial tension. 

In the Louisiana folklife program’s ongoing “Sense of Place—And Loss” workshop series, Owens hosts discussions about the future of bayou traditions to collectively imagine what the near future might look like as the Gulf Coast changes. Artists, other tradition-bearers, and community leaders are invited to envision how they might make their towns and counties more welcoming for climate migrants, and Owens assists them in developing concrete action plans. Such an effort includes having receiving communities inventory their cultural and economic resources to see what they can offer newcomers, invest in trauma-informed care for disaster survivors, and consider what they might need to make themselves ready to integrate newcomers.������

The Louisiana state coastal protection and restoration authority has identified some towns that might have the capacity, and need, for more people; many of these places have the space but lack the social infrastructure to support the continuation of rural peoples’ foodways and artistic traditions. Though receiving communities may not be far away, those most vulnerable to displacement are often Indigenous, French-speaking, or otherwise culturally distinct, and moving even a short distance can expose them to unfamiliar circumstances. In her workshops, Owens is proposing ideas lifted in part from the adaptation strategies immigrants often rely upon, like cultural festivals and an emphasis on cultural exchange and language education. In a recent project, several coastal parishes (what Louisianans call counties) near Terrebonne created a collaborative quilt at a regional community festival as a way to draw attention to the beauty and ancestral importance of their wetlands and deepen their connections with one another.

That’s where Owens hopes folklorists can affect policy change, too. Owens is keeping a close eye on the state’s Coastal Master Plan, providing feedback with an eye towards supporting the culturally rich, and vanishing, coastal parishes. The Louisiana Folklore Society has urged the state to conduct its planning with respect to the desires and needs of the people who live on the coast, prioritizing engagement before any major mitigation project, and saving habitat not merely for its inherent value but also for its importance to the coastal tribes it sustains.

Though climate disasters have already thrown towns along the Louisiana coast and beyond into disarray and prompted seismic changes in how residents live, this is just the beginning. As floods and fires, droughts and erosion, and the myriad other impacts of a warming world wreak greater havoc, some of the answers to the crisis won’t be found in engineering or science, but in the cultural fabric that binds us together.

This article originally appeared in Grist at . Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at 

Yet, in stark contrast to this thriving collection of lives, quiet, depleted areas of the forest and old logging trails tell a different, darker story. The wild beauty of this place used to expand to every horizon before it met a violent history of colonialism. I was raised in the woods of western Massachusetts, not far from here, but my feelings of innate connection to the environment were profoundly altered when I learned the history of this stolen land. My sense of belonging was replaced by questions about my place in the world as someone whose ancestral roots stretch to Scotland and the Middle East, among other lands shaped by colonization and dispossession. 

If you’re not on the land and part of the land, then who ultimately speaks for the land?” —Àdhamh Ó Broin

When my partner and I purchased Mount Owen two years ago, the idea felt like a grotesque misnomer: a false claim of ownership over life impossible to possess, since plants, fungi, and more-than-human animals inherently belong to themselves. Trying to figure out the right word to describe the uncomfortable transfer of “ownership” we were negotiating, my partner and I landed on the word “stewardship.”&�Բ�����;

While the word expresses our intent to nurture the local ecosystem, it doesn’t acknowledge the land’s original guardians. Today, we hold a land title rooted in a legal system that views land as property, not as a living entity with inherent rights. It is a title linked to historical theft, genocide, and dispossession. Mount Owen rises 1,500 feet above the traditional homeland of the Nipmuc Tribal Nation, stewards of this land for more than 12,000 years. We are working hard to move forward locally and culturally to dismantle colonial land laws and embrace a more respectful understanding of the living Earth. 

Àdhamh Ó Broin, a friend and colleague dedicated to helping to decolonize the Gaelic people of Scotland through reconnection with Indigenous culture and language, highlights the importance of direct communion with the land. Without an intimate relationship, he argues, authentic advocacy for the land’s well-being is impossible: “If you’re not on the land and part of the land, then who ultimately speaks for the land?” 

On Mount Owen, we are moving slowly, learning from the land and its original stewards, and building community rooted in respect for Indigenous people and their knowledge. We are working toward a future where the land has been restored its rights and agency—as well as deep love.

Countering Settler Ecologies

How can we transition from exclusionary, extractive practices to a system that honors Traditional Ecological Knowledge and prioritizes the well-being of Earth? This is one of the questions I posed to Irus Braverman, author of . Her book explains how “dispossession of Palestinians in the hands of the Zionist settler state occurs, centrally, in the ecological realm.”&�Բ�����; She coined the term “settler ecologies” to describe the oppressive situation, arguing that the territorial reach of Israel’s nature protection advances the Zionist project of Jewish settlement and the corresponding dispossession of non-Jews from this place.

Just as olive trees embody Palestinian identity and deep connection to place, pine trees represent Jewish claims and settlement expansion.

The environmental damage and confusing arguments surrounding “native” and “non-native” species add another layer of devastation. Non-native species are ; some like plantago major provide ecosystem services like improved soil quality, erosion control, habitat, and food sources for wildlife. Plus, a fixation on their potential negative impacts can overshadow other, perhaps greater threats facing native species, like habitat destruction and pollution. Braverman describes how these arguments, mirroring the human struggle for land and belonging, position various creatures—fallow deer, gazelles, wild asses, griffon vultures, pine trees, and cows—as Israeli “soldiers” against their Palestinian counterparts—goats, camels, olive trees, hybrid goldfinches, and akkoub. 

Just as olive trees embody Palestinian identity and deep connection to place, pine trees represent Jewish claims and settlement expansion. 

The Aleppo pine has become a tool of erasure, obscuring the ruins of Palestinian villages beneath a green veneer. Braverman describes pine forests as being central to the earlier Zionist mission and “the imaginary of the European forest.” While the Aleppo pine is native to the Mediterranean region, widespread planting in areas where it was not historically present has led to ecological concerns. The trees’ aggressive growth and dominance in certain ecosystems has raised questions about whether it should be classified as . 

To complicate and confuse matters, olive trees are sometimes labeled “non-wild,” which in turn legitimizes ecological violence toward them, such as their uprooting from nature reserves, even with evidence that olive tree cultivation dates to the Chalcolithic period (3600–3300 BCE). Where exactly does the timeline for “wild” and for “native” begin? More than just crops in Palestine, olive trees are woven into the fabric of the culture. Yet hundreds of thousands of trees have been destroyed in recent decades to make way for Israeli settlements and for the separation wall, threatening livelihoods and the environment. 

When people are distanced from land, they lose the intimate knowledge necessary to be effective stewards.

Throughout the world, this pitting of native and non-native organisms and species harms not only plants and other animals, but also displaced humans seeking refuge in new lands. In a , Charles R. Warren, a professor of environmental management at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argues such labels are outdated and misleading and that they ignore the dynamic reality of ecosystems while promoting a view of nature as static and unchanging. The focus, as the article suggests, should be on how species interact within the environment, not their origin. He writes, “The native/alien paradigm purports to be about flora and fauna, but actually it is all about us—our perceptions and preferences about where other species belong and our ethical judgments about how to treat them.”&�Բ�����;

To Forage Is to Connect

Foraging is one of the many ways people have interacted with their environment for generations. Beyond a means of sustenance, foraging for specific herbs and ingredients represents a cultural connection to the land. Layla K. Feghali, author of , emphasizes this point, stating that ancestral landscapes of the SWANA region in Southwest Asia and North Africa have “inspired every aspect of our relationships, rituals, beliefs, and identities.”

But throughout the world, fines and arrests for trespassing sever this vital connection. In the United States, the right to forage began to erode in the mid-19th century, leading to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and those who lived close to the land. In 1977, Israel enacted laws that criminalized foraging on designated nature reserves. Criminalizing foraging divorces people from local flora, weakening ecosystems and unraveling cultural traditions. And of course, when people are prevented from foraging, they must often buy plants that the earth gives freely; leading to unnecessary economic burdens.

When people are distanced from land, they lose the intimate knowledge necessary to be effective stewards. So how can we navigate this? In spaces we inhabit, how can we protect plants, fungi, and other animals we don’t know or understand? How will we recognize their absence if we don’t notice their presence?  

“Recentering our relationship with the earth can begin to transform the traumatic wounding of colonial ruptures,” Layla K. Feghali writes. 

On Mount Owen we’re exploring ways to develop a reciprocal stewardship framework that honors the land’s rights as well as those of humans, who are also part of the ecosystem. Effective stewards know, love, and understand their local ecosystems. That is why my partner and I are working to foster an emotional connection to the land so we don’t lose sight of whom and what we’re protecting.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 10:02 a.m. PT on Oct. 1, 2024, to correct the spelling of Àdhamh Ó Broin’s name. Read our corrections policy here.

Though a world away from my daily life as a climate communicator in Boston, I found myself returning to a pressing question: “Is it too late to address climate change?”

It’s a question that marine biologist and self-proclaimed “policy nerd” Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, with her own family connections to Jamaica, is intimately familiar with. In her latest book, (One World Press, September 2024), Johnson offers an evocative exploration of possibility and transformation in the face of climate change. The collection of essays, interviews, poems, and art began as an attempt to spark conversation about climate solutions in popular culture, but it evolved into something much bigger: “This book is my response to anyone still wondering whether all of our climate efforts are worth it,” Johnson told me when we spoke on the phone in September as she was traveling for her book tour. 

Johnson, who co-edited the bestselling 2021 anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solution for the Climate Crisis, builds on her previous work to deliver a timely and urgent guide for envisioning and implementing climate solutions. The book is not just about understanding the problem (though Johnson and climate scientist Kate Marvel make clear “the atmosphere is fundamentally different now” due to human activities); it’s about contemplating—and in a way, manifesting—the various paths we as a society can take toward a livable future.

Find your people, whoever that might be, or bring your people. Don’t feel like you’re supposed to go it alone. This requires community.” —Brian Donahue

One of those paths must inevitably involve looking to nature for solutions. In a section of the book entitled “Replenish and Re-Green,” Johnson and others imagine a world where food systems are regional and regenerative, biodiversity is valued, and human stewardship of other species is the norm. Brian Donahue, a professor, farmer, and New Englander like myself, proposes a novel plan to revitalize rural America by growing more food closer to home and repopulating small towns. 

As a Black woman with dreams of leaving urban life for a country homestead, I’ve often felt afraid of the conservative values that typically come with living in rural communities. But Donahue offers sage advice: “Find your people, whoever that might be, or bring your people. Don’t feel like you’re supposed to go it alone. This requires community.”

Community is a throughline of the book, and not just the human variety. Animals and insects, ecosystems, and various natural cycles are incredibly important for planetary health. But they remain enigmatic for most of us. Take, for example, the fact that even documenting the number of species on Earth is a never-ending effort. Yet Johnson writes that “the climate solutions that nature offers can comprise more than one-third of the CO₂ mitigation needed to hold global warming to below 2 degrees C.” A crucial part of unlocking this potential for change is having greater respect for—and ceding decision-making power to—the naturalists, conservation scientists, and Indigenous communities already stewarding the natural world.

What if we had systems that loved us and, by extension, the planet?”

Just as the book homes in on specific solutions, it also zooms out, taking aim at the cultural values undergirding many of our modern systems. In an interview with author and activist Bill McKibben, Johnson draws connections between the capitalistic values of short-term growth and the funding of new fossil fuel development. The book lays bare the fact that money that companies and consumers have sitting in major banks produces more carbon than the average American does in a year. 

According to McKibben, a reimagined financial ecosystem might rely more on credit unions and locally owned banks that keep money in a given community: “That should be happening as we start to rely more on renewable energy, because oil and gas are in Texas and Saudi Arabia and Russia, but happily, sun and wind are everywhere.”

Through the exploration of subjects from media and labor to transit and legal systems, Johnson and co-conspirators answer a deeper question about the climate crisis: What if we had systems that loved us and, by extension, the planet? In the section she calls “Away From the Brink,” Johnson sees these ideas to their rightful conclusion: Advertisements for fossil fuels and gas-powered cars would be an aberration. Climate change would be embedded in all local journalism, not viewed as a niche topic. We would evolve beyond the climate-apocalypse box office flick, and climate realities would become the backdrop of every genre of television and film. The influence of fossil fuels in politics would be reigned in, and our democratic system would become more representative. Exploitative labor practices would be abolished, and a livable wage would be commonplace. Seeing this vision laid out with striking specificity, it feels to me like it’s within our grasp.

Johnson admits that on the role of electoral politics in climate action, and the climate impacts of mega industries like fast fashion, the book is a bit light. These are two topics Johnson plans to cover in her new podcast debuting on her in the fall of 2024. “This is such a useful question—what if we get it right?—that this book can’t fully answer,” she tells me frankly. “So I want to keep the conversation going.”

Whether you’re an activist, a parent, or simply curious about climate, you are likely to find pieces in this collection that appeal to you—and that’s intentional. The book does not argue for one-size-fits-all solutions. “Too often, the climate movement and the media tell everyone to do the same things: Vote, protest, donate, spread the word, and lower your carbon footprint,” Johnson writes. “But all too rarely are we asked to contribute our specific talents, our superpowers.”&�Բ�����;

For my part, I saw myself in the book’s Afrofuturist agricultural artwork by Olalekan Jeyifous. And reflecting on Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use” inspired me to view my climate work, with its many ups and downs, as an exercise in perseverance. It encouraged me to recommit to incremental change and stay invested for the long haul. 

We need to live as though we understand this crisis is real.” —Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

The variety of pieces in the book and the many forms they take serve as a reminder that everyone has a place in these climate futures and a hand in bringing them to life. Johnson’s climate action Venn diagram aims to pinpoint the intersection of what brings you joy, what you’re good at, and what work needs doing. That, she says, can be your place in the climate movement. For me, it’s probably something involving but the book overflows with inspiration and starting points for anyone struggling to picture a replenished world.

That’s not to say that this world is without sacrifice, though. In a concluding entry, Johnson and ocean farmer Bren Smith are clear-eyed about the necessary work and change ahead. “We’re going to have to say goodbye to some things we hold close to our heart,” Smith says, remarking on the many natural wonders we’ve already lost. Johnson adds, “We need to live as though we understand this crisis is real,” which means trying out a range of solutions and having a healthy relationship with failure. 

A book of this kind, with its cautiously optimistic view on climate, might read as wishful thinking. To me, it is a prayer for the modern era: where practicality meets possibility.

Fever: An Old-fashioned Tale About Modern Problems

In that town, the people know all kinds of spells. There are spells for protection, spells for assistance, spells for small wonders.

Those who tend the sick know the magic words which will keep you safe from fever. The traveling merchants know the incantation to shield you from the poxes that swirl in other towns. One spell lightens the load in your cart so your horse trots along as if he were pulling nothing at all. Here, a little cantrip that conjures a basket to carry home your bread. There, a charm to preserve the herbs you carry to market; when you arrive they’re as crisp and fresh as when you picked them that morning. And simply murmur the right words, and the water in your cup will flow to your lips, bubbling upward like a waterfall being reeled in. The children giggle as they drink, and others find relief in being able to drink so effortlessly. What a world it is: magic to salve, to ease your path through life, to dazzle and delight.

No one in the town remembers asking for such marvels, and none of them can explain quite how they came to have all this ordinary magic. It’s been around so long, handed down and shared around, that it’s woven into their lives now. They only know that the witch who lives on the hill, or some other witch, once gave them these spells and charms, drawing her power from wherever witches find it. (And no one could quite tell you where that is. Although some do say that the witches’ magic comes from deep in the earth, that it’s the breath of the first living things. That if you were to see the magic, it would be dark like peat. Black with uncountable years.)

Everyone knows, of course, that there’s a price to pay for these small wonders. The witches have always been clear about this. Nothing comes for free in this world. Just like life, magic is a balance, and the universe needs to settle its ledger. Meet a need today, savor a small luxury, and you might encounter some little misfortune tomorrow. It sounds unpleasant, but it’s not hard to understand how the people accept it. Oftentimes, the price comes due so long afterward that it doesn’t seem related at all. Or perhaps it pops up elsewhere, far away, causing some other person to stumble or trip instead. True, it’s a haphazard sort of accounting, but people will accept almost anything if it’s just the way things have always been.

In this way life proceeds unquestioned, until who knows what it is that finally cracks and starts the dam bursting. Because, lately, the discomforts have begun to trouble the people. The small misfortunes seem to mount; they feel bothersome and close by.

Take the stream, for instance: Once it flowed cleanly, but now it overflows its banks, and foul water floods the paths. Sometimes, the people find their own animals have been swept away by the currents and drowned. The people always knew the magic came with a price, but the small misfortunes don’t seem so small anymore. And what else are they to conclude but that it’s the fault of the witch and the silly magic she gave them?

When the people meet in the marketplace, they mutter about the spells of convenience: those devilishly crisp herbs, the bewitched bread baskets, the sorcery of that up-tumbling water. Why, they grumble, did the witch ever offer them such absurdities? They curse her wicked, sticky magic. It should have stayed where it belonged, they say, deep in the earth’s hot belly.

The witch knows what is brewing. When she passes the townspeople in the woods or in the market, she hears them muttering and seething. She’s seen their eyes flash with fiery resentment. And she knows it won’t be long before they confront her, fueled with righteousness, ready with their hot words.

They’re angry about the spells that seem so frivolous, so extravagant. They forget, for now, all the others that heal and ease. Even so, she knows that something has to change. The people could use fewer spells, but there’s more to it than that. Perhaps, after all, the old magic has run its course. Perhaps it’s time to craft new spells that don’t carry so steep a price.

She’s heard of one incantation that could protect 40 people from fever before any harms would be incurred. And she might be able to make a charm to shield not just one person but the whole town from poxes. The healing spells have always come with a cost, but it doesn’t have to be that way. She knows that bargains can sometimes be struck with the cosmic ledger, that nothing is set in stone.

From her window, she can see the people’s faces flickering in the torchlight as they climb the hill to her little house. Soon they will hammer on her door, feverish with indignation, demanding she account for herself. But who knows if they will want to hear what she has to say. In the white heat of rage, people don’t always want to sit and talk. It can seem like the only answer is to burn things down. 

Although, sometimes, it’s also right there in the heat of the crucible that the world might be reimagined. Where we can dismantle the old ways and forge something brand new. 

We know that when it comes to the wicked problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution we need to shift worldviews. “And the most advanced tool we have to change worldviews—to transform people’s attitudes, values, and structures of perception—is called the story,” writes Marek Oziewicz, professor of children’s and young adult literature.

As Will Storr, author of The Science of Storytelling, reminds us, folktales have been used to communicate social codes and since humans first formed societies. Whoever tells the stories defines the agenda: the framing of our common issues and enemies.

“Fever,” the story that opens this piece, is about the magic of plastics, which we take for granted today. IV bags, tubes, and personal protective equipment (PPE) have revolutionized medical procedures and saved lives through reduced contamination risks. Plastic packaging has also transformed our ability to keep and thereby wasting the resources involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, and transporting those goods.

Yet we can no longer look away from the accumulated impacts of plastic pollution. And as a result, we often blame consumers for choosing plastic bags or plastic straws. Instead of individualizing responsibility, in “Fever” we articulate a tale that gets us wondering about broader systemic changes required of manufacturers and petrochemical companies.

There is no singular, standardized account of plastic’s history. Some point to the seeking of alternatives to ivory and elephants’ tusks for billiard balls, others to a repurposing of military materials fueling a postwar boom. Either way, plastics were not initially designed for single use. Yet, as a result of their explosion onto the scene in the 1960s, plastics have become a and a market for expanded growth by fossil fuel companies.

One of the major issues with plastics is that there is inadequate research on their health impacts, and a lack of labeling on the more than used in plastic production. We know as well as waste pickers, sorters, and recyclers is cause for concern. And, thankfully, these chemicals’ toxic bearing on human health remains part of the currently being negotiated.

This sort of collective, upstream regulation is what is actually required to balance the cosmic ledger. Recent shows that even with a massive expansion of waste infrastructure, we cannot keep pace with the of plastic production. We have to look at how to stem the flow upstream. As such, another key systemic intervention we , is making the polluter pay through .

For example, in the U.K., . That’s U.K. residents paying so that businesses can save money by delivering their products in inexpensive, disposable containers. If businesses were paying the additional 90% through Extended Producer Responsibility, it’s not hard to imagine that companies would be motivated to innovate different products and services with less waste.

Because, as Max Liboiron, author of , eloquently argues, the concept of disposability—including recycling—is dependent on the idea that we can send unwanted materials away. Indeed, there is continued violent enactment of this colonialist approach when one considers landfills and dumps being sited in or near Indigenous communities and communities of color.

It’s time the polluters pay for the creation of systems that maximize the value of this magical family of materials. We don’t need to burn all plastics at the stake to make meaningful change; instead we need to look at the broader systems around how we manufacture, use, and dispose of plastics. In this way we can find ways to live with them (perhaps happily ever after).

Stories can help us create universal climate literacy and find united agendas. We need tales of collective action and of finding well-being in doing less. We need tales that inspire activism and mobilize visions of joyful, low-impact lifestyles. It’s time to rewrite some traditional tales in service of the people and the planet.

Note: The fairy tale, Fever, was written by Becky Tipper based on the academic research by Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs and her colleagues.

“Our farm is queer because it’s really different from the normal farm,” says Hannah Breckbill, one of the farm’s three worker-owners. For one, the farm prioritizes sustainable perennial crops, which regrow year after year, in contrast to the , which require planting each year. She says that her farm’s emphasis on community also stands in stark contrast to out-of-town commodity crop growers. As a vegetable farmer on small acreage, Breckbill isn’t considered a “real” farmer by many other farmers in the area.

“Day in and day out we’re growing food for people,” she says of herself and her fellow worker-owners. “We’re bringing people out onto the land and into connection with what’s going on.”

That access to land is a critical component of this work. It’s an effort to overcome the centuries of systemic discrimination that have prevented marginalized groups from owning farms or homes, as well as the economic freedom and mobility they can provide. 

To this same end, is tackling the Seattle housing crisis head-on by setting up a land trust to support those left behind by rampant gentrification and displacement. The group centers BIPOC leadership and just purchased a 12-bedroom house after a in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. Housing manager for Queer the Land’s Beacon House, Nya Shahir, knows the housing crisis firsthand, having lived in a tent in an unfinished basement for a time. They say that their project is more than just helping people find secure housing.

“We want our BIPOC queer community to be well,” says Shahir, who is Black-Latinx and uses fae or they pronouns. “The key is to survive, thrive, all the things.”

Though different in their focus and approach, both Queer the Land and Humble Hands Harvest are working to defeat the extractive capitalist economy that fuels the climate crisis. In its place, they aim to create a regenerative economy of care. Key to this is taking back the land.

Addressing History to Thrive

As it stands, systems of oppression make it difficult for QT2S BIPOC (Queer Trans Two-Spirit Black Indigenous people of color) to thrive. After centuries of Native genocide, the U.S. passed a series of federal laws in the 1950s and selling their land to non-Natives. By design, people of color, particularly Black folks, have also been denied the opportunity to accrue wealth. in the year 2000 could trace their land ownership or the wealth it created to white ancestors who were beneficiaries of the Homestead Acts passed during the Civil War.

On top of that, cities have long used , a practice of color-coding maps to segregate and deny mortgages for Black people and . In Seattle, , those same redlined neighborhoods are now pushing out people of color. In light of the almost nonexistent social safety net in the U.S., between of houseless youth identify as LGBTQ, despite only comprising .    

This systemic discrimination matters in accessing land for housing as well as for farming. People of color and women also face a USDA that has denied them lending for decades Today ; only of U.S. farms have at least one Black farmer. of U.S. farmers identify as women. As Breckbill, who is white, explains: With heteronormative family structures where women have to either marry a man or inherit land from family in order to farm, the barriers to land ownership compound as white farmers pass down their land.

“This original theft enshrines this white supremacy and white wealth accumulation.”&�Բ�����;

The Connection Between Land Access and Climate

Why does this matter for the climate crisis? Corporate interests that directly exacerbate climate change can purchase land. For example, was set to be purchased for a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) until neighbors banded together and convinced the landowner to sell to them instead of putting it up for auction.

Addressing the white supremacy embedded in land and housing inequalities also addresses the climate crisis. Housing, land, and food justice cannot be separated from climate justice.

Queer the Land suggests that the existing system has long contributed to the climate crisis by operating on a logic of scarcity: the idea that there’s only so much to go around and therefore marginalized people must simply endure crisis after crisis. Instead, the group wants to move to a logic of abundance. While their house is still under repair, members have big visions for what’s to come: a microfarm that provides free or low-cost organic food for the community; a facilitation space for folks to teach or create art; a bike share program; and a community apothecary stocked with herbs.

Jayce Marrakesh, a Two-Spirit Black and Indigenous program facilitator for Queer the Land, says they will do their part to minimize climate impacts through permaculture, which is all about regeneration. Marrakesh sees the elements of their work as connected by a common thread of healing generational trauma and reclaiming wellness for marginalized people: “If you’re well in body and spirit, you can dream and create.”

The project’s decision-making and structure reflects a queer mode of relating to each other, too. Marrakesh explains that with about 80 members, four paid staff, and an advisory board, Queer the Land is creating a model different from “colonizing, white oppressive spaces” where bosses surveil and micromanage workers. Moving by consensus, the Project wants to establish a space with grace, generosity, and trust so that everyone has a say over their land and labor.   

Humble Hands Harvest likewise uses a worker co-op structure to make decisions. Instead of those with more equity having more power in decision-making, all workers have equal say. “We needed a way to have clear agreements,” Breckbill says, “to match what our values were and the world we wanted to live in.”

One of those values is to open opportunities for future generations of farmers through a project called “.” When Breckbill and other worker-owners want to retire from farming, new farmers will be able to enter without debt, thanks to long-standing investments from the local community. As she puts it, “I think of the Commons as a resource held by the community that uses it and manages it for sustainability.”

Creating the World We Want

Both projects acknowledge the massive scale of the climate crisis and consider their work to be a model that other communities can follow. “We want Queer the Land houses everywhere. It’s not just a Seattle thing,” Shahir says. “We do this to inspire people to build their own land trusts in their own cities.”

Luckily, Queer the Land and Humble Hands Harvest are in good company with their efforts. Humble Hands Harvest organizes a Queer Farmer Convergence, which annually gathers queer farmers to connect with one another. like the are using a Commons model to advance Indigenous land sovereignty and reparations. Across the U.S. since fall 2017, has forged bonds among QT BIPOC farmers. The and build solidarity. For a year starting in 2017, the envisioned land justice in West Virginia. And in 2018 in California, worked with the Oakland Community Land Trust to purchase the 23^rd Avenue Community Building, which continues to be used as a space for affordable housing, a community garden, and the home for a queer and trans arts organization.

Breckbill suggests that her work at Humble Hands Harvest provides the foundation for a social transition as much as a technological one: “When I think about transforming the entire economy, I don’t just think about fossil fuels. I think about how do we change ownership? How do we distribute wealth?” These changes, even at a small scale, present a model for how to ultimately address the climate crisis.

This story is part of��, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

According to the history books, these horses don’t exist. In the official narrative, America’s original horses “went extinct” thousands of years ago, killed off by . Horses that live in the Americas today, claim historians, are descendants of those first brought by European explorers and settlers in the early 16th century.

But according to Indigenous oral histories and spiritual beliefs from Saskatchewan to Oklahoma, America’s Native horses never went extinct. They survived the Ice Age and lived among Native people before, and after, the arrival of European colonizers, and a mountain of historical and archaeological evidence proves it—from to .

Now, with only a few thousand Native horses believed to be left in the Americas, Native people are beginning to share the knowledge they have quietly protected for centuries. For many Indigenous people, these Native horses aren’t beasts of burden but relatives and sacred “medicine.” And in recent years, reserves such as the Sacred Way Sanctuary and South Dakota’s have stepped up their work to rescue Indigenous horse lineages from extinction as part of the. An alliance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous caretakers, the sanctuaries on the trail are dedicated not just to preserving Native horses but to promoting their history and protecting related sacred sites and ceremonies.

“T������ were certain relatives that Creator sent that specifically are designed to help us in our journey spiritually, to help strengthen us. One is the horse,” explains Dr. Yvette Running Horse Collin, co-founder of the Sacred Way Sanctuary. “They literally share our experience,” With only a relative few Native horses remaining, she says, “we have decided that we will now speak and we’re not going to stop.”

Native horses and the medicine they provide

The Sacred Way Sanctuary is set off a semirural road in the bucolic hinterlands of northwestern Alabama. Bound by 2 miles of freshwater streams, it lies within the original borders of one of the first federal Indian Reservations in the United States, a place meant to contain and civilize members of the Cherokee Nation.

About 100 horses live on the land, each a descendent of Native North American horse lines named for the nations associated with them, including the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Lakota, Cheyenne, Apache, Ojibwe, and Pueblo. The horses at the Sacred Way Sanctuary and the others along the Native American Horse Trail are different from those of European lineages. They’re smaller, for starters, rarely more than 14 hands high (4.7 feet high at the withers). They stand differently, consume foods that European horses can’t digest, and their coats have distinct patterns and markings. There are speckled appaloosas and patchwork paints. There are horses with webbing on their faces.

Above all, the horses at these sanctuaries are sacred beings that can help to heal the wounds that cause the mind, body, and soul to shift out of alignment, says Running Horse Collin. The horses, or parts of the horse, are incorporated into ceremonies. An Oglala Lakota rite of passage ceremony, for example, involves piercing the ears of young boys and girls with earrings made of horsehair, says Loretta Afraid of Bear-Cook, an Oglala Lakota elder, faith keeper, cultural specialist, and a at the Sacred Way Sanctuary.

Another form of horse medicine was used by Oglala Lakota leaders in the 19th century, including famed chief Crazy Horse. “Once the horse dies, there’s a part on the leg that looks like a little circle, and that’s where the power comes from,” Afraid of Bear-Cook explains. “The chiefs of that time period, they [took] that horse medicine off the leg and they dried it and put it back behind the ear. Whenever they were going to ask for anything, whether it was spiritual or physical, they had the mindset that they would include the horse.”

Just being around a horse is healing medicine, too. “From watching the horses, watching what they do, you learn responsibility. You can talk to that horse, which we still do today. If you look directly into its eyes, [it] will look to you, it’ll put its nose to you and it will open up,” Afraid of Bear-Cook says.

Indeed, in recent years Western science has begun to confirm what Indigenous communities have always known. Riding and caring for horses can and . Equine therapy is becoming increasingly popular for and . “Horses are incredibly sacred, they’re more than sacred,” Running Horse Collin says. “Our people didn’t need those kind of studies, we just knew it worked.”

A shared history

Horses and the Native people of North America are not just spiritually intertwined; their histories echo each other. After the conquistadors arrived, both were slaughtered, forced into subservience, and pushed onto inferior lands. Both have survived. “Side by side, they are with us, and they’ve experienced everything we’ve been through,” Running Horse Collin says.

The memory of those injustices still live on in the stories of Native people. Afraid of Bear-Cook was just a girl when the Bureau of Indian Affairs stormed the Pine Ridge Reservation with a fleet of empty trailers. They came for the horses and cattle of her people, the right to which the U.S. government claimed because the Lakota had “failed” to pay taxes on their livestock.

The bureau rounded them up one by one, loaded them on the trailers and drove away. Afterwards, remembers Afraid of Bear-Cook, the women cut their hair in mourning. The BIA hadn’t just taken their animals, they had “severed” the tribe’s relationship to their sacred relatives. They were never seen again.

Removing horses from their Indigenous caretakers (or slaughtering them outright) was a common tactic used by the U.S. government to force Native people to assimilate. “Going through our lives, we became aware that to further invalidate our existence in our communities, the bureau, the first thing that they did was come to [take] the cattle and horses,” says Afraid of Bear-Cook.

But denying Native claims to horses didn’t start with the U.S. government. chronicled the presence of horses throughout North America. In 1521, herds were seen grazing the lands that would become Georgia and the Carolinas. Sixty years later, found herds of horses living among Native people in coastal areas of California and Oregon. In 1598, described New Mexico as being “full of wild mares.”

Yet, the official story that was written into the history books, and which persists today, is that the New World had no horses before the arrival of the Spanish. According to the narrative, the first horses to arrive in the New World in 1519 were the progenitors of every horse found on the continent in later years. That it would have been biologically impossible for a small group of horses in Mexico to populate regions thousands of miles away in as little as two years is never discussed.

That’s by design, says Running Horse Collin who, after being asked by elders from different Native nations to set the record straight, conducted more than a decade of research and . In the Spain of the late 15th and 16th centuries, horses were associated with nobility, power, and cultural refinement. “If indeed there were horses here and the Native people had a relationship with them, with Europe’s standards at that time, we were civilized. And, in order for them to “conquer” and do what they wanted to do, we had to be uncivilized,” she says. Covering up the accounts of those who bore witness to horses in the New World and denying that horses existed in the New World at all, helped to sell the myth of on which the conquest of the Americas was built.

Crossbreeding with European horses and their slaughter in the name of “herd management” have reduced the Native horse population to just a few thousand. Still, Running Horse Collin believes it’s not too late to bring their story to light. In addition to her work with Sacred Way, this past fall she began talks with a team of French geneticists to analyze the DNA of the sanctuary’s native horses. She expects that their results will provide undeniable scientific proof not just that American horses persevered through the Ice Age, but that they, like Native people, have survived through the centuries.

Protecting Native horses and their spiritual relationship to Native people as well as educating the public about their existence drive not just the Sacred Way Sanctuary but other horse sanctuaries along the Native American Horse Trail. A handful of reserves participate in the partnership, established in 2014, each with its own area of focus. The Red Pony Stands Ojibwe Horse Sanctuary, for example, is dedicated to the preservation of the endangered Ojibwe pony, while the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary is dedicated to caring for and preserving the wild “American mustang,” sacred sites, and the range.

“T������ is no doubt in my mind that wild horses are native to North America,” says Rob Pliskin, a 30-year volunteer of the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary and former board member of , an organization dedicated to protecting wild horses and burros. “The sanctuary is for the benefit of the horses and their opportunity to live as they were intended to live. It also offers firsthand on-the-ground education about the nature of the wild horse and its presence in the ecology of the American West.”

Ultimately, raising awareness about Native horses does more than just assure their continued survival. It makes Native experiences, as a whole, more visible. “It’s many times hard to talk about [the Indigenous experience] directly because the world doesn’t want to hear it. But you can talk about the horses,” concludes Running Horse Collins. “We’re still alive. Are we battered? Sure. Are the horses battered? Sure. But is it over? No.”

A forget-me-not wildflower bloomed in the clearing. This is where the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians have been restoring their oak savanna meadows, after decades of fire suppression and the removal of large, fire-adapted trees under federal management.

In addition to land they bought from private owners, in 2018, the Tribe received 17,519 acres of land from the U.S. government for the Tribe to manage under its own authority. This came as part of the ; this bipartisan legislation in trust in order to return the restoration of these lands—and the related economic activity and job development they created—to the Cow Creek Umpqua and the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians.

The Cow Creek Umpqua government hired foresters to study the landscape, which was dotted with decades-old Douglas fir stumps from clearcuts. They discovered that before the area had been overtaken by conifers, it was historically an oak savanna meadow, a pocket in the Willamette Valley that stretches the length of the Cascade Mountains and the Oregon Coast Range. This finding matched Tribal elders’ stories about a time when game was abundant, and grasses thrived as the tribe practiced cultural burning.

“We are not living the way that we want to live,” says Jackson, Cow Creek Umpqua member and education coordinator for the tribe. His ancestors, the Nahánkʰuotana, moved seasonally between homes in the foothills and in the valley. When leaving their summer camps in the foothills of the Cascades, or Umpqua mountains, they would burn the land before moving down to their winter camps at lower elevations. They did the same when coming back up as the weather warmed. The Nahánkʰuotana would return to each place to find healthy soils enriched by the charcoal left from the fire, which came from burned wood and plant debris that acted as a natural fertilizer.

“We are a burn culture,” Jackson says. “We would say that we burned here since time immemorial. Anthropologists or archaeologists would say that we burned here 20,000 to 40,000 years.” In any case, Jackson says, the feds have “messed up” that legacy in the past 200 years by not continuing these age-old land practices.

The U.S. Forest Service’s fire suppression policies began in the early 1900s and to the tribe’s current struggle with wildfires that burn larger, hotter, and out of control. To reduce this risk—to both the Tribe and the nearby city of Roseburg, Oregon—and to revitalize their cultural resources, Cow Creek Umpqua is blending Western science with traditional ecological knowledge to manage the landscape and safely reintroduce fire. Despite the challenges posed by climate change in finding suitable conditions for burning, outcomes from the managed areas so far are promising.

But to bring fire back, they first needed their land back. 

The Knowledge to Thrive

Despite the historic theft of the Tribe’s land, many members, like Jackson’s ancestors, never left. 

When the Treaty of 1853 was signed, the Cow Creek Umpqua viewed it as a government-to-government agreement between two sovereign nations. In exchange for land “ownership,” the U.S. government would provide the Tribe with health care, housing, and education. However, the U.S. government didn’t follow through on its promises. Rather, it claimed more than 500,000 acres of Cow Creek Umpqua’s land, and while the agreement was to pay the Tribe just $0.02 per acre—a fraction of the $1.25 per acre the government charged settlers who quickly moved in— they never received even this low sum.

Many people of Cow Creek Umpqua resisted the U.S. government’s efforts to relocate them to reservations, and instead lived in seclusion. They held onto their culture and continued to hold council meetings as they had for countless generations. 

In 1954, the Cow Creek Umpqua pursued justice with the U.S. government. After being forcibly terminated under the , the Tribe filed a land claims case, resulting in its recognition as a sovereign tribal government and a $1.5 million settlement in the 1980s.

In the following decades, the Tribe started buying its land back. In 2018, the Bureau of Land Management returned around 3% of the Cow Creek Umpqua’s ancestral lands under the Western Oregon Tribal Fairness Act. It was returned in trust, meaning the federal government holds legal title, but the beneficial interest remains with the Tribe. Elected leaders who supported the passage of the law called it an in righting the injustices toward Indigenous peoples.  

Then, in 2019, a wildfire came through. 

The Milepost 97 wildfire destroyed nearly a fourth of what was returned to the tribe: 3,634 of their 17,519 acres. The fire raged when it reached the burn scar of the 1987 Canyon Mountain wildfire. Years’ worth accumulated snags and thick brush prevented firefighters from quickly accessing the area and added dangerous fuel to the flames.

“When I first went up there, it was like an atomic bomb had gone off,” Cow Creek Umpqua Chairman Carla Keene this year. “The trees were gone. It was just black, and it was just the most depressing sight I’d ever seen.”&�Բ�����;

The Cow Creek Umpqua Tribal Board of Directors resolved to restore the forest, initiating efforts to salvage and repurpose the charred logs. Today, that lumber is showcased in the construction of the Portland International Airport and the Tribe’s remodeled government office. These structures display the tribe’s principle that forests and people are meant to have a hands-on connection. 

“For people that have not had their voices heard at many tables for a long time, our [Tribal] voice is starting to be heard and starting to be cherished,” Jackson says. “You’re starting to see Western scientific knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge start to do this, like they should.”&�Բ�����;

After the fire, the Tribe hired Wade Christensen, an enrolled member of Choctaw Nation, as a forester. He was trained in silviculture—a practice focused on managing forest health and growth to meet specific land management objectives, such as ecosystem restoration through thinning and burning. He creates detailed maps and work plans focused on cultivating the oak savanna and reducing the conifer monocultures that had been introduced for timber.

To make this happen, Christensen coordinates closely with the Forest Service and neighboring landowners for prescribed burns. Foresters like Christensen refer to it as a “prescription” because, much like a doctor treating a sick patient, they are writing a plan to restore the land to health. 

Early in his time working for the Tribe, Christensen was following a prescription on land the Tribe had purchased from a timber company. As he began marking trees for removal, he quickly realized the plan didn’t account for the meadow ecoregion. Within it were Oregon white oak trees, a species with thick bark that can survive fire. Moving forward, he knew he had to adapt. He worked to gain a deeper understanding of the landscape, not only to reduce wildfire risk, but also to promote cultural resources like berries, native grasses, and ​medicinal plants that flourish in recently burned soil and under an open canopy.

“I’ve got this understanding of the benefits of burning in the forest, and I’m all in on prescribed burning,” says Christensen, who has a degree from Oregon State University in sustainable forest management, “and I work for a Tribe, so I’m learning why it is important to the Tribe.”��

That learning is ongoing. Christensen recalls hearing a speaker at a conference say that he knows to light the trees when the acorns drop: “I was like, I am not at that man’s level.”

Christensen was listening to Frank Lake, a Karuk Tribal descendant and leading research ecologist with the Forest Service’s Southwest Station, who explores social-ecological frameworks to understand the impact of colonization—like fire suppression policies—. Lake’s research underscores that between federal agencies and tribal nations is essential, something Christensen understands well.

“You really got to dig deep with these guys and spend a lot of time with them,” Christensen says. “I’m using [fire] for fuels reduction, and hopefully I do things right, and we have other benefits. I am trying to get to where I understand where we can apply it to help a plant that we gather off of, but that takes time, and that takes a lot of conversation.”&�Բ�����;

Healing Cultures and Landscapes

In an era of climate change, government agencies across the U.S. are increasingly recognizing the need to actively apply traditional ecological knowledge to mainstream land management practices—balancing these institutions’ often short-term, extractive values with an intergenerational perspective. 

To mobilize, the National Science Foundation to launch its Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledge and Sciences last year. The center has set up hubs from the Pacific Islands to the Northeastern United States. 

Leaders in the Land Back Movement have relied on a limited set of policy tools. For example, the Department of the Interior for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, a similar trust structure that returned land management to Cow Creek Umpqua. There’s also co-management agreements—like Forest Service with tribes in the Midwest and Western states—and conservation easements—like the one Oakland used to in the hands of the Ohlone people. 

Critics argue that while these actions may return land to tribes, they often do so under federal, state, and municipal terms that in managing their lands.

That’s where purchasing lands outright comes in—a strategy the Penobscot Nation used in 2022 when nearly 30,000 acres of private forest lands went up for sale in Maine. The Nation worked with Trust for Public Land, . Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit organization focused on expanding outdoor access, has collaborated with more than 70 tribes and Indigenous groups to help them acquire and preserve their homelands and culturally significant sites. The organization tries to facilitate a tribe or nation’s right to self-governance. To do so, it has adopted internal policies that don’t require legal agreements that limit land use to conservation. 

“When you impose restrictions or conservation easements or those types of things on the property, then you’re really not supporting the tribal sovereignty,” says Ken Lucero, director of tribal and indigenous lands at Trust for Public Land. Lucero is a member of the Pueblo of Zia, who historically practiced dry farming and waffle gardening, which harnesses the little bit of rain that falls in the Southwest desert. 

“By having Indigenous knowledge and land back be at the center of the new definition of conservation, then we have a lot of good things that can come of that,” he says. “If we can put land back, land return, and Indigenous knowledge at the center of conservation … we really can support a global solution to climate warming.”&�Բ�����;

Indigenous peoples are considered by dangerous weather brought on by climate change, though they have contributed the least to the greenhouse gas emissions driving it, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Public health researchers stress that climate justice, as exemplified by the Land Back movement, requires addressing the harms of settler-colonialism past and present. 

“T������’s a lot of healing that has to happen,” Jackson says. “I’m one of the few that was never ripped off these lands. That’s why I live here, and why it’s very special to me.”&�Բ�����;

In May, Jackson visited an 800-year-old Douglas fir called the Grandmother Tree for the first time since the U.S. government gave the Cow Creek Umpqua back some of their land. The tree is a few miles away from where Christensen and the Tribe’s forestry team have been restoring the meadows. 

So far, finding a time to burn has been tough. Challenges like climate variability from season to season limit how much they can burn each year. But near the grandmother tree that day, there was a glimpse of what’s to come. 

Jackson turned to a patch of wild strawberries and pulled out a leafy green that smelled like a mix of eucalyptus and mint. The plant in his hands is native to the Pacific Northwest and commonly known by its Spanish name, yerba buena, which means “good herb.” Jackson, whose grandmother Dolla was one of the last medicine women and healers in the Tribe, called it a perfect example of a medicinal plant that returns with fire, growing abundantly in sunlight. 

As Jackson’s traditional ecological knowledge tells him, this is the kind of growth the landscape will see again as the Cow Creek Umpqua manage fire for open and clear savannas, benefiting the land and people there for generations to come. 

This story was produced in collaboration with . Reporting for this story was made possible with a fellowship from the nonprofit Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:24a.m. PT on Sept. 24, 2024, to clarify that Christensen attended Oregon State University, not University of Oregon. Read our corrections policy here. 

This horrific practice was as uniquely American in the 1940s as mass shootings are today. The consistency with which they occurred in natural spaces, especially in the South, maintains lasting effects on how African Americans engage with the outdoors. Systematic barriers, such as socioeconomic status, access to transportation, and Jim Crow laws, further compounded to exclude African Americans from natural spaces.

“At some point, we got kind of pushed out of these spaces,” says National Park Service ranger Rebekah Smith, age 31, who is Black and grew up enjoying the outdoors in Georgia. She now works as a ranger at the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. Smith is driven to uncover untold stories to reinvigorate Black Americans’ love for the outdoors.

It’s part of a larger effort for current generations to reclaim their rightful place and sense of belonging in natural spaces.

“It’s time for us to go back and reconnect,” Smith says.

That’s “White People Stuff”

My maternal grandmother, Delores (known in my family as “Gima”), was born in Louisiana in 1944 and moved to Los Angeles, California, around the age of 3 as part of the Great Migration. She grew up in the Jim Crow era, and while Gima didn’t allow her relationship with the natural world to be broken, she knew where outdoor recreation was safest.

Gima was able to enjoy horseback riding, boating, and visiting Lincoln Park and beaches during summer vacation, in part because of how her elders protected her from the harshness of the social climate. 

“If you went around certain places, like in Marina del Rey, not all white people, but some of ’em … you can tell how they was snobby and prejudiced,” Gima recounts. “It didn’t phase us. It didn’t phase me none.”

Still, she doesn’t venture out into “wild spaces,” claiming that Black people realize that these areas are far too dangerous, and implying a sort of naivete that white counterparts display when visiting them.

“We’re not fools,” she says. “We don’t go out there in the wilderness and lay on the ground in a tent.”

Unlike Gima, many Black people opted to protect themselves from the vulnerability of wild places by settling for life indoors or close to home. Some culturally evolved to accept the norm that outdoor recreation is “w�󾱳ٱ� people stuff.”

Today, though threats certainly persist, there is a thriving community of Black recreationists enjoying every aspect of the outdoors. Take, for example, the National Park System (an institution built on a foundation of dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples as well as Jim Crow segregation). African Americans make up only despite comprising 13% of the U.S. population. But many people are working to grow our presence in nature-based recreation through historical education.

In August of 2022, Smith led a program titled “Black People Don’t Do That.” In it, she explained the ways racism shaped so many of our outdoor spaces. The talk was part of an event hosted by Outdoor Afro, an organization that “celebrates and inspires Black connections and leadership in nature.”

Smith described how Doughton Park, a 6,000-acre recreation area along the Blue Ridge Parkway—the scenic road through Shenandoah National Park—was named in 1961 after Robert Lee Doughton, a U.S. House Representative, segregationist, and son of a Confederate soldier. The origins of the parkway can be partly traced to Josephus Daniels, who published racist cartoons in the Raleigh News & Observer and was one of the perpetrators of the 1898 Wilmington Massacre, a coup that burned down the offices of a local African American newspaper, banished democratic lawmakers, and murdered up to 60 people in order to pass Jim Crow laws. In later years, other white supremacists to Shenandoah National Park, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

If Black people weren’t kept away from outdoor spaces by racial terror, they were shut out by socioeconomic status. According to records from the U.S. Department of Commerce, non-white men earned about 41% of the average white man’s salary in 1939, while non-white women brought in 36% of a typical white woman’s income.

Further challenging access, few Black people owned vehicles. Those who took public transportation endured a unique humiliation. They were relegated to “Jim Crow cars” and mistreatment, only to arrive at Negro-only facilities that were subpar to those reserved for whites, such as Shenandoah National Park’s Lewis Mountain.

White people and leaders chalked it up to disinterest. In a 1940 memo, then-director of the National Park Service Arno Berthold Cammerer wrote of the Lewis Mountain cabins, “I myself have felt right along that there was not sufficient demand by negroes for this particular type of accommodations to make it pay.”

Yet, despite it all, 10,217 African Americans visited Shenandoah National Park that year.

An Enduring Tradition of Outdoorsmanship

Outdoorsmanship is a longstanding tradition in the Black American community. York, an African man enslaved by Lewis and Clark alongside Sacagawea, ensured the duo’s survival with his frontier skills, especially hunting. He and others like him worked as “go-betweens” for communication and trade with the Indigenous people of North America. George Bonga, born to an enslaved person in 1802 and later free, was a renowned fur trapper who worked for the American Fur Company and helped negotiate a treaty with the Ojibwe people in 1820. Before them, maroons, a name for escaped slaves, like the African inhabitants of Virginia and North Carolina’s Dismal Swamp in the late 1700s, saw the land as a key to freedom.

In the centuries since, Black people have continued to help mold the culture of American outdoorsmanship. The land has retained its significance as a place of resistance and reclamation, continuing the maroons’ tradition.

In addition to Outdoor Afro, organizations like Hunters of Color, Diversify Outdoors, and Black Girls Hike RVA lead the charge in inviting African diasporic people into outdoors-based recreation across the United States.

Black Girls Hike RVA’s co-founders, Narshara Tucker and Nicole Boyd, said in an email that in the past, they were often the only people of color (POC) on hiking trips. This repeated experience inspired them to create “space to offer a safe and supportive environment for women of color while on the trails.” Since the organization’s founding in 2020, they’ve organized monthly hikes near Richmond, Virginia, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, leading groups of around 20 people on excursions.

“From slavery to lynchings, the outdoors have historically been a painful place for POC,” they said. “Seeing, and more importantly, welcoming black people in the outdoor recreation is vital to changing that narrative.”

When other hikers see Black Girls Hike RVA on the trail, they assume it’s a church group, “as if a group of black women cannot be intentionally on the trail and in the outdoors like everyone else,” Tucker and Boyd said. As if Black women’s love for natural spaces is abnormal or must be qualified by other, more stereotypical social structures.

On the contrary, the outdoors has long been a place of healing, where many Black people go to convene with the spiritual world.

Reclaiming Connections With the Land

“This is God’s country,” says my paternal grandmother, Marilynn (known to me as “Ma-Ma”), 68, as she explained to me the significance of her time in the outdoors. “God invented all of this … and we should be enjoying it.”

Her reverence for the outdoors is palpable as she describes what she feels when spending time in nature: “Any and everything that I had in my mind that was negative is gone. I don’t even think about it. My mind is just on what I’m seeing, enjoying the breeze, looking at the ducks, hearing the birds,” she says. “It’s very relaxing.”

Ma-Ma’s relationship with the outdoors has evolved with each generation and member of our family. As a child in Galveston, Texas, and then Los Angeles, California, she would garden, visit local parks, and even observe nature at the junkyard and airports with her dad. When she met my grandpa, she learned to fish. As a teacher, she’s now determined to share the wider world with her students.

“I want the kids to know … it’s other things out there,” she says, explaining her motivations for taking her kindergarteners on school trips. “If you’ve never been shown or introduced to nothing, how are you supposed to know it? White folks, they’re forever traveling, taking their kids here and there and showing them things. … And Black folks, it’s like we’re scared to get out and know.”

I’ve inherited Ma-Ma’s love for the natural world, including her adoration of gardening, animals, and awesome landscapes. These passions have given me and my family outdoor opportunities beyond those afforded to my grandmother in her youth. I enjoy backpacking and scuba diving. My dad and I go off-roading, something we’ve been able to introduce Ma-Ma to as well. Our relatives admire our adventurous dispositions—and have even joined us on a few excursions—but we’ve also heard our fair share of accusations, such as, “You tryna act white.”

Smith’s mom was similarly determined to instill in her a love of nature, and Smith then helped normalize wilderness-based recreation for her father. “He didn’t really go to parks or do any outdoor things until I got older and I started bringing him with me to these places,” Smith says, “to introduce him and connect with him about my work and what I’m doing.”

With such a rich history of outdoor experiences and skills, the idea that “Black people don’t go outside” is a relatively new concept—one that contradicts our lived experiences and aspirations. It is the result of extreme systemic exclusion and decades of victim-blaming. We maintain our historical love for the natural world today, though for some, it may be buried under racial stereotypes imposed upon us.

By remembering these histories—both painful and proud—and consciously welcoming loved ones into natural spaces, we can reignite a sense of belonging on this land and overcome generational exclusion in the outdoors.

Smith is hopeful that by sharing stories of Black history in the outdoors, she can help Black people overcome statements like “This stuff ������’t for us” and “We don’t do that.” Black people did and continue to do these things, Smith says. “Really, we’re just embracing our ancestry.”

This is key to the future envisioned by Tucker and Boyd: “We want black people to be outdoors and viewed as a constant and not an exception.”&�Բ�����;

Among the greenery, he has spotted an orchid: Dracula morleyi. Blotted in black with a flash of white at the center, it’s barely bigger than a fingernail. “This place is full of so much biodiversity,” he grins. “Scientists don’t even know about most of it.”

Ovando is a guide at Los Cedros Protective Forest, a of cloud forest in the northwest Ecuadorian Andes, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas.

This tropical haven—home to a , including the critically endangered black-and-chestnut eagle and brown-headed spider monkey, jaguars, endemic frogs, more than 300 species of birds, 600 kinds of moths, and 200 varieties of orchids—is at the forefront of a global movement to recognize the legal rights of the natural world.

The movement is rooted in the common Indigenous belief that nature—from the Andean mountains to Amazonian rivers right down to a single soldier ant—is a system to which human beings belong and with which they must harmoniously coexist. The legal theory argues that these ecosystems and species have intrinsic rights that should be protected in the same way as those of humans.

“The idea that rocks, rivers, and animals are alive and so should be granted a legal status is a core aspect of Indigenous worldviews,” says César Rodríguez-Garavito, professor of clinical law and director of NYU School of Law’s , an initiative attempting to further nonhuman rights and the larger web of life. “Indigenous peoples have turned that belief into practices of reciprocity with nature, through ceremonies, use of medicinal plants, and more.”

The planet faces a human-led that has already wiped out entire species and risks destroying whole ecosystems. This destruction would accelerate under authoritarian regimes and right-wing agendas around the globe, including Project 2025 in the United States. Los Cedros is the world’s leading example of how non-anthropocentric laws can be used to effectively defend the planet.

“By putting ourselves [humans] outside of nature, we’re hurting ourselves,” says , an ecologist at the University of Oregon who first visited Los Cedros in 1998 and has since returned many times. “We live within the system of nature, we rely on it, and it’s part of us. The rights of nature recognizes this in a way that old laws haven’t.”

WATCH: Does a Forest Have Rights? In Ecuador, It Does.

So-called “rights of nature” arguments, a novel conservation strategy dating back to the 1990s, have been lodged in 397 cases across 34 countries and even the United Nations, according to the . These cases have been brought from Bolivia to Brazil to Uganda, as well as Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. 

Some cases have broadly recognized the rights of , , , and even the entirety of , whereas others have focused on species like in the North Sea, in Panama, or a specific animal, such as , who was living in a cage in New York. In one particularly creative case this year, campaigners succeeded in getting music streaming platforms to .

In Ecuador, the groundwork was set in 2008 when, thanks to lobbying from Indigenous groups, the country that included the rights of Pacha Mama, in essence stating that Mother Nature has the same rights as people.

But Los Cedros’ story began much earlier. Today, the reserve is owned by the state, but in 1988, the land was purchased by Josef DeCoux, an American environmentalist who managed a scientific station at the heart of the reserve until his death in May 2024. Photo by Bitty Roy

Bit by bit, with the help of friends and nonprofits including Friends of the Earth Sweden and Australia’s , DeCoux bought land in the area in order to preserve it. For many years, he lived in a shack deep in the forest.

“I fell in love with the unique beauty of the place,” said DeCoux, during a visit to the monitoring station in Los Cedros shortly before his death following a years-long battle with cancer. “I immediately knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to this forest. And that’s what I’ve done.”

DeCoux worked with Indigenous communities in the surrounding Manduriacos Valley to build local support for the effort, resulting in Los Cedros securing state conservation status in 1994. “People stopped shooting all the monkeys,” he added.

“They appreciated the reserve and its value, and how it protects the watershed.”

As a result, Los Cedros—which ranges from 3,000 to 9,000 feet in altitude and is crossed by four rivers—thrived, in contrast to the suffered by the surrounding, highly endangered Andean cloud forest. Under an open-door policy aimed at raising the profile of the reserve, scientists came from across the world to study its wealth of biodiversity, with more than now published.

“I could spend time studying a single square meter of Los Cedros and still not understand everything there,” Roy says. “Western Ecuador is head and shoulders above the rest of the world in terms of amphibian, bird, and plant biodiversity.”

However, conservation efforts hit a major stumbling block in 2017 when the government granted the state-owned mining company ENAMI EP rights to mining concessions for copper and gold in more than two-thirds of Los Cedros’ landmass.

This is where the rights of nature legislation came into play. Before extraction could begin, a legal challenge was tabled at the Provincial Court by the local government of Cotacachi, a region home to 43 Indigenous communities. After an appeal, the case was then taken to Ecuador’s Constitutional Court. The claimants argued that if mining was to proceed in Los Cedros, it would violate the forest’s constitutional rights, and they demanded the protection of its “right to exist, survive, and regenerate.”&�Բ�����;

After a years-long legal battle, in December 2021, judges at the Constitutional Court finally annulled the concession that had been granted to the mining company, in effect turning a theoretical constitutional text into a tangible, real-world policy.

The unprecedented was one of the first times that any court in the world had ever recognized the rights of nonhuman organisms—and the judges went as far as to state that the law not only applied to Los Cedros and to other protected areas, but, under the terms of the constitution, to any kind of nature within the country of Ecuador.

“T������ was no case before this, there was no precedent,” added DeCoux. “It was a case of science winning over extractive industries.”

In Los Cedros, the miners were forced to remove their machinery immediately and the court banned all future mining and other extractive activities.

Now, 24 hours a day, the reserve thrums with activity, from the early-morning roars of howler monkeys among the dense canopy to the afternoon squawks of toucans and the buzzes of nocturnal bats swooping after the many critters that fill the night sky.

“It is a great pleasure to observe the greatness of the animal kingdom here every day,” says Ovando, as he watches a pair of yellow-beaked toucans in the distance. “Life is calmer here now. The wildlife is more at ease.”

Follow-up monitoring has also confirmed the early impact of the ruling. As part of a published by the More Than Human Rights Project in June 2024, Rodríguez-Garavito visited Los Cedros twice and found that mining equipment and staff had been removed from the reserve, which remained a “sanctuary” for biodiversity thanks to the ruling. The report concluded that the enforcement of the rights of nature and rulings like Los Cedros “can be effective tools to protect endangered ecosystems.”

“I was positively surprised,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “Especially because Los Cedros is in the midst of the region with many active mining projects. It should not be taken for granted that these rulings will be properly implemented.”

Proponents argue that the successful use of those rights to defend an ecosystem like Los Cedros has set a powerful precedent, and it is already influencing rulings in Ecuador and beyond. In July, the Indigenous Kitu Kara people won a claiming pollution violated the rights of the Machángara River, which runs through Ecuador’s capital, Quito. In March, Peru the rights of the Marañón River to be free of pollution after a lawsuit was brought by the Kukama Indigenous Women’s organization against the oil company Petroperú. A recent claim relating to Ecuador’s Fierro Urco wetlands even .

“It’s a phenomenon that’s catching fire and that’s spreading very rapidly around the world,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “Because the Los Cedros case is a sophisticated and detailed judicial decision, it’s being referenced by other courts.”

Nicola Peel, an who first visited Los Cedros in 1999 and testified during the Constitutional Court case, argues that the ruling marks a turning point in global conservation. “I absolutely believe that the time has come for the rights of nature,” she says. “This feels like the natural progression for a new era.”

However, plenty of concerns remain over the long-term success of the ruling in Los Cedros, and rights of nature cases more generally, in the face of powerful extractive industries and limited resources to monitor and enforce legal protections.

“The courts move on to new cases,” Rodríguez-Garavito says. “But the argument behind my study is that researchers, policymakers, and advocates must continue paying attention to implementation. We need to follow what happens after.”

The Ganges River, for example, which is considered sacred by more than a billion Indians, was by the highest court in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, which is home to part of the river, as a “living entity” in 2017, but sewage and industrial waste has continued to pollute the river since then and it mostly .

Rodríguez-Garavito’s findings also highlighted other threats to Los Cedros: mining activities in nearby areas that risk a “spillover effect,” a growing problem with organized crime in Ecuador that could hinder efforts, “grossly insufficient” resources for park rangers, and the passing of DeCoux, who led the movement.

An ongoing challenge is also maintaining the support of locals, some of whom—in situations of poverty, without alternative sources of income, and barely any support from the state—have been tempted by the pay offered by mining. “Companies always offer them good jobs,” Ovando says.

Others are concerned that the ruling could simply boost illegal hunting, logging, and mining outside of the reserve’s borders, which could result in mass biodiversity loss.

“My worry is that Los Cedros will become an island surrounded by private lands that get degraded,” Peel says. “How can we ensure the protection of other areas too?”

But few disagree that the case of Los Cedros, with its beguiling, mist-covered forest, has provided a vision of a future where the rights of the natural world are actively and effectively protected.

“Mining ������’t going to happen here again,” said DeCoux, in a typically direct tone that has driven the conservation success in Los Cedros. “People need to get that into their heads.”

Around this time, my grandmother was poisoned in an inter-clan conflict. On her deathbed, she had a vision and told the family that if they followed the voices from the planes they would weaken, get sick, and die. My grandfather, devastated after her death and trying to avoid an inter-clan war, decided to heed the voices. 

My father was a small child then. He and some of my aunts and uncles have told me these stories since I was a little girl. They walked for a month, from the old lands, now Yasuní, to the river where the bocachico fish run, now Pastaza. On the walk my great-grandfather, Nenkemo, had a dream. In the dream he abandoned his daughter-in-law, my grandmother who had died. The next morning he woke up, ate breakfast, and refused to continue on with the rest. He said that his knee hurt, but everyone knew that he wanted to remain in the forest he loved. The others kept going, and Nenkemo turned back with his spear and blowgun. 

My grandfather and his family had seen the metal machetes, knives, and pots left by previous invaders and thrown from the planes. My grandfather thought of the power of the metal blades that were so resistant and did not rot. Perhaps they will have more of these upstream. They walked to the missionary communities in Pastaza. There they heard the talk of the devil and God and salvation. And within six months, they began to die. 

My grandfather and his brothers, themselves sick and dying, were terrified and irate. They wanted war. The lead missionary, a white woman named Rachel Saint, convinced the Waorani women to break all the men’s spears. She offered them clothes and processed food like sugar and flour, and she preached. The men and women who got close to her got sick. They became racked with fever, many became paralyzed, and many died, including a number of my aunts and uncles. My father, only still a small boy, crossed the river and hid, surviving on raw shrimp. Rachel preached salvation. My father saw slow torture and death. Our resistance was born there. My father later said: We will pretend to go to her church, but we will not believe in her god. She killed our family.

I grew up in the missionary village of Toñampare. My father told me these stories and taught me the beauty and bounty of the forest. At the same time, Rachel seemed to be everywhere, always scolding us, calling us savages, and trying to prohibit our songs and dances and sharing of dreams. Sometimes she would receive visitors from her world. My little brother and I would compete to see who could hear the approaching planes first. And we would sneak to the dirt landing strip to watch the people who seemed to descend from the sky. Once a young white girl visited and I thought she looked so pretty. I harmed myself terribly in a deluded attempt to look more like her. 

I became enchanted with the white people’s things and their promises of salvation. I wanted to learn to speak Spanish, to wear light cotton dresses, to have blue eyes and straight, white teeth. I wanted to know this god who offers eternal life and see what was beyond the horizon, the place that the planes came from. My worried mother tried to dissuade me, a tactic that rarely works with teenagers anywhere in the world. My gentle father did not approve, but did not stand in my way. My desire to learn led me into the arms of the missionaries, led me to face, survive, and escape from forms of abuse I had never imagined, led me to glimpse into the savior’s world and then, like my great grandfather, to turn back to my own.

And my world, the Amazon rainforest of Ecuador, was at that moment facing an existential threat. The government had auctioned off Waorani territory to multinational oil companies behind our backs. I joined other Waorani and people from distinct Indigenous nations, some of which had a long and disastrous history of oil exploitation in their territories, to fight the government and oil companies. I realized that they too promised salvation. Oil, they said, would save us and the entire country from the very poverty they created. 

My relatives had sickened and died from polio upon contact with the missionaries. I soon met men and women from Indigenous Kofan territories whose relatives died from cancer and whose children died from bathing and drinking water in rivers contaminated by the oil companies.

And then it hit me: The authors of our destruction are the very ones who preach our salvation. Salvation from what? From being Waorani? From living healthy and rich lives in the forest? From discussing our dreams in the morning? From being irreverently funny and laughing all the time? From dancing naked in our palm-thatched longhouses? From living in harmony with the very place they want to destroy? 

If you would like to invade our territory and destroy our home, our people, our language, and culture, have the courage at least to say so. Stop offering salvation to the people you want to eliminate. And allow me to be clear as well: We will resist. We will fight to continue to make our lives in the forest, to speak Wao Tededo, to share our dreams in the mornings, to laugh at you and each other. We will fight to keep your oil companies from poisoning our land and rivers. We will fight, it turns out, even for you, by stopping the global devastation brought on by climate injustice. We will fight to continue to be Waorani. And we will not be saved. 

This essay is inspired by Nemonte Nenquimo’s forthcoming memoir,

The leak came as no surprise to activists, environmental groups, and government officials who have been fighting against the facility for nearly a decade. Red Hill contains 20 tanks that are each 250 feet tall and can hold a total of 250 million gallons of fuel—and all this has been located just 100 feet above the island’s sole source aquifer. 

Built during World War II and classified until the 1990s, the Red Hill facility has since been exposed as a source of multiple leaks . The November 2021 leak happened weeks after the Hawaiʻi Department of Health fined the Navy for a host of operations and maintenance violations, and provided false testimony and withheld information about corrosion at the facility.  

In the wake of the 2021 leak, hundreds of water protectors and their allies descended onto the state Capitol to demand the immediate shutdown of the facility in Red Hill, a site originally known to Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) as Kapūkakī. They called out elected officials and the military for putting U.S. imperialism over human lives. 

Demonstrators stood in front of a statue of Queen Liliuokalani, the last monarch of Hawaiʻi. She ruled until 1893, when the U.S. Navy aided sugar barons in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The prevailing rallying cry was and has been: “Ola i ka wai” (“water is life”).

“They’ve done so much damage that it will take years, decades to heal from what they’ve done to us,” says Healani Sonoda-Pale, an organizer with the Oʻ��hu Water Protectors, a coalition working toward environmental justice, sovereignty, decolonization, and demilitarization. “And when I say ‘us,’ I’m talking about the Indigenous peoples of this land who have been under U.S. rule since 1893. As the first peoples of Hawaiʻi, we are the voice of the land, the voice of our water, and our nonhuman relatives. What happens to them happens to us and vice versa.”

Sonoda-Pale’s genealogy on Oʻ��hu can be traced back hundreds of years. She says she dealt with the trauma of growing up in poverty and watching her family struggle to survive under the grip of U.S. rule. “This gives me the fire and strength to continue on with all of the issues we see in Hawaiʻi,” Sonoda-Pale says. “The fact that my people recovered from the brink of an apocalypse and is still here after 131 years of occupation gives me a lot of hope.”

An Ongoing History of Contamination

This most recent spill was just the Kānaka Maoli’s latest chapter in a century-long fight against the U.S. military and its continued displacement of people and destruction of Native land and natural resources. 

“The story of Indigenous people on Oʻ��hu is a David and Goliath story,” says Sonoda-Pale. “Kānaka Maoli are up against the most powerful military in the world, which also happens to be the biggest polluter in the world. With climate change and global warming looming, our struggle for liberation has become about ensuring a livable future, not just for us but for everyone and all life.”

The U.S. military has come to occupy more than 250,000 acres of land across the island chain, taking up more than 20% of the land on the island of Oʻ��hu alone. Nearly half of the military’s combined acreage is also on so-called ceded lands, which were annexed of Kānaka Maoli or their sovereign government.

The Red Hill fuel facility is just a few miles from Puʻuloa, also called Pearl Harbor. Prior to contact, Puʻuloa was one of the most abundant food sources in the islands, rich with marine resources, and numerous loko iʻ�� (traditional fishponds) and loʻi kalo (taro patches). It was fed by the water of 12 different watersheds and served as the seat of political power for Hawaiian royalty.

This was destroyed by the dredging of the Pearl Harbor Naval Station in the late 1870s. Today it is one the most contaminated military installations in the nation, with six Superfund sites.  

According to a , in the waters surrounding Oʻ��hu, the U.S. military has dumped thousands of bombs, tons of unspecified toxins, hydrogen cyanide, and 4 million gallons of radioactive waste liquid. In 2019, the military was also found to have dumped 500,000 pounds of nitrate compounds—. 

As recently as January 8, 2024, the Navy released of partially treated wastewater into Puʻuloa’s waters after heavy rains knocked out a power transformer. This came a year after the Department of Health ordered the Navy to pay $9 million in fines for hundreds of at the water treatment plant.

The location of the Pearl Harbor Memorial—the popular tourist destination for the sunken battleship the USS Arizona—is also home to an active oil leak that has been spewing fuel since World War II. Its iridescent toxins float visibly on the water’s surface at all times. Despite having the equipment and knowledge to clean up the spill, the military has chosen not to so as not to disturb the bodies of the 900 service members who lost their lives and remain entombed in the ship. This is a grace the military often hasn’t (ancestral bones) or sacred sites of Kānaka Maoli. 

The Oʻ��hu Water Protectors have spent the past two years holding the Navy and public officials accountable by creating awareness and helping mobilize thousands of people through social media campaigns, press conferences, protest marches, and calls to action. But these days, for the first time, Kānaka Maoli and their allies are standing together with military families who joined them to demand justice, accountability, clean water, and aid for the military’s affected service people and civilians. 

Wayne Tanaka, water protector and director of the Sierra Club, which successfully sued the Department of Health twice over regulations regarding Red Hill, says, “I guess there’s a little bit of irony in [members of the military joining the movement], but also a lot of inspiration. To see people from completely different backgrounds coalescing around the bigger picture—protecting what we need to thrive, what we need to give the best chance to have a bright future for our kids—it’s been so inspiring to witness and gives me hope to come together to tackle some of these existential crises that we’re facing.”

Water Protectors and Military Families Working Together

When families in Kapilina Beach Homes—civilian housing southwest of Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickham—began getting ill, they were told by both Kapilina apartment management and the Navy’s emergency operation commander that they weren’t on the Navy water line. After that was proven to be false, those in Kapilina were offered nothing. Active military members, in contrast, were given water and housing in hotels for months. 

The , despite various residents’ reports of sheens on the water, odors, and health problems. Sampling from the EPA determined there are still hydrocarbons in the water and advised the Navy to investigate the root cause and provide water to affected residents.

Kānaka Maoli veteran Aidyn-Rhys King, with his wife, Mandie, and roommate Xavier Bonilla, were among the several affected in Kapilina. They, alongside Oʻ��hu Water Protector Mikey Inouye, formed Shut Down Red Hill Mutual Aid (SDRHMA) shortly after the leak, which has been providing water to that community every month since. 

In addition to clean water, the SDRHMA collective has also been providing the affected community with political education, resources, and tools to organize themselves for justice and accountability. They also hold community picnics to give military families and others affected a safe forum to share concerns. Through this organizing, they have been able to build solidarity between military families and Kānaka Maoli, so the historically opposing groups can communicate together, learn each other’s histories, and figure out how everyone can show up for each other’s struggles.   

“It’s a bridge that many of us never thought to be possible within the next 10 years, but is now possible because of this terrible crisis,” says Inouye.  

Jamie Blair Williams, who lived at Red Hill Mauka Army housing, eventually became a core member of the group. Williams, whose spouse is in the Coast Guard, was who got ill and continued to get ill after drinking and bathing in water that the Department of Health reported had petroleum levels 350 times higher than the department considers safe.  

Williams also lost her two dogs, her home, and thousands of dollars in personal belongings contaminated by the water. She, alongside thousands of others, are part of various litigations against their housing complexes and the Navy, who denied their health concerns were related to the fuel leak. A mass tort, with more than 1,000 litigants, is set to go to trial in 2024. Another mass tort claim, in which Williams is the lead plaintiff, will go to trial in 2025. 

Williams got involved with the water protectors after she, like many, felt that affected residents were being denied salient information. She posted a video from her home’s security camera showing Army officials talking about hazards worse than fuel on her property. She made the video public on social media in hopes that it would force more transparency from the military. 

Inouye amplified the video’s reach on the Oʻ��hu Water Protectors’ social media pages and invited Williams to a sign waving. Already looking for ways to get involved in the activism, but not sure where to begin, Williams accepted and has since participated in panels, protests, and joined the Oʻ��hu Water Protectors in a demonstration in front of the White House. 

Inouye also helped get her and others associated with the military access to Mākua Valley—5,000 acres of land that was seized during World War II for live-fire practice. Back then, Kānaka Maoli were evicted with the promise that their lands would be cleaned up and returned after the war. Nearly 80 years later, that hasn’t happened, and much of the valley’s native forests and cultural sites have since been destroyed by wildfires. 

In 1996, the nonprofit Mālama Mākua formed for the preservation, community access, and return of the valley. Due to a court-sanctioned Cultural Access Agreement in 2002, Mālama Mākua is given cultural access to the valley twice a month, which is how Williams was able to see it. And in December 2023, the military training there. Many credit the nonprofit for this decision.

Williams says she came to Hawaiʻi with a very surface-level understanding of the contentious relationship between the military and Kānaka Maoli, but after multiple trips to Mākua, now her understanding is deeper in a way that she says feels knitted into the fabric of who she is. Though she also adds, “As someone who is not Indigenous, the true depth of pain that comes with when you are part of a culture that considers wai (water) and ʻ�徱�Բ� (land) as a spiritual part of human existence and the kind of violence that the military then unleashes and how that injures you as a human being, as an individual, and as a community, I’ll just never fully be able to understand.”

Collective Successes

Near the one-year anniversary of the 2021 leak at the Red Hill facility, yet another leak occurred: 1,300 gallons of toxic fire-suppression foam leaked from the facility. The foam is a per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS)—a “forever chemical” that does not break down naturally.

Twelve days later, thousands of demonstrators, including the Oʻ��hu Water Protectors and 65 other organizations, coalesced in a “Walk for Wai.” They were led by Ernie Lau, the manager and chief engineer of the Board of Water Supply, as they marched from Keʻehi Lagoon to the Navy Exchange. 

Despite having called for the aquifer’s protection for years, this was Lau’s first time joining to publicly support the group’s efforts to pressure the Navy. “It’s time for me to come out of the box and not be a typical government official that stays in his office,” he told .

The Board of Water Supply recently filed a claim for $1.2 billion against the Navy to cover the costs of the crisis.  

The collective efforts of water protectors and military-affiliated organizers on Oʻ��hu over the past two years eventually forced the Department of Defense to order the Red Hill facility be shut down and emptied of fuel. This is after the Department initially fought the facility’s closure. In the fall of 2023, more than 104 million gallons of fuel was removed from the Red Hill tanks. Some 64,000 gallons remain, which are set to be removed starting in January 2024, with permanent closure of Red Hill set for January 2027. 

Inouye says the reason why the military responded to their public pressure in such a historic way was because they saw that the situation was so bad that it threatened their future presence on the islands. Many of the 65-year land leases that the U.S. military obtained for a mere $1 in the 1960s will expire starting in 2029. If the leases aren’t renewed, the military may be forced to vacate. Activists have already begun . 

Many water protectors say they are not done organizing around Red Hill until the last drop of fuel is out of the facility, and there is a guarantee of no future use. Still, the movement they have built has been a success in many ways. They have created lasting systemic change through education, mutual understanding, and learning how to show up for one another’s struggles, which Inouye says involves more of a deep organizing approach within communities.

“It happens at a person-to-person level, neighbor to neighbor. While not as flashy as thousands of people at a protest, it’s the type of work required to build towards disruptions that actually create a crisis for decision-makers of powerful institutions,” says Inouye. This way, he added, when it’s time to mobilize for larger issues, it’s not a call to action for strangers, but a call to action to comrades who have organized their own community.

Water protectors, impacted residents, affected members affiliated with the military, and Sierra Club representatives in a Community Representative Initiative (CRI) as part of a consent decree the Navy signed with the EPA and the state of Hawaiʻi. After , federal officials did not attend the next meeting in January 2024, . The Oʻ��hu Water Protectors contend that the CRI was created as “.”

“What’s still up in the air is whether this giant bureaucracy will also be able to acknowledge the bigger picture—that it’s not within our national security interests to jeopardize resources we need to survive the climate crisis, especially water,” Tanaka says.

Kalehua Krug is one of the organizers of Kaʻohewai, a coalition of Hawaiian organizations that erected a ceremonial ���ʻ��, or fishing shrine, in front of the U.S. Pacific Fleet command headquarters days after the 2021 leak. It remains there today to create awareness and serve as a place for the Hawaiian community to gather.

“Education is the only proactive way we have to reshape reality,” Krug says. 

Krug is the principal of the Ka Waihona o ka Naʻ��uao Public Charter School, where students are taught through a culturally informed educational model that centers the Indigenous worldview. He teaches them about kinship with nature and the importance of water so they can appreciate, love, and care for it—and then grow up to have more ethical values around how to treat the world.

Whereas mainstream culture’s attachment to the idea of progress is to leave the past behind, Krug says, “It’s the past that informs the future.’’ He points to the fact that before colonization, Native Hawaiians developed ways to live on the islands sustainably for thousands of years in ecological harmony. With that data, he says, “We’ve got enough science to rebuild the world.” And he says an Indigenous worldview, at this point, is a must for everyone on the planet: “We’ve all got to behave different.”

Land is important to Native nations for myriad reasons. Land enables the Yurok to maintain cultural traditions such as gathering traditional foods and practicing place-specific religious ceremonies. Like all sovereign entities, land defines the Yurok as a nation, both culturally and politically. Land offers economic development opportunities. It also bolsters climate resilience as the tribe restores wetlands, coastal prairies, and old-growth forests using traditional land management techniques.

In the past three and a half decades, the tribal land base has grown twentyfold, to a total of 100,000 acres, funded in large part by sequestering carbon. For this work, the United Nations Development Programme awarded the Yurok Tribe its , which recognizes efforts that reduce poverty through environmental justice work. It’s an exciting example of a small community—about 5,000 members are enrolled—building climate resiliency in a way that best fits their needs.

“When I was a young man growing up on the reservation, all of our land laid behind locked gates,” says tribal Vice Chairman Frankie Myers. “We’d have to break into our land in order to get into our prayer sites. In order to get to our gathering sites, we had to be outlaws. My kids growing up will never have that feeling. My wife can gather without worrying about being harassed by law enforcement or a logging company.”

The Tribe’s Quest for its Traditional Territory

The Yurok Tribe has long faced state and federal policies meant to eliminate its land base. Before American colonization and conquest, the tribal territory stretched along what is now the Northern California coast and inland within the Klamath River watershed.

The in the 1840s drew white settlers West, where they killed of Native people through forced displacement, enslavement, and disease. In the 20th century, the Yurok continued to be denied access to their land and water, leading to over fishing rights. By 1986, when they finally gained federal recognition, the tribe was returned—about 1% of its traditional territory.

For these reasons, “our number one priority is to get our land back,” Myers says. In 2011, the tribe used to buy about 32,000 acres in the and watersheds, which had been owned by a timber company. The watersheds were selected both because of their biodiversity and old growth forests, according to Myers, and because the areas were used in Yurok religious ceremonies.

This purchase more than quadrupled their land base, but also meant the tribe owed the state government millions of dollars. They originally planned to pay back their loans by sustainably logging the land, but that would have taken a long time. “We needed to be creative about how we were going to attack this problem,” Myers says. “We needed to be courageous in leaning into what we had.”

They soon found a creative solution. In 2010 and 2011, the California Air Resources Board (ARB) was conducting a formal rule-making process to create a . Cap-and-trade programs allow industries that cannot otherwise reach their emission compliance requirements to purchase credits, called offsets, from sellers that sequester greenhouse gases. (In California, industries can use credits to offset up to 8% of their emissions.)

The ARB did not initially engage with tribes because they were focusing on land where the state had enforcement jurisdiction. At that time, Jason Gray, now head of the state’s cap-and-trade program, had just joined ARB as an attorney to advise on offset protocol design. “The Yurok, rightly so, came to us and said, ‘Shame on you guys. Why aren’t you including us?’” he recalls. The state listened, and the Yurok and several other tribes provided feedback to ensure the program worked within the structures of tribal law while fulfilling the state’s need to enforce regulatory standards. In 2013, when the cap-and-trade program formally launched, the Yurok became the first entity in the state to register a forest offset project.

Participation in the program has been a huge success for the Yurok. With income from the offset program, the Yurok have paid off loans from their previous watershed purchases; supported youth programming, housing, and road improvement; and helped develop off-reservation businesses such as in Humboldt County, California. They have also been able to buy back tens of thousands of acres of their traditional territory, which has had a powerful impact on the tribal nation.

“It’s quite amazing what the Yurok have accomplished,” Gray says.

A Holistic View of Forest Management

The Yurok’s small land base was once heavily logged by private timber companies and co-managed by agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, who viewed land management from a fundamentally different perspective than the Yurok.

For example, the Yurok view fire as a tool and partner. They historically used prescribed burning, also called cultural burning, to prevent the coastal prairies from becoming overgrown with conifers and , the stems of which the Yurok use for basket weaving. Yet for much of the 20^th century, Forest Service policy treated fire as a threat. “They considered fire arson,” says Joe Hostler, who works in the Yurok Environmental Program’s community and ecosystems division. The Forest Service’s suppression of prescribed burning is “one of the reasons we have such overgrowth in our forests today,” Hostler says.

Myers says this management approach is part of a colonial, Western perspective that views humans as separate from the natural world, rather than part of it. In contrast, he says that “one of the core tenets of our traditional ecological knowledge is [the idea that] nature is not natural without human interaction.”

Land reclamation with income from the cap-and-trade program has enabled the tribe to take control of its land management again and revitalize once-banned techniques like cultural burning. It has also allowed them to sustainably harvest timber for economic development and forest management, restore salmon habitats in the Klamath River watershed, and create farms to increase food sovereignty.

This is all part of the tribe’s climate change adaptation strategy. “The climate change we are seeing now is unprecedented,” Myers says. “But we still hold true to those same teachings that we [have held] since time immemorial.”

To establish the tribe’s vision of a more resilient future in a changing climate, Hostler interviewed elders about historical environmental conditions. They described a cool, clear, and clean Klamath River, healthy salmon runs, and vast forests of old-growth redwoods. These memories became the baseline of what the tribe now says a healthy environment should look like, and what they are working toward with their climate change adaptation plan.

“We are connected to our land,” Hostler says. “We have intimate knowledge of the landscape and intergenerational knowledge.”

Following in the Yurok’s footsteps, 13 other tribes and Alaska Native corporations from across the U.S. now participate in California’s cap-and-trade program, from the White Mountain Apache in Arizona to the Passamaquoddy in Maine. As of September 2020, were issued to tribes or Alaska Native Corporations for forest projects through California’s program; about half of all forest offset credits issued. 

What is most important to Myers, though, is that the Yurok’s participation in California’s cap-and-trade program has strengthened tribal members’ relationship to their traditional territory. “The most beneficial thing we’re doing with our land is giving members access to it,” he says. “That is the greatest benefit we’ve done with our land.”

The Moloka’i are one of many Indigenous groups around the U.S. making inroads toward energy sovereignty. But the approach and methods differ depending on communities’ belief systems, landscapes, and local politics. For two rural cooperatives in Hawai‘i and New Mexico, energy sovereignty means taking actions toward decentralizing resources, increasing solar power plus storage, and centering community and the land in the process.

Not All Renewables Are Created Equal

The residents of Moloka’i are still in the nascent stages of gaining more community control over their energy. To find the best renewable solutions that fit both their culture and the natural environment, they have turned to their traditions and beliefs.

“The land is the chief, and we are the servants,” says Lori Buchanan, vice president of Ho’ahu Energy Cooperative. The cooperative was formed in 2020 and was officially incorporated in February of 2021 with the aim of providing locally owned, affordable, renewable energy. “The people are there to serve the resources and to ensure that the resources are not only sustainable—which is a word I don’t like to use—but make them abundant in perpetuity, because we think hundreds of years down the road. Our vision is not shortsighted like corporate greed and a quick buck, but very longsighted for the next generation and the next generation.”

The first step toward reaching that goal has been devising a proposal to submit to Hawaiian Electric, the main energy utility in Hawai‘i. In 2015, the state mandated that Hawaiian Electric consider community-based renewable energy projects in their work, so Ho’ahu Energy Cooperative and the Moloka’i community are demanding to be considered. 

Their plan is for the cooperative to own solar panels and battery storage while Hawaiian Electric would continue to own the poles and wires that transfer electricity to residents’ homes. Hawaiian Electric would purchase the solar power from Ho’ahu Energy Cooperative and provide renewable energy to cooperative members at a discounted rate.

Buchanan is Native Moloka’i and one of many on the island who has staved off extractive energy projects through protest. In 2012, she and other residents of Moloka’i organized to stop 50 wind turbines from being put on the island because of the degradation it was anticipated to cause to both the environment and the residents living there. While wind is considered a renewable energy source, it alone cannot supply a community’s energy portfolio. When the wind stops blowing, tapping into energy storage, including batteries, could help power the turbines. After that storage is used, a community may still need to use the fossil fuels provided by the existing grid. Wind turbines range in size, and the larger the turbine, the more chances there are for as seen from on the island of O’ahu.  

“T������’s a Hawaiian saying,” says Todd Yamashita, president of Ho’ahu Energy Cooperative, “He wa’a he moku, he moku he wa’a—‘the canoe is an island, the island is a canoe.’ Of 7,000 people, we only have what we have and that’s all we have. So if you have anything to do here—whether it is cultural, educational, environmental, economic—if it’s extractive in nature, you are absolutely unwelcome.”

Time of Transition

In 2020, renewable energy usage (wind, solar, and hydro power) in the U.S. accounted for 19.8% of total kilowatt hours, compared to 60.3% from fossil fuels (natural gas, coal, petroleum, and other gases). A meaningful transition to renewables at scale will involve both existing electric utilities and new models, like that of Picuris Pueblo.

Located in the mountains of northern New Mexico, Picuris Pueblo is the smallest tribal nation in the state. With relatively few opportunities for economic development in their remote location, Picuris partnered with Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in 2018 to embark on a solar power project that would create revenue for Picuris, meet 100% of daytime energy demand with solar power, and reduce energy costs for tribal members.

Through funding by the Department of Energy, Picuris built a 1-megawatt solar power system with about 4,000 solar panels. The energy generated is sold to Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, which relies on a mix of solar and non-renewable energy sources to provide power to its membership, including Picuris. Thanks to the solar array, residents of Picuris receive a $50 to $75 credit on their energy bills.

The project has been so successful that Picuris Pueblo is expanding their solar power operations to include a second initiative. Kit Carson is also increasing its solar power grid. The cooperative estimates that it will be able to buy solar power at $0.03 cents per kilowatt hour compared to the $0.05 cents per kilowatt hour it costs to purchase coal. Its members will save the difference on their energy bills. 

“We define [energy sovereignty] as you’re free to decide which type of fuel source you want to use,” says Luis Reyes, CEO of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative. “So, in the case of Kit Carson, if we don’t want to be tied to the fossil fuel pipeline, our power suppliers would allow this kind of energy independence to find a fuel source that best fits our needs.”

The partnership benefited Kit Carson Electric Cooperative too: Picuris Pueblo’s added solar capacity brought them closer to providing 100% daytime solar power to its 33,000 members, a goal they are on track to reach by 2022. More solar power also means less reliance on natural gas and coal, some of the main sources of energy used in New Mexico. The cooperative will provide solar-generated power to its membership during the day, and at night, it relies on stored energy in batteries the cooperative owns, as well as supplemental energy from Four Corners, the site where they source their non-renewable energy.

In 2016, Kit Carson bought out of their contract with their former vendor, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, because they were only allowed to provide 5% solar power to their customers. The cooperative then partnered with Guzman Energy, an independent energy contractor to pursue their solar power plan.

Since Kit Carson has developed its solar infrastructure, the cooperative has purchased less coal energy from Four Corners. What was a 90% purchasing rate of coal energy in 2016 has decreased to around 40% in 2021. However, if Four Corners were to incorporate more solar sourcing into its model, it could help retain vendors who prioritize sustainability, such as Kit Carson, in the long run.

“If Four Corners today were to put solar, maybe some wind, then we would continue to buy from them and then we would continue to build solar locally,” Reyes says.

A New Energy Future

As countries across the world have pledged to reduce carbon emissions, many Indigenous communities across the U.S. have been and are creating new energy futures. Blue Lake Rancheria, a tribal nation in Humboldt, California, has developed enough of its own solar energy grid that it can “island”—a term that the renewable energy sector uses to describe communities that can use power separate from the grid. When rolling blackouts were happening across the western part of the United States in 2020 and in 2021 because of an overtaxed grid, Blue Lake Rancheria was able to still provide electricity to its residents on the reservation and reduce stress on the main grid.

Even with success stories like these, the renewable energy sector is facing significant questions. As of now, the industry does not have a responsible way of disposing of certain pieces of the solar panels once they have exceeded their lifespan, usually an average of 30 years. There are also concerns about associated with mining the materials needed to make electric battery storage. But experts argue renewable energy is still than our current model of fossil fuel dependence. And as the world invests big in renewables, the sector will likely see myriad community-led innovations and improvements, which continue to inspire the residents of Moloka’i.

“As we go, we’re hoping to do many creative projects that pushes the technological envelope for what you can do on a small island community,” says Yamashita of Ho’ahu Energy Cooperative. “Projects that have equity, that directly benefit the people. And I can’t think of any better way than the people here building it themselves.”

“I never had any interest in buying a fishing permit or owning my own boat because I saw the changes happening,” says Rion Schmidt, a Sugpiaq Native who has worked in fishing and fish research his whole life. “Fewer and fewer fish, water warming up; I realized while I might be able to live a subsistence lifestyle and eat these foods, that making all my money off the fisheries might not be totally sustainable for someone like myself.”

Instead, he’s looking to another species that has supported Indigenous Alaskans for millennia: kelp. The nonprofit has started a program to empower and equip young Indigenous people with the resources and training to start their own kelp farms. The goal is threefold: creating economic opportunities, supporting the health of the ocean, and connecting people to a traditional food source.

Schmidt is one of seven soon-to-be-kelp-farmers working with the Native Conservancy to build out his 22-acre kelp farm next year. Cultivating this traditional food in its natural environment is a prime example of food sovereignty, which Schmidt defines as “protecting Native people’s right to the resource.”

An Emerging Industry

The Native Conservancy is the first Native-owned and Native-led land trust, which empowers Alaska Native peoples to permanently protect and preserve endangered habitats on their ancestral homelands.

The Conservancy was founded in 2003 by Dune Lankard, who grew up in the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound. There, his family fished and hunted wild game and always had more than they could fit in their freezers. They regularly delivered their excess to friends and family who appreciated traditional foods and didn’t have the time, energy, or resources to hunt and fish themselves. He learned at an early age that sharing an abundant harvest was not only an act of philanthropy and good will, but also a responsibility.

When the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill left subsistence foods contaminated in oil, Lankard began to focus his life’s work on conservation and protection of the wild foods that had sustained his community for thousands of years. He started the the day of the spill, which then worked to successfully protect 765,000 acres of forest from clear-cutting in the spill zone in 1995. The Preservation Council became a 501(c)3 in 2001 and now focuses its efforts on salmon habitat protection and environmental justice.

Since its founding, the Native Conservancy has worked with the Preservation Council to preserve more than 1 million acres of wild salmon habitat along the Gulf of Alaska coastline. Many of the Native Conservancy’s current projects work to build resilience and food sovereignty by delivering traditional foods to elders, piloting a portable freezer model in the community, and training kelp farmers.

“Indigenous peoples are interested in the kelp space for three reasons,” Lankard says. First, “restorative purposes; second, growing and eating a nutritious traditional food source; and third, building a regenerative local economy.”

The ecologically restorative benefits of growing kelp are well documented: Kelp grows in the ocean and requires no land, fresh water, or fertilizer. In contrast, it takes and 216 gallons to produce one pint of soybeans. Kelp can also sequester carbon up to , which means it’s a powerful tool in countering the impacts of climate change, such as ocean acidification and warming.

To Lankard’s second point, kelp is nutrient-rich, with high levels of potassium, magnesium, iron, and calcium, so it can support human health, too. Coastal tribes have harvested and dried kelp for generations, using it in a variety of dishes from soups to kelp cakes—a delicacy made by smoking and curing kelp and dried berries. Lankard remembers that during his childhood, his mother and grandmother harvested kelp in the spring during low tide and brought it home to dry and eat.

To Lankard’s final point, a regenerative economy is one that promotes cooperation and environmental sustainability rather than extraction. By supporting young Native kelp farmers, Lankard wants to empower communities to decide their own fate. He also hopes to get ahead of what could be a burgeoning kelp industry before it’s entirely profit-driven. The idea is to equip young Indigenous farmers with the skills and resources they need to successfully source, cultivate, harvest, process, and market kelp themselves.

“It’s not that easy with this operation because there is no established kelp industry; it’s a fledgling space,” Lankard says. “That’s why we felt that the only way Indigenous people can get in, let alone compete in this new kelp space, is if we address [potential] bottlenecks through our testing and our pilot programs.”

A New Generation of Farmers

The process of kelp cultivation begins with a Native Conservancy dive crew that sources specimens of fertile wild kelp, or sorus, to maintain genetic diversity within the crop. Then, harvested sorus is brought to the Conservancy’s partners at the in Seward. Here the spores are encouraged to settle onto spools made of string wrapped around large PVC pipes, and the kelp starts to grow.

Water is changed daily to support the young algae. After six to eight weeks, when the algae is 2 to 3 centimeters long, it is transferred, or outplanted, onto offshore test lines accessible by boat. The kelp then grows to its full size in the open ocean.

The Native Conservancy now grows kelp on seven test sites covering 100 miles within Prince William Sound. Over the past year, the organization successfully grew 4,000 pounds of ribbon, sugar, and even bull kelp, a notoriously difficult species to cultivate. Lankard’s team regularly measures salinity, pH, nutritional profiles, and growth profiles of the kelp.

“Our aim is to collect and synthesize information that will be most useful to future farmers,” says Tesia Bobrycki, director of regenerative economy at the Native Conservancy. This includes “a landscape analysis of the best, proven places to grow kelp, array designs, species-specific modifications, and best practices for outplanting, monitoring, and harvesting,” Bobrycki says.

In addition to conducting research to inform future farmers, the Native Conservancy recently received funding from the , a federal agency providing infrastructure and economic support throughout Alaska, to design a portable kelp nursery. The Conservancy is now making this scaled-down model available to remote villages and communities around the state.

Startup costs can a be a big barrier to entry for new kelp farmers, with expenses for permits, anchors, buoys, and lines totaling tens of thousands of dollars. To address this, the Native Conservancy is working to help secure low-interest, long-term deferred loans for Indigenous farmers as they start their mariculture operations. The Conservancy now has commitments from several donors to jumpstart the loan program, and is in the process of interviewing tribal and non-Native community development financial institutions to house this loan product.

Questions for the Future

As Schmidt prepares to build his farm, and the Native Conservancy looks toward the future, many questions remain.

For kelp that is harvested for commercial purposes, marketing and creating a value-added product can be tricky. New farmers must figure out what their regional markets look like for kelp, and whether they want to sell their harvest wholesale or work with producers to create new, value-added products like the kelp popcorn, pastas, pickles, and salsas produced by companies including and . If the quality of harvested kelp is not food-grade, farmers may have to sell it at a lower price to be used as fertilizer or compost. New farmers will have to grapple with these questions as they write their business plans, and they won’t always have answers.

Another concern is ensuring the carbon-sequestering power of kelp cultivation is not squandered. While harvesting kelp annually will certainly yield economic benefits, a major goal of the Native Conservancy is for every acre of kelp harvested, one acre of kelp will stay in the water year-round in order to sequester carbon long-term and support ocean health. Lankard is looking at creating a 501(c)(4) with regional tribes to push for policy that would potentially allow the community to grow restorative kelp alongside commercial kelp.

Ultimately, Lankard is hopeful that Indigenous and non-Indigenous customers alike will be interested in his community’s products, not only for taste or quality but because these farmers are looking to live a new way on the planet—one that supports environmental restoration as well as a regenerative economy. While the coming months will surely present further questions and challenges, Lankard is not deterred. He says, “Let’s just see what we’re capable of accomplishing.”

One nonprofit organization in Hawai‘i, , is attempting to improve food production through aquaponics. In Hawaiian, malama means “to take care of or protect,” and �ɲ�������Բ�����, also a name of a community on O‘ahu, means “potable water.” The program was founded to test “culturally grounded family-based backyard aquaponics intervention,” according to the organization’s website. Now, the program is working to expand its operations to other communities and islands, bringing malama to more Hawaiians.

Aquaponics: Renewing the Old

Aquaponics is the combination of cultivating fish (aquaculture) and plants in water (hydroponics). Essentially, it is a method of growing animal protein in a confined space with practically no waste materials. Bacteria in the tank convert ammonia from fish waste into nitrates. Nitrates then serve as a nutrient to plants. 

The only inputs include fish, fish food, seeds, pest control (which can be done with insects), and the electricity required to run pumps and water wheels. Murky fish tank water is recirculated to plants, which purify it in the process of gleaning its nutrients, and then the oxygenated water is pumped back into the fish tanks. Aside from some evaporation, these systems can produce for years with very little water replacement.

Aquaponics as practiced by Malama is a powerful system utilizing ancient Indigenous knowledge, improved with contemporary materials and methods. Much criticism can be made of the food systems that exist in contemporary society that are harmful to human and environmental health, including mass monoculture cultivation, soil degradation, chemical use, and today. The result is not only the destruction of biodiversity, but also of ideas.

In Hawai‘i, Malama’s founder, Ilima Ho-Lastimosa, was “doing a lot of food sovereignty work, traditional gardening, and connecting it to kids,” says Jane Chung-Do, the organization’s public health researcher and an assistant professor of public health at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. Ho-Lastimosa’s vision was to preserve Native Hawaiian culture, founding a nonprofit in 2005 called God’s Country Waimanalo. The vision would grow into one that focused on ecological practices and the health benefits of returning to traditional diets. 

Malama Waimānalo, as the organization was renamed, incorporated that cultural legacy into a program focused on backyard aquaponics. Ho-Lastimosa “just really saw the need for Hawaiian families to get interested in family-based, multigenerational, culture-based activities,” Chung-Do says. 

A Legacy of Exploitation

While Hawai‘i has fantastic conditions for scientific research—including the on Mauna Loa that led to early warnings of global warming—the state has always been at the intersection of exploration and exploitation.

Hawaiians were first “discovered” by Captain James Cook in 1778, and the islands became the site of sugar cane plantations owned by haole (White) sugar barons, a situation that persists to the present day. Though widely since at least the 1840s, Hawai‘i suffered the cruel overthrowing of its queen and an abolishment of its language for nearly a century. The subsequent adoption into the United States in 1898 as a territory and in 1959 as a state has yet to provide , as the U.S. does to people who are Indigenous to the contiguous United States and Alaska. 

Today, the islands face high food costs and environmental destruction from the tourist industry. Couple these colonial stressors in Hawai‘i with a rapidly changing climate, and the topic of food sovereignty reigns superior.

Climate change, as evidenced by the rising carbon dioxide recordings in Mauna Loa (which have gone from 315 parts per million in 1958 to ) has caused the oceans around the Hawaiian Islands to warm, rise, and acidify. These changes have , harming other native food species that rely on reefs for calcium carbonate—the literal backbone of so many of these species. Consequently, land-based ecosystems are also suffering, as increased drought harms traditional foods like breadfruit and taro, which have fed Indigenous peoples on these islands since time immemorial. 

In Waimānalo, on the eastern tip of O‘ahu, Malama’s backyard aquaponics research project is restoring sustainable and fresh foodways by rejuvenating harmonious techniques similar to the ancient ahupuaʻ�� method, which utilizes the water flowing from the mountains to the sea to grow plants and fish, Chung-Do says.

This traditional system divides land vertically along rivers so that each ahupuaʻ�� has a region of mountain, valley, and sea, creating a wedge of land with all a community’s needs along its slopes: salt, fish, taro, sweet potatoes, koa trees, and so forth. Although the classes the organization offers and the food-growing systems it implements are at a much smaller scale and use contemporary materials, Chung-Do says the team views these methods as “mini ahupuaʻ��” capable of continuing traditional knowledge, foodways, and the healthy communities that come with it.

Chung-Do described the toll colonization, militarization, and mass agriculture took on Indigenous farming systems. Malama Waimānalo works to counter those effects by providing equipment and training to build backyard aquaponics systems and grow traditional plants, such as taro. She says the Waimānalo community has responded well to the concept and how it incorporates Indigenous ʻ�徱�Բ� (“love of the land”) farming practices and stewardship.

The strength of aquaponics in this context comes from the symbiotic relationship of all the elements, Chung-Do says. All organisms involved (plants and fish and humans) benefit from each other, reflecting the relationship Indigenous peoples around the world have with the land. Malama, through its work, demonstrates that it’s possible to restore ancient methods and revitalize the systems threatened by modern environmentally damaging practices that do not contain the same symbiotic relationships, she says.

Restoring Traditional Foods in Untraditional Lands

While Hawai‘i faces its unique challenges as a collection of destination islands without a treaty that guarantees the rights of Native Hawaiians, other tribal communities within the geopolitical boundaries of the United States navigate their own troubled waters. They face many historically similar challenges, threats of cultural erasure, and legacies of oppression. While many tribes are combating the high prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and other diseases in their communities by restoring traditional foodways and place-based spirituality, tribes removed from their ancestral lands must find unique ways to cope.

The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma teamed up with , a Native-run company, to build customized aquaponics farming systems for individuals, schools, businesses, communities, and tribes. Kaben and Shelby Smallwood, two brothers from the neighboring Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, founded the business in 2012. Symbiotic Aquaponic partnered with, trained, and provided equipment to the Seminole Nation through a grant, and now that system grows and distributes foods to the tribe. These systems allow organic foods to be grown with 1% of the water used in industrial agriculture, empowering Oklahoma tribes who, like the Seminole and Choctaw, were forcibly relocated here. 

Seminole Aquaponics, a division of the Seminole Nation Division of Commerce in Oklahoma, is managed by rancher and self-described former-nurse-gone-ag Rebecca Votaw. Votaw, who is not Native, combines her passion for holistic healing with the Seminole traditions of her husband and children’s Indigenous ancestors to restore food sovereignty for the tribal nation and help improve its members’ health.

Votaw grows traditional foods in the system, such as the Three Sisters (corn, pole beans, and squash), and also prioritizes finding the best varieties for nutrition, seed saving, and succession planting. She also grows Job’s Tears, a variety of millet related to maize and other important crops, and analyzes seed catalogs to pick tomato varieties that can be canned if a surplus is produced.

“The whole idea for creating [an aquaponics system] was finding ways to expand on [Seminole] food sovereignty, but also create a business that could potentially turn around and affect the community,” Votaw explains. “If used properly, and the way it was intended for, it will do just that. But it’s a growth process.”

One of the initial barriers to that growth process was a financial one. Votaw says that startup costs are high, but the return on investment can be surprising. For example, Seminole Aquaponics started with 12 pounds of bluegill in one tank. In less than a year, that had increased to 29 pounds, and the tribe is now expanding its system to include catfish and bass. 

All the project’s income goes back into expanding the system. Votaw says that, in early spring, they are “starting seeds, putting in pots, and getting ready for plant sales to make available to the [Seminole] Nation and outside sources.” Seeds are started on-site near the aquaponics system and then transferred to pots to make the best use of limited space. Besides distributing produce, these pots are also given to tribal members to grow their own food, create their own seed banks, and continue the positive feedback loop. Because potting soil is expensive, Votaw is now introducing red wiggler worms and their castings. She calls it “doing our own worms” to reduce costs and exponentially increase the system’s zero-waste quality.

One of the challenges for the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, however, is that not all traditional foods thrive in the hot Oklahoma summers like they did in the tribe’s ancestral lands in the American Southeast, before the tribes were forcefully relocated in the 19th century. Examples include the medicinal tea leaf yaupon, the incense sweetgrass, and blueberries. Votaw says tribal members have tried different techniques to grow these species, such as companion planting, and continue to explore a variety of options for maximum nutrition and the benefits of an aquaponics system that is sheltered from the weather.

But she says the best part of their aquaponics endeavor is the flavor.

When visitors bite into ancient yellow and purple carrots, Votaw says, they are surprised by the taste. “People in general, that shocks them, because store-bought food is picked too early and is not the same flavor.”

Seminole Aquaponics also provides tribal youth with wholesome samples as part of its partnership with various diabetes and wellness programs. The food Votaw and her two-person team grows packs a punch of nutrients and taste to get tribal members tucking in.

Restoring Indigenous foodways is not just about restoring sovereignty and traditional practices. It’s also about celebrating the ancestors and taking care of a community of relatives. “Food is the center of so many Indigenous cultures. Food is central to everyone’s health,” Malama Waimānalo’s Chung-Do says. She says the participatory community endeavor is being validated by the impact aquaponics are having in Native Hawaiian households. Not only are families eating healthier, but children are learning where their food comes from, and entire communities are reconnecting to the land.

Abaki Beck contributed research to this story.

This story has been supported by the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

Since time immemorial, the Great Lakes Anishinaabeg have used fire to manage the landscape across what is now called North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and parts of Canada. Despite fire’s universal value to humanity, European settlement put an abrupt stop to the traditional practice of controlled burns, deeming fire an entirely destructive force. The resulting damage has rippled across centuries. The wildfires that currently rage across western North America are post-colonial scars of that ideologically driven mismanagement.

“It only takes a generation or two to lose knowledge,” Panek says. Traditional knowledge of fire handling, fire-related language, and the fire-adapted landscape are just a few of the cultural pillars nearly lost to time. Yet, in the past several years, the restoration of fire knowledge and fire-dependent ecosystems has gained traction thanks to Indigenous leadership.

Panek, for example, spearheaded the return of prescribed burns to Stockton Island (or its Ojibwe name, Wii-saa-ko-day-wa-ning, meaning “the place that has been burned”). The island, located in Lake Superior, off the coast of northern Wisconsin, is a traditional site for blueberry gathering. Indigenous efforts like Panek’s have sparked interest in challenging the American fear of fire around the Great Lakes and beyond.

“The forests that we see today are pretty colonized. … That’s not what our ancestors would’ve known,” Panek says. “Our ancestors used fire to build landscape, fire-adapted landscape—or fire-dependent landscapes, in some places. And those landscapes influenced our identity, our language, our way of thinking, our place in this world.”

A Colonized Forest

Just west of Lake Superior’s far western shore sits the University of Minnesota’s Cloquet Forestry Center. It has been a hub of forestry research and education since it was established in 1909, and researchers here are leading the effort to reconcile relationships with local tribal people through fire management.

On a recent tour of the Forestry Center, Evan Larson, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville, points to the cross-section of a tree. Each of the lobes growing concentrically around the original trunk is separated by a thin layer of healing sap and represents a fire event. The tree survived every human-made fire in its lifetime using its specially adapted bark and healing mechanisms. In this way, the tree has thrived in the landscape since 1793.

“This big lobe of healing wood that goes from that last fire out ’til today: That’s that fire-free interval,” Larson says. “That was the period of removal, of the expression of allotment and land displacement, fire suppression.” It represents the fire-free growth the tree experienced for the latter half of its existence.

“These trees have been waiting 115 years [for fire],” says Kyle Gill, forest manager and research coordinator, as he stands in a fire-treated portion of the Forestry Center’s research area known as . The plot is noticeably more open than the adjacent, untreated portion of the forest. Ferns have sprung up from the soil, sunlight floods the forest floor, and the breeze sings in a pitch distinct from the plot with a denser composition, developed in the absence of regular fires for more than a century.

In the absence of fire, the native red pines in Camp 8 are being replaced by hardwoods. This leads to a denser forest composition made up of plants that are more shade-tolerant, choking out sun-loving groundcover species that were once dominant below the red pines in the area, such as blueberries, honeysuckle, and sweet fern.

This has transformed the landscape, threatening local tribal knowledge and traditions. Forested ecosystems in the Great Lakes region are uniquely poised to welcome back fire treatment. In fact, they’re built for it.

One of the local native species, red pine (also called Norway pine) needs fire for regeneration. Its bark thickness, elevated crown, life cycle, and physiology all evolved in response to the regular presence of fire. Rejecting fire altogether endangers the historic forests that are home to species like the red pine, and the ecocultural lifeways associated with them, including the management of hunting lands and preparing sites for berries.

More Than a Destructive Force

Evidence of controlled fire’s benefits and its crucial value to Native populations is documented and preserved in oral tradition. But fear and misunderstanding have caused the United States to take a firm opposition to the practice since the very beginnings of European settlement.

In 1894, the Great Hinckley Fire killed 418 people in Northern Wisconsin. Just two decades later and 60 miles away, in 1918, the Cloquet Fire killed 559. These are still the second and third deadliest wildfires in U.S. history. These harrowing events, along with the Forest Service’s introduction of Smokey Bear in the 1940s to inspire social anti-fire sentiments, solidified public opposition to fire in all its forms.

And that sentiment flared up with a vengeance during World War II. “Until we smash the Axis, every manmade forest fire is an enemy fire,” warned the U.S. Government Campaign Plan for Wartime Forest Fire Prevention in 1943. At that time, the U.S. was seeing an average of 140,000 to 220,000 forest fires every year. Ninety percent of them were human-made, caused by “careless smokers” and campers, along with farmers looking to develop better pasturage without the means or know-how to control the blaze. By spreading propaganda framing fire as the enemy of the nation, the government primed the public to support universal and indiscriminate fire suppression.

The U.S. is still living with the consequences of the centuries-long fire eradication efforts from the North American landscape, from changes to the landscape to disruptions of the traditions of First Peoples. Panek explains that a lot of Indigenous place-based knowledge is passed down via stories, many of which are “cued” by the ancestral landscape. Without fire, the landscape looks much different than it did to Ojibwe ancestors. This has led to generational losses of sacred knowledge.

“If we don’t have the triggers, the cues to transmit that knowledge, it literally dies with our elders,” Panek says. “Our language, our culture, our ways of seeing the world is based on an ecosystem that is fire-adapted. And we don’t have that right now, so what does that mean for us?”

“We have to rebuild it, and we have to recapture that understanding and relationship with fire,” he says. “Our identity depends on it.”

The Slow Burn of Progress

In recent years, the University of Minnesota Cloquet Forestry Center has made a significant effort to overcome American taboos and fears of fire, in part by studying the ecocultural history of fire in the Great Lakes region.

Since 2016, the Forest Center has also focused on relationship building with the Fond du Lac Band via listening sessions, ceremonial feasts, and meetings with council leaders for planning and knowledge sharing. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 provided abundant opportunities to deepen relations with local Anishinaabe peoples.

The Forestry Center is now working to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge into its work without appropriating it. Above all, this means being considerate of Ojibwe lifeways and traditions, avoiding feelings of entitlement to Anishinaabe knowledge of fire, and respecting the boundaries that come with sharing that knowledge.

This work culminated in the Forestry Center reintroducing prescribed burns to its share of the unceded territory of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, most recently in the spring of 2022.

Gill and Larson note that efforts must be taken on an individual level, in addition to institutional change.

“As researchers, we have a tendency to go into these communities and just start extracting … rather than investing in the community,” Gill says. He recalled learning more about his innate colonizer mindset from a local Fond du Lac elder, Ricky Defoe, at a workshop in 2016. “Decolonization starts with how we approach things,” he tells me. The essence of the colonizer mindset is “What can you give to me?” whereas the Indigenous mindset asks, “What can I contribute and have to develop a relationship that’s more reciprocal?”

A Future of Fire and Sovereignty

The Forestry Center leadership’s engagement with local Ojibwe communities and the Ojibwe people’s concrete steps to reaffirm their sovereignty are essential to sustaining Traditional Ecological Knowledge and preserving these historic forests in the face of climate change. Still, the reintroduction of fire at the Cloquet Forestry Center has not been without its challenges.

The Forestry Center and the University of Minnesota at large are still grappling with their own history of colonization. Much of the Forestry Center’s work must be carried out under the looming historic reality of land theft under the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887. The former stole Native land for the purpose of creating colleges to “benefit the agricultural and mechanical arts.” The latter legislation was another attempt to forcefully assimilate Indigenous peoples into Western lifestyles, dividing up their land for individual ownership and agriculture, and selling significant portions of it to non-Natives.

Tom Howes is the natural resources manager and a member of the Fond du Lac Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa. His family was one of the many displaced by a land grab that took 3% of unceded Fond du Lac territory, on which the University of Minnesota and the Cloquet Forestry Center sit today.

“In the 1854 Treaty, we gave up the Arrowhead region in Minnesota, and we said, ‘We’ll take this 100,000-acre reservation.’ That was the deal. That’s the last thing we consented to,” Howes says. “When we said we want a 100,000-acre homeland forever, that was so we could live our life. And part of that living our life is to hunt, fish, trap, pick berries, tap trees,” he says. But the Forestry Center “is off-limits for that.”

Although the Forestry Center has recently allowed limited berry picking, Howes believes the proper path forward is to support Indigenous peoples’ efforts to reacquire the stolen land and undo individualized allotment in favor of collective tribal ownership.

He proposes that land grant universities, in particular, also waive tuition fees for Natives affected by their land theft. Minnesota State colleges have with the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council as of this year. Similar efforts are underway in the University of California system, Colorado, Oregon, and Arizona, among others. Ultimately, Howes says, the land must be returned to Indigenous caretakers. Yet, Howes notes that these efforts will look different across different communities.

“It just depends on which community you’re talking to,” Howes says. “We’re fortunate here. … We actually have treaty rights that … are acknowledged and affirmed, and we have quasi-intact ecosystems to gather from.”

The Minnesota Indian Affairs Council has also taken steps to further affirm Indigenous sovereignty over the unceded lands containing the Forestry Center, acknowledging in 2020 the theft of unceded Fond du Lac territory “which allowed tribal lands to be wrongfully taken to build the University of Minnesota and other universities.” The document further notes the University’s past unwillingness to acknowledge and resolve this wrongdoing, before recognizing “a new era of relationship building and partnership with the University of Minnesota” founded on expectations to engage with local tribal governments “at the highest level of the University and given the same status and attention as conducting state and federal regulations.” The resolution lays the foundation for continued collaboration between the Cloquet Forestry Center and Lake Superior Chippewa for future fire management.

The Forestry Center’s work in fire reintroduction and relationship building is the result of several years of intentional, sensitive, culturally and academically informed work to dismantle Eurocentrism and combat generations of harm from colonization. Fire stewardship is just one of the countless Indigenous lifeways that has nearly been lost due to Western imperialism and hegemony. Yet, prioritizing humility and creating spaces for listening, uplifting, and centering Indigenous voices are all tangible steps to unravel the harms of colonization and reawaken resilient ecosystems as they existed for millennia.

“It takes the strength to approach something with humility and the confidence to expose ignorance,” Larson says. “If you’re going to learn about these places, then the teachers that you have are the people who have lived in these places for millennia. … If we are actively learning how to live in these places without destroying them, or at least destroying our ability to live in them how we want to or hope to, then you have to open yourself up to learning new ways of living.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2:39 p.m. PT on Oct. 10, 2022, to correct the spelling of oshkigin and to add the names and titles of those featured in the photos.��Read our corrections policy here.

This story is the third in a three-part series produced in partnership with , an editorially independent magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Read parts 1 and 2 here.

The species is listed as endangered in the state of Washington and threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. But lynx once existed in abundance in Washington state—including on the Tribes’ ancestral territories—before colonization, habitat destruction, trapping, and climate-change-worsened wildfires all took their toll. These compounding factors have had a lasting impact on the region’s lynx population.

While the cats are protected in the United States, they are still trapped without limit in British Columbia. Many of these lynx might otherwise migrate south across the border. But without that natural influx, human-aided immigration may be necessary for the survival of lynx, at least in Washington state. In 2013, an interagency task force was formed and affirmed the importance of the Kettle Range in conserving lynx in the U.S. because of its viable connection to existing habitats and populations north of the border. 

Climate change and the growing threat of catastrophic wildfires are key reasons for the lynx’s precarious conservation status. While lower-intensity fires historically created mosaics of lynx habitat, massive wildfires, which began in earnest throughout the region in 2002, have burned entire swaths of the Okanagan Mountain Range, which contains one of the state’s few core lynx habitats. By 2019, fires like these had substantially impacted 50% of the suitable lynx range in the Okanagan Mountains.

In this era of climate change, widespread drought, and wildfires of increasing frequency and intensity, the already small lynx population in Washington could soon be left without adequate habitat. Lynx disappearing from the state has become a real possibility.

Sanpoil District wildlife biologist Rose Piccinini, who is not a tribal member, grew up close to the land, due north of the reservation in an area known as the “North Half,” where the Tribes maintain their traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. “I always am proud to say that I work for the Tribe, and I think part of it is that connection to the land and the connection to the animals, and the holistic way the Tribe looks at managing,” she says. “I don’t work in a vacuum, only looking at lynx and lynx habitat, but recognizing that all of the animals are important, and part of the picture and part of that balance that we’re trying to restore.”

Assessments conducted by Washington State University and the nonprofit Conservation Northwest between 2013 and 2019 determined the Kettle Mountains still contained a small number of likely transient lynx and adequate habitat and food for lynx to be reestablished there, despite the heavy impacts that megafires have had in the Okanogan Mountains. 

With this evidence in hand, Whitney, as the Tribes’ wildlife department director, gave his department the go-ahead to jump on board. The five-year plan was to translocate 10 lynx per year from British Columbia to the Colville Reservation. They hoped the lynx would make their homes there and begin to reproduce. In addition to restoring the community, a major goal was to provide an additional population in western North America, as well as increase the chances of connectivity with lynx in B.C. and an existing population in the Okanagan highlands. 

The first season, which ran from November 2021 to February 2022, saw three of the nine introduced lynx return to Canada. One of those later made her way back down to the Kettle Mountains, demonstrating that north-south connectivity was not only possible but happening. 

During the second season, in October 2022, the team trapped and released the animals earlier in the fall instead of through winter as they had in the first year. “They had an opportunity to get the lay of the land before the winter,” Piccinini says. The team trapped and released 10 lynx the second year, two of which had been captured the first year and had returned to B.C. Earlier this year, the team was planning to set up a geofence and use newer, better GPS collars to determine more precisely where and how lynx are moving between habitats, which may inform future wildlife corridor projects.

Now, at the beginning of the project’s third year, all metrics point to success. Of the surviving 17 lynx trapped and released in both years, 10 appear to have established themselves in the Kettle Range, while four have returned to B.C. Three of the relocated lynx have since died. This sobering news, however, is at least partially offset by the likelihood of a new litter of kittens born on lands north of the reservation boundary, which, if confirmed, will help bolster the local population. Piccinini is anxiously awaiting confirmation from trail cameras she and tribal members have set up in the area. Seven additional lynx were recently captured and of those five remain on the reservation.

The return of lynx to the Colville Confederated Tribes’ lands represents an important geographical reciprocity. Some of Whitney’s human relatives, too, are reestablishing themselves in B.C., where they once lived with the lynx, the salmon, the elk, and myriad other relatives. “We’re intermingling,” he says. “They’ve taken care of the habitat up there for us and ensured our return, so we’re helping them return as well.”

The territory of Whitney’s band, the Sinixt, extends from Kettle Falls, in Washington state, to the Big Bend area north of Revelstoke, B.C. in 1956 as they were negotiating the first Columbia River Treaty. “They declared us extinct so they didn’t have to do anything,” Whitney told me in his office in Inchelium, Washington, approximately 24 miles as the crow flies from Kettle Falls, which now lies dormant beneath Franklin D. Roosevelt “Lake.”

In order to have the Sinixts’ rights recognized in Canada, Whitney’s uncle, Richard Desautel (after whom Whitney is named), shot an elk in British Columbia on traditional Sinixt territory and turned himself in to the provincial wildlife law enforcement agency. After a series of court victories and appeals in 2021, Desautel and the Sinixt in Canada that forced the government to recognize their Aboriginal rights in British Columbia. The Tribe recently opened an office in Nelson, B.C., to further assert those rights.

Meanwhile, the Tribes haven’t slowed their efforts to restore their community. Next up are burrowing owls, Whitney says, and if possible, buffalo. But only if they’re allowed to run free, he says. Whitney cites historical evidence of the presence of buffalo in the Tribes’ territory. “A lot of stories I’ve been told were of folks back in the day who would jump on their horses, ride over to Montana, and round up a bunch of buffalo and bring them back. And then they would persist, however many years, until they either ate them all, they dispersed too far, or they died,” he says. The Kalispel Tribe recently gifted the Colville Confederated Tribes 33 buffalo, which they released on the range at the beginning of October. “Our goals are being developed and will be compiled into a bison management plan over the winter months,” Whitney says.

Whitney loves the work of restoring his community. “We talk about animals like people, like friends,” he says. “I grew up in the woods learning about different animals, and spent time with my father and uncle. A lot of them aren’t around anymore,” he says.

Whitney thinks back to a separate ceremonial release of salmon he participated in at the inundated site of Kettle Falls, where he released salmon into waters that hadn’t known them since the dam blocked access to their ancestral spawning grounds. “It was pretty emotional,” he says. Not long after, some of those same salmon were caught by anglers in the Canadian reaches of the Columbia River. “We have proven that they will go to Canada,” he says.

Indeed the salmon are once again traveling north, in parallel with Whitney and his Sinixt relatives in Canada. And along their way, the spawning fish the Tribes have released will provide them information about the suitability of spawning habitat along their journey. In turn, this will likely put pressure on the U.S. government to ensure that salmon can pass through the dams on the Columbia River and spawn through the Colville Confederated Tribes’ lands on up into the Canadian headwaters of the Columbia River.

Essentially, voice by voice, individual by individual, the Tribes are working together to restore, protect, and sustain their community on lands under their jurisdiction by managing those lands in line with their cultural and traditional values—with the aid of science. By strengthening the very fabric of the ecosystems their ancestors have been stewarding since time immemorial, they’re strengthening their vital role in those systems—in that community, in that chorus. In this way, the community itself evolves together toward a natural balance that is abundant, resilient, and mutually reciprocal. 

“It makes my heart happy,” Whitney says. “It heals me.”

This story is the third in a 3-part series produced in partnership with , an editorially independent magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:34 a.m. PT on Dec. 16, 2023, to clarify that the Tribes are referred to as the Colville Confederated Tribes or the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, not the Colville Confederacy. Read our corrections policy here.

Scott is deeply invested in maintaining healthy soil. She is the fourth generation of her family to ranch the land along the Missouri River east of the Cheyenne River Reservation, and the 125th generation of Lakota peoples to steward the land. 

Everything on Scott’s ranch, DX Beef, is done a little bit more slowly than one might see on a conventional ranch: Cattle graze rotationally on 14 different permanent pastures across 7,000 acres of land. Because her cows aren’t treated with any antibiotics or chemicals, she and other ranch hands regularly check on the cow dung to make sure it looks healthy; if it doesn’t, cattle are removed from the herd and treated individually. 

While some might praise regenerative agriculture as a new advent, the techniques are older than the U.S. itself. These foodways are based on ancient movements now touted under new names: regenerative agriculture, permaculture, farm-to-table, and eating local. But the land theft that built ranching businesses is one of the main reasons Native peoples were killed, disenfranchised, and separated from traditional foodways in the first place. 

It’s not lost on Scott that the ranchers getting most of the credit for sustainable techniques are those newest to the land. Native farmers, who have long been pushed to the margins, want newcomers to the world of non-industrial food production to know there’s nothing novel about caring for the land that grows our food. 

“It’s not a new discovery,” Scott says. “It’s just a late discovery for some that are a lot more confident in using it as a marketing approach.”&�Բ�����;

Colonialism via Cattle

Cattle, specifically, can help tell the story of colonization of Native peoples on Turtle Island. Ranching was one of the reasons settlers and colonizers began to claim land from Native peoples west of the Mississippi in the mid-1800s, according to Ryan Fischer, a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls, and the author of the book Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai‘i. 

Fischer says there are no cattle native to this land. Spanish and English colonizers brought them to the U.S. Bison, which are native to the U.S., maintained the Midwest’s rich ecologies and supported the diets and cultural practices of Scott’s Cheyenne ancestors. But bison nearly went extinct because of settlers’ desire to turn Native land into ranchland. 

By the mid-1800s, the construction of railways and refrigerated train cars made beef more readily available and affordable. Later, federal officials found that unused fertilizer from WWII munitions could be used to boost corn production, which helped justify the creation of factory farms and introduced beef to an even broader market of consumers. 

Around the same time, Scott’s ancestors were removed from their ancestral river with the signing of the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program, which created dams as a means of “flood control.” Scott remembers being told stories of this from her grandparents and great-grandparents; the history of cattle colonialism is still recent. 

But thanks to Scott’s work, the land, and the community, is healing. 

So while Scott would like to raise bison, these animals need thousands of acres and many years to roam before being ready to slaughter. In today’s agricultural economy, she can’t make a living off them.

“We just can’t do it the way that our ancestors intended for us due to larger systemically oppressive realities that we’re navigating in the development and evolution of what our future food systems are going to look like,” she says.

Cattle, she’s found, are a decent alternative; their hooves roughly resemble those of bison, which means DX Beef cows can help break down soil nutrients. Because she doesn’t use chemicals, the animal waste can naturally fertilize the land in the way bison used to. 

After processing, about 90% of the finished beef is sold in the two counties nearest the ranch. The direct-to-consumer business model means Scott is able to offer beef raised on the same land her customers themselves interact with. She’s also been able to address some of the food-access challenges that peoples living on the Cheyenne River Reservation face by bringing healthy options directly to them. 

In this way, Scott says her business is “an expression of resiliency amongst a system that disregarded the functioning relationship that we had in agricultural production prior to colonial impact.”

Cross-Cultural Collaboration

Agriculture practices that prioritize soil health and honor an inherent relationship between cattle and the land are increasingly seen as an environmentally sustainable alternative to industrial farming. Raised this way, cattle can create a thriving habitat for soil phytonutrients, support the growth of native grasses, and result in beef that some say is tastier than the industrial alternative. 

This system of farming practices, broadly referred to as regenerative agriculture, only accounts for 10% of farms and ranches today, but the numbers are slowly increasing, according to Ryan Siwinski, an organic livestock and dairy consultant for the Rodale Institute, a research and advocacy organization in the organic food movement. 

As the movement grows, he says regenerative agriculture is showing consumers, who have long been told that meat consumption is inherently harmful, that the environmental impact has everything to do with the way cattle is raised.

Enrique Salmón, a professor in the department of ethnic studies at Cal State East Bay, is hopeful the larger ranching and farming community will listen to the lessons of Indigenous ranchers and support their leadership in the growing field of regenerative agriculture. He cites a centuries-old system of water management that’s been so integrated in New Mexican culture that many forget it was imported by the Spanish—a story not so dissimilar from that of cattle. 

Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, 19 Pueblo tribes relied on a system of water sharing based on irrigation from rivers, streams, and tributaries, but limited transport of water meant Pueblo peoples mainly hunted and gathered their food. This changed after the Spanish introduced the Pueblo tribes to a water-management technique that remains in use today, and acequias, or gravity-fed canals, turned the desert into arable land. 

More importantly, acequias increased Pueblo peoples’ ability to farm and grow food without losing their traditional practices. “If those guys could do it, we can figure out other ways for that kind of collaboration to happen,” Salmón says.

Raising Climate Resilience 

Western science is now backing Indigenous knowledge that eating locally is best for personal and environmental health. But Spanish and English colonizers brought cattle to the U.S., meaning there are no cattle native to this land. 

Still, so-called heritage breeds can be a key tool for climate resiliency, according to Jeannette Beranger, a senior program manager at The Livestock Conservancy, an organization dedicated to raising, sustaining, and saving breeds of livestock whose populations are threatened by industrial agriculture.

Even though many of the breeds supported by the Conservancy aren’t native to the U.S., the genetic diversity they offer can be critical to staving off disease and illness, which industrial agriculture practices are exacerbating with a high usage of antibiotics, pesticides, and other chemicals. With a reliance on breeds of marketable animals, like standard broiler chickens that gain weight quickly, monoculture industrial agriculture threatens to eclipse the cultural and culinary value of other breeds. 

Once breeds that are less profitable or more difficult to raise—in other words, breeds that aren’t well-suited for the factory setting—are gone, they’re gone forever. 

The Conservancy helps build a community of like-minded ranchers and support a wealth of resources for raising uncommon breeds. But these kinds of organizations and the business platform they offer ranchers aren’t necessarily easily accessed by Native farmers and ranchers. 

Scott, for her herd, does not raise “heritage” cattle. Instead, she favors the Black Angus, because she can intentionally incorporate traits from other breeds that create a herd able to endure climate change’s hotter summers and colder winters. 

“We have this inherent desire to be connected to the production of our food systems, and we’re going to do that in whatever way that we can,” Scott says. 

Many of these projects are very innovative—feats of the intellect, really—but as I hear them, the absence of life (and reverence for it) looms loud. The graphs and catchy pitches leave little room for the beings these projects purportedly aim to protect.

The pull of solving problems is nearly irresistible, especially in times like these when many of us are so desperate for change. But the over-reliance on human agency can pull us out of the present and distract from the life that’s all around us.

That’s true for global climate catastrophe and it’s true for my own backyard. When I moved into a new apartment in Delft, Netherlands, a year and a half ago, I walked outside, looked around, saw what might be changed to fit my aesthetic, and went back inside. And that from someone who strongly identifies as a nature lover.

A recent course exploring the concept of opened my mind to the ways colonial ideology is ingrained in our society. My growing awareness of this has shown my relationship with nature—as with technologists’—to be troubled. We have a deeply rooted propensity toward controlling, grasping, and extracting. This desire for domination manifests in the technological climate “fixes” on a global scale (as well as the fossil-fuel-driven development that created the crisis in the first place). And it also manifests in my heartfelt efforts to solve, fix, and make projects of life.

I know full well that overcoming this problematic mindset can’t be tackled with my usual slew of deadlines and measurable goals, since these are part of the problem. Instead, it must be a great easing. A gentle breathing that loosens the shame I bear for my colonial mindset and soothes the adrenaline spikes that propel me into anxiety-fueled action.

Walking helps. Lately, I’ve slowed my pace dramatically, allowing my buzzing mind to simply hum. Instead of making to-do lists, I look around. Remarkably, delightfully, with just a little attention, a whole world bustling with life reveals its abundance. This opening of my perception—to grass, to ants, to wind, to birds—places me as one piece in the beautiful complexity. It’s a relief knowing how tangled up I am with everything else. Certainly, I’m not alone.

Still, my perception ������’t wholly liberated from my ancestral thinking. When saying a belated greeting to my backyard this past summer, I stopped in front of each plant separately: the eight shrubs, two trees, many ferns and flowers, grapes, berries, and two pigeons. This parsing up of the land is an impulse of the individualist worldview that gave rise to private property and ownership.

And it’s in the same vein as the impulse to encounter and assess each plant based on its potential utility to me. When meeting the red raspberry bush, I imagined the berries I could eat. When stung by nettles in the park, I thought of how to pilfer them to make tea. In treating them as resources rather than beings in themselves, I continue the objectification and extraction methods of colonial science, according to professor of Indigenous peoples, technoscience, and society . In doing so, I miss the opportunity to say “hello,” a simple yet profound greeting that lays the relational groundwork for the future question, “May I?”

I’ve noticed, too, how my heart stretches toward some beings in my surroundings and shirks others. The trees and flowers, for example, are easy to breathe with. But I’m reluctant to connect with the pavement, bricks, and lampposts. And ������’t the fence in my backyard a dead thing meant to separate?

This moral distinction between natural and unnatural, alive and dead, is yet another layer of colonial heritage blocking me from relationship with the environment I inhabit. After all, artist and futurist Adah Parris posits that all . Neglecting the cement means neglecting most of the city that surrounds me and disregarding the genealogy of things.

Herbalist, gardener, and educator mused about the effects of kinning within an urban environment when she said in her podcast For the Wild: “I often think of our bodies in the city as also the lungs that are helping to purify the life here.”

Anyone might be a conduit of healing like Pérez. But not as a savior in the posture of charity, which some climate solutions seem to assume. Such a stance acts in unidirectional and demeaning ways. Pérez encourages embodied care, which involves relationship and mutual attunement.

My deeply held tendencies toward individualism, extraction, and separation won’t be easily shifted. But with tender attention, they might be eased over time. As I experiment with this embodied practice of recognition and relationship, I already feel a difference in how I move in the world. The uniqueness of this place unfolds, and grand global fixes seem more and more out of touch. This ������’t to say that massive shifts aren’t needed. But rather that these shifts should begin from a place of communion rather than generalization.

Certainly, moving through the streets with this openness begins a deep shift within me. In attending to my surroundings—from grasses to fences to building—my shoulders unclench and my breath slows. Any healing that might emerge in the environment, then, is mutual.

The exclusion of Indigenous people and other non-white communities in environmental and conservation work is, unfortunately, nothing new. For centuries, conservation has been driven by Eurocentric, Judeo-Christian belief structures that emphasize a distinct separation of “Man” and “Nature”—an ideology that does not mesh well with many belief structures, including those belonging to Indigenous communities.

Christianity has deep, painful historical associations with the obsession of dominance.

“Christianity has been largely built up around the idea of colonization,” Braun says. Not only do these belief structures hold disproportionate power in environmental legislation, but they hold historical pains for those outside of Western religions. “Christianity was forced down our throats,” Braun says. “Our reservations were divided up: ‘OK this community … you can be Catholic. This community … you’re Lutheran. This community … you’re whatever.’”

Before the onset of such religion through colonialist conquests, the overwhelming consensus throughout the world was that human beings were just a small part of this natural world. Neither detached, nor superior. Of course, this “consensus” was not necessarily expressed in such a way that all groups adhered to the same belief structures. Yet, the underlying environmental ideology remains: Human beings are, to some extent, connected to all other living things on Earth, even the Earth itself. As European imperialism—and along with it, cultural genocide—began to take hold worldwide, so began the spread of the “Man versus Nature” dogma.

Today Braun’s life is just one example of the ideological exclusion of non-European thought as it relates to wildlife and the natural world. Nonsubscribers are barred from participation in the protection of the world and nonhuman lives they hold so dear, which inhibits their environmental stewardship. But around the world, and especially in the United States, we are witnessing a historical push toward the dismantling of imperialism, the decentralization of power, and the welcoming of non-white, non-European values into conservation.

How Modern Conservation Upholds the Superiority of Humans

Christianity has deep, painful historical associations with the obsession of dominance. The same Bible that was used to enforce humans’ domination over nature was also used to force Indigenous peoples to abandon their cultural truths for those more palatable to Europeans. This laid the foundation that continues to separate human life from nature to this day.

As the Bible states in Genesis, “Let [Man] have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over all the wild animals of the earth.” We see echoes of this passage in the frameworks of many conservation objectives today, with concepts such as “creating” sustainable forests, “managing” wildlife populations, and “preserving” wilderness as a realm separate from that of humans. This reduces our perception of human connectivity to nonhuman life and to distance constituents from the objective recognition of Earth’s intrinsic value.

Experiences rooted in genocide and slavery still inform people’s experience of the outdoors.

Take one of the ��.��.’s leading environmental organizations, for example. The —a federal organization with —has a mission statement that almost exclusively highlights the instrumental value of North America’s natural lands: “The National Park Services preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations … to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resources conservation … throughout this country and the world.”

Their mission is painfully anthropocentric, never mind that the very lands it aims to extend were stolen from Indigenous tribes who are now denied access. Missions such as these create a near-impenetrable ideological barrier through which environmentalists of non-Christian cultures cannot pass.

Keeping POC Out of Conservation

These organizational goals exclude other faith (or non-faith) groups and have nurtured a hostile environment that disproportionately affects people of color. Historical experiences function to reinforce these impacts, further preventing people of color from exercising agency in conservation initiatives. For one, white constituents do not live with the same generational trauma that people of color do.

Experiences rooted in genocide and slavery, for example, still inform people’s experience of the outdoors. Black people were forbidden to enter certain spaces owned by the National Park Service and other natural lands because of Jim Crow laws and deeply rooted racism, . . Many were lynched in these landscapes as well. Thus, for Black people, experiencing the outdoors was to put one’s life on the line.

Simultaneously, “those in power [imposed] a particular concept of environment,” Gould says, which denied Black people’s experiences in natural habitats. Ideological disparities have likewise discouraged Indigenous agency in land management despite how profoundly they value land and wildlife. In the words of , “The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies… It is not a matter of being ‘close to nature’… The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as our self (or selves).”

Inequality lies even in the evasiveness of definitions. “Google the word, ‘environment’ and see how far you need to scroll to see pictures of people in urban areas,” Pomona College psychologist Adam Pearson says. “What counts as being an ‘environmentalist?’ And what counts as ‘environmentalism?’” The vast majority of Americans believe that people of color do not feel strongly about environmental causes. Black, Latino, Asian, and white respondents overwhelmingly associated environmentalism with whiteness and underestimated environmental valuation in their own communities. Some 65% of Latin and 68% of Asian respondents self-identified as “environmentalists,” compared to 50% of white respondents.

What Equal Opportunity Actually Looks Like

The public has long held onto the idea that the socioeconomic inequalities play a large role in a person of color’s individual capacity to care for the environment when in fact, conservation organizations often create unequal socioeconomic barriers. People of color who try to enter professional roles in American conservation often encounter pay rates (and have done so for decades). That requires applicants to have enough accumulated wealth to be able to afford forgoing reasonable pay to “gain experience”—a luxury out of reach for many non-whites because of . Even those who fall in line with the Christian dogma are granted unequal access and compensation. Forty-nine percent of Black Christians, compared to 28% of white Christians, earn less than $30,000 annually, according to the .

Ideological disparities have also had clear effects on Indigenous agency in land management. For example, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services works to combat “,” the idea that wildlife poses a threat not only to human health, safety, and property, but to natural resources as well. This concept is a stark contrast to many cultures’ environmental values. 

Indigenous knowledge can reveal truths not visible with white, Eurocentric approaches to conservation.

How would one expect an Indigenous person, a Buddhist, or a Muslim to feel welcome in such a space? The answer lies not only in dismantling millennia of imperialism, but also in the conscious invitation of non-white, non-European cultures into conservation.

According to Pearson, this requires combating stereotypes of environmentalists and creating enthusiasm for working in traditionally noninclusive spaces. Fulfilling these responsibilities requires taking an honest look at how ideological contrasts actively exclude people of color and perpetuate a negative feedback loop that overrepresents white people in environmental and conservation spaces.

“Inviting people to advise doesn’t mean that they’re gonna listen,” Braun notes when discussing possible methods of increasing diversity in conservation. “I’ve seen that a lot. That’s just them patting themselves on the back.” She says real progress relies on human connection. “When you are facing one another, then you’re forced to deal with things like the prejudices you carry on your back. You’re forced to face the potential of racism. You’re forced to face the economic divides.”

Abandoning Exclusivity for Diverse Community-Based Management

As climate change becomes a mainstream concern, Indigenous knowledge can reveal truths not visible with white, Eurocentric approaches to conservation. Traditional ecological knowledge is , according to a 2019 study in British Columbia and Alaska. “The region is a bellwether for biodiversity changes in coastal, forest, and montane environments,” the authors write, and “an extremely dynamic and resilient social-ecological system where Indigenous Peoples have been adjusting to changing climate and biodiversity for millennia.”

Nearly 100 Indigenous elders from communities along the Pacific Coast shared with researchers the changes they had observed in coho and sockeye salmon migration patterns and the effects of warming aquatic temperatures with great detail. They had similar observations of the Sitka black-tailed deer, highlighting that their migration patterns had been influenced by fluctuating factors such as rising temperatures and reduced snowfall. Ultimately, the researchers asserted that present environmental governance is far too rigid in its exclusivity of Indigenous knowledge and that “token community visits” must evolve to invite Native environmental observers and managers to share their knowledge to create tangible progress.

While these ideas remain nascent in much of American conservation, other countries provide examples of success. For decades, forests in Benin were exclusively owned and managed by state officials. They were supported (and thus, politically influenced) by major stakeholders including the Fondation Aide á l’Autonomie Tobé, a Swiss non-governmental organization. Though the foundation surely had the best interests of the Benin constituents in mind, their collaboration didn’t represent the public’s values. Those living within the Tobé-Kpobidon forest, for example, did not feel welcome in forest management, which led to unsustainable resource use and degradation of the land. 

To establish newfound hope for sustainable forest management and community involvement, a team of researchers, led by Rodrigue Castro Gbedomon . This methodology aims to “alleviate poverty among forest users, empower them, and improve the condition of the forests.” The idea was that the invitation for community involvement (and thus, agency in management decision-making processes) would nurture a sense of ownership in constituents, encouraging them toward more conservative use of forest resources, thereby creating a more sustainable existence for the forest.

The team consciously invited varying ideals and perspectives into management practices by interviewing elders and community leaders on their perspectives regarding the forest’s health. Stakeholders included nongovernmental organization leaders, and traditional and religious authorities that led and guided the surrounding communities. Divinity priests were invited as well, representing deities revered by the locals, including Ogu (the god of iron), Tchankponon (the god of smallpox), Otchoumare (the god of the rainbow), and Nonon (the god of bees). First Settlers and local hunters were also given authority in this work, serving to extend the network of participation deeply into every facet of the residents surrounding and within the Tobé-Kpobidon forest.

This decentralization of power and integration of diverse belief structures was supported by the foundation, which provided the financial resources and the means for reinforcement of the constituents’ chosen management policies. This included warning signs indicating forest boundaries and guards to manage entry into the area. The foundation also rewarded locals’ involvement with a yearly stipend of 500,000 FCA ($1,000 USD) to further encourage their continued dedication to conservation activities.

This new governance structure yielded phenomenal results. As community access to the forest expanded for medicinal gathering, hunting, beekeeping, and more, the forest’s contribution to the local economy increased to make up more than 25% of the First Settlers’ income. Also, the native flora experienced a “progressive evolution” alongside a healthy, low rate of human agricultural interference. (Cashew plantations, for example, expanded at only 0.4% annually). This community-focused approach continued to have positive effects on the forest in the years after the study.

The Tobé-Kpobidon Forest experimental management approach, along with the extensive foundation of evidence validating Indigenous knowledge, serve as a beacon of hope amid the darkness that looms over non-white, non-European demographics that yearn for a role in conservation initiatives. It demonstrates that the present ideological chasms that keep people of color out of conservation can be defeated and that such cultural victories powerfully serve both humans and the natural landscapes in which we reside.

Note: This story has been updated to reflect the writer’s preference not to capitalize white when referring to race.

Much of the Camp Fire burn scar is in the  ancestral homelands. The Mechoopda are a federally recognized tribe and a subdivision of the Northwestern or Konkow Maidu. Meders-Knight launched the  in response to the Camp Fire and has run a number of TEK workshops for both Native and non-Native students since then. 

One of the ways in which such efforts are distinct is that wildfire destruction is contextualized in history. For example, Meders-Knight opened the Paradise TEK seed workshop with a primer on decolonization to help participants understand the role of seeds within California’s history of genocide and ecocide.

Giving back to the plants is like giving reparations to the tribe.

Ali Meders-Knight

Seeding a landscape claimed by European American settlers during the California Gold Rush, Meders-Knight repopulates this land with native plants and Indigenous land tending. As she puts it, “Giving back to the plants is like giving reparations to the tribe.” Calling plants by their Maidu names expresses ancient relationships tied to specific ecosystems. 

For non-Native participants, restoration work is an act of reversing colonization and supporting Mechoopda sovereignty. Every week, Meders-Knight teaches Native and non-Native volunteers how to give back to plants at Verbena Fields, a restoration site in nearby Chico, where many of the seeds for the Paradise workshop were gathered. By using Native plant names, knowledge, and burning practices, TEK practitioners such as Meders-Knight are connecting with their ancestral past and trying to create a viable future for their children and grandchildren.

At her workshops and during volunteer work days, Meders-Knight teaches participants what Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer calls Indigenous people’s “.” This approach means referring to plants and animals as family members and treating them respectfully. During the Paradise seed workshop, Meders-Knight encouraged volunteers to make a gift to the land by offering prayers, or dedicating seeds to those who have died in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“Mechoopda” means “when the snow melts, the land gets wet,” according to Meders-Knight. The tribe’s name ties it to the particular valley and foothills where snowmelt is essential to restoring waterways and wetlands. 

At the heart of Verbena Fields is a gathering circle and ceramic tile display of a Mechoopda creation story that Meders-Knight and a group of Native youth created in 2009. In the artwork, Earth Maker and Turtle appear, as does an oak tree with acorns. Turtle helped Earth Maker by diving down under the waters and bringing up dirt in its claws. Earth Maker then shaped the dirt into the Earth and used ��’i�貹 (willow) sticks to create humans, so the story goes.

Fires, many of them intentionally set, also shaped much of California’s vegetation before European colonization.

The beautiful open vistas and bountiful plants and animals described by early European explorers were not an untouched wilderness in which humans played no role. Geographer Meleiza Figueroa, who works with Meders-Knight at Chico Traditional Ecological Stewardship Program, explains that Native people created the landscape that Europeans encountered: “Lands adapted to them as they adapted to landscapes.” Throughout what is now California, Indigenous people developed cultural beliefs and land-tending practices over millennia of belonging to specific ecosystems.

Fires, many of them intentionally set, also shaped much of California’s vegetation before European colonization. Meders-Knight wants to bring back traditional burning practices because, as she says, “fire lives here.” According to her, each tribe had a fire story about “a bird or animal that takes the fire back, because fire is power.”&�Բ�����;

For Meders-Knight, Mechoopda are like the animals in these stories, helping to “steal the fire back.” She makes a clear distinction between “good” and “bad” fire. Good fire is carefully tended and set during appropriate weather conditions. It has “w�󾱳ٱ� plumes,” while catastrophic wildfires have smoke that is brown and purple, “like a bruise.”&�Բ�����;

 (Plains Miwok) observes that in Native Californian stories, knowledge of fire goes back to “the beginning of time.” Native communities treated fire as an ally to increase biodiversity, improve basket materials, encourage healthier berries, control pests and diseases, enhance the growth of grasses and bulbs, germinate seeds, encourage mushroom growth, and reduce the chances of high-intensity fires. As  Tribal Chairman Ron Goode claims in a , “Fire has spirit, this land has spirit, and when we’re burning, they come alive.”&�Բ�����;

Indigenous cultural burning is starting to return.

According to Hankins and other experts, Western methods of fire suppression are largely to blame for California’s catastrophic fires that are becoming increasingly common every summer. The removal of Indigenous people and their land-tending practices, such as intentional burning, went hand in hand with misguided fire-suppression policies. 

But Indigenous cultural burning is starting to return. In 2003, the Mechoopda tribe acquired 650 acres of land south of Chico, where it has conducted cultural burns as part of a larger restoration project to heal the land. In October 2020, the  conducted a cultural burn in the  in Santa Cruz County. In 2019, in northwestern California, members of the , , and other tribes started a cultural burn with wormwood torches, as reported . 

In the aftermath of the Camp Fire,  under collapsed buildings and debris in Paradise and other towns that flourished during the Gold Rush. In a presentation on decolonization in Paradise, one year after the Camp Fire, Meders-Knight declared, “For generations we were not allowed or invited back on this land. … For generations, White people in Paradise were finding our pestles and mortars and displaying them in their homes. After the fire, often the only things left were these mortars and pestles.” A sign of resilience, these ancient objects also pointed to the history of genocide and ecocide that created the conditions (fire-starved forests) that led to the Camp Fire. 

Meders-Knight told participants at the same TEK seed workshop in Paradise last December that Native people are especially well-positioned to confront climate change because they already “know how to survive the end of the world.” The Gold Rush and its accompanying massacres were her people’s apocalypse. 

Beginning in 1848, the Gold Rush precipitated violent and catastrophic change for Mechoopda people as well as for the ecosystems on which they depended. Many Mechoopda, in what is now the Camp Fire burn scar, were killed by settlers. Others were removed from the land during the tragic 1863  or Konkow Trail of Tears. 

Meders-Knight’s work at Verbena Fields is a response to the destructive displacement of people, plants, and animals in Northern California. After gold mining, massacres, forced removal of Mechoopda, and construction of Army Corps of Engineers dams, Verbena Fields became a dumping ground for construction projects. 

Neat suburban homes with manicured lawns sit on both sides of the park. When these subdivisions were constructed during the second half of the 20th century, builders dumped their waste materials in the creek’s channel. 

In 2009, when Meders-Knight started her work, bulldozers had removed the hazardous construction waste, leaving nothing but dirt at the site. It is Meders-Knight’s artistic vision, expressed in her paintings and restoration plans, that imagines what was once here and will be again: a fire-resilient native garden, full of food and medicine.

Today, in an agreement with the city of Chico, the Mechoopda tribe manages Verbena Fields. As part of that effort, Meders-Knight has been working there for more than 12 years, coppicing ��’i�貹/willow, saving and dispersing seeds, and removing star thistle, mustard, Scotch broom, Himalayan blackberry, and other invasive non-native plants. Every Friday morning, anywhere from 5 to 25 volunteers show up to put their hands on the land and learn from Meders-Knight and DiGenova, the native-plant expert. 

On a plant walk at Verbena Fields during the winter of 2021, Meders-Knight and DiGenova, who lead monthly tours of the park together, pointed to a flourishing patch of wedakdaka/Indian lettuce (otherwise known as “miner’s lettuce”) where a year ago there had been far less. Waji/“Indian potatoes” that they planted a couple of years earlier were pushing through the soil in tiny shoots. 

Verbena Fields is an emerging model of what decolonizing land can look like, supported by partnerships between Native and non-Native communities. DiGenova, who uses they/them pronouns, has been an essential collaborator with Meders-Knight for the past couple of years by contributing their extensive knowledge of native-plant propagation. For them, Verbena Fields is an example of what land around Chico might have looked like before colonization. As they see it, “T������ aren’t that many things in the world that really make a difference, but planting and tending to native plants does. We’ve seen a restored forest, that it works.”&�Բ�����;

Yet the return of native plants and Native people to Verbena Fields is not without conflict. One Friday workday in 2021, Meders-Knight arrived at Verbena Fields to find that vandals had chopped down some trees, including a favorite t’at’am c’a/alder. She felt like a “12-year-old friend died … before its time.” The following week, a large group assembled to work on the fallen trees. While peeling t’at’am c’a/alder bark, Figueroa, the geographer, explained that in this way they could “honor” the t’at’am c’a by putting it to use. 

For many volunteers, working at Verbena Fields is a way of coping with the shame and guilt that descendants of settlers feel for all that has been lost. Restoration rites offer reparations for a colonial past that had terrible consequences for both the Indigenous people of California and the animal and plant communities with which they lived. For DiGenova, working at Verbena Fields became a therapeutic response to grief about what was lost, as well as something to do in the face of impending climate change. As they explained it, “I just recognized that if I came here, I could have a taste of being more fully human.” Being more fully human came about because of their connection to the land that they used to grieve, that they thought was gone. But even “in the story of it being so devastating, there’s a shred of hope in it being so much better than I thought it could have been. … It’s too soon to give up.”&�Բ�����;

Land restoration and decolonization are not quick fixes. Meders-Knight says she wants to “create restorative places and ecosystems for the next 100 years.” Until then, it will be hard to know the full fruits of her labor. As she put it in an interview on the radio show , “I will be visiting and tending these places in spirit form.”&�Բ�����;

“Those are visual clues that you are in an important place of learning,” says , a University of Montana natural areas specialist. “This is the standard way that American universities look.”

The common design was an effort by white settlers to recreate the prestigious Ivy League campuses of Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, Marler says. These kinds of landscapes are “all based on European ideals of what is valuable and beautiful,” she says. This has conditioned Americans to associate places of learning with European landscapes instead of local, Indigenous ones.

By dismantling Indigenous landscapes, settler-colonists reimagine them as their own. Environmental historian Traci Brynn Voyles describes the process by which non-white lands are recast as valueless and available for erasure as “.”&�Բ�����;

The cultural roots of university campus landscapes surround whiteness and a European aesthetic, which can result in Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) feeling a and alienation on college campuses, even if there is no overt racial hostility.

Advocates are calling for places of learning to instead be aligned with Indigenous values and aesthetics. The demand for meaningful action has emerged and reverberated throughout institutions of higher education across the country. 

“When I think of decolonizing, I think about exercising ways of Indigeneity,” says , a Shoshone-Bannock and Chippewa-Cree Master of Science student at the University of Montana. “For me, that means maybe less development, or focusing resources on native plants, maybe creating more areas where we can access foods or things like that when we’re in these college spaces.”

Re-Indigenizing the Settler Colonial Aesthetic

Re-Indigenizing the colonial landscapes of college campuses can address both the historical erasure of Indigenous presence and the isolating impact campuses currently have on BIPOC students, faculty, and staff. Ethnobotanical gardens can create a welcoming and healing space for all—especially for Indigenous participants—through emphasizing human relationships with native plants.

Educational institutions such as ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; and others have recently established ethnobotanical gardens, native plant gardens, and as a means to restore Indigenous flora.

The ethnobotany garden outside of the at the University of Montana (UM) attracted Fellows, who says, “I like to walk around and observe and see what’s growing and know that I can go harvest sweetgrass during a break. … It’s a special place … that I’ve spent a lot of time at.” She says it is a great space that students can visit between classes to unwind.

Fellows also served as an intern in UM’s Four Sisters Garden. Based on the agricultural practices of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, the garden includes sunflowers, squash, corn, and beans, which support one another’s growth. Sunflowers attract pollinators, squash leaves protect the soil from drying out, corn stalks allow vines to climb, and the beans fix nitrogen in the soil. Fellows emphasized that as someone who is not a member of these tribes, “caring [for] these seeds and caretaking for these plants,” requires participants “to be careful about how we’re doing these practices.” In order for campuses to re-Indigenize their landscapes, there is a need to understand what the land and what people’s relationship with that land looked like precolonization.

It is similar at other universities. The modern-day campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for example, was covered in tall- and mixed-grass prairies until less than 200 years ago. These lands were host and ecological partner of the Bodwéwadmi (Potawatomi), Peewaalia (Peoria), Kaahkaahkia (Kaskaskia), and Myaamia (Miami) since the slow retreat of the last glaciers about 12,000 years ago, according to .

Since the 1830s, the Illinois landscape, and especially that of its college campuses, has lost nearly all of its native plant species. Only 0.01% of Illinois’ original Indigenous prairieland remains today. Some of the last remnants were in March 2023 by the Greater Rockford Airport Authority just outside Chicago as part of a . As bulldozers leveled the most in the state, they were carrying out the task of and Indigenous removal in yet another settler-colonial process. 

Environmentalist Rob Nixon refers to this kind of centuries-long change in landscape as “.” Often uncinematic, the damage is real—but its perpetrators are difficult to pin down with specificity.

The erasure of the Indigenous landscape has taken, and continues to take, time. The final violent act of Indigenous removal is to prevent any possibility of Native peoples’ return. On college campuses, as in many places, this is done by imagining they were never here in the first place.

Re-Indigenizing University Campuses

But across the country, advocates are making change. In an effort to re-Indigenize college campuses, BIPOC students, allies, alumni, and faculty are introducing gardens and cultural houses based on Indigenous practices to campuses. While such projects aim to create safe places, they are often on the periphery of the university grounds and not in a central or visible location, adding to the isolation and othering of people of color on college campuses.

In contrast, Oregon State University (OSU) has created both an Indigenous center and a garden in the middle of campus. Director of Tribal Initiatives in Natural Resources , Latinx with Raramuri and Apache heritage, describes the importance of these places: “[It’s] not just being ourselves, but stepping into our power. And having conversations that we might not have felt safe having here, you know, a decade ago on this campus.”

Eisenberg has been part of the OSU community since 2006, first as a graduate student and then as a postdoctoral researcher. Eisenberg’s in restoration ecology, wildlife biology, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge frames her work in partnering with tribal nations to support sovereignty rights. “Back in 2006 it was not a safe space to be Indigenous or different,” she says. “It’s very, very different right now.”

Thanks to the efforts of student advocates over the years, OSU now has and Indigenous plants on campus, and in the future there will be Indigenous cultural burning. Thinking back over her time at OSU, Eisenberg says, “I would have never imagined that we would get to this point.”

By restoring a place’s history, a college community can see the ways that Native plants sustained and continue to sustain Native people, which is why Eisenberg says re-Indigenizing the land is so important today.

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign is still in the process of creating an Indigenous plant garden, but students in the ecological restoration club utilize Indigenous knowledge to volunteer and care for native plants at the UI Arboretum.

“It’s a place that not that many students really know about unless they are already seeking it out, myself included,” says Vijay Shah, an Indian-American chemical engineering Ph.D. student. “I take it upon myself to understand the place I am, through learning Indigenous language and learning about Indigenous plants on the land.”&�Բ�����;

Red Bison has advocated for installing pollinator habitats with native plants in relatively unused land at the center of campus, such as along the periphery of the main quad. Some in the campus community, Shah adds, “may not recognize that a prairie plant restoration, which appears unseemly or disorganized, can actually be healthy in its own right.”&�Բ�����;

Marler, at the University of Montana, has also noted that when Indigenous plant gardens are attempted on college campuses, some may view them as “ugly” or think they “look bad” because the campus community is not used to this Native aesthetic.

Despite this wastelanding, however unconscious, there is much for everyone in a campus community to gain from restoring Indigenous land connections. Shah described the benefits of pollinator habitats beyond cultural and ecological restoration, recounting that “the more students get to recognize … prairie flowers … it brings people closer to the place [where] they’re studying.”

Another purpose of these kinds of native plant or pollinator gardens is educational. “Most people have plant blindness and they just don’t think about … how plants are organized or what the plants are,” Marler says. By drawing attention to Native plants, appreciation can be cultivated. 

Beyond Land Acknowledgements

In recent years colleges and universities have begun writing and presenting “land acknowledgement” statements on their websites and at campus events. But some argue these statements are performative and preclude more meaningful action. University land acknowledgements do not address the process of slow violence or the false colonial narrative perpetuated by these institutions, students say.

Fellows shares that while her university in Montana is creating new native plant gardens, it is also continuing to demolish campus green spaces to construct new buildings. “We say those acknowledgements, however here we are … continuing to develop these spaces and … for what? For a ?” she asks. “And what does football represent within our [Indigenous] communities? Who is represented in those communities? What does it mean when we’re putting all this infrastructure and capital into [campus] space?”

More work is still needed, but many advocates are hopeful for the future of re-Indigenizing college campuses—especially in places where Indigenous ethnobotanical gardens have already been successfully established and integrated into campus life.

The most sensible way to stop slow violence and end waiting for settler-colonists to imbue “wastelands” with value is to intervene. This is done by returning to the kinds of landscapes that Indigenous peoples stewarded for some 30,000 years. Centering that history—centering Indigenous presence—can meaningfully transform institutions of power into places of learning.

Matteson remembers the collective dismay and anger in the room as the five-person board approved Enbridge’s permit request. She also remembers what happened next: Tania Aubid, a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, stood up and told the commissioners that they had just declared war on the Ojibwe people. 

Outside of the conference hall, organizers held a rally. Matteson listened as Winona LaDuke, a member of the White Earth Nation and executive director of the nonprofit Honor the Earth, spoke alongside several youth interveners—teenagers who were suing to stop the pipeline in court. Listening to their words, Matteson was moved by their unwavering dedication―to the land, water, and climate, but also to upholding the treaty agreements, which were being violated by this pipeline project.

Only by confronting the context of the ��.��.’s settler-colonial history can settlers begin to reckon with their personal identity as treaty people. 

After the news conference, Matteson packed her two young children into the car. They drove for nearly three hours before reaching a part of the land where the Mississippi starts to widen into one of the nation’s most storied rivers. It was a place she knew well. Matteson’s family had lived in the area for five generations, ever since her great-great-grandfather, Amasa, settled a homestead and opened a small sawmill on 1855 Treaty land. She’d grown up in the nearby town of Palisade, Minnesota, population 150.

Here was where Enbridge planned to drill the Line 3 pipeline under the Mississippi.

Standing on the riverbank that night, Matteson made a pledge to do everything she could to uphold the treaties and to stop Line 3. “I remember that day, saying to myself ‘I am making a commitment to this fight,’ ” Matteson recalls. 

Defending Treaty Rights: From the Salish Sea to Line 3

On July 25, a Lummi Nation-carved totem pole will pass through the Mississippi Headwaters, under which Enbridge plans to drill the Line 3 pipeline. It’s part of a 1,500-mile journey from the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest through numerous Indigenous sacred sites, including Bears Ears in the Southwest and Standing Rock in the Midwest, en route to Washington, D.C. The totem pole is intended to invite Native and non-Native people to connect with the idea of broken treaties and the ongoing efforts to honor them, especially when treaty rights come into conflict with extractive capitalism.

Putting a hand on the totem pole, as people are invited to do at each sacred site event stop, one can’t help but feel a sense of awe for the many stories, hopes, and prayers it carries—and to offer their own. The 24-foot pole, hauled on a trailer behind a pickup, bears images that tell stories of the present-day struggles faced by Indigenous communities—including the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, the crisis of children held in cages at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the work of language revitalization. One carving is a grandmother with seven tears, using culture to teach her granddaughter how to turn trauma into wisdom. The totem pole aims to serve as “a reminder of the promises that were made to the first peoples of this land and waters,” Lummi master carver Jewell James told . 

Once you know the true history, you can learn from it, and become wise from it.

These promises were made in the form of nation-to-nation treaty agreements, recognized in the U.S. Constitution as “the supreme law of the land.” For non-Native individuals residing in the U.S., treaty rights are still the legal mechanism giving people the right to live on ceded tribal land. Put another way, if settlers (like the two of us writing this piece) are not actively holding up their end of the deal, then they forfeit the right to be here.

In exchange, the U.S. government promised tribes services, such as health care, education, and housing—and in many cases, treaties reserved the right for Native people to hunt and fish within their traditional territory. Instead, the reality has been a history of genocidal massacres, forced displacement, brutal residential schools, the outlawing of language, religion, and culture, and broken treaty obligations. Only by confronting the context of the ��.��.’s settler-colonial history can settlers begin to reckon with their personal identity as treaty people. 

“Part of what’s so wonderful about the pole is how it invites people to learn about the treaty, and to learn about the true history of this country,” says Lummi tribal fisher and treaty advocate Ellie Kinley, co-founder of Sacred Sea, a Indigenous-led nonprofit whose mission is to defend Lummi sovereignty and treaty rights and promote Indigenous stewardship of the Salish Sea.

“Once you know the true history, you can learn from it, and become wise from it.”

“We Are All Treaty People”

On June 7, 2021, about 2,000 people attended Treaty People Gathering, a mass Line 3 protest in rural northern Minnesota. At one of two actions that happened that day, more than 1,000 people marched to a part of the Mississippi where the pipeline is slated to be drilled; at the other action, hundreds risked arrest (and more than 200 were arrested) shutting down an Enbridge work station for the day. 

“We Are All Treaty People” was one of the gathering’s main rallying cries. They are words that Matteson has thought seriously about since that night at the Commission hearing.  

In 2020, after two decades living and working in Minneapolis, Matteson moved her family back to Palisade. She quickly got involved with the , a cultural camp supporting people standing with the Ojibwe opposing Line 3. She is now close friends with Tania Aubid, the founder of the camp and the Ojibwe woman who informed the PUC commissioners that Line 3 was an act of war upon her people. The women’s friendship has given them both the strength to do more. In early 2021, they embarked on a hunger strike together. To bring attention to the fight to stop the pipeline, Matteson went 21 days without food; Aubid went 38.

When asked why she moved with her two young children to the Welcome Water Protector Center, Matteson is clear that protecting the water and the climate were reasons, but so too was ensuring that her government upholds its side of the treaties. 

The treaties are not just a concern for Indigenous people.

“I’ve been reminded by so many Indigenous people that the treaties are not just a concern for Indigenous people,” she says, golden light falling between the trees at camp. “They were entered into by the U.S. government, and as citizens, we have a responsibility to ensure our government honors that law.”

Over the course of the 19th century, the Red Lake Nation, the White Earth Nation, and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe signed treaties with the U.S. government—treaties that granted rights to U.S. citizens and reserved rights for tribal members. In recent years, tribal attorneys have argued that Line 3 would infringe upon those treaty-protected rights, including the right to cultivate and harvest wild rice―manoomin in the Ojibwe language―which is regarded as a sacred species and is a vital source of sustenance for local tribal members. “It’s a perpetuation of cultural genocide,” founder of Line 3 resistance group, , Tara Houska told , describing the impact Line 3 would have on manoomin.   

It has been a long road for the tribal attorneys, a road made more complicated by the fact that some Native-owned and two other Ojibwe nations . Most recently, on June 14, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled against the tribes, finding that Enbridge had appropriately demonstrated that there was a need for the pipeline. There are, however, reasons to believe the Tribes’ case will fare better in a case at federal court, where it is to be heard in the coming months. In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the favor of treaty rights in high-profile .

But as the case makes its way slowly through the federal court system, the fight for treaty rights is playing out on its own timeline in the woods of rural Minnesota.

Before Line 3 was anywhere near the edge of the great Mississippi, Aubid and Winona LaDuke built a waaginogaaning, a traditional Ojibwe prayer lodge, on the banks of the river, in the exact spot where Line 3 was slated to be drilled under its waters. Earlier this year, in the depths of the Minnesota winter, Enbridge workers appeared on site, nailing “No Trespassing” signs to trees.
   
The workers informed Aubid and LaDuke that they were trespassing on Enbridge property. 

“No, you’re trespassing,” Aubid replied.
   
When the workers returned with law enforcement, Aubid handed the police officer a copy of the 1855 Treaty Authority letter, informing them of her legal, treaty-protected right to practice her religion there. The police and the Enbridge workers left Aubid in her prayer lodge soon after, but nobody expected Enbridge to stay away for long.

They didn’t. In July 2021, Enbridge drilled under the river, despite Aubid, Matteson, LaDuke, and others to try and stop them.

The prayer lodge still stands in the path of the pipeline, and dozens more people have joined the Welcome Water Protector Center as the fight against the pipeline is reaching a boiling point. Since December alone, nearly 600 people have been arrested for actions related to stopping the construction of Line 3 and tens of thousands more have marched, intervene, and funding the pipeline.
   
Aubid is clear on what she hopes will happen next. “We’d like more people to come here,” she says. “We’d like people to help us protect the lands, protect the waters, and to do what they can to uphold their side of the treaties.”&�Բ�����;

Later, as we walk beside the languorous waters of the Mississippi, Matteson reminds us of the importance of settlers upholding the treaties. “This ������’t history,” she says. “This is happening here. It is happening now.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 5:26p.m. on July 20,2021, to reflect the current state of the drilling. Read our corrections policy here.

“It feels very bad working in the warehouse when it gets hot,” he says in Spanish, through a translator. “The hot air gets stuck, and having to drive the equipment or be around it, it gets really hot.”

Sweating, head pounding, Ramirez operates heavy equipment to ensure that pallets of goods flow steadily through a facility delivering products to Costco and Sam’s Club. He’s working under the constant pressure of quotas, aware that supervisory eyes are on him every time he takes a break to get some water.

Approximately work in warehouses like Ramirez. Some 160,000 of those workers are in California, working in what California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal/OSHA, terms a “” industry. 

In the Inland Empire, the increased emissions caused by the warehouse industry are a direct contributor to climate change, as is the built environment more broadly, which creates a that raises temperatures even more. 

Like Ramirez, most workers dread summers, especially as climate change is increasing the number of high-temperature days. This year, that dread is tinged with frustration: Eight years after the legislature to establish an indoor heat standard to protect workers like Ramirez from hot working conditions by 2019, the agency finally that was almost immediately derailed by protests from another state agency, the . It, along with the state’s Department of Finance and by heat protections for indoor workers, claimed the standard would be too costly, despite a finding that “the anticipated benefits of the proposed regulation, primarily improvements in worker health and productivity, exceed the anticipated costs.” On June 20—the first day of summer—the agency to address these objections by exempting prisons from the regulation. It could go into effect as early as August if state regulators agree to fast-track it.

With momentum on indoor heat protections for most workers finally being realized, Ramirez, among others, will be keeping a close eye on Cal/OSHA to see if the agency makes good on its . Heat is hazardous for not just carceral workers, but incarcerated workers—who are not necessarily covered by Cal/OSHA in the first place, explains AnaStacia Nicol Wright, policy manager at worker advocacy organization Worksafe. Wright notes that all incarcerated people, including workers, often swelter in conditions that can be. Of Cal/OSHA’s regulatory exemption for prisons, Wright adds, “it always does beg that question of racism and incarceration.”

Nevertheless, California worker-organizers and groups that have been steadily advocating for indoor heat standards and are looking to this landmark moment in heat regulation as a sign of hope. Worksafe is one such group, which has been with testimony and written submissions at state hearings and played an important role in organizing around the state’s development and implementation of a standard. The worker-led , which engages in education and worker actions, is another example, along with . 

Setting Standards

Indoor heat standards create a framework for regulating workplaces that get dangerously hot, including warehouses, commercial kitchens, and the bowels of sprawling parking structures. Heat illness can cause severe symptoms,. Repeat heat exposures can be especially risky and may cause problems such as. 

At least 436 indoor and outdoor workers nationwide died because of high heat. Those deaths are likely an undercount: Cal/OSHA as well as its federal counterpart depend on companies to report these fatalities, and a 2021 NPR investigation observed that Cal/OSHA’s recordkeeping on the subject was “.”

Higher temperatures are also associated with a. For overall health and safety, it’s critical to protect workers with basic safety measures, including proper ventilation, access to cool water and places to recover from heat, and rest breaks. In the absence of a federal standard on heat for indoor or outdoor workers, only provide guidance for indoor workers. Washington, Oregon, and California have extended protections to outdoor workers, but some states actually go in the opposite direction. Florida just passed a law from setting their own heat standards, for example, following a growing GOP trend to pass state-level preemption laws that block more liberal municipalities and counties from passing ordinances and regulations related to labor,, and, among other issues. 

A national standard would address these issues, protecting workers in every state, . On July 2, 2024, the Department of Labor ��that it would be issuing a ������ the Federal Register, setting the stage for a comment period and public hearing to implement a standard covering indoor and outdoor workers nationwide. However, given the ������ Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council curtailing the power of regulatory agencies, and depending on the outcome of the presidential election in November, a federal standard or may be subject to litigation.

Without formal heat regulation, it can be challenging to hold employers accountable for dangerous conditions, as seen in San Bernardino in July 2023 when Cal/OSHA inspectors were.

“These are jobs we go to [in order to] make a living. Nobody should be dying at work. Who wants to go to work and die? Of all the ways you could die, to die at your employer because you were trying to make a living and they couldn’t be bothered to make sure you were safe…” says Worksafe’s Wright, her voice trailing off as she reflects on the suffering across California’s sweltering indoor workplaces.

“For folks who might not know, particularly in the Inland Empire, it’s very hot,”  says Tim Shadix of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center. “In the worst warehouses there’s not good climate control or air conditioning. It can get as hot or hotter inside as the temperature outside. In the Inland Empire that’s easily in the 90s or triple digits.” The Southern California Association of Governments notes that the number of extreme heat days——in some areas of the region . 

California’s regulation will require access to drinking water and cool places to recover from heat exposures when indoor temperatures rise above 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Workers wearing restrictive clothing (such as PPE) or working in areas with radiant heat, such as the equipment Ramirez works with, would be entitled to more protections. At 87 degrees or higher, workplaces would also be required to use “engineering controls” (such as ventilation) to lower and control temperatures. Worksafe in arguing that protections should kick in at 75 degrees, or around 71 degrees for workers doing moderate and heavy labor. 

“The temperatures are high if we’re just sitting out and having lunch with our family, and high if we’re at the beach,” UPS employee Robert Moreno told the Department of Industrial Relations at a . “But now think about these temperatures inside of a warehouse that’s been sitting in the sun all day long. Most of these warehouses are sheet metal—sun radiates inside all day long. You go into these warehouses, there’s zero to no airflow, very [stifling] heat.”

Outdoor Heat

Indoor workers aren’t the only ones wilting in the heat. Poor conditions for outdoor workers, especially farmworkers, are a perennial theme of hot summers. California was actually an early trendsetter in adopting an, which mandates access to clean drinking water and requires shaded places to rest when outdoor temperatures exceed 80 degrees. Employers are also required to allow agricultural workers a 10-minute cooldown period at a minimum of every two hours when temperatures soar above 95.

Temperatures are, as seen in 2020 when farms took advantage of their “” to keep workers onsite in the midst of wildfire evacuations, and again this June when agricultural workers were once again “” to enter areas under evacuation to work. Those workers were sent out even when the air was from wildfires with the express goal of bringing in crops before they were smoke-tainted. 

California requires employers to “offer” N-95 masks and other PPE on days with poor air quality, but that requirement ������’t necessarily honored, and some may not even be aware of this entitlement. And a more robust version of that bill would have included “strike team” workplace enforcement that created a framework for inspectors to to enforce protections. That measure was stripped from the final version.

Incentivizing Protections

Although regulation is a key component, it’s not the only way workers can access protections. The same Florida workers affected by the state’s ban on local heat standards have found other ways of holding employers accountable. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers’, for example, includes a that growers can follow to achieve certification, with the worker-led organization targeting large corporate clients such as, calling on them to purchase from qualified growers. 

Similarly, the model helps workers across industries, including the warehouse industry through groups like the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, . Similarly, sectoral bargaining such as allows workers in the same industry to collaborate on setting standards that will apply across that industry.

But regulation is not sufficient if it’s not enforced, or if workers are not provided with the tools to understand it.

“Workers are asking for employers to train their workers so they know what to look out for, and that also includes the managers,” says Ramirez. “The workers and the employers need to be aware of the symptoms to look out for, and prevent them, as they’re happening. When we feel overheated, we need time to rest so we won’t get to a point where we faint. To rest, workers need a place to sit, they also need water close and accessible.”&�Բ�����; 

Training also includes worker engagement and transparency, , including “posting heat illness risk assessments in work areas [and] ensuring workers’ rights to measure temperatures with their own instrument.” Notably, in 2021, the Supreme Court requiring union access to worksites during nonworking hours, which allowed organizations such as United Farmworkers to visit workers onsite for labor organizing and education, critical to ensuring that workers know their rights.   

Workers must be protected from reprisal for reporting unsafe conditions, an issue that has . This is particularly critical for who may fear the consequences of speaking out, a valid fear given who say the company threatened and eventually terminated an employee for his organizing work, including efforts to address dangerously hot temperatures in Amazon Air warehouses in the Inland Empire. The Department of Homeland Security recently addressed the chilling effect created when employers to silence immigrant workers, creating legal protections for workers coming forward to report workplace violations, but such protections are only effective if workers are aware of them.

“They take more time and more money to protect the products, the things making money for the business,” says Ramirez of industry resistance to regulations. “They’re not taking time to protect workers.”

Moreno’s testimony at the Department of Industrial Relations spoke to hopes for a better future: “What I’m asking from you guys is, 20 years from now, I want someone to look back at what this Board did and say, “Okay, in 2023 California did it right. They set standards that are above and beyond.’ I want other states to look at California and say, ‘California is doing it right. They are putting people over profits.’”

UPDATE: This story was updated at 3:06 p.m. on July 9, 2024, to include new developments, including the Department of Labor’s July 2 announcement that it would be issuing a proposed rule in the Federal Register that could implement national heat standards for indoor and outdoor workplaces. Read our corrections policy here.

“Our connection to the outside world is satellite internet—so no power, no internet,” Alexandre says. He and others at Shelterwood Collective were without power for two weeks in early 2023 when massive storms hit California. “We ran the generator two to three hours a day to check in with the outside world, let people know we were OK.”

“We joked that this was the worst-best storm of our lives. The damages are only going to get worse, but our autonomy and ability to respond to it is only going to get better,” Alexandre says. “Our hope is that as we build up this microgrid we won’t be as dependent on Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E)—both in the summer when they cut off power because of wildfires and in the winter when the trees come down on the power lines. We’ll shift from a community that is vulnerable to one that is more independent and sovereign in how our energy is produced and used.”

is an Indigenous-, Black-, and queer-led collective of land protectors and cultural strategists stewarding 900 acres of forest in Northern California. They are among a growing number of organizations and localities trying to wrest control of their energy futures away from behemoth, dirty, and dangerous energy utilities like PG&E, and to put decisions about energy production, distribution, and use in the hands of the most impacted communities. For Shelterwood and others, one way to do that is to build community-governed solar microgrids. 

The nation’s largest utility, , is investor owned. It serves some 16 million people across 70,000 square miles in Central and Northern California. As a profit-seeking private entity whose shareholders are guaranteed a specific rate of return on investment, PG&E often forgoes spending on essential measures to protect human and ecosystem health. This has resulted in catastrophic wildfires, deadly explosions, power shutoffs for millions of people, escalating rates, expansion of dirty energy projects, and vehement opposition to the increasingly popular move toward community-controlled, renewable energy. The consequences have been particularly devastating for Indigenous, Black and Brown, disabled, elderly, poor, working class, and rural communities.

In 2010, PG&E malfeasance caused an explosion in San Bruno, California, blowing a hole in a major city and killing eight people. In 2018, PG&E’s crumbling electrical grid started a fire that ravaged Paradise, also in California, killing 85 people and burning 14,000 homes. Year after year, massive megafires—the Dixie, Tubbs, Zogg, and Mosquito fires, each in the top 10 fires in California history—have either been caused by PG&E, or PG&E has been at the center of investigations and settlements surrounding the fires. The utility , some are ongoing, there have been without , and the clock is still ticking on some .

The company has recouped its losses from these fires by hiking up costs for ratepayers, who already pay among the highest rates in the country. Additionally, instead of completing long-overdue infrastructure repair to minimize wildfires, PG&E has sought to limit its liability for future fires by instituting rolling blackouts during wildfire season, leaving millions throughout the state without power, with little advance planning to protect communities dependent on power to live.

The ability to have uninterrupted service is particularly important for people with disabilities.

“This week in the Bay Area, disabled people and elders without power are having difficulty breathing, moving, eating, and staying alive,” explained the late disability justice organizer Stacey Park Milbern at a rally outside PG&E’s headquarters during a power blackout in 2019. “A friend is going without her nebulizer treatment. A neighbor didn’t have a way to store insulin. Another community member is homebound because she needs electricity to open the garage. People are being forced to throw out groceries without knowing where the money will come from to replace them. Blind people are crossing the street without there being traffic lights or audible signals telling them when to cross. Have you tried communicating in American Sign Language in the dark? It’s not easy.” Milbern continued, “I use life-sustaining medical equipment—my ventilator—16 hours a day. My doctor completed extensive paperwork telling PG&E why I need power to live. When I called PG&E, I was on hold for two hours. I hadn’t received any notice from PG&E, but my house was on four different maps as losing power. To PG&E, my life is not important.”

Despite being abandoned by PG&E during the wildfires and planned power outages, disabled activists to survive—making do-it-yourself box-fan filters, distributing KN95 masks, sourcing generators and ice, and buying hotel rooms for those in need of power. 

While the consequences are especially stark for disabled people, who’ve long been marginalized in conversations about energy policy, communities everywhere are recognizing that if we need power to live, that power cannot be controlled by a profit-driven monopoly utility. Rather, decisions about energy production, distribution, and use must be made by people with the most at stake in those decisions.

Energy democracy is the fight to shift energy from a resource that has been centralized and commodified by corporations into a shared resource that is decentralized and democratized, resilient and redundant, aligned with the health of local ecosystems, and which meets the needs of workers and communities. It is a key pillar of a larger .

“Everyone waits in fear of a Wall Street corporation pressing a red button to turn their power on or off,” says Pete Woiwode, co-director of the . “What if we flipped that and the folks who make the decisions about whose needs to prioritize—who has access to life-giving energy—are the folks most vulnerable in these scenarios? Energy can be a process by which we upend generations of horrific injustice and put our lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems at the center.”

Increasingly exasperated with powerful, polluting utility companies, fire survivors, environmental justice communities, and people with disabilities formed Reclaim Our Power to organize for renewable energy, public ownership, and community control. They have repeatedly called on California Governor Gavin Newsom to deny PG&E’s safety certificate, or what advocates have dubbed PG&E’s “license to burn.” Reclaim Our Power’s sister organization, , was essential in creating throughout the state, which put the decision about where to procure energy in the hands of local communities.

While Reclaim Our Power tries to pry loose PG&E’s stranglehold on California’s energy, the coalition is planting the seeds of an energy future beyond PG&E by supporting a cohort of local communities in designing and constructing their own solar microgrids. The idea is simple: To effectively control the energy system, people need to practice.

That cohort includes fire-affected migrants in Sonoma County, Black high school students in East Oakland, immigrant elders in Oakland Chinatown, and queer and trans people of color acting as land stewards at Shelterwood. Through the cohort, 10 organizations thus far have learned about the energy system, their own consumption needs, and the emerging technology.

For some in the cohort—like Shelterwood—controlling their own energy is critical.

“Shelterwood centers queer and trans folks in ecology. It means a lot—returning to home—especially in a community in which we’re ostracized into the margins or forced into the cities for protection,” says Layel Camargo, co-founder and co-executive director of Shelterwood, and an Indigenous (Yaqui and Mayo of the Sonoran Desert), trans organizer and cultural worker. “We’re returning our people back to the land.”

But Shelterwood is in the heart of Northern California’s wildfire country, Camargo explains. When it’s hot and windy, PG&E turns off the power without warning. This is a problem for Shelterwood, which sits outside of cellular service and relies on electricity to power satellite phones. Shelterwood also depends on power for their housing, kitchen, retreat center, phones, lights, internet, electric vehicles, and electric tools.

“Rural communities are really at the hands of these monopolized energy companies. In an emergency, without power, we couldn’t call 911. There’d be no way to get information about an evacuation,” Camargo says. “The best way for us to survive out here, and to stay ecologically aligned, is to have as much control of our utilities as we can.”

For Shelterwood, building out their own microgrid ������’t just practical, it’s also political.

“When I heard about the counts of manslaughter against PG&E after fires, I felt like it was my responsibility that if I was going to be in charge of electrical infrastructure for a 900-acre forest I would want to be less dependent on a company where our values are not aligned,” Camargo says.

In addition to solar, Shelterwood is also installing a hydro microgrid. This will be used in winter when the sun is less plentiful but the water is flowing through the creeks, streams, and gullies on their land, sometimes up to 25 gallons per minute.

Energy Insurrection

California ������’t the only place building out microgrids as part of new energy futures. Puerto Rico has traditionally imported most of its energy, which means that it is both more fossil-fuel intensive and expensive. Importing energy also leaves the archipelago more vulnerable to energy shortages and outages in times of disaster.

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, it knocked out power to most of the island. The small town of Adjuntas was one of the last regions reached by FEMA, a full month after the hurricane hit. Prior to the storm, the 45 solar panels on , a community center in Adjuntas, had been something of an oddity. But suddenly without electricity on the island, Casa Pueblo became an instant “energy oasis.” People came from all over the island to store refrigerated medicine, plug in their respiratory equipment, and charge their cell phones.

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, Casa Pueblo distributed 14,000 solar lanterns to residents, reducing the risk of fire by candlelight and the vulnerability of elders. They equipped 10 homes with extra energy for dialysis and small refrigerators for insulin and antibiotics to meet critical health needs. With their solar power, they set up a public satellite phone, which people came in long lines to use to contact their families. They also recorded one-minute messages from residents to play on-air from their solar-powered radio station.

Post-hurricane, Casa Pueblo built out the island’s first community-controlled microgrid. It outfitted an additional 150 homes with solar energy, installed 50 full-sized refrigerators in solar-powered homes, and powered a barbershop, two hardware stores, an agricultural center, two elder homes, the fire station, a restaurant, a pizzeria, five mini markets, a solar cinema, the transmission tower of the radio station, the elementary school, and a pharmacy, among others.

“Everyone has a right to energy, not just those who can pay for or finance solar power,” says Arturo Massol-Deyá, executive director of Casa Pueblo.

For these homes and businesses, solar used to be the backup source of energy. Now Puerto Rico’s main private utility company, PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) is the backup. Energy bills for solar users in Adjuntas have gone down from $85 per month on PREPA (fossil fuels) to $5 per month on solar. Casa Pueblo is now working to bring “second life” used-car batteries to Adjuntas to serve as solar storage.

“Energy is the capacity to do work. We don’t enjoy the wealth made from our work. One way to decolonize Puerto Rico is in practical terms: Create energy independence. We can be producers, not consumers. We don’t need coal and gas. We have sun and wind,” Massol-Deyá says. “We’re calling for an energy insurrection. We’re not going to wait for the government. We’re going to unplug ourselves.”

Bringing Energy Independence to the Mainland

The “energy insurrection” in Puerto Rico is an inspiration for many U.S. energy-democracy activists, but especially for Selena Feliciano, national campaign coordinator of the and herself Puerto Rican.

“I have Taíno [the Indigenous peoples of Puerto Rico] roots in my family. Indigeneity understands that energy is not wires, not technology. It’s the sun. It’s what connects us, keeps us going. It’s only in the last 150 years that we’ve equated energy with infrastructure,” says Feliciano. “The people of Puerto Rico have held steadfast to honoring the tradition of energy beyond technology, and as a basis of resistance.”

The Energy Democracy Project is a collaboration of 40 frontline organizations in the U.S. to advance energy democracy. Their members hail from Alaska to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and from Jackson, Mississippi, to the Gulf South.

It will take statewide policy change to dismantle private utilities like PG&E and to truly move an energy transition at scale. To get there, microgrids—like at Shelterwood and at Casa Pueblo—make concrete improvements in people’s lives, foster familiarity with the technology, bring the conversation into people’s homes, allow us to practice self-governance in place, and ignite political imaginations about an energy future beyond private utility companies.

“Energy Democracy rests on community decision-making, but if the community doesn’t know about the available technology or doesn’t know that an alternative is possible, it’s hard to organize around it,” adds Feliciano. “That’s why these first steps are so important—for people to experience these possible configurations and solutions for themselves.”

“The microgrids point to how else we can do it. It creates a real choice between PG&E and this other thing we’ve built. It’s a world that people can fight for, and it is within reach,” Woiwode says. “However, no one technology, microgrids included, is the answer to true energy democracy. If a Google campus, Chevron refinery, and a prison used microgrid technology, but did so in a way that didn’t actively disrupt the racist, extractive, anti-democratic structure of our current system, we would not be any closer to the energy future we all need.”

A just transition in the energy sector ������’t merely a question of technology—replacing coal, “natural” gas, or nuclear power with solar, wind, or hydro power—but rather a political struggle over who governs decisions about the resources it takes to power our lives. Like the double meaning in Reclaim Our Power’s name, it’s not just electric power, but political power.

“It’s not just about the poles, wires, and technology. It’s about the decision points in people’s lives,” Woiwode says.

It is the collective contending with those decision points, say energy democracy activists, that define energy democracy. Unplugging ourselves, as Massol-Deyá calls for, doesn’t mean we all act as individuals. Rather, it is the relationships between microgrids that make the system resilient and redundant. Decentralization without democratization would only exacerbate existing inequities.

“Our vision is not that everyone takes their ball and goes home to self-contained units of energy distribution. Energy sovereignty does not mean get out, disappear, with wealthy white people disappearing from the system. There needs to be connective tissue,” Woiwode says. “What we want is a mosaic of interconnected community—like the forest.”

The energy justice movement doesn’t seek merely to reform the existing shareholder-owned governance structure of our energy system. It is not a call for a kinder, gentler, slightly less deadly PG&E or PREPA. Rather, it is a reckoning with how the privatization and enclosure of energy has estranged us from earth’s regenerative cycles. It is an invitation to restore our relationship to energy, and to each other. It is a reminder that there is enough energy for all when we are able to have a reflexive, responsive relationship to place and to earth’s living systems. It is a course correction that devolves governance down to the level of greatest impact so that decisions aren’t made by a few men with MBAs, tucked safely away in corporate offices, but by people in our communities whose lives are most impacted by the tough choices in precarious times. It is an opportunity to practice people-to-people, radical self-governance.

As , when climate disasters like wildfires and superstorms intensify it only further reveals the failures and fractures of our existing energy system that burns fossil fuels in one place and transmits that energy over large swaths of land, according to the whims of a profit-maximizing corporation. But grassroots activists on the ground are building models of the kind of renewable, affordable, interconnected, community-governed energy systems needed for energy democracy.

This story was produced as part of a Just Transition reporting fellowship with��.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 1:07 p.m. PT on Sept. 13, 2023, to clarify that Shelterwood Collective’s generator was gas-powered, not diesel-powered.��Read our corrections policy here.

The cognitive dissonance of these circumstances hit home when, in 2003, at age 10, Guzman first visited her grandparents and family still living in her parents’ hometown in Mexico. Here, in the small community of El Pedregal de San Juan, in the state of Hidalgo, Guzman says she was amazed by the rain-fed milpa system of growing corn, wheat, and squash that her uncles still maintained, using seeds that have been in her family for generations. 

“I was just so enamored,” she says. But anger and sadness followed as she came to understand the forces that caused her parents to migrate in search of employment in the United States. “People like my parents, they were pushed off the land.”&�Բ�����;

Guzman’s parents gave up caring for the soil and growing food that nourished them in pursuit of greater opportunities that involved growing crops for export and other people’s profit. It’s an ironic yet common occurrence: Although Western agriculture has begun embracing regenerative farming principles, the very people who have been using these practices since time immemorial have been socially, economically, and politically forced from the lands that sustain them.

“That’s not the society we should be living in,” says Guzman. Instead, she and a host of scientists, educators, farmers, organizers, and activists around the world are working to implement these regenerative principles and reciprocal practices, literally from the ground up.

Living History

“When I think about soil, I think about the ecosystem and I think about history,” says Briana Alfaro, administrative program manager at in upstate New York. “I think about the geology that helped create the makeup of what minerals are in the soil.”

But soil is not just bits of rock and dust. In addition to minerals, it is composed of gas, water, living organisms, and the organic remains of once-living creatures. And the process of turning these components into soil is incredibly slow and microscopic. In the prairie, it takes between . In . 

But destroying that formation, hundreds and thousands of years in the making, happens quickly. Humans can compact the soil in a matter of seconds with a bulldozer or a slab of concrete. During the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, due to massive disturbance of the soil through over-tilling, the center of the American continent . And today, even when the soil stays on the ground, we’re through the use of pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, and more. 

Soil is alive. It is filled with life, and it supports the lives of so many living creatures—including us. Recognizing and tending to this reciprocal relationship could help shift our understanding of sustenance and what it takes to achieve lasting prosperity for both people and the planet. 

Alfaro suggests using the term “soil livestock,” which she recently heard and feels best encapsulates the true work of caring for the soil. “It’s another part of farming, right?” Alfaro explains. “It’s another set of beings that you’re responsible for.”&�Բ�����;

How we respond to that responsibility will have compounding effects for the Earth—and all of us who live here. As the climate warms, and the human population grows, soil will be foundational to our thriving—or our downfall. At a core level, our collective survival will depend on how humans choose to interact with soil. 

“The soil to me is the source of life. That is, it nurtures many of the lives—not just humans, but also the plants and animals and all those tiny things that we can’t even see,” says Miwa Aoki Takeuchi, associate professor in the University of Calgary’s department of education. “When we say ‘rich soil,’ we imagine the soil itself is populated with so many lives and diverse networks.”

And that richness can translate into the systems we use to impart value to other things in our lives and our economy.

“I think a healthy soil is a form of community wealth,” says Liz Carlisle, associate professor in the environmental studies program at University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s an intergenerational form of community wealth.”

Carlisle studies the deep history of regenerative agriculture, going well beyond the buzzword it has become in environmental circles of late. She says it started with her grandmother, Helen, who had grown up on a farm in western Nebraska that the family eventually lost in the Dust Bowl. “As a child, I remember my grandmother saying, ‘You know, we need to learn how to take better care of the soil,’” recalls Carlisle. “It felt like a responsibility—having been born into this family that made some really big mistakes—to be part of a process of repair.”

Carlisle now focuses her research on Indigenous food systems that existed for thousands of years on the North American continent, on the African continent, on the Asian continent—all over the world. She contrasts these enduring practices with the hierarchical approach to industrial agriculture we see today: “Extracting from soil for short-term financial gain only makes sense in a world where certain people and other living beings fall outside of our circle of care. Whereas if we really believe that everybody’s life matters, it makes all kinds of sense to steward this common resource of soil for everyone and for those beings yet to come.”

Such a fundamental shift would upend how our society defines prosperity today. 

When it comes to soils and what they’re producing, “we always seem to be using a cost-benefit analysis,” says Michael Kotutwa Johnson, assistant specialist at the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Resilience Center as well as its School of Natural Resources and the Environment. “Why can’t we look at a social-benefit analysis instead?”

In October 2023, Kotutwa Johnson hosted a group of scientists and educators from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and he said the number one problem they wanted to address was not pollution or agricultural runoff—it was diabetes. He believes the spread of this disease is a direct result of the U.S. exporting its ideas of food and food policy. 

“We need to rethink our policies, our agricultural policies, in the United States to focus more on quality, not quantity and efficiency,” he says. 

Kotutwa Johnson is a Hopi farmer who evaluates the success of his farming not only on the corn he produces but also on other impacts it has in his community: Are our bodies becoming healthier? Are these communities doing well? 

For the Hopi, a matrilineal agricultural society, there is no distinction between their agricultural system, their belief system, and their social structures, Kotutwa Johnson explains. One cannot exist without the others, and they can only thrive together. 

“The act of planting alone for us is an act of faith,” he says. “We live in a climate that only gives 6 to 10 inches of annual precipitation a year, but yet we’re able to raise things like corn, beans, melons, and squash, which I was told, when I went to Cornell, needed 33 inches of rain.”&�Բ�����;

But creating a nurturing, respectful relationship with the soil and what grows from it has allowed these crops to thrive under Hopi stewardship.

“Those plants are like our people to us,” says Kotutwa Johnson. “We take care of those plants from when they’re little babies coming up out of the ground to when they get old and they pass on; and we lay them down at the end, and they provide us seeds for another generation.”

Laying down the cornstalks at the end of the plants’ lives, to Kotutwa Johnson, is a means of thanking them and giving them well-deserved rest. In Western terms, keeping the ground covered is a means of holding the soil in place to prevent erosion. As the organic ground cover breaks down, it also adds nutrients to the soil. So whatever the worldview behind it, this practice unquestionably leads to better soil health. 

Reciprocity Over Extraction

Shifting from a relationship of extraction from soil to one of reciprocity with soil is central to Indigenous ways of knowing and growing—both food and community prosperity. 

“Our ancestors revered soil and had such a relationship with it,” says Alfaro. “And that’s such a huge part of what we do at Soul Fire Farm: help bridge that connection, catalyze that connection for people—to land and to that ancestral knowledge.”

Central to this connection is an understanding that this type of relationship involves both give and take. For Alfaro, a multiracial Mexican American farmer and activist, this comes in many forms. “I feel better when I go spend time in my garden for so many reasons, you know, but I know that one of them is that I process and leave something behind every time I’m there.” She describes this process in natural terms, as the composting of sadness and grief. “I’m inevitably also growing myself food, growing my community food, growing my community flowers—all the things that help lighten me up and provide nutrition.” And the benefits of that relationship go both ways: “If we’re healthier, then we can give back to the soil more.”

Likewise, Aoki Takeuchi respects and finds inspiration in the way soil cooperates with others to decompose what humans consider garbage. “As someone who has experienced the intersectional system of oppression, I sometimes didn’t have a way to metabolize or decompose all the traumas,” she explains. But she uses soils as a literal and metaphorical lesson in her teaching. “How can [soils] metabolize that trauma, that historical trauma, and transform that into a source of nurturing and a source of growth?” says Aoki Takeuchi. 

Her belief in the power of this work is part of what inspired Aoki Takeuchi to create , a program for refugee youth in Canada to rediscover and reconnect with land after they’ve been forcibly removed from their own. The goal of the summer research program is to “listen to the silenced voices of the soil, land, and displaced communities.”

And that reciprocity goes beyond the simple exchange of materials. 

“How do we give back to the land for everything that the land has given us, including scientific and mathematical knowledge?” asks Kori Czuy, one of the instructors at Soil Camp and the manager of Indigenous science connections at the in Calgary. Western science always wants to name and categorize things definitively, but that’s not how Czuy teaches students. She de-emphasizes scientific hierarchies and rigid categorization.

“I always distinguish between the word[s] ‘knowing’ and ‘knowledge,’” Czuy says. “Knowledge is set. It’s the written word. It can’t be changed. It’s static. Knowing is alive.”

Land Matters 

But reconnecting with soil ������’t always possible, easy, or even desirable. Too many communities and people have been forced to work the soil on other people’s terms. 

Carlisle says race is implicated in current U.S. food production in profound ways: “If you think about why we had a plantation system, and why we now have a system that still looks a lot like that, you could argue that it’s not because it’s the most productive way to produce food, but it is a very effective way to produce racial hierarchy.”

Carlisle says the pattern is painfully consistent around the world: “You have a global majority of people who carry traditions of regenerative food systems who are being excluded from land ownership, and yet who are being asked to labor in industrial agriculture, [who] are so infrequently in decision-making positions about how that land is cared for.”&�Բ�����;

“People have persisted and maintained these regenerative ways of relating to land in the face of hundreds of years of brutally oppressive structural violence,” she says. “It’s an instructive pathway of what it means to continually articulate a vision of reciprocal care—even in the face of the most tremendous obstacles.”

Carlisle says we can’t make meaningful strides toward regenerative agriculture if we don’t simultaneously insist on a transformative shift toward racial justice. “That’s work for all of us,” she says, “and I think it is especially work for those of us who identify as white.”

Guzman agrees that the transformation of our agricultural system needs to come from a place of inclusion and equity. “When we think of soil, and really trying to support soil and build up soil, we can’t forget … the human piece: that we need people who care about it to be able to have access.”&�Բ�����;

If that access were widely granted, Alfaro at Soul Fire Farms imagines a parallel shift in the way farmers relate to and invest in the soil. Without the limitations of one-year leases or the risk of displacement, she dreams of the beauty of transitioning away from annual crops that are planted and harvested every year, to perennial crops, which stay rooted in the ground more permanently, offering their benefits to the soil year-round and year after year. She says it was a profound moment when she learned “how beneficial it is to have perennials, to grow perennials, and what it means to be able to grow perennials, and what a privilege that is.”

The Humanity of Soil

As people, our bodies are deeply shaped by our environment and teem with microbial life in various forms of symbiosis. Maybe we’re not so different from soil after all. 

“We’re all made of the same thing, you know, from rocks to microbes to everything,” Czuy says. “We’re all stardust. We’re all made of particles that are in motion constantly.”&�Բ�����;

Indigenous growers prioritize those personal connections and relationships with soil. 

“It takes time to know your soil,” says Alfaro. “And there’s a lot of different ways you can get to know your soil. Start where you are: What is this soil? What does it like? What likes to grow here?”

In her soil camps, Aoki Takeuchi encourages students to connect with the soil in whatever way feels right for them.

“We really would like to foster a space for humbly listening, and listening in plural forms, so that we can listen to the very quiet voice of the soil.” She says that voice is easy to miss if we don’t pay attention—or if we limit our listening to ableist notions of the idea—but that there are many ways to listen to the story and honor the soil’s voice. “One could be seeing the color of the soil, another may be smelling different .”&�Բ�����;

For Guzman, the connection to soil comes in the form of her passion for pottery, as well as her Ph.D. research with farmers much like her parents—who care deeply about the land but have been forced by economic circumstances to become cogs in the industrial food system. She holds fast to a reminder a professor once gave her: “‘When the revolution comes, we’re gonna need everyone—we’re also gonna need scientists.’”

Guzman says she considers herself a “cynical optimist.” “I’m kind of a shit-talker and hateful about where the system is … but really optimistic about the future.”&�Բ�����;

That optimism is important—because the stakes are only getting higher. 

“In the face of the climate crisis, growing food has only become more and more difficult,” Carlisle says. “Farmers face flooding, droughts, extreme heat, new pest and disease challenges; and all of these are things that healthier soils can help farmers to weather.”

A soil with more organic matter is going to hold more water, which can prevent flooding in heavy rains and can help through long dry seasons and excessive heat. Healthier soils also make for healthier plants, which can better withstand pests and diseases. And those plants make for more dependable and nutritious food sources for people. 

“It’s never been more important to steward this common resource of a healthy soil, as a matter of climate justice and food justice for those populations that will be most heavily impacted by the ways that these extreme weather events impact people’s ability to produce food,” Carlisle says.

Or, as Alfaro puts it: “T������’s life in the soil, and we also have to take care of that so that we can be resilient.”

This story was funded by a grant from Kendeda Fund, as part of the è������! series “Redefining Prosperity.” While reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, è������! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. View our editorial independence policies here.

“Every social movement in the U.S. that has been successful has always had strong youth and students out there leading the charge—and in most cases, leading the charge more aggressively and demanding actions over and beyond the general population,” says Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. That’s certainly true for climate, with youth demanding a radical transition away from fossil fuels on decidedly tighter timelines than their predecessors have advocated for. Pressure from youth such as Varshini Prakash, the co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, led Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to endorse a bolder over the course of the campaign.

Sena Wazer, co-director of Sunrise Connecticut, describes how her work is often viewed by older activists: “The main response that I think many of us get from older folks is, ‘Well, you’re so inspirational and give me hope,’ which is nice, but it ends up getting really frustrating, because we’re not here to give you hope, you know? We’re here to get something done.”

Bullard says it’s critical that we, as a society, allow youth’s energy and optimism bubble to the top, and to empower young people to assume the leadership they’re seeking. Having written more than a dozen books on environmental justice, he considers himself an elder in the movement. In contrast, Bullard calls young people “the tip of the spear,” and says it’s absolutely critical to have them out there “pushing hard for transformative change.”

A Convergence of Issues

The unequal impacts of a changing climate have become extremely clear in 2020, so equity has come to the fore of climate conversations in every corner of the country. A global deadly pandemic continues to rage out of control in the U.S., heat waves are setting new temperature records, wildfires are scorching American Western states, and the hurricane season has already made it to the end of the alphabet for naming storms. In all cases, low-income, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities are bearing a disproportionate amount of the impacts.

“Today, the scab is off, the ugly reality of injustice is hitting us up close and personal, made more realistic by this COVID pandemic,” Bullard says.

This year the decidedly youthful focus on intersectionality is a big part of what defines the transformation of the climate movement. Climate is not just an environmental issue, according to youth activists. It’s also a racial justice issue, an economic issue, and an access-to-health care issue.

Today, the different movements are converging, and I think that convergence makes for greater potential for success.

“Environmental justice is really seeing the intersection of these issues,” says Alex Rodriguez, a community organizer with the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, which aims to make environmental issues a priority for the state’s elected leaders. The group is now focusing their efforts on the coming election and recently succeeded in persuading the state to allow absentee voting in November. “We want people to be safe when casting their vote,” says Rodriguez, 26, whose fellow grassroots committee members range from age 16 to 60.

Rodriguez, who also serves on the equity and environmental justice working group for the Governor’s Council on Climate Change, says, “We see our programmatic work as a way to help lawmakers see what they can do to improve the dignity of those suffering from environmental racism, systematic racism, and economic oppression.”

Seeing the overlap and bringing these issues together is a strength that Bullard says was missing from the civil rights organizing he was involved with in the 1960s. He says 2020 is unique in many ways.

“The number of marchers is unprecedented, from different economic, ethnic, and racial groups—an awakening unlike any that I’ve seen on this Earth in over 70 years,” Bullard says. “Today, the different movements are converging, and I think that convergence makes for greater potential for success.”

Young and Old

But young people are one essential demographic among many when it comes to climate action. With all that’s on the line for climate in the coming elections, up and down the ballot, collaboration becomes key. Bullard says previous generations of climate activists can now play the critical role of mentoring, assisting, and supporting. Standing with, not in front of, youth.

“Youth are leading us and taking on frontline activity,” says Jayce Chiblow, the community engagement lead for Indigenous Climate Action, a Canadian organization that works for Indigenous-led climate justice solutions. But in doing so, she says many young Indigenous activists are experiencing the trauma of violence, getting arrested, and being taken away from their land. “All of our older people are supporting those youth: Elders, mentors, people trained in nonviolent action,” Chiblow says. “The youth aren’t alone.”

That support can go a long way. “T������’s a lot of anger and a lot of fear, and that’s understandable,” says Wazer of Sunrise Connecticut. “I definitely feel those things, too, just considering the ways that our future has been threatened and kind of trashed by older generations.”

Under the Trump administration, the number of environmental rollbacks alone can be disheartening, not to mention new drilling permits in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge going up for auction.

An intergenerational approach can leverage the individual strengths of youth and older people in all their diversity.

Wazer is frank about the risks of burnout, depression, and anxiety from the stress of it all, but draws inspiration from the example of the late U.S. representative and lifelong civil rights activist John Lewis. “That forgiveness and that ability to keep fighting and stay motivated … I think that that is something really powerful to learn from older generations.”

An intergenerational approach can leverage the individual strengths of youth and older people in all their diversity.

“The elders hold our stories,” says Chiblow, who is Anishinaabe from Garden River First Nation, Ontario. Those stories include lived experiences, culture, history, and generations of adapting to changes in climate. Such collective experience continues to inform Indigenous knowledge and connections to the land, as well as how people manage and govern themselves in relation to it. This knowledge is passed on through relationship-building and storytelling.

“Every time you hear that story, you’re at a different point in your life, and you’ll pick up something else … something new,” Chiblow says.

Changes in perspectives that come with time and experience are among the reasons why intergenerational learning and coalitions are critical to the climate movement. To combine that living and learning is to expand the reach and meaning of the message exponentially. As part of her research for her master’s degree, Chiblow brought together youth, community leaders, and knowledge keepers in her community to workshop climate action. “Those relationships are vital to keep that movement going,” Chiblow says.

Intergenerational collaboration around climate issues, particularly in this election season, starts at home.

The value of intergenerational relationships resonates far beyond Indigenous cultures, too. Rick Lent, a member of Elders Climate Action in Massachusetts, says he is motivated to act for his granddaughter. He recounts the time she said to him, “Please tell me that there is something hopeful regarding the climate in our, in the future, because I’m going to be living with the repercussions, and I’m scared.”

Lent takes that request seriously and says that working on behalf of future generations translates into effective messaging. “When you show up as a group of elders, and you’re talking to your legislator, our pitch is, ‘I’m not doing this for me. I’m doing this for my grandchildren.’ So it gives you a whole different story about who you are and why you’re doing this work.”

Elders Climate Action has in the Massachusetts legislature, which would set a net-zero emissions goal for 2050 and codify environmental justice in state law. With the November elections fast approaching, the group’s focus is now on assuring everybody can vote safely. In some states, the group’s chapters are pushing for voter registration and in others, ensuring people can vote by mail.

“We’re going to be in a pandemic in this year’s elections,” Lent says, which poses risks to people’s health, especially that of older voters. And because most poll workers, traditionally, have been seniors, Elders Climate Action is also encouraging youth to take up that mantle. “We need vote-by-mail,” Lent says, “And we need more poll workers, younger poll workers.”

The Unique Value Proposition of Elders

Older activists bring unique strengths to the table, according to gerontologist Mick Smyer, who designs strategies to move people from anxiety to action on climate. He calls himself “the aging whisperer to climate groups” and “the climate whisperer to aging groups.” He is quick to point out that the learning can go in both directions.

“I think older adults are untapped resources,” Smyer says. “Older adults bring several resources, one of which is their circles of influence. Just by virtue of having lived longer, older adults are going to have denser and richer networks,” Smyer says. “The second is, when it comes to voting and civic engagement, older adults, as an age group, outperform all other age groups.”

He uses the 2016 presidential election to illustrate his point: “The older age groups, 70% of them voted. Nobody [else] came close.” He is cautious about making sweeping statements about older people broadly, but he says that ageism is alive and well. And that can deter the kind of collaboration that would beget necessary progress on climate action.

As the twin global patterns of an aging population and a changing climate continue arm in arm, Smyer says a good place for starting this work is within one’s family.

“We each have that power to use in our circles of influence, particularly in our families, and we don’t realize it,” Smyer says. Whether it’s via Zoom or FaceTime or a phone call or a chat in the living room, Smyer says, family members have a superpower: They will listen to each other, and they’ll at least start the conversation.

 “Intergenerational collaboration around climate issues, particularly in this election season, starts at home, and then goes to the polling booth,” he says.

Speaking the Same Language

As an individual’s network of family, friends, and connections becomes wider and more diverse, the more work will need to be done to have them all working toward the same goals. That is equally true for the climate movement at large.

In bridging the gaps among baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials, Bullard says, “Each generation will have some idiosyncrasy and uniqueness about it that another generation will not understand or comprehend.”

If everybody in a group or institution is similar, then there’s no need to explain a lot, Bullard says. There’s usually a fair amount of shared knowledge and values. But the more diverse that group gets, in age, race, gender, or culture, he says, the greater the potential for making mistakes, stepping on people’s culture, and causing pain. But the potential for learning also increases exponentially.

We’re finally at the turning point where we could start to make real change.

Chiblow says successful collaboration comes down to being able to speak in shared concepts. The term “justice,” for example, is an English word that’s hard to translate into the Anishinaabe language. Chiblow says that because her community sees itself as belonging to the land, and being part of the land, the Anishinaabe worldview, and therefore their understanding of justice, is necessarily more holistic than the mainstream.

“Indigenous people have been feeling [the effects of climate change] for so long,” Chiblow says. Today, as wildfires rage across the West, the mantra of “I can’t breathe” is being driven home on a grand scale. For better and worse, climate justice is finally a front-page story.

“It’s affecting the broader society,” Chiblow says. “We’re finally at the turning point where we could start to make real change because … people are really starting to feel that urgency.”

The urgency will be tantamount in the coming election. A lot is at stake, says Chiblow: “Incentives, funding, all-around agreement, and also the way we’re able to manage our lands and ourselves as people.”

Bullard, too, is insistent on urgency. “This election is one of the most important elections of a generation, because there’s so many things at stake,” he says. “We can’t wait another 40 years on climate. We don’t have that much time. We don’t have 40 years to get justice.”

There’s a lot of knowledge built up in experience, and there’s a lot of energy that’s stored in young people.

Issues of climate justice will be on the ballot in state and local elections this fall, such as Nevada’s proposed renewable energy standards and Louisiana’s proposed disaster funding. And the topic has finally made it onto the national stage. Joe Biden called Trump a “climate arsonist” for not acting on or even admitting that the wildfires in California are clearly climate-related. The frequency and intensity of such disasters is indisputable.

“Hurricanes don’t swerve to avoid red states or blue states. Wildfires don’t skip towns that voted a certain way,” Biden . “The impacts of climate change don’t pick and choose. That’s because it’s not a partisan phenomenon.”

In many ways, the results of the upcoming elections will reflect the ways youth activists and older activists are able come to a common understanding of what climate justice means and what they want the future world to look like.  

“T������’s a lot of knowledge built up in experience, and there’s a lot of energy that’s stored in young people,” Bullard says. “When you put those two together, you have … an excellent recipe for potential success.”

Additional reporting by Krista Karlson.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 7:06 p.m. on Sept. 21, 2020, to reflect that Rick Lent is a member of Elders Climate Action in Massachusetts, not Connecticut, and that the group was not part of the push to get Markey reelected. Read our corrections policy here.

In megacities such as Cairo and Dhaka, Bangladesh, the lack of green space contributes to a host of problems: increased air pollution, higher air temperatures, and greater exposure to ultraviolet radiation, all of which are making these cities increasingly dangerous places to live. According to the World Health Organization, outdoor air pollution , most in low- and middle-income countries. Outdoor air pollution is particularly deadly in dense urban environments in these nations. In Cairo, for example, researchers estimate that in people over the age of 30 can be attributed to long-term exposure to two common air pollutants: nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). That’s an estimated 20,000 deaths each year in this city alone.   

Why do cities like these lack green space? The natural environment often plays a role: Cairo, for example, is in a desert; it’s not naturally lush. Rapid urbanization in recent decades has also led to the development of informal neighborhoods and other new construction projects, exacerbating the problem. But mostly, it comes down to planning. 

Gardening on a rooftop is more than just a clever use of limited space.

For postcolonial cities, formative urban development occurred under colonial domination and focused on exploitation. Urbanist Garth Andrew Myers, author of , that “cities were predominantly oriented around the extraction of goods for the metropole.” They were never designed to be sustainable. 

Even today, foreign powers shape the development of postcolonial cities in pernicious ways. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is����of foreign development projects that have caused environmental destruction and left developing nations with untenable debts. From 2015 to 2017, Egypt����to finance infrastructure projects. But much of this recent development��, which is , drought conditions to worsen, and extreme weather events like flash flooding and sandstorms to become more common across the nation.

Informal settlements, home to the cities’ most impoverished and marginalized communities, are the most vulnerable to rising temperatures, ultraviolet radiation, and air pollution. These neighborhoods have multiplied in both Cairo and Dhaka since the turn of the 20th century, and they often lack proper infrastructure and access to green space. “Some areas in informal settlements have zero square meters per inhabitant of green space,” says Abdallah Tawfic, co-founder of Cairo-based organization . 

These patterns hold true for many of the Global South’s largest cities. But organizations like Urban Greens as well as in Cairo and in Dhaka are committed to greening their cities by weaving rooftop gardens into the crowded cityscapes. The inspiration behind their projects is simple: “We don’t have the space to plant trees, but we have 500,000 rooftops capable of taking the load of a rooftop garden,” says Ahsan Rony, founder of Green Savers. 

Gardening on a rooftop is more than just a clever use of limited space, though. Rooftop gardens have substantial positive effects on air pollution and city temperatures. “Having a green cover is the best thing that could happen to this environment,” says Khaled Tarabieh, professor of architecture at the American University in Cairo. 

Cooler, Cleaner Cities

When a rooftop has a green cover, comprised of plants in raised beds, tables, or trellises, it shades the apartments on the upper floor, preventing overheating, especially in buildings that lack proper insulation, as is often the case in informal settlements. Rooftop gardens also reduce the heat that concrete structures absorb throughout the day and then re-emit at night, keeping cities cooler overall.

In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s hottest cities, a study showed that indoor air temperatures in buildings with rooftop gardens were than those without gardens, even during the warmest hours of the day. That saves on energy, too, which can have knock-on environmental effects. Research also shows that even relatively small rooftop gardens can by more than half a degree Fahrenheit. 

With cooler temperatures, less ground-level ozone forms, reducing outdoor air pollution. that plants can remove ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and carbon monoxide from the air. “If you are living in a place where you have a thick green cover, you’re enjoying a better and healthier quality of life,” Tarabieh says.

Rooftop gardens are also more practical than green walls or roofs, which are mounted on buildings. Green walls , but Tarabieh says these spaces often require more water than a rooftop garden of the same size, are much more difficult to maintain, and can even compromise the structures on which they are mounted.

Green Savers has worked on more than 5,000 rooftop gardens in Bangladesh since its founding in 2010. Most of its projects have been in Dhaka, the nation’s capital and one of the most densely populated cities in the world. But it has also expanded to the cities of Cox’s Bazar and Sylhet. 

Urban Greens is a much younger enterprise, but it’s growing fast. Founded in 2018, the organization partners with sponsors to provide hydroponic gardening supplies to low-income families for free and sells these same supplies to other customers. Interest in home gardening skyrocketed during the pandemic so the sales side of the business took off, according to Yahia El-Masry, the organization’s co-founder and business development manager. 

Reinvesting those profits has allowed Urban Greens to expand faster than anticipated. It is now launching new projects in Upper Egypt and a website called the “Urban Greens’ Network,” which it hopes will inspire more Egyptian city dwellers to begin gardening. “We want to create a network of practitioners to share knowledge and information and at the same time, invite other people,” El-Masry says. 

Tending Community Health

Beyond rooftop gardens’ environmental benefits, they can also provide food and income to the families who tend them. Those are the goals of Schaduf, another Cairo-based organization working in urban agriculture. “Environmental and social change are both in the vision for the company,” says Malik Tag, the organization’s business development manager.

Schaduf, founded in 2011, establishes produce-bearing rooftop gardens for Egyptian and migrant families in informal neighborhoods. The families that receive training and equipment from Schaduf grow gourmet leafy greens and herbs, and Schaduf connects them with upscale supermarkets to sell their produce for the best possible price.

In response to Bangladesh’s , Green Savers has also embraced a social mission, hiring and training young people as “plant doctors” to tend to rooftop gardens.

The greatest challenge for all three organizations has been convincing funders and local residents that the cost and effort of maintaining rooftop gardens are worthwhile. This is particularly true for those peddling hydroponic systems, which come with a higher startup cost. But the organizations have all had success increasing interest through community workshops and school programs. “We found that kids are really interested,” Rony says. Many students, after learning about rooftop gardens in school, have convinced their parents to research them further. 

As global temperatures continue to rise, megacities like Cairo and Dhaka will require more significant interventions than urban agriculture alone to prevent air pollution and temperatures from increasing to unlivable levels. But initiatives to green these cities are an excellent place to start. As Tarabieh puts it, green rooftops may not solve all the cities’ problems, but, “Will it give us an advantage? Absolutely.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:31p.m. on July 9, 2020, to more clearly explain how foreign powers shape the development of postcolonial cities.��Read our corrections policy here.

About of U.S greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity, so transitioning to renewable energy like solar power is an important part of reducing the nation’s overall emissions. Climate change is already tribal communities across the U.S.—affecting the ability to gather traditional foods and medicines, drinking water quality in rural communities, and more. In places like Montana, climate change-driven warmer temperatures, drier soils, and reductions in snowpack may .

For tribes like those Covenant Solar works with, the switch to solar power is urgent to mitigate the long-term impacts of fossil fuels. But it is also a way to strengthen tribal self-determination through workforce development and energy independence from often exploitative, non-Native-run utilities. “We are disrupting the broken fossil fuel-based energy system,” says Covenant Solar founder Cheri Smith. “This is economic development with really high human impact.”

Both Northern Cheyenne and the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, where Covenant Solar works, are on the front lines of the fight for a renewable energy future to combat climate change. At Northern Cheyenne, the battle was against coal mining. In 2016, after years of—including by Vanessa Braided Hair, Covenant Solar’s advocacy and community engagement manager—Arch Resources (then called Arch Coal) withdrew its application to mine 1.3 billion tons of coal at Otter Creek, near the reservation.

At Standing Rock, the battle is against the Dakota Access oil pipeline, part of which runs under the Missouri River on the reservation. In summer 2016, thousands of activists, known as water protectors, gathered along the Cannonball River to protest construction of the pipeline. Oil began flowing in May 2017, though activists continue to to shut down DAPL. During the 2016 protests, Cody Two Bears, one of the co-founders of Covenant Solar, helped organize a fundraiser to get 300 kilowatts of solar power installed on the reservation. Today, Covenant Solar is using the solar panel purchased with donated funds as a demonstration project and training opportunity.

“The majority of solar work being done on reservations don’t address core issues of poverty and lack of an economy,” Smith says. “[These one-off projects] are fine, but oftentimes what happens is when systems are donated, they’re dumped there and then the donor goes away, and the tribe is left with a hulking mess.” Not all tribes have the staff, technical knowledge, or funding to operate or maintain the specialized machinery solar energy requires. That’s why Covenant Solar is taking a different approach.

The company is not interested in short-sighted solar installation projects. It wants to create a self-reliant, renewable energy economy that lasts long past the media buzz. And that’s no small task. “This is a first-of-its-kind approach. There’s no template,” Smith says. “Our long-term goal is return to self-determination and restoration of hope.”

A Replacement for Fossil Fuels

Robert Blake, founder of the Minneapolis-based solar installation company and the nonprofit , has a similar vision. He is developing a solar microgrid on the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, where he is a member. Like Northern Cheyenne and Standing Rock, the Red Lake Reservation faces a similar fossil fuel fight. Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 pipeline expansion, proposed in 2014, would cross three reservations as well as wetlands in Minnesota where tribes hold treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice. Indigenous people and environmental activists have been protesting the expansion for years, with action ramping up in the past few months. Between November 2020 and August 2021, more than were arrested.

Blake believes tribes are key to the United States reaching its climate goals, and that investment in renewable energy is an essential part of that puzzle. “Those old fossil fuel forces have a stranglehold on our system,” Blake says. “T������’s no way we’re going to get off of fossil fuels unless we have something else on the market.”

Covenant Solar and Native Sun both take a systems-based approach to renewable energy development. In addition to solar installation, workforce development and technical training are key aspects of their work—with a long-term goal of establishing tribally owned solar utilities. Today, Covenant Solar is helping develop three megawatts of solar power at Northern Cheyenne that will provide power for utilities, homes, and businesses. The dozen solar panel installers Covenant Solar trained at Northern Cheyenne are now going to other tribal communities in the Great Plains to train tribal community members to be solar installers and get jobs in the field of renewable energy.

Though these projects may seem small-scale—a megawatt here, a few kilowatts there—they represent a large chunk of the solar economy in their states. Montana, where the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, has that generate 17 megawatts of electricity. The installation under development with Covenant Solar would bring that total to 20 megawatts. North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Reservation is, has zero utility-scale solar installations. But tribal lands also possess immense potential: Tribal lands in the lower 48 have an estimated per year of solar energy potential. That’s a staggering 4.3 times the in 2020, only 2.3% of which came from utility-scale solar electricity.

On the Red Lake Reservation, Native Sun is working to install 17 megawatts of solar power, including five megawatts on tribal buildings and a 12-megawatt solar farm. The reservation already has helping power its government building and 240 kilowatts on its job training center.

Like Covenant Solar, an important part of the work at Red Lake is workforce development to ensure that community members are in charge of installation, operations, and ongoing maintenance of the solar panels. Native Sun also partners with the Minnesota Department of Corrections to train local formerly incarcerated people in solar installation and site evaluation.

“We need our own electricians, our own people servicing our communities,” Blake says. “Energy runs the entire community. We really need to have our own tribal utilities.”

A History of Exclusion

Energy development on tribal land has long been stymied by federal regulations. When the Rural Electrification Act passed in 1936 to expand electricity to rural communities throughout the nation, tribes were not expressly discriminated against, but bureaucratic barriers made it nearly impossible for tribes to access loans.

Barriers persist to this day. Federal government approval to develop energy projects on tribal land can be a long and confusing process. The type of regulatory oversight depends on the size of the project, who is funding it, and where the tribe is. That oversight may come from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Bureau of Land Management, the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, or the Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2005, the established Tribal Energy Resource Agreements, or TERAs, which were meant to increase regulatory control held by tribes themselves over their own energy resources. But tribes have identified several problems with TERAs. First, not all tribes qualified: the Secretary of the Interior had the discretion to determine whether tribes had the capacity to manage energy resources. Further, TERAs allowed tribes to take over certain approval activities previously performed by the federal government, but did not allow tribes to perform any “inherently federal functions.” What constitutes an “inherently federal function” has never been defined. All of these issues mean that since 2005, not a single tribe has entered into a TERA, though several have tried.

In 2018, Congress responded to these issues by updating TERA regulations to restrict the Secretary of the Interior’s ability to reject a TERA and to remove the requirement for the secretary to judge tribal energy development capacity. The Department of the Interior has yet to implement these new regulations.

“The majority of tribes—especially those in the plains states where energy-related poverty is especially rampant—don’t have the resources to navigate these barriers to renewable energy development,” Smith says. That’s where Covenant Solar comes in. Founded by a mix of tribal community leaders and renewable energy experts, Covenant Solar’s team provides pro bono consulting to tribal governments. “When the size and scope of a project triggers regulatory scrutiny, we are there as a buffer and trusted subject matter expert to ensure that the best interests of a tribe are upheld,” Smith says.

Working with nontribal-run utilities is rarely easier than dealing with lengthy regulatory processes. In the Great Plains, where Covenant Solar works, reservations often face discriminatory utility pricing, Smith says, with monthly rates as often twice or three times the Montana average of per kilowatt hour.

Blake sees the same issue in Minnesota. “The system is set up to prey on our tribal communities,” he says. “They’re like predatory lenders. It’s predatory servicing! There are so many fees on top of fees.”

Solar power run by tribal communities themselves thus offers the opportunity to reinvest the money saved on utilities back into their communities. “This is a self-determination issue,” Blake says. “Red Lake spends about $40 million [annually] off the reservation for the electricity bill. We’re trying to cut that in half. What would $20 million in our community look like?” That kind of investment could go a long way on a reservation with an average income of $10,236 and a poverty rate of 36.3%.

Smith agrees. “In a home that’s stricken by poverty, if you can eliminate a big percentage of that electric bill, those savings go to food, to medicine, to clothing,” Smith says. “If you offset that for the tribal government itself, you can get better services, better medical infrastructure, better safety infrastructure.” Tribally run renewable energy has the potential to positively impact the entire tribal economy. Smith sees it as “truly momentous and hopeful work.”

Getting utility companies to agree to support a tribal microgrid has not been easy for Native Sun. The company’s interconnection agreements—required approval from the utility company to connect to the electrical grid—often stalled out, Blake says. Because the tribe is one of the local utility co-op’s largest customers, the company stands to lose a lot of money if the tribe creates its own energy system.

“They don’t want us using batteries. They don’t want us using solar,” Blake says. “They want us to be dependent on them, and they put up all kinds of barriers.”

Another issue Native Sun ran into was what to do with the excess energy that their new solar farm will produce. First, they proposed selling it back to the local utilities co-op, a common practice called “.” The utility co-op refused. Instead, the tribe will charge its extra energy to a 40-kilowatt battery, using a system called . While this will benefit the community—they plan to use their solar batteries to power lights for evening events like pow wows and basketball games—it also means the tribe is losing out on potential revenue generation from its solar energy.

“T������’s not a lot of [outside] interest in seeing tribal nations transition into these renewable energy microgrids,” Blake says.

Taking Back Power

Because so many of these roadblocks come down to policy decisions, it’s clear that tribes need a seat at the table when it comes to managing energy resources.

One way Covenant is making its work self-sustaining is by creating a revolving fund in which tribal communities contribute some of the money they earn from solar power, while other tribes can pull money out to develop their own solar installations. Right now, Covenant’s projects are funded by a combination of tribal funds, Department of Energy grants, and individual donations. Smith estimates the revolving fund will be solvent in three to five years. This will create a tribal solar energy ecosystem and ensure tribes aren’t reliant on chasing down short-term, external grants or donations for their solar energy infrastructure, which would threaten the stability and long-term sustainability of these projects.  

Beyond tribally run utilities, Blake thinks tribes should also create tribal utility commissions that work alongside public utility commissions. In the U.S., public utility commissions are state-run bodies meant to regulate companies that provide public services, such as electricity, natural gas, and water. By forming tribal utility commissions, Blake hopes tribes will have a greater say in policies that directly impact tribal communities’ ability to develop economically, address climate change, and strengthen their self-determination. 

Not all tribes see it that way, and development or sale of oil, coal, and natural gas resources still offer strong economic incentives. The Crow Tribe, for example, which lies just west of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, signed a deal with Cloud Peak Energy Inc. in 2013, allowing them to mine 1.4 billion tons of coal from the reservation. The Council of Energy Resource Tribes estimates that traditional energy sources in Indian Country—including oil, natural gas, and coal—. But investment in fossil fuels ������’t a long-term solution: U.S. fossil fuel use and research shows that fossil fuels are a vulnerable and .  

For Blake and Smith, this is all the more reason to create renewable energy economies. The fossil fuel industry won’t last forever, and tribal communities can be part of a climate-conscious solution today.

“We need to stop fossil fuel from encroaching,” Smith says. “But, what’s next? This is the ‘what’s next.’”

This story has been supported by the , a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.

“I was working on behalf of an idea whose time had come,” Kennard says. “And there was no stopping me or anybody else.”

Through decades of activism, Kennard never hid his identity as a gay man. He realized that progress wasn’t fast, nor always linear, whether it be the environmental rollbacks that started in the 1980s or having to wait until 2014 to marry his partner of 50 years.

Now 83 years old, Kennard has written multiple books, including an upcoming text on the power of diversity in nature through a broader understanding of gender and sexuality. While the connection between queer identity and the environment might not seem immediately clear, a growing number of LGBTQIA academics, artists, scientists, and activists like Kennard are working at the intersection of these identities. While he fears for the future of the Anthropocene, Kennard also finds the most hope in young people bringing about a new green economy through technological and social innovation.

“What Earth Day did was to change the cultural and social values of unborn generations,” Kennard says. “And now, every incoming generation is greener than the one before.”

Recent climate protests shine a light on how marginalized groups are most impacted by rising temperatures and sea levels, along with stronger and more frequent storms and wildfires. For example, up to 40% of American youth experiencing homeless are LGBTQIA, making them particularly vulnerable to climate disasters. Queer representation in the environmental movement not only centers these experiences but also has the power to change the narrative around humans’ relationship to nature: from people domineering over the environment to living in tandem with all living organisms.

Gender and Environmental Equity

As a high schooler in Kenya, Vanessa Raditz was inspired by Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement to combat deforestation and build community resilience. Later, while studying at the University of California, Berkley, in 2016, Raditz co-created the to address how LGBTQIA perspectives were being left out of the environmental movement and vice versa. Originally operating as a reading group, the project has since expanded to be a resource for those wanting to explore topics like ecofeminism, environmental racism, and queer ecology (viewing nature through a lens of queer theory). The project’s work is particularly grounded in Indigenous and Black feminist writing on these issues. The project’s , and the Queer Ecojustice Project .

In the same way colonialism imposed a singular idea of gender and sexual relations on populations, Raditz reflects on how a similarly narrow way of thinking has created environmental and gender inequity over the past 40 years: “At the end of the day, how does the gender binary and heteronormativity support the extraction and moving of wealth to this handful of global elites?”

Raditz is now a University of Georgia Ph.D. student and a board member of , which provides advocacy, fundraising, relationship building, and training. Raditz is inspired by civil rights-based LGBTQIA organizing, but is critical of the rise in gay pragmatism they’ve seen. Raditz says members of these communities can’t stop at the legalization of gay marriage and the limited economic, social, and political power it has given them. Rather than assimilating into an exploitative capitalist system, Raditz says everyone in the queer community needs to continue to advocate for those who are more vulnerable than them, especially in the face of a changing climate.

“Liberation doesn’t end with overturning the sodomy laws if we’re still living in a settler state that’s extracting resources from the planet that’s ultimately our larger body,” Raditz says.

Many queer people understandably choose to be invisible during moments of disaster because there’s increased risk for violence. That’s one reason why Raditz is also creating a documentary called Fire & Flood: Queer Resilience in the Era of Climate Change about two climate-related disasters—Puerto Rico’s Hurricane Maria and the wildfires in Santa Rosa, California. Raditz thinks storytelling can help: “It’s hard to make sense of [these climate crises] until there’s a story, a narrative, a person that can help you connect these abstracts to tangible experience.”

Climate Education Rooted in Intersectionality

Others have found a voice through social media. runs Queer Brown Vegan, in which he educates on environmental topics for his 100,000-plus followers. Growing up in Section 8 affordable housing in the San Fernando Valley, Hernandez realized environmental inequalities from a young age, living near a handful of toxic industries that impacted air and water quality. At school, climate change was taught as a phenomenon impacting people far away, but a 2008 wildfire near his home sparked his desire to learn about how it was happening in his own backyard.

He went on to study environmental science at the University of California, Berkeley, but realizing that much environmental education was inaccessible to those who came from diverse backgrounds, he started Queer Brown Vegan. He covers topics from his college studies and beyond, ranging from how contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, to a primer on , an anti-consumerist internet aesthetic based on nature. He also dedicates many videos to the changes individuals can make to live more sustainably, particularly for those who are just becoming interested in environmental activism: “I believe that education is true wealth in this society. This is a space for those to get started to build their own frameworks.”

What started as a side passion project has now become Hernandez’s full-time job; he cites an explosion in the past few years of people invested in climate education rooted in intersectionality. Hernandez says being vulnerable with his followers is a strong counter to the anxiety many feel toward climate change and the apathy that they can’t make a difference. Hernandez intersperses his content with videos of himself with his partner, a hobby that helps him re-center and reminds him of his work’s purpose: “When you make these connections and when you get personal with people, they get to get personal with you and get to build relationships with others around them.”

Despite his influence, Hernandez still faces gatekeepers; he applied but was delayed in receiving a badge for the recent COP26 United Nations climate conference in Glasgow. He was frustrated to see celebrities and athletes receive theirs instantly. But he eventually got a badge and went to Scotland to prove his legitimacy as a content creator of color, an identity he says is often disregarded: “Unfortunately, the political and economic powers of these institutions have upheld a lot of the oppression of people. COP26 should be focused on community-building relationships, but at the same time, we need to take time to sit back and listen to the most effective people—activists that don’t have the voice to address governments.”

Inclusive Spaces in Nature

Many queer environmental activists are instead choosing to build their own communities outside of existing institutions. In 2015, spouses Pinar and So Sinopoulos-Lloyd created to reclaim outdoor skills and rebuild relationships with the more-than-human world.

“My inspiration was that if civilization is in the process of collapsing, we need people to be learning these skills and teaching them to others who don’t have access to them,” Pinar says.

Pinar says their queer identity was informed specifically by their Indigenous lineage from the Quechua people. As a transgender youth pathologized as neurodivergent, they found mentors and elders in cottonwood trees, sagebrush, and a creek near their Arizona home: “They taught me so much around queerness, specifically around fluidity and how to create refuge around rivers but also in your life.”

Pinar’s partner, So, grew up in a New England town and was inspired by the rhythmic sound of their Greek mother’s wool weaving. This desire to make things with organic objects led them to study agriculture and permaculture and to work on farms. So and Pinar connected as children of immigrants who often felt like outsiders in spaces that erased queer and Indigenous identity and knowledge.

“I didn’t want to perpetuate the narrative of what most people see with survival skills, which is one person by themselves, Bear Grylls-style,” So says. They started at Pride in Boulder, Colorado, with demonstrations on tracking, friction fire, and twisting milkweed to make rope. They quickly realized there was a strong desire for inclusive spaces for these activities.

“I think there’s this feeling of belonging that we come to know through learning these skills that have been truly devalued, yet are some of the oldest and most fundamental skills for our species,” So says. “One great example is basket weaving, which people literally use as a metaphor for a topic that is superfluous, yet basket weaving is one of the oldest industries in civilization and is pivotal to our survival as a species.”

A few hundred people have engaged with Queer Nature, through half-day courses or multiday excursions. Their flagship offering, Queer Stealthcraft, focuses on guardianship for the Earth and teaches camouflage as a form of shapeshifting, blending, and drag. Pinar and So have also seen the positive mental health impact of regaining this “enchantment” with nature. Trained in ecopsychology, Pinar views the mind and body as an ecology connected to the planet and believes in the power of building Earth intimacy during a time of climate chaos.

When asked about Queer Nature’s impact, Pinar brought up the closing reflection circle during a recent Queer Stealthcraft course near their new home base in Washington state. They were in a Cascadian forest surrounded by trees dripping with lichen and a thick moss blanketing the ground. One participant was moved to tears and said, “This reminded me of dreams that I’d forgotten or didn’t know I had.”

A Diversity and Plurality of Voices

Others are using artwork to encourage these profound connections with nature. Wanting to reach outside the gallery walls with more experimental mediums, sculpture, video, and social practice artist Lee Pivnik created in 2017. He says the title “institute” is a way to re-center artists who are often considered superfluous in discussions around important policy issues like climate.

Starting , the institute has since collaborated with around 120 artists. Pivnik says it’s built on a chosen family understanding of queer community. Projects have included guest editing the zine and an exhibit called “,” featuring the work of more than 40 artists at Prairie Gallery in Chicago. The institute’s work has grown to include workshops, lectures, and even a in collaboration with the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The game, H.O.R.I.Z.O.N. (Habitat One: Regenerative Interactive Zone of Nurture), is inspired by utopian communes and encourages players to create their own “digital commune” on a remote island.

While the pandemic has limited its interactive, place-based residencies, the institute has reached an even broader audience online through “Metamorphosis,” an online video series exploring how to transform the extraction-based economy into something more equitable and regenerative. The story, told through the process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, connects with many queer people whose identity is equally fluid and evolving: “So much of the human has been constructed against queerness, so I think it opens your eyes back to what could be human in an expanded understanding and sense of it.”

Pivnik says themes of hope and optimism run through the institute’s output, allowing art to provide an empathic alternative to a doomsday mentality around climate change. He wants the institute’s work to be disseminated widely to encourage others seeking unconventional tools to understand, and hopefully fight, climate change.

He says, “You can address this huge loss of biodiversity not through the same homogenizing tools of Eurocentric science, but through a diversity and plurality of voices that builds both on queer discourse and diversity more broadly.”

The movement is called “d��������ٳ���Գ�,” and it’s growing both inside and outside financial institutions’ walls. The idea is simple: Pull money, talent, and public approval away from banks and financial institutions that invest in fossil fuel extraction. Most often, this comes in the form of grassroots student-led campaigns at universities and colleges, as was the case with the Harvard students whose protests convinced the president and board of trustees to divest its endowment from fossil fuel-related investments.

Divestment first emerged as a strategy in the 1980s in the fight against South African apartheid.

Divestment first emerged as a strategy in the 1980s in the fight against South African apartheid. Environmental activist and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben was one of the first major U.S. figures to recycle the idea to apply to universities and financial firms, outlining the case for divestment in a piece. “The logic went something like this: Most people don’t live near a coal mine [or] oil pipeline, but everyone is near some pot of money—their college endowment, their church pension fund, their local pension fund in their community,” McKibben says. “Those are all sites where you could take effective action about climate change.”&�Բ�����;

Some “good-hearted” universities, like Unity College in Maine, were the first to divest their assets from fossil fuels, which offered activists early momentum and evidence that divestment wins were possible. And divestment strategies have expanded and diversified since then to include disrupting pipeline construction and funding, thwarting college recruitment efforts, and organizing members of state pension boards. 

Over the past decade of climate activism, McKibben says, what’s made the divestment movement successful is how diffuse the individual, primarily student-led campaigns have been. The strategy of divestment campaigns on college campuses, in solidarity with front-line resistance efforts and organizing at state pension board meetings, are working: Extractive corporations increasingly report challenges raising capital for their projects. Investors are pushing banks to downsize fossil fuel financing, and has gotten more expensive. in fossil fuels are no longer seen as viable investments. 

Even Larry Fink, the head of one of the largest private asset managers that funds climate change, has , “We are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

If Money Talks, What Is It Saying?

Divesting from the banks that support extractive industries takes a multipronged approach, says Matt Remle, an enrolled member of the Hunkpapa Lakota and the co-founder of , a coalition of Indigenous people and activists that targets pipeline funders. No corporation or oil company has enough financial footing on its own to construct a pipeline without the help of multiple banks, he explains. In other words, banks are sustaining the extractive companies, profiting off their returns, and financing the debt—all at the expense of the planet. 

Despite annual over the past decade from G-20 countries to end their reliance on fossil fuels, governments continue to provide hundreds of billions of dollars in financial support for the industry. So instead of relying on far-off targets and broken promises, Native leaders and grassroots activists are waging campaigns against the financial industry from a consumer standpoint. 

Mazaska Talks has staged direct actions to shut down bank branches, organized community groups and churches to change which institutions they bank with, and even introduced the in Seattle to push the city to cut ties with banks that fund fossil fuel extraction.

Maza means “m��ٲ���” and ska means “w�󾱳ٱ�” in Remle’s Lakota language, which is a testament to the continuous nature of American capitalist violences as well as Native resistance to genocidal forces. “I’m Lakota Standing Rock, and I think we’ve never been at a time of peace with the settler colonizers,” Remle says. “It just has changed forms, and the battlefield has changed, and the weapons used have changed, and that’s really about it.”&�Բ�����;

Now, the battlefield is financial institutions, and the weapons are public education and outrage, Remle says. The organization encouraged people to move their money out of Bank of America during the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, the fight concerns Wells Fargo and the section of a transnational pipeline called Line 3, which runs through northern Minnesota. 

“The only thing that will talk to them is the money,” Remle says. “So when we started going after [the] money, [it] was the first time corporations and banks started listening.”&�Բ�����;

Who Wants to Earn a Paycheck From a Financial Institution?

Divestment ������’t just about moving money. It’s about fundamentally changing the companies that invest in fossil fuels, either by pushing them to consider climate change as a threat to their business or by withholding labor and workers. This part of the divestment fight often starts on college campuses, where students are demanding more from potential employers. 

“When you think about market forces,” says Sof Petros, a distributed organizing support coach at , “what are the things that actually get corporate targets to move?” Answer: potential young employees and corporate “recruiting pipelines,” a catchall term for the various ways banks show up at universities to attract potential workers—the future of their workforce. 

Petros helps young people on college and university campuses develop strategies to disrupt the recruitment pipelines that financial firms typically rely on to bring in young and talented employees. To push back against the neutral or positive messaging of banks and asset managers, Petros says the work begins before career day by changing how students think of banks and shifting what influence financial firms have on campus goings-on. On some campuses, that looks like pressuring boards of trustees to disinvest from fossil fuels, refusing to allow banks to open a branch on campus, bird-dogging professors who also sit on boards of financial institutions, or refusing donations from financial institutions altogether. 

Divestment ������’t just about moving money.

There’s a long history of divestment on college campuses, McKibben says. “One of the best results of the divestment campaign was that many of the students who undertook it in the U.S. … graduated from college and went on to form the Sunrise Movement and bring us the Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal legislation and the swell of grassroots organizing that emerged across the country in support of it catalyzed a new generation of climate activists, leaders, and political candidates.

“Corporate targets are very sensitive,” Petros says, because “they’re used to … evading public consequences for their actions.” Whether it be their from facing consequences for the 2008 financial crisis or the fact that engaging with predatory and harmful practices that led us there, financial institutions have slipped through the cracks of government accountability. Pushing back against the direct source of climate harm—and seeing a response—shows there’s hope in the fight against climate change. 

Amber England, a community organizer and masters student at the University of Houston, piloted some recruitment disruption tactics on her campus in fall 2021. England’s current focus is on AIG, a global insurance company that invests billions of dollars in insuring fossil fuel extraction. “They are one of the only companies without any commitment to reduce its support for fossil fuels,” England says. “They’re facing a recruitment crisis, and they’re struggling to recruit new talent.” Part of that is because are no longer willing to put up with financial firms’ long hours and demanding workplace culture for the pay. The other part is that young people are questioning the ethics of for financial firms more broadly.

During a virtual career fair this year, England pretended she was looking for a job at AIG in order to secure a meeting with the recruiter, and then proceeded to ask them questions about their company’s climate policies and support of the fossil fuel industry. “I was [later] relayed an anonymous email from the [AIG] sustainability team that basically said that climate change is a complex issue and it ������’t in the best interest of their stakeholders to completely divest from fossil fuels.”&�Բ�����;

Next semester, England hopes she’ll be able to ask these questions at an in-person recruitment fair in front of other students to demonstrate that the insurance company doesn’t have answers when it comes to climate change—or the futures of its potential employees. 

Dispersed campaigns of recruitment disruption seem to be working. Petros says she and other organizers have been invited to discussions by Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Citibank, and while these meetings are tense, they “chip away” at the grip banks have on university leadership and students. The larger goal of these efforts is to push these companies to change their investment or insurance portfolios to exclude fossil fuels altogether.

What Would You Do if Your Retirement Savings Put Your Future at Risk? 

It’s not just private money and institutions that fund fossil fuel extraction; it’s also public pension funds run by elected officials. The problem is that most people don’t know their retirement savings are being used in this way, much less that there’s something they can do about it. Mary Cerulli, the director of , which trains coalitions to organize individual states’ publicly funded investment portfolios, says pension board treasurers and board members who are both appointed and elected “haven’t used the muscle of these huge pension funds to mitigate the climate crisis.”&�Բ�����;

But they can. 

Across the country, state and local government pension funds total . That’s public money managed both by government officials and outside asset managers, including Vanguard and BlackRock, Cerulli says. “Vanguard and BlackRock are the number one investors in coal, the number one investors in deforestation companies, the number one investors in utilities,” Cerulli says. She and the CFA team help other organizers build relationships with pension board treasurers to understand what’s blocking them from making changes.

Pension funds can change the asset managers they hire if constituents lobby for change and members of pension boards self-organize to shift the portfolio of investments. For instance, Cerulli explains, when the Massachusetts pension board treasurer and chair wanted to shift elements of the portfolio to exclude fossil fuel extraction, she had to organize and educate two climate deniers on the board, which CFA assisted with. Working with those who manage money or with third-party financial firms can yield different results than an outside public pressure campaign that stands in opposition to banks, like strategies of direct action protests or pulling one’s savings account from a bank. 

In the past decade alone, has been divested from fossil fuels, meaning the divestment movement is growing and, importantly, is effective. Divestment is showing in real time that everyday people can take part in the fight against climate change, and it’s demonstrating to financial firms that climate change is no longer a worthy investment.

This class is one of many hands-on environment-oriented classes that have sprung up around the world in the past decade as part of governments’ efforts to introduce sustainability into school curricula. But how realistic is it to expect schools to fix humanity’s environmental mess? After observing the class, I asked the teacher whether she connected her hands-on lessons to larger conversations around climate change, and she said no. The point of the class, she said, was precisely to get away from theoretical discussions about global environmental issues and to help students take tangible action.

This is not surprising if we consider how most public education systems are run. They are generally under direct control of governments, the vast majority of which are currently doing nowhere near enough to tackle the environmental crisis—. Why would governments encourage their young citizens to question the states’ lack of action? It is simply not in their interest to do so—and this is the major flaw in the idea that we can educate the world out of the climate crisis.

Touting technological innovation and as the central solution—and reiterating these lessons in their public schools—governments around the world largely , such as and . Even as countries move away from fossil fuels, they for continued economic expansion.

The mainstream political response to the crisis is, in other words, merely targeting the symptoms rather than the . Environmental education must tackle these issues head on.

What Counts as Action

As the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental crises intensify, leaders across the world look to education as one of the solutions. In recent years, we have seen this idea at the highest levels of policymaking. The . Goal 4.7, for example, aims to ensure that by 2030, “All learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including among others through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles.”

Much of what passes for environmental education uses the Sustainable Development Goals as its justification. Such education often ends up being depoliticized and limiting the agency of young people in low-income countries. Many public environmental education programs describe themselves as action-oriented, but what counts as “action” in the context of education geared toward fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals?

I have spent several years observing environmental education programs in Africa, Asia, and Europe since 2016, and I have come to realize that planting trees, growing food for the school canteen, or fixing a leaking tap in the school’s bathroom to reduce water waste all frequently qualify as action. But writing a letter to a politician or taking part in a march or demonstration rarely do. It is as if these programs see students as capable of influencing only their immediate physical environments rather than engaging in wider political conversations.

There was a particular view of citizenship at work in these classes—. These observations led me to search for alternative ways to educate young people about environmental solutions.

The Power of Activism

In the communities where I have been working, activism has emerged as a clear contender. Activist movements often attract young people and create a space for dialogue between generations as well as opportunities to talk about and act on the politics of environmental decay.

This was very clear during one of the community meetings I witnessed during my research in South Africa. The ’s main mission is fighting air pollution caused by the petrochemical industry in the city, but over the past three decades, the organization has come to work on many other environmental and civic issues. The meeting I attended in April 2017 took place on a cloudy weekend morning inside a community hall, with perhaps three dozen residents of different generations and from many different walks of life.

In the meeting, a group of activists from the alliance asked the residents to imagine a future they would like to see for their community. In sharing their thoughts with the group, the residents expressed many different wishes, from less rubbish in the streets to tackling economic inequality. The conversation soon turned to how the community could act together to achieve change. Unlike in the environmental lessons I observed in public schools in South Africa and beyond, the young people at the meeting grappled with the politics of environmental change and thought about what they could accomplish together.

Activism does not just help catalyze social change; it is also a form of education. If we are serious about tapping into education’s potential to help us achieve a more sustainable future, we need to recognize activists as educators and help build bridges between them and schools. 

For policymakers, this means funding activist-led educational efforts and incorporating activist-inspired pedagogy into teacher training programs. For activist organizations, it means highlighting the contributions they have made toward educating young people on environmental solutions and sharing their best practices.

Beyond Greenwashing

None of this is easy. Activists and teachers often find themselves on opposite sides of the barricade. But the first step forward is recognizing that the two groups have more in common than meets the eye.

In most cases, it is not that teachers don’t want students to think of themselves as changemakers; more often, the teachers simply fear repercussions. I have met many teachers who told me they were not fully on board with the curriculum they were teaching but felt their hands were tied. The government, after all, was paying their salaries. I often heard in interviews that getting into political issues in the classroom was simply too dangerous for teachers’ job security.

But these are the very issues our education systems must tackle if they are to contribute to meaningful environmental solutions at scale. Otherwise, we might one day realize that tepid efforts on environmental education have been just another form of greenwashing. Ultimately, education—self-discovery and the discovery of the world—is an end in itself, not a means to any end, including sustainability. But given the urgency of environmental decay, we can’t afford to let our education systems get in sustainability’s way.

The result? The climate crisis is now reality. Globally, due to climate change, and that number is set to increase with the higher temperatures, desertification, and more extreme weather events on their way.

But who’s at fault? The identified 90 companies, mainly fossil fuel companies, that are responsible for two-thirds of carbon emissions. Despite this, global leaders still somehow conclude that individuals are to blame.

At the COP26 conference last October, leaders regurgitated the same tired talking points about individual responsibility, insisting that the public change its consumption patterns, even as companies urge people to consume at unprecedented rates. This is unsurprising given that there were —two dozen more than the largest country delegation—despite fossil fuel companies being banned from participating directly. Experts argue the integrity of the talks was compromised by the presence of these fossil fuel lobbyists, whose influence led to the Glasgow Climate Pact containing commitments to rather than phasing it out. This deal gives fossil fuel companies the social license to continue business as usual. 

Writing for , columnist George Monbiot described individual responsibility as one of the most significant lies ever told by the fossil fuel industry and the PR companies that devise their messaging. And still, these messages continue to be perpetuated by leaders worldwide.

“The myth of individual responsibility has origins in 40 years of the creation of societal order fixated on individualism by the Republican Party,” says Robert Brulle, visiting professor of environment and society at Brown University. The first mainstream manifestation of this individual focus, he says, was BP inventing the concept of the “.” It’s a that has fundamentally reshaped how the public views the climate crisis.

Suggesting turning off the lights or driving less loses sight of the global severity of the climate crisis and shifts the focus off those with the greatest capacity and responsibility to make meaningful change.

�ѱ�����������������DzԳ������, associate professor of media studies at Rutgers University and co-author of , describes it as “misdiagnosing and misunderstanding the scale and scope of the [climate crisis]. It keeps [humanity] external to the environment instead of seeing us as part of the environment.”

This externalization of responsibility allows fossil fuel companies to downplay their role in the climate crisis and undermine climate litigation, regulation, and activism.

Individualizing the responsibility is an insidious weapon within the fossil fuel industry’s arsenal, which includes greenwashing and woke-washing. By obfuscating the reality of the climate crisis, it has exacerbated climate consequences and caused long-term damage to climate justice efforts.

To counter this, climate action plans must place blame where it belongs and focus on the problem’s immediacy. Two main ways of achieving this are collective action and requiring the companies that caused the problems to be at the forefront of finding solutions.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing is a multibillion-dollar PR campaign run by fossil fuel companies to market themselves as environmentally friendly. It began in the 1970s and ’80s.

“[Fossil fuel] companies figured out that it’s not popular to be against the environment,” Aronczyk says. “T������ is no way that a company could say they are anti-environment and be legitimate.”

And so the fossil fuel industry uses advertising to greenwash its ongoing contribution to the climate crisis. Companies use various messaging tactics to “position themselves as contributing to the public interest rather than working against it,” Aronczyk says. “They started using tactics like raising awareness and coalition-building to support their interests.” For example, Shell has to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 by offering more low-carbon products and transitioning into renewable energy sources.

But according to an analysis from environmental lawyers at ClientEarth, the truth behind Shell’s greenwashing paints a grimmer portrait. According to the company’s , Shell has no intention of reducing its production by 2030 and is still committed to exploring new oil and gas sources. Shell is currently going ahead with off the coast of South Africa and plans to continue to grow its fossil gas business by 20% in the coming years.

There is no indication that Shell has aligned its investments with its reduction targets either: The company’s 2020 indicates that Shell has allocated just $2 billion to $3 billion per year for investment in renewable energy while investing roughly $17 billion into fossil fuel production.

In May, the Hague District Court that Shell’s planned emissions reduction of 20% was insufficient and said the company must raise its decarbonization commitments. Under the ruling, Shell will need to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030, compared with 2019 levels. Shell is the ruling.

Woke-Washing

As ClientEarth has indicated, greenwashing is a thinly veiled attempt at reputation laundering—one that is becoming increasingly easy for the public to see through. So companies are now engaging a new tool to delay efforts to curb emissions—one rooted in social justice arguments.

Colloquially known as woke-washing, these marketing campaigns aim to persuade people that fossil fuel companies are fighting for the poor, the , and . Companies are pumping billions of dollars into fossil fuel propaganda that casts the industry as integral to society. This process of co-opting social justice arguments is derived from companies getting good at using the tactics of social movements to justify their actions.

The woke-washing strategy usually takes one of two forms: either warning that a transition away from fossil fuels will adversely impact poor and marginalized communities, or claiming that oil and gas companies are aligned with those communities. As an example, Chevron is one of many companies that posted “Black Lives Matter” on during the 2020 BLM protests. Ironic, considering that fossil fuel pollution disproportionately and that Chevron paid soldiers and police to shoot on Chevron’s oil platform in 1998.

Woke-washing represents a transformation point for corporate PR.

“Up until recently, companies were reluctant to enter into partisan battles, as they didn’t want to alienate potential consumers,” Aronczyk says. But she says that changed as the youth market grew and being political became trendy. “[Companies are] capitalizing on a market trend but also help to create it by reducing social justice movements to a commodity.”

This tactic makes consumers feel like they’re achieving social justice goals by engaging with brands. For instance, buying products from Chevron is marketed as supporting BIPOC communities. This effectively compromises the original messaging of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as climate change benchmarks.

What Real Solutions Look Like

The solutions to climate change are complex. Many solutions, like implementing multilateral instruments to hold corporations liable for failures to set out realistic targets for emissions reductions, depend on policymakers enacting the appropriate policies to trigger systemic change. However, the machinations of capitalism and governance mean that meaningful change through policy is slow.

Additionally, part of the solution is to force companies to be honest about climate change. But the long-term effect of these disinformation campaigns is public uncertainty about the role fossil fuel companies play in causing the climate crisis.

The results of the COP26 talks, which United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres as insufficient, have further set back climate progress by entrenching the legitimacy and value of the fossil fuel industry.

The often-touted solution of changing individual consumption habits is a nonstarter. It feeds into the narrative of individual responsibility that the fossil fuel industry has manufactured. Ethically, yes, one should reduce meat consumption and use public transportation more often. However, those things will not single-handedly make a difference in the grand scheme of things: An individual can save a meager 2.6 tons of carbon dioxide by going carless, which can’t compare with the 1.38 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent Shell emitted last year.

“T������ is a dire need to overcome the messaging of individualism that has been ingrained within society,” Brulle says. “Your individual actions, while admirable, need to be backed up against collectivism—particularly collectivism that calls fossil fuel companies to account.”

He identifies practical solutions, such as urging one’s congressional representative to look into corporate greenwashing. This is particularly relevant because of ongoing investigations into greenwashing by the . Additionally, communities can support lawsuits against greenwashing campaigns, such as the one filed by the state of Massachusetts against .

Collective action has already had tangible results within the private sector. After environmental activists placed legal pressure on the U.K. government to disallow drilling, Shell recently off the Shetland Islands, citing that there was not an economic case for the project. Community organizations in Australia also caused Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, to announce that a controversial proposal to drill for oil and gas off the New South Wales coast .

Private equity investors, too, are ditching fossil fuel investments in favor of green assets. This is mainly due to the rise in public demand for climate accountability. Furthermore, organizations like Clean Creatives are engaging in of PR firms that work with fossil fuel companies.

Still, Aronczyk stresses the need to place companies at the forefront of finding solutions to the climate crisis. “Advocating solutions can contribute to the problem,” she says. “It suggests that we as individuals should find the solutions. By doing that, aren’t we letting decision-makers and policymakers who need to make system-wide changes off the hook?

“We have to be careful not to suggest that individual solutions can be carried out instead of pushing the large decision-makers to develop and implement solutions,” she says. “They’re already diverting resources to distracting people from the larger issues at hand when they could rather use those resources to find actionable solutions.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:51a.m. on Feb. 1, 2022, to clarify that �ѱ�����������������DzԳ������ co-authored the book with Maria Espinoza. ��Read our corrections policy here.

“People think of laws being so objective and serious, and almost separate from the social norms,” says investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt. “But it’s really just a handful of people’s beliefs that have gotten baked into law.”

Uncovering whose beliefs have shaped existing environmental law led her to report on an emerging legal arena that has been making headlines around the world: rights of nature laws. To explore the fascinating stories and characters behind some of the 200 cases currently underway, Westervelt is launching a new podcast today called , described as “Law & Order meets the climate crisis.”

The idea behind the rights of nature approach extrapolates on the Western legal system’s insistence that a corporation is considered a person. If that’s legally true, then why not grant legal personhood to a watershed or a forest? For those who grew up indoctrinated by the existing legal system, Westervelt says their initial response is often delivered with a scoff: “So, what, like, a tree could sue me?”

But beyond this initial skepticism, she sees a lot of practicality and possibility to the approach. Take, for example, a polluted lake. “It’s almost impossible to say my cancer was caused by this chemical in the water,” she says. “But it’s super easy, scientifically, to say this chemical in this water is destroying this watershed.”

And in this way, granting nature its own rights could provide an avenue to protect specific environments—and the communities that depend on them. Because, she points out, “Humans actually need ecosystems to live a lot more than we need corporations.”

The Proof Is in the Pushback

When it comes to protecting the environment, most existing laws are human-centered. They focus on the rights of people to a healthy environment. Westervelt says that well over 100 countries have these kinds of laws on the books. Still, since they require making a direct, causal connection between a pollutant and a human health outcome, winning a case in court can be difficult.

Rights of nature cases, in contrast, are “playing the long game,” as Westervelt puts it. They approach legal arguments with a completely different philosophy and timescale. Incorporating the rights of nature into the constitutions of municipalities, states, and countries could shift the foundational approach to how environmental cases are litigated, Westervelt says.

And it might just be working. She says the proof is in the pushback.

“We’re starting to see pre-emptive laws get passed to block rights of nature legislation,” Westervelt says. Ohio, Florida, and most recently Missouri have passed laws to this effect—a backlash she explores in Episode 5 of the podcast. “That’s always a key indicator that something’s working, right?” Westervelt says. “They’re not passing pre-emptive laws against calling your reps—let’s put it that way.”

The other strength of this rights of nature approach to environmental protection is the surprising coalitions it creates. “The Lake Erie Bill of Rights is not a bunch of hippies in San Francisco. This is suburban moms in Toledo, Ohio,” Westervelt says. “I think that’s actually what scares the industry folks and the right wing about the way that [rights of nature laws have] progressed in this country, is you’re seeing it really pop up in the Rust Belt, in working-class towns in the Midwest.”

Take fracking, for example. A person in Pennsylvania might be upset their neighbor has a fracking well that has ruined the water in the surrounding wells, making their land essentially valueless. So, Westervelt says, you have right-wing, anti-government libertarians fighting in defense of private property alongside Indigenous leaders arguing to protect the watershed’s right to live. 

The motivations may be very different, but Westervelt says the outcomes they’re fighting for are actually quite compatible.

Take the example of the Te Urewera rainforest in New Zealand, which Westervelt examines in Episode 4. She says this case is the one that international organizations point to as a key success story for the rights of nature, because the government recognized the rainforest as its own legal entity and the Tūhoe people as its legal guardians. In a lot of ways, this is a victory, but at the end of the day, it’s still a compromise on what the Tūhoe actually want: simply the return of their land.

The idea that the government had to grant these land rights is almost offensive to those who live there, Westervelt says. Still, she sees these cases, which aim to bring an Indigenous approach to both nature and justice, as a way to “give Western law an instant upgrade on the environmental front.”

Wild Rice for the Win

One unique aspect of Westervelt’s podcast is the way it frames Indigenous science, which she says is all too often viewed as myths or “woo-woo mystical nonsense.”

Westervelt shares an example of a water protector she spoke with in Hawai‘i who was working to protect his people’s sacred mountain, Mauna Kea. He told her the reason it’s sacred is because half the island’s ecosystems are affected by it. Western watershed science eventually came to the same conclusion, but centuries later, after colonization had already caused great harm.

The same goes for why wild rice is sacred to the Ojibwe: it’s an indicator species. They knew its ecological importance and therefore came to reflect that in their cultural values.

In this way, Westervelt says, storytelling—be it through Indigenous knowledge-sharing or a podcast—is an effective way to explain why it’s important to protect water.

On this note, she starts off the podcast’s first season with Episode 1: “Manoomin v. Minnesota.” This case looks at the rights of wild rice to survive and thrive in local waterways, which the Ojibwe added to their 1855 treaty with the U.S. government. The White Earth Band of Ojibwe, based in present-day Minnesota, has since sued Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 pipeline, which they say will violate the rights of the rice and threaten the health of the ecosystem at large.

The reason Westervelt starts with wild rice is because of the impact this case could have on so many other potential pipeline fights across the U.S.

“Whatever decision they come down with will be pretty monumental,” she says. The case is currently in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, and if its decision is appealed, Westervelt says this could be “another case where the Supreme Court is deciding whether the U.S. is going to honor these treaties.” And that has far-reaching implications for the treaty rights of tribes across the continent.

“Every time I tell people, ‘Yeah, wild rice sued the state of Minnesota,’ it helps to get people to let go of the idea that the way things are is the way they’ve always been and always have to be,” Westervelt says. She believes exposing people to that idea by way of a story is less threatening than arguing with them about water clarity or carbon emissions. “Showing people a different perspective and what it can look like, I think, is helpful in opening people up to other possibilities.”

Plans for the Mountain Valley pipeline were first announced in April 2018. The proposed pipeline would transport fracked gas from West Virginia to a compressor site in southern Virginia, and then another 70 miles into northern North Carolina. This last section is called the Mountain Valley Southgate Extension, and it goes through the state to allow a major that already services nearly to . It is this section of the pipeline that would decimate the Haw River. 

The pipeline was originally supposed to be completed in less than a year and cost financial partners . But four years of coordinated cross-state grassroots resistance to the pipeline’s construction has thus far prevented the Mountain Valley pipeline corporation from laying even an inch of pipeline in North Carolina soil. New county, city, and state laws have a far reach in preventing pipelines that are slated to start in one state and end in another, as seen with a that impacts the North Carolina section of the pipeline. 

With the project over budget and lacking necessary permits, one financial backer of the Mountain Valley pipeline corporation says it’s its 31% investment in the now-$6.2 billion pipeline. The corporation is also facing an impairment charge—a financial term to describe when the value of a good or service drops below the cost to produce it. 

“It was determined that the continued legal and regulatory challenges have resulted in a very low probability of pipeline completion,” the funder said in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing. That, along with the additional legal and financial hurdles the pipeline now has to overcome, is likely causing other investors to see the project as more of a financial risk, forcing them to reconsider their own stake.

And this cross-state collaboration is only one of many where people power is waging a concerted, and increasingly successful, campaign against fossil fuel corporations and the harmful extraction they promise. Pipeline corporations often rely on silence and intimidation—social ills that splice communities and convince neighbors of their isolation from each other. But organizers in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Nebraska are proving that building collective community power can successfully counter Big Oil’s moneyed interests. 

Given that oil extraction in the U.S. and that federal officials continue to despite scientific warnings to stop their sale and combustion, it’s clear to organizers that grassroots strategies are critical to fighting pipelines.

“When a pipeline is proposed, [those impacted] either don’t know about it until it’s too late, or they don’t have the access to the information or time to dedicate to showing up to all of these meetings and giving comments,” Sutton says. When it came to the pipeline threatening the Haw River, though, she says that wasn’t the case: “We really gave the power to the people who are impacted.”&�Բ�����;

How to Stop a Pipeline

In many ways, pipeline fighting is a battle between narratives—one of money versus people power—and also one of priorities—economic benefit in the short term versus generations of climate disaster. To understand the impending defeat of Southgate, it’s important to realize that wins against pipelines don’t occur in a vacuum; generational Appalachians in West Virginia have organized in tandem with water defenders and protectors in North Carolina. Organizers from different communities, even in different states, are stronger working together when they have a shared aim.

There’s a blueprint, organizers say, of what to do when a pipeline threatens already vulnerable communities. The first step is to educate neighbors and those who care about the land. The second is to make the building process as legally untenable as possible by advocating for the passage of new city and county laws, demonstrating a pipeline’s fallibility to state environmental agencies. 

“It’s hard to fight against major corporations when you don’t have money,” says Crystal Cavalier, a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation. Cavalier lives in Mebane, North Carolina, and is one of the main leaders working on the Southgate resistance efforts. She says organizers and impacted residents are made to feel like if they don’t have money, they don’t have power. Cavalier’s work is to disprove that hypothesis.��

There are certainly immediate risks to the river’s ecosystem: rerouting creeks with pipe, sediment pollution from construction, and gas leaks due to breakages in the line. But there’s even more at stake. Within the Haw’s watershed, the Southgate Extension would threaten 207 streams, three ponds, and 9 acres of wetlands, as well as more than 600,000 square feet surrounding a nearby watershed, . And these threaten the river’s future as well as its past.

The word haw means “river” in the language of the Sissipahaw, one of the Indigenous tribes that called the region home. “This river was the lifeblood for entire civilizations,” says Sutton, with the Haw River Assembly, the nonprofit dedicated to advocacy and protection of its watershed. English settler-colonizers committed genocide against the Sissipahaw peoples; the river and its name honor their existence. Surviving members of the tribe joined the Catawba tribe and the��Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation.��

The river was also a site of the underground railroad during the period of legal enslavement of African Americans in the United States, according to the Assembly. 

Even today, the Haw “still continues to be this connecting source from people in the triad, in Greensboro, all the way down to Jordan Lake and the triangle in North Carolina,” Sutton says. 

Fighting for All People, and Their River

In late 2021, three years into the battle against the Mountain Valley Southgate Extension, organizers in North Carolina were beginning to lose hope. The state permitting process looked like it was going to allow the beginning stages of pipeline construction, portending an uphill climb of legal challenges for defenders of the Haw River. 

But then, in the first week of December, organizers pushed the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board to the permit required to build a pipeline compressor station, citing a 2020 Virginia and the potential that the compressor station would contribute to ongoing environmental injustices faced by Black and Brown residents living near the site. The compressor is a key element connecting the mainline of the Mountain Valley pipeline to the extension through North Carolina. This forced the company to start the permitting process all over again and allowed organizers more time to rally impacted residents and lobby public officials.

A month later, in a brought by the Sierra Club, Appalachian Voices, and other environmental organizations, a federal appeals court overturned permits previously issued by two agencies, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, that would have allowed the mainline to devastate two species of endangered fish—the Roanoke logperch and candy darter—that live in the Jefferson National Forest, which straddles the West Virginia–Virginia border. 

Moreover, officials in North Carolina have a necessary Water Quality Certification permit, mandated by the Clean Water Act, to the pipeline company. And as long as the mainline ������’t built, there can be no Southgate Extension. 

“Southgate doesn’t have anything to stand on in North Carolina,” Sutton says. 

But these wins aren’t the product of state and federal agencies deciding to do the right thing, she says. They’re consequences of years of relationship building and storytelling by communities most likely to bear the brunt of pipeline construction and its ongoing devastation in the form of gas leaks, methane pollution, and water contamination—the critical first step in the blueprint of pipeline resistance. 

“You have to stand up, you have to say no, and you got to start telling these people how you feel,” Cavalier says. By “these people,” she means city and county officials, representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and state agencies and boards tasked with evaluating permits filed by the construction company.��

Along with other organizations fighting the extension’s construction, Cavalier coached landowners and other impacted residents in Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina to tell their personal stories in the few minutes allotted for public comment at meetings held by regulatory agencies and commissions charged with handing out permits. Cavalier says she’s working with tribal leaders and nations that steward land in what’s known as South Carolina to prevent any future plans for pipeline construction.��

“We use our traditional Indigenous values when we’re organizing, so it is kind of slow,” Cavalier says. “It’s just really about gaining people’s trust.”

Learning From Successful Decades-Long Battles

While fighting his own pipeline battle in Memphis, Tennessee, organizer Justin J. Pearson spent time in North Carolina with Cavalier to swap strategies and speak at actions she had organized. From October 2020 through December 2021, Pearson led a grassroots resistance against the construction of the Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would have ravaged the majority-Black neighborhood of East Memphis. The proposed 49-mile pipeline was funded by a subsidiary of Valero and Plains All American Pipeline, billion-dollar corporations with vast legal and economic resources.��

Pearson’s efforts focused on the second part of the pipeline resistance blueprint: passing preemptive local laws. “The only way you’re gonna get legislation passed is with people power,” Pearson says, explaining that the legislative process also serves as a means to educate constituents and policymakers who may not know the many threats pipelines pose. “It ������’t enough to get things done; you have to have folks behind it and supportive of it to show politicians that it matters.”&�Բ�����;

The 2021 passage of legislation protecting drinking water and residents’ homes affirmed that the pipeline’s construction company and financial backers would need the consent and participation of the people of Memphis if they wanted to build. In response, community members helped pass a countywide setback ordinance and two citywide ordinances—one instituting a setback and another protecting the .

In July 2021, the company announced that it was , proving Pearson’s community campaign against Byhalia a success.

During this time, the Biden administration also revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, indicating to Pearson that his ultimate goal might just be attainable after all: “We’re collectively fighting for a future … for people, especially Black, Indigenous, people of color—people who this society has excluded intentionally. We are changing that narrative in the course of history about whose lives are deemed worthy and worth protecting,” Pearson says.

It also helped that Jane Kleeb, of the Keystone resistance, called Pearson up early in his resistance work to see how she could support his efforts. Kleeb says she provided some resources, but more importantly, she connected him to a whole community of pipeline fighters—organizers across states who share stories and swap strategies on what Kleeb refers to as “pipeline-fighter calls.”

For nearly a decade, Kleeb fought Keystone by building relationships between groups who, on the surface, might appear to have little in common, like White ranchers and Native peoples. Kleeb learned that pipeline companies follow their own playbook, starting with predatorily approaching landowners and coercing them to sign easement agreements that allow the companies access to their land for drilling or pipeline construction. For instance, companies may tell landowners that all of their neighbors have signed easement agreements and that they’re the last to do so (when in reality no one else has), Kleeb explains, in an attempt to isolate, intimidate, and pressure the landowner to comply. 

“The only thing that stops these pipelines is if you lock up the land,” Kleeb says. 

Today, the organization built out from the fight against Keystone XL, Bold Alliance, mobilizes communities to fight pipelines in multiple ways, particularly by creating easement action teams. In these teams, groups of landowners are represented by Bold Alliance’s lawyers, who ensure pipeline companies won’t approach or speak to the landowners without legal representation. 

“It kind of takes that power that the pipeline companies had of preying on landowners away, and puts some power back into the hands of landowners,” Kleeb says. 

Not every pipeline battle leads to a win, Pearson says, nodding to the now-operational section of a tar sands pipeline known as Line 3, which runs through Native land in northern Minnesota. A more local risk is a bill being fast-tracked through the Tennessee state legislature aimed at usurping local control from cities that try to prevent fossil fuel companies from operationalizing. If passed, the legislation would become effective this summer, undoing the work Pearson and others organized so hard for. Yet each successive fight bears lessons, and that’s important, he says. 

“Even when we lose some of our fights … there’s something that has happened in our awareness and our attention and our intention and our ability to still fight on,” Pearson says. “The next fight won’t start at the same starting place; it’ll be a little further. The people who are fighting that fight will be a little more ready for the next one.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 2:45 p.m. PT on March 30, 2022, to correct a misspelling of Crystal Cavalier’s last name, and to clarify that surviving members of the Sissipahaw tribe exist, and have joined the Catawba tribe and the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation.��Read our corrections policy here.

It was once a common bird near her hometown and across the Colombian Andes, but its population had dwindled to a flock of 81 individuals. Captivated by the fate of the little bird, she abandoned her career as a civil engineer and, along with British ornithologist and her now-husband Paul Salaman and a group of other conservationists, founded ProAves to protect it.

With the help of nearby communities, especially local women, the group successfully fought for an end to the logging of wax palms—the bird’s nesting and feeding site—and hunting of the parrot for sport. The yellow-eared parrot was adopted as a regional emblem. Soon, the population started growing rapidly. Today, there are more than 2,800 individuals, and a couple of years ago, a flock of two dozen parrots was spotted near Lara’s hometown. 

It was a huge win, and it taught Lara an important lesson: Women are instrumental in conservation. Women often , and their participation in ProAves’ work quickly demonstrated that they were essential to the success of community-based conservation projects. In many rural communities in Colombia, women are responsible for meeting their families’ most basic needs from nature, including water, firewood, and food—all of which become increasingly difficult as the environment suffers. But the women she encountered needed support, too.

“Many of the women I met were exhausted from childbearing, they did not have any food to feed their children, and they were desperate to have access to family planning,” says Lara. 

In 2004, Lara founded Women for Conservation to increase access to public health, family planning, economic opportunities, and environmental conservation. The nonprofit organization aims to build the health of the communities bordering nature reserves, so they can be more economically independent and better able to protect their local environment. The organization runs workshops and trainings, ranging from environmental education to sustainable livelihoods and family planning, for women in 10 communities. It became independent of ProAves in late 2019, and reports that it has since directly reached more than 2,200 people, mostly women and young girls. 

Women for Conservation also teaches women to produce wildlife-friendly artisan crafts to replace dependence on cattle ranching and prevent deforestation. In Puerto Pinzón, for example, as part of a broader project to protect the blue-billed curassow, the organization , the seeds of palm trees that are known as “vegetable ivory,” and to produce jewelry that they can sell on the market. Women for Conservation also encouraged the local community to ban hunting, use fuel-efficient stoves to decrease deforestation, and start a tree nursery.

Women for Conservation also runs workshops aimed at training women for careers in conservation and ecotourism. 

Ninfa Estella Carinialli was the first woman forest ranger trained and sponsored by Women for Conservation and ProAves. She , and she works in the Águila Harpía ProAves Reserve, which is located in the eastern Colombian state of Guainía. 

Carinialli’s first few years as a forest guard were hard. “My son drowned and my husband passed away from COVID,” she remembers. But, as it had with Lara, the forest proved a refuge. “I felt a deep sadness, but I am thankful for the memories I have with them, and for the opportunity to work in conservation, which makes me happy and fills me with peace.”

Overcoming Myths and Barriers

One of the most important—and sensitive—tasks Women for Conservation has taken on is a focus on reproduction and family planning in local communities. Lara initially had to deal with pushback from local communities. “When we started talking about family planning, we had a couple of incidents where women were severely beaten up for participating in our workshops,” she says. “I learned in a hard way that we need to present women’s empowerment not as a threat, but as a benefit for the family.”&�Բ�����;

In partnership with the reproductive and family health organization , Women for Conservation organizes reproductive health workshops and provides family planning services. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the organization reports it has facilitated 360 contraceptive implants and 27 surgical procedures, including tubal ligations and vasectomies. 

The ability to plan pregnancies becomes vital for women and girls when they can’t depend on the natural environment for basic survival needs, says Kelly Donado, who organizes logistics for the family planning brigades at Women for Conservation.

“When there’s ever-less food, jobs, and water, it scares me to think of bringing more babies into the world,” she says. “What kind of situation are we bringing them into? When girls have unplanned pregnancies, they cannot be adequate carers, and often, they’re not able to provide for their babies.”&�Բ�����;

Donado is leading a campaign in Zona Bananera, a municipality of Santa Marta, which suffers from water scarcity due to diversion for banana and palm growing. Her sister is a local nurse and has offered her home as a center for the clinics and workshops, as there are no medical clinics in the area. Ana Marquis, an 18-year-old from the area, is one of those who participated and decided to get a contraceptive implant. 

“It lets me decide when to have my children,” she says in Spanish. She lost two pregnancies in recent years. “Right now, I’m looking after myself so that I can study and not have to worry about getting pregnant.”

In February 2022, Women for Conservation provided 72 women in Zona Bananera with contraceptive implants, in addition to offering cancer screenings, follow-ups, and reproductive education workshops. By the time the group’s representatives returned in March for checkups, more than 190 women and girls had added their names to the waiting list. Men also began requesting contraception from Women for Conservation, which resulted in the first vasectomy procedures in the Zona Bananera region in February 2022.  

“Family planning has myriad social, economic, and environmental benefits: It improves the livelihoods and well-being of people and the planet and relieves population pressures on the natural environment, as well as on food production and water scarcity,” says Catriona Spaven-Donn, the Empower to Plan project coordinator for the British charity , which supports Women for Conservation.  

While Women for Conservation has made significant progress destigmatizing family planning, resistance remains. Marquis says her family forbid her from getting the implant until she was 18, as they have for her 16-year-old sister.

Some families believe that denying teenagers access to contraceptive resources will prevent them from engaging in sexual activity, . 

Women for Conservation also faced resistance from its peers in the environmental world. Lara remembers other conservation leaders telling her that working with women was nice, but it was not a priority. Whenever she spoke about the link between a growing population, increasing poverty, and environmental impacts, she was told to avoid talking about population. 

among development, environmental, and reproductive rights community groups. The focus is instead on sexual and reproductive health, choice, and rights of individuals, rather than addressing demographic factors.

“In the past, people wasted a lot of time stereotyping our planetary crises, asking whether the main problem is population or consumption,” says Phoebe Barnard, professor of global change science and futures at the University of Washington, and founding director of the global , which aims to stabilize and reduce consumption and global population. “Well, of course, it’s not either–or. It’s both. Investing in women’s education, leadership, and opportunities remains a really powerful way to bring benefits not only for women, but for families and children, nature, and the future of our whole civilization.”&�Բ�����;

Still, even the issues of reproductive health and women’s rights can be difficult to raise among poor, rural Colombian women living in communities where maternity and a large number of children are often viewed positively, and where men may feel a loss of control over women’s sexuality when women use modern contraceptives. In such contexts, contraception is and is therefore not trusted or not used.

What’s clear is the close tie between women’s empowerment and environmental outcomes. Recent research found that . The , from equal access to education to family planning. 

That link has pushed Women for Conservation beyond family planning to providing basic services to ensure Colombian women are healthy and safe. , so last year, the NGO started providing mammograms and training women on how to conduct a self breast exam. With a drastic increase in calls to domestic violence hotlines during the pandemic, Lara has also started leading workshops and education on the subject.

What do these have in common? They represent the new frontier in human rights.

The  voted overwhelmingly on July 28, 2022, to declare the ability to live in “” a . It also called on countries, companies, and international organizations to scale up efforts to turn that into reality.

The declaration is not legally binding—countries can vote to support a declaration of rights  those rights in practice. The  is also vague, leaving to interpretation just what a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is.

Still, it’s more than moral posturing. Resolutions like this have a history of laying the foundation for effective treaties and national laws.

I am a  who focuses on , and much of  investigates relationships between development-driven environmental change, natural resource use, and human rights. Here are some examples of how similar resolutions have opened doors to stronger actions.

How the Concept of Human Rights Expanded

In 1948, in the aftermath of World War II, the newly formed United Nations adopted the  in response to the atrocities of the Holocaust. The declaration wasn’t legally binding, but it established a baseline of rights intended to ensure the conditions for basic human dignity.

That  the right to life, religious expression, freedom from slavery, and a standard of living adequate for health and well-being.

Since then, the scope of human rights has been expanded, including several agreements that are legally binding on the countries that ratified them. The U.N. conventions  (1984) and  (1965) and on the rights  (1989) and  (2006) are just a few examples. Today, the  also includes binding agreements on , . Eleanor Roosevelt and others read from the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today’s Triple Planetary Crisis

The world has changed dramatically since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was written, perhaps most notably with regard to the scale of environmental crises people worldwide face.

Some  that the “” of , , and unmitigated pollution now threaten to surpass the  necessary to live safely on Earth.

These threats  the right to life, dignity, and health, as can air pollution, contaminated water, and pollution from plastics and chemicals. That is why  for the U.N. to declare a right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

The U.N. has been discussing the environment as a global concern for over , and several international treaties over that time have addressed specific environmental concerns, including binding agreements on  and . The 2015  to limit global warming is a direct and legally binding outcome of the long struggles that follow initial declarations.

The resolution on the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment was approved without dissent, though : Belarus, Cambodia, China, Ethiopia, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Syria.

The Human Right to Water

Voluntary human rights declarations can also  in changing state policy and providing people with  to demand better conditions.

The  is one of the strongest examples of how U.N. resolutions have been used to shape state policy. The resolution, adopted in 2010, recognizes that access to adequate quantities of clean drinking water and sanitation are necessary to realize all other rights. Diarrheal disease, largely from unsafe drinking water,  under age 5 every year.

Human rights advocates used the resolution to help pressure the Mexican government to  and adopt a human right to water in 2012. While the concept still  , the idea of a right to water is also credited with  in marginalized communities in , , and .

The Rights of Indigenous Peoples

The 2007 U.N.  is another example.  the specific histories of  that many Indigenous peoples around the world have endured, and .

The resolution outlines rights for Indigenous peoples but stops short of recognizing their sovereignty, something many critique as . Within these limits, however, several countries have . In 2009,  integrated it .

The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples discusses a right to  about development and industrial projects that would affect Indigenous people. That has been a powerful tool for Indigenous peoples to  through the legal system.

In , , and , Indigenous peoples have used the resolution to help win important legal victories before human rights courts with rulings that have led to land restitution and other legal gains.

Tools for Change

U.N. declarations of human rights are aspirational norms that seek to ensure a more just and equitable world. Even though declarations like this one are not legally binding, they can be vital tools people can  and private companies to protect or improve human well-being.

Change can take time, but I believe this latest declaration of human rights will support climate and environmental justice across the world.

This article was originally published by��. It has been published here with permission.

But since the mid ’90s, Jamaica and other unique islands in the Caribbean region, according to a meta-study by , have been facing the loss of one of their most critical resources: fish. And it will take a blue economy, like the one developing along Jamaica’s northeast coast, to keep this muse alive.

Not far from the buzzing tourist center of Ocho Rios is a stunning, sequestered coastal spot accessible only by driving 25 minutes along off-road trails: the Oracabessa Fish Sanctuary. It has crystal-clear waters that reveal emerald-hued depths, and a shoreline decorated by colorful boats, small yachts, and fish pots. With waters like these, one would assume Oracabessa to be a great fishing spot. But a sign on the docks boldly warns, No Fishing.

“I’ve been a registered fisherman since 1975, and I’ve seen the depletion,” says Captain Murray, a vessel operator and warden at the Oracabessa Fish Sanctuary. “We saw the need to put something in place, because if you have a farm and you’re always harvesting without replacing new seedlings, it will run down.”

The Importance of Fish

Often, environmental conservation comes across as a philosophy, or a political or moral conviction. The human element—the fact that people are relying on these same ecosystems for survival—is generally overlooked. But a large part of the magic and beauty that remains in Oracabessa is the result of efforts by local fishers.

Rural communities along Jamaica’s coasts rely on fish. They generate employment by selling and reselling fish, crafting and repairing fishing equipment, serving as fishing crew, and assisting with other fishing traditions. And in the face of soaring food prices, they can fish for dinner.

But environmental stewardship asks for sacrifice. The endorsement and buy-in of critical stakeholders, like fishers, can make or break a conservation project. And in Jamaica, fishers tend to be independent.

“To have any kind of success, you have to centralize and organize,” says Captain Murray. “Fishers don’t want to do that, because they may believe that it might cost them more.”

And so fishers were invited to the table as the conservation project took shape.

“For one thing, we allowed the fishers to decide the boundaries of the sanctuary so they actually chose how much they gave up,” says Travis Graham, a board member of the Oracabessa Fish Sanctuary. Second, he says, “All of our wardens are fishermen. We’ve created a source of employment for them through that role, so they understand that they benefit in more than one way. The commitment comes from that.”

In short, the group was able to create a feedback loop where nature helps support those who nurture it. For a decade now, Oracabessa Bay’s GoldenEye hotel and James Bond beachfronts have been home to the area’s 185-acre resident fish sanctuary. As unofficial evidence of their success, massive tarpons float gracefully beneath the dock of the sanctuary’s office.

Thanks to a dive shop and frequent tourist customers from the GoldenEye hotel, Oracabessa’s Sanctuary has enough money coming in to support the wardens and captains who patrol the borders. Although much of the land is privately owned by the hotels, the sanctuary itself is open to the public in areas where the beaches are public, like the James Bond Beach.

With a roster of 18 people—fishers, captains, coral gardeners, supervisors, managers, and board members—the staff manages and maintains the resources and a series of programs. This sanctuary is always buzzing with activity: educational school tours, maintaining and upgrading the budding coral gardens, and the newly installed sea urchin nursery. The sanctuary has met its ambition of planting 18,000 corals annually and releasing more than 20,000 sea turtles each year.

Oracabessa continues to expand, as it looks to add more conservation education programs and a sea urchin nursery to raise more of the animals that are so essential to reef health.

Thanks to the Oracabessa fish sanctuary and those of its ilk, the abundance of fish island-wide has increased more than fivefold between 2013 and 2020, according to Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency’s island-wide reef . Coupled with reports from fishers of increased fish on the outskirts of the sanctuary, NEPA’s reef survey indicates a slow but strong rehabilitation taking place.

A Model for Success

A sister sanctuary in White River, situated just half an hour up the road, has adopted a similar model of operation. Following Oracabessa’s example, this sanctuary operates under a partnership between fishing entities and the tourist sector.

“It’s community-based, so 50% of all our operations and decision-making is in the hands of the White River Fisherman Association, and the other 50% is contributed by White River Marine Association,” says Reanne McKenzie, general manager of the White River Fish Sanctuary.

The sanctuary itself is housed on protected land in the Ocho Rios Marine Park. “We have a three-pronged mandate for the sanctuary, which is protect, restore and engage,” McKenzie says. To protect, fishers patrol the sanctuary. To restore, they raise two different kind of coral at two different sites. To engage, they educate nearby communities and primary schools. “It’s important they have this appreciation of the environment from a young age,” McKenzie says.

With the Ian Fleming Airport in Boscobel—just 20 minutes from the White River Fish Sanctuary— open to commercial flights, the entire northeast coast may soon experience an increase in tourist activity. This could increase the viability of White River, Oracabessa, and other future community sanctuaries.

As White River’s sanctuary enters its fourth year of operation, the organization has an enthusiastic stream of volunteers, including a local student and two foreign students as well as a reliable staff of fishers and wardens. The sanctuary is in the process of conducting its first biomass survey, and it hopes to expand its coral programs and eventually the boundaries of the sanctuary itself.

“We really want to get to a point where we have so much of the community and surrounding areas sold on this conservation idea that we won’t really have a need to police waters,” McKenzie says.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 1:12 p.m. PT on September 1, 2022, to correct the size of the sanctuary and Taylor Graham’s job title, as well as to clarify the accessibility of Oracabessa.��Read our corrections policy here.

For thousands of years, the Massachusetts, Nipmuc, and Pawtucket peoples relied on the “Missi-tuk,” or Great Tidal River, and the migration of the river herring to sustain their way of life. Beginning in the 1600s, European colonizers filled in surrounding marshland and built dams, shipyards, tanneries, and other industrial infrastructure, releasing untold quantities of toxins, like arsenic and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, into the watershed.

The Mystic River is cleaner today than it was 50 years ago, thanks in large part to the Clean Water Act, passed 50 years ago this month, in October of 1972. The Act was a game changer for urban waterways like the Mystic, long a dumping ground for industrial waste.

“The Clean Water Act is a foundational environmental law,” says Katharine Lange, policy specialist at the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance. “Having clean water gives us clean forests, clean agricultural products, clean recreational opportunities.”

However, the Mystic River faces new threats today from stormwater pollution, climate change, and the potential for lost protections.

In the days leading up to my expedition, the anniversary project took on new urgency, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency. The case, brought by an Idaho couple and backed by polluting industries and represented by the pro-industry Pacific Legal Foundation, challenges the very definition of a protected waterway. A decision in favor of the Sacketts would not only jeopardize the recovery of America’s rivers, but also make surrounding communities more vulnerable to climate change.

But if the EPA prevails, rivers like the Mystic hold promise of cleaner futures.

Signs of a Healthier River

The morning I set out from the river’s headwaters in the Mystic Lakes, I see little evidence of environmental degradation. As the river winds through the suburban neighborhoods of Arlington, Medford, and Somerville, I paddle alongside swans and painted turtles sunning themselves on logs. The fall foliage reflects in the water, which is clear enough to see striped fish darting between the lily pads.

In 2021, the main body of the Mystic River earned a grade of B+ on its annual EPA Water Quality Report Card. The assessment is based on how often waters meet bacterial standards for safe fishing, swimming, and boating. This grade is up from the D the river earned in 2007, when the EPA began compiling data.

The improvement is largely thanks to the Clean Water Act, which gave the EPA authority to crack down on “point source pollution” from single, traceable sources, like factories and chemical plants. However, the key to successful enforcement has been the energy and activism of local nonprofits, residents, and volunteers.

Andrew Hrycyna is a watershed scientist at the Mystic River Watershed Association, a nonprofit committed to the protection of the Mystic and adjacent wetlands. He oversees a dedicated corps of 40 to 50 trained volunteers who are on call to monitor the river’s baseline water quality once a month. From 2008 to 2016, the Mystic River Watershed Association partnered with the EPA to organize a hot-spot monitoring program, which dispatched volunteers during heavy rainstorms to collect samples from stormwater outfalls. This real-time data has helped the EPA pinpoint contamination from leaky pipes and illicit discharges, including from the Suffolk Downs Racetrack and ExxonMobil’s Everett Terminal.

“That was a way of our investing effort that wasn’t being done by other people, by government, using our status as nonprofit to contribute data that then got the regulators to start putting pressure of various kinds on municipalities,” Hrycyna says.

Yet many toxic discharges originate far above the Mystic’s main channel, in the smaller tributaries, streams, and swamps that feed into it. This is why the impact of the Sackett case is so potentially devastating; it would narrow the scope of the Clean Water Act to apply only to navigable bodies of water, leaving adjacent wetlands open to contamination or to being filled in altogether.

“Not only are [wetlands] a source for water quantity, they also play a big role in the water quality in the rest of the river,” says Lange of the Massachusetts Rivers Alliance. “Wetlands in particular are really good at filtering off gross stuff from water.”

According to Lange, wetlands also help build climate resilience by protecting surrounding communities from flooding associated with severe storms and rising sea levels. “Swamplands absorb even an abnormal rain or snowmelt in a way that our streets and basements cannot,” she says.

Such precipitation events will only become more frequent and intense as climate change accelerates. Rainfall is already overwhelming Boston’s “combined” sewer system, which transports both raw sewage and stormwater to wastewater treatment facilities. These combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, release excess bacteria, nutrients, and other non-source pollution into the watershed, causing toxic Cyanobacteria blooms and other unsafe conditions.

A Cleaner, Post-Industrial Future

Once I pass under the Mystic Valley Parkway, the river widens, revealing the Boston skyline. I am nearing the end of my 7-mile journey from the Mystic’s source in the northern suburbs to its mouth at Boston Harbor.

Ahead of me lies the Amelia Earhart Locks, which separates the upper freshwater segment of the Mystic from the lower tidal reaches. I’d been advised to buy an airhorn to get the attention of the lock master, who is unaccustomed to small vessels like mine. But even after repeated blasts, there’s no sign of acknowledgment in the control tower. I end up carrying my 28-pound plastic kayak up and around the dike, to the astonishment of dog walkers on the Assembly Square bike path.

Prior to 1877, this lower portion of the Mystic was surrounded by saltwater marsh. The entire area was then filled in to make way for the loading docks and industrial lots now lining the broad channel between Charlestown and Everett. Above the locks, I had encountered other kayakers, but now the only other vessel in sight is a ferry from the new Encore Casino, which was built atop a former Monsanto Superfund site.

Only a few stray nips and fishing bobs litter the stony shoreline, a testament to the success of the Mystic River Watershed Association’s Trash-Free Mystic initiative. The water doesn’t appear dirty, but rather deep blue and bottomless, the reflections of smokestacks rippling across the surface. This is the Mystic River made famous by the 2003 crime-noir film starring Sean Penn, where intergenerational trauma played out in the shadow of the Tobin Bridge.

By the time I reach Boston Harbor, the sun is sinking behind the city skyline. One week earlier, Massachusetts lawmakers had gathered on the waterfront to mark the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Speaking at the event, Sen. Edward Markey said, “I look forward to working with the EPA to continue to protect our waterways and expand access to historically underserved communities.”

The new Bipartisan Infrastructure Law appropriates . That includes rain gardens and bioswales, which filter nutrients from stormwater runoff. But a decision in favor of the Sacketts could undermine these potential solutions. 

Still, more than political promises, what gives me hope for the future of this post-industrial river and so many like it is Hrycyna’s quiet army of tireless volunteers, and groups like theirs across the country, huddled over sewer drains in the rain.

“Cities change rivers in a lot of ways that negatively affect the ecosystem,” Hrycyna says. “But urban rivers are nonetheless living systems, and so they’re still filled with aquatic life. It’s a cool thing to notice when you’re out on the river in a canoe.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:17a.m. PT on Nov. 2, 2022 to correctly identify the bridge in the final photo as the Zakim Bridge not the Tobin Bridge.��Read our corrections policy here.

Bulus now picks up bottles and other recyclables from locations around her community and brings them to Ecobarter drop-off locations, where she exchanges the recyclables for cash. The cleanup exchange now adds 2,000 naira ($5 USD) to her monthly income of N25,000 ($64). 

“I use the money they pay me to buy ingredients to cook,” Bulus says. 

Actions like Bulus’ aim to tackle the problem of waste in Nigeria, where solid waste management is arguably the most pressing environmental challenge faced by urban and rural areas alike. Nigeria generates an 32 million tons of solid waste annually, one of the highest rates in Africa. Nigeria is already Africa’s most populous country, with a current population of more than ‌200‌ ‌million‌ ‌people‌, ‌‌and that ‌figure is expected‌ ‌to‌ ‌by‌ ‌2050. 

Most of the country’s waste is to be generated by households or local industries, artisans, and traders who litter the immediate surroundings. The country’s disposal, recycling, and waste-management system is and insufficient, with 70% of plastic and non-plastic waste ending up in sewers, beaches, water bodies, or landfills, where it is often burned.

Still, efforts like Bulus’ are a start. She is pleased not only to bring in some extra income, but also to reduce the waste she sees in the environment around her. “The experience has been nice,” she says. 

Connecting Homes to Reuse Services 

is a youth-led sustainable waste-management company that connects homes and local communities to recycling services, such as community exchange centers and doorstep collectors. 

The goal is to make responsible consumption and disposal easy. Schools and organizations can have Ecobarter install collection bins on site, where the waste is safely stored and regularly picked up. 

The company has an integrated website and mobile app to make it even more convenient for waste producers and collectors alike. Users get points for the weight of the waste they collect, either by delivering it to a drop-off location or by requesting a pickup in their community hub using the app. Plastic, for example, is 1 point per kilogram, whereas metal is 3 points per kilogram, depending on the location and the day. 

The points are converted to monetary value, which can be deposited into a bank account and then withdrawn as cash. The points can also be transferred to friends or family using the app, or users can shop at a physical Ecobarter marketplace to purchase eco-friendly household items or subscribe to basic health insurance services.

Rita Idehai is a young social entrepreneur and the founder of Ecobarter. She realized the lost value of resources like waste while researching as a geo-scientist, traveling to different rural communities to look for solid minerals like gold, zinc, and lead. In 2018, she started the social enterprise to help people transform waste into wealth. 

“With my passion for making a positive impact,” Idehai says she drew inspiration from the UN’s (specifically those pertaining to responsible consumption and sustainable waste management), which she says “will help people use their everyday waste and transform it into currency and value.”

Blessing Ekwere, Ecobarter’s head of operations, says the company was created not only to build systems for waste transformation, but also to give hope to the people.

Some of the Nigerians who benefit most from this work are informal waste collectors, which includes individuals, associations, or waste traders who are involved in the sorting, sale, and purchase of recyclable materials. Ecobarter works with market cleaners, street cleaners, and waste pickers that gather their waste via doorsteps, vendors, or events, and bring it to community centers, where a hub manager pays for the waste.

“In Abuja and Lagos, our major operations for all the recyclables we collect from households and communities are taken to our main operations yard, where they’re properly sorted, bagged, and sent to companies that help us generate revenues.”

Ekwere says recyclables, such as plastic bottles, cartons, and metals, are sold to off-takers who make them into fibers for furniture, egg crates, and new metal products, respectively. And the savings can be meaningful: If they didn’t have recycled waste to use, Ekwere says new paper and nylon cost N20 to N30 ($0.05 to $0.07), cardboard costs N35 to N40 ($0.08 to $0.09), and metal for cans costs upward of N150 ($0.35).

“The plastic bags we collect are transformed into functional lifestyle products using traditional weaving methods by internally displaced women in our communities,” Ekwere says.

Other Waste-Management Efforts

Another enterprise working to tackle waste-management issues in Nigeria is . The company recently launched its Smart Mobile Bin, a waste collection cart it says keeps collectors and communities healthier. 

The cart has two wheels and is pushed by hand, which allows operators to reach communities with narrow, unpaved streets that conventional waste-collection vehicles can’t access. The cart is also airtight, which prevents the common problems of smells and leaks between waste pickup and drop-off. The bin operators themselves are trained and provided with personal protective equipment to keep themselves safer and healthier on the job. The company’s founder, climate activist Aliyu Umar Sadiq, is also working on an eco-friendly toilet project, which utilizes plastic waste to construct bathroom facilities in rural schools. The goal, he says, is to simultaneously address health, hygiene, and pollution challenges associated with open defecation. 

Another organization approaching waste management in Nigeria through its awareness-raising campaigns is SustyVibes. The group champions sustainability projects to make young people into responsible environmental stewards. Jennifer Uchendu, the CEO of and a sustainability professional with more than 10 years of experience, says the organization has been addressing issues like waste management since its founding in 2016. 

“Our street conferences usually include sanitization and advocacy sessions, where we educate community members on the importance of a clean environment and connect them to recycling hubs to ensure proper recycling of the waste generated,” Uchendu says. 

SustyVibes’s team of volunteers organizes campaigns and street conferences to educate everyday people on the importance of waste management. Its Susty Marshalls project, for example, aims to empower informal waste pickers, enabling them to see the dignity in their work, and motivating them to do their work in a more organized manner.

Its “Stare Down on Pollution” campaign involves visiting various communities across Nigeria to educate and enlighten local residents in their native languages about the dangers and impacts of negative waste habits, as well as the need to change the culture of littering.

From Trash to Cash 

Since Ecobarter launched in July, the company has signed on 200 users, who have collected 300,000 kilograms of waste, primarily plastic bottles and cartons. Based on the company’s modeling, that’s the equivalent of 800 metric tons of carbon. 

Abigail Andrew, 35, is a mother of two children, and she works with Laurmann and Company Limited, an indigenous professional environmental service organization in Garki, Abuja. Andrew, whose husband left years ago, earns N18,000 ($46) per month, well below Nigeria’s monthly minimum of N33,000 ($85). 

“My friend told me about Ecobarter,” Andrew says. “Picking waste for them has been helping me, because I … get money to buy food for my children.”

Now, when she picks bottles for Ecobarter, she earns an average of N4,000 ($10) over the course of a month to help cover the cost of feeding her children.

Juliana Garuba, 45, who works with a cleaning agency in Abuja, says seeing waste around makes her angry, which is why she signed on with Ecobarter. “The experience is good for me,” she says, and the extra income helps too. “Sometimes I don’t have money to go home after work, but now I can pay for my transport.”

Ecobarter’s CEO says the social enterprise is now servicing more than 5,000 households on the platform to recycle their waste, especially within its community hubs in Abuja and Lagos. 

But there’s still room for improvement. 

Rebecca Bulus, waste picker, says, “I want to appeal to the company to increase the money they pay us, because the place we dip our hands to get the waste from is filthy,” she says.

Another challenge the social enterprise faces, according to founder Idehai, is behavioral change. It’s hard to convince people to sign on, because awareness of waste management as an issue in Nigeria is low, and because government policies backing waste disposal aren’t mandatory. Safe waste disposal, too, can be a challenge. 

Still, Ekwere, the head of operations, says the company wants to take the solution to all states in Nigeria and beyond. For Ecobarter, this vision includes instituting mini drop-off centers in semi-public areas, such as malls, markets, and estates. The company acknowledges the obstacles to this expansion, including funding, policy issues, and societal acceptance. But that’s not stopping it.

“The goal for us is to ensure recyclables do not get to the dumpsite,” Ekwere says. “Every household should have access to a collection system.”&�Բ�����;

But what sets some landraces in a class of their own—monumentally ahead of commercial rice varieties—is their nutrition profiles. This has been proved by the research of Debal Deb, a farmer and agrarian scientist whose studies have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and books.

In the mid-1960s, with backing from the U.S. government, India’s agricultural policy introduced fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation facilities, and high-yielding varieties of crops under the moniker of a “Green Revolution” to combat hunger. Instead, it began an epidemic of monocultures and ecological destruction.

In the early 1990s, after realizing that more than 90% of India’s native rice varieties had been replaced by a handful of high-yielding varieties through the Green Revolution, Deb began conserving indigenous varieties of rice. Today, on a modest 1.7-acre farm in Odisha, India, Deb cultivates and shares 1,485 of the 6,000 unique landraces estimated to remain in India.

Deb and collaborators have quantified the vitamin, protein, and mineral content in more than 500 of India’s landraces for the first time, in the lab he founded in 2014, Basudha Laboratory for Conservation. In one extraordinary discovery, the team documented 12 native varieties of rice that contain the .

“These varieties provide the essential fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids that are found in mother’s milk but lacking in any formula foods,” Deb says. “So instead of feeding formula foods to undernourished infants, these rice varieties can offer a far more nutritious option.”

Deb and his team have also documented high levels of antioxidants and several B vitamins in more than 250 landraces of rice. Both of these compounds are essential for the functioning of a healthy human body, Deb says, but are rarely found in modern high-yield varieties.

In Garib-sal, a rice variety from a remote village in West Bengal, Deb and his co-workers discovered the in its grains at 15 parts per million. This may explain why Garib-sal was prescribed in traditional medicine for the treatment of gastroenteric infections, since .

Miraculous as these traits may appear, they are far more than happy accidents of nature. They are the result of a conscious exercise of selective breeding by ancient farmers, whom Deb refers to as “unnamed, unknown scientists.”

“These farmer-scientists did not know anything about DNA, proteins, or enzymes,” he says, “yet they managed to develop novel varieties through generations of selective breeding.”

Deb’s conservation efforts are not to preserve a record of the past, but to help India revive resilient food systems and crop varieties. His vision is to enable present and future agriculturists to better adapt to climate change.

Cultivating Resilience

Deb conserves scores of climate-resilient varieties of rice originally sourced from Indigenous farmers, including 16 drought-tolerant varieties, 20 flood-tolerant varieties, 18 salt-tolerant varieties, and three submergence-tolerant varieties. He shares his varieties freely with hundreds of small farmers for further cultivation, especially those farming in regions prone to these kinds of climate-related calamities. In 2022 alone, Deb has shared his saved seed varieties with more than 1,300 small farmers through direct and indirect seed distribution arrangements in several states of India.

One of these farmers is Shamika Mone. Mone received 24 traditional rice varieties from Deb on behalf of Kerala Organic Farmers Association, along with training on maintaining the purity of the seeds. Now these farmers have expanded their collection, working with other organic farming collectives in the state of Kerala to grow around 250 landraces at two farm sites. While they cultivate most of their varieties for small-scale use and conservation, they also cultivate a few traditional rice varieties for wider production, which yield an average of 1.2 tons per acre compared with the 1 ton per acre of hybrid varieties.

“But that’s only in terms of yield,” Mone says. “We mostly grow these for their nutritional benefits, like higher iron and zinc content, antioxidants, and other trace elements. Some varieties are good for lactating mothers, while some are good for diabetic patients. There are many health benefits.”

These native varieties have proven beneficial in the face of climate change too.

With poor rains in 2016, for example, the traditional folk rice variety Kuruva that Mone had planted turned out to be drought-tolerant and pest-resistant. And in 2018, due to the heavy rains and floods, she lost all crops but one: a folk rice variety called Raktashali that survived underwater for two days.

“They have proven to be lifesavers for us,” Mone says.

With extreme weather events, like droughts, floods, and storm surges, on the rise across the world, small farmers suffer damage to their farms, lose harvests, and go into debt. But small organic farmers incur less debt since they don’t depend on expensive inputs.

“About 90% of the overall costs incurred on most organic farms in Kerala are mostly for labor costs, while only around 10% goes on manures and composts, if any,” Mone says.

By expanding the cultivation of resilient crop varieties, an agricultural system can bounce back faster to its original capacity.

“Our emphasis and advice to every farmer in the world would be to foster and nurture diversity at all levels—at the species level, at the crop genetic level, and at the ecosystem level,” Deb says. “The building of complexity and diversity is essential to building resilience.”

The Case for Agroecology

Many fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides (killers of life forms) and, in so doing, decimate the microorganisms in the soil. Soil microorganisms, like mycorrhizal fungi, are recognized as essential to deliver nutrients from the soil to the plants. , plants cannot remain productive, and they become more prone to pest attacks. Thus begins the degenerative cycle of spraying more pesticides while adding more synthetic fertilizers to compensate for the lack of nutrients.

Industrial farming, associated with monocultures and synthetic chemical inputs, leads to the loss of soil fertility year over year and ultimately the collapse of the farm ecosystem. Commercial hybrid seeds, dependent on costly inputs, have also proved to fall behind in climate tolerance.

“We need resilience under uncertainty and hardship,” says Sujatha Rajeswaran, a farmer from Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu, who received seeds and training from Deb. She sells her produce directly to a group of friends and family members.

“Growing traditional varieties coincides with our philosophy for life,” Rajeswaran says. “Just having a lot of money is not enough. We need good physical and mental health. We need good relationships. We need good ecology, not only in a human-centric way, but for all beings to be able to live and thrive.”

Deb asserts that in order to grow resilient and nutritious food sustainably, global food systems must transition to agroecology, which doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals to the environment. and many have also documented agroecology to be more productive than industrial farming, and that it leads to better soil fertility year over year.

“Agroecology is an essential component in the fight against climate change and [greenhouse gas] emissions,” says Steve Gliessman, professor emeritus of agroecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an international expert with more than 50 years of teaching, research, and production experience in the field of agroecology.

“Agroecology is all about farming practices that capture and hold carbon, but it is also all about how all other parts of the food system contribute to sustainability. This means more local, seasonal, and integrated food systems, where what we call ‘food miles’ are reduced, food waste is reduced, and local food production capacity once again plays an important role.”

Gliessman applauds Deb’s conservation and participatory work with local farmers. “[His work] confronts the modern idea of ‘improved’ seeds when farmers already have the seed knowledge they need in their hands. Deb has rescued this knowledge, codified it, and made it available once again.”

Roadblocks to Implementation

Despite a plethora of reasons to prioritize a transition to agroecology, funding for these open-source solutions is severely lacking. Public institutions and private businesses alike favor putting their money toward patented technologies and seeds.

There are two pathways to adapt agriculture to climate change, according to Rasheed Sulaiman V., director of the Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy, a nonprofit organization that promotes research in the area of innovation policy for agriculture and rural development. Pathway 1, he says, is the development and promotion of new climate-resilient, high-yielding varieties of seeds. Pathway 2 is to promote and strengthen in-place conservation of native, climate-resilient varieties by civil society organizations and seed champions like Deb.

in Odisha, Sulaiman says Pathway 2 can help in achieving several more of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals than Pathway 1, without causing adverse impacts to the environment and agro-biodiversity. “Unfortunately,” he says, “almost all science, technology, and innovation support is invested in Pathway 1, and there are practically no resources invested in strengthening Pathway 2.”

Deb documents that many native varieties of crops measure more resilient and nutrient-dense than commercial varieties and patented seeds, even after the billions of dollars that have been invested in agribusinesses. For example, the International Rice Research Institute, an  and training organization that contributed to the Green Revolution, has developed an iron-fortified genetically modified rice variety, IR68144-2B-2-2-3, containing 8.9 ppm of iron. This is meant to be its “high iron” variety. Contrast that with the approximately 80 native varieties of rice Deb has documented that contain between 20 and 152 ppm of iron.

Such knowledge becomes vital in light of government policy that favors food fortification instead of food sovereignty. The Indian government recently mandated that rice supplies be fortified with iron and other supplements in order to tackle malnutrition. This fortification process involves rice being milled into a powder form, fortified with supplements, and reshaped into rice grains. The Mandatory Food Fortification Program is now in effect across four states (Bihar, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand) and counting, and all rice supply in India will need to be .

“According to this fortification mandate, everyone, whether you need it or not, has to consume this fortified rice. What if your child has thalassemia, a condition where excess iron is lethal?” wonders Deb. So far, local news outlets have produced concerning reports: district of Orissa fell ill after consuming the fortified rice in their public school meals. In the state of Punjab, 19 samples of fortified rice out of 22 collected failed national quality control tests.

“Experts are spending billions of dollars to fine-tune genetic engineering, while these nutritious and resilient varieties already exist,” Deb says. “In the name of smarter agriculture, we are losing these climate-smart varieties.”

Small-Scale Solutions

Patented and high-tech solutions have also proven inequitable for small farmers. Deb asserts that these are not for peasant countries like India, where nearly 80% of farmers operate on less than 5 acres of land. High-yielding varieties have raised the input costs (since fertilizers, pesticides, and the seeds themselves have to be bought every year), making farmers increasingly dependent on markets. At the same time, the prices farmers receive for their harvests have fallen with greater market supply.

At times, in the short run, growing fragile, high-yielding varieties can be profitable. But in the long run, only large landholders are able to weather losses thanks to their other asset classes. Small landholders, Rajeswaran says, don’t have that cushion. They go into debt and face complete ruin. In fact, today in India, , leading to episodes of farmer suicide.

On the surface, reduced drudgery and more yields may seem worth it, which is why so many farmers opt in. “New varieties are being created for higher yields and process mechanization—for doing well in control environments,” Rajeswaran says. “But the real world is not a controlled environment, although we are constantly trying to make it one.”

Nearly three decades since beginning conservation work, Deb remains motivated. He recognizes that some of the farmers requesting his seeds today are the descendants of his original seed sources. They come to him after losing their seeds to high-yielding varieties.

“These ancient farmers never wrote down their discoveries or patented their work, so we are [wrongly] taught to assume they were unscientific,” Deb says. “Our task is to honor their discoveries by conserving these varieties.”

Lennon is in Northern California searching for answers to big questions: “How do young Black land stewards in the United States negotiate the ethical and political tensions of doing antiracist, decolonial work in outdoor spaces through property ownership in a settler colony built on racial capitalism? How do you own land when you don’t believe in land ownership? How do you liberate your livelihood from a system of labor you know you can’t ever escape?”

, a nascent collective on 900 acres of forest and prairie, might be the newest and largest land project on the West Coast to explore answers to these queries on the ground. Co-creators Nikola Alexandre and Layel Camargo aspire to develop a community grounded in the ecological and cultural practices of their ancestors. They bought the land in July 2021 from a Christian fellowship that used it as a camp for 75 years.

The work Shelterwood Collective has carved out includes quite literally uprooting invasive species. If the hands-on work also helps uproot structural racism, reestablishes healthy redwood along with environmental justice, and heals the land as well as the trauma of its residents, Shelterwood accomplishes its mission.

Making Space to Find Safety

Just the simple fact that the core staff defies the stereotype of the straight white American farmer sends a clear message. “We are a queer BIPOC group,” Shelterwood retreat manager Julia Velasquez says. “When queer, Black, Indigenous folks and people of color come with family and chosen family, and they see us on the land, they experience an overwhelming sense of safety.” She recalls one young boy, who had been described as extremely shy, but when he arrived at Shelterwood, “He got out of the car and started running and dancing, yelling, ‘I’m free! I’m free!’”

Many of the current core staff members didn’t believe they would find a place in nature where they could truly build a home for their passions. “I almost didn’t go into land stewardship because it was so heavily dominated by straight white men,” Alexandre says with a wry laugh. “As queer folks, as folks who are often denied a home and often denied family, we’re trying to nurture a safe space for those of us who don’t always have a safe space to return to. Look at the shooting that just happened at Club Q, look at all the trauma that comes with the kinds of holidays where a lot of us queer folk aren’t necessarily welcome at our family’s dinner table. Shelterwood is meant to be a safe haven for those communities to just exist.”

He and co-founder Layel Camargo met during an immersive program at Soul Fire Farm, the upstate New York farm of Leah Penniman, author of Farming While Black and a leader in the movement to establish sustainable and equitable land ownership for historically disenfranchised communities. (Penniman has also authored several pieces for è������!) They sat in “a homemade hot tub at a Buddhist temple up the street from Soul Fire,” says Camargo, when they had the idea to “walk the walk.”

Now, Shelterwood’s vision goes beyond the small farm model of Soul Fire and Earthseed, or the biocultural restorative focus of The Cultural Conservancy. Both Alexandre and Camargo want to “shift the narrative away from the individual nuclear family type of farm approach where it’s all very individual,” Alexandre explains. “It’s about seeing nature as your kin, and people around you as part of your family, even if they don’t have direct blood ties to you. That’s at the core of what we’re trying to do, our environmental messaging.”

Camargo is a transgender and gender non-conforming social activist of Yaqui and Mayo descent. They studied feminism and law and were on track to become an environmental lawyer, but then connected with filmmakers and pivoted to storytelling, especially about the climate crisis. “Indigenous, Black, and Brown people are bearing the brunt of climate change, and yet seem so far removed when we talk about carbon trades and global greenhouses,” says Camargo. “I’m really passionate about paving a new narrative and a path for people to see themselves as connected to nature, as really powerful forces on how we engage with the ecosystem.”

They were able to buy the Shelterwood land in July 2021, “paying a ransom of $4 million,” as Alexandre says, facilitated with a generous grant from the Wend Collective and the support of Black farmer, singer, and bestselling author Rachel Bagby. Camargo emphasizes that they believe the support would not have galvanized without the growth of the Movement for Black Lives following George Floyd’s murder, and also the pandemic crisis. Previously, Alexandre says, when he’d tried to convince investors and philanthropists of his dream, he was met with skeptical incrementalism. “Either you’re a social justice project or you’re a conservation project; why and how would those two things intersect?” he recalls being told.

The fact that social and environmental healing are intrinsically connected has since become much clearer, Camargo adds. “You cannot harm the planet without exploiting a group of people.” Their solution: “We have to have communities coming back together and tending the land. The American idea was built on the backs of Indigenous and Black peoples. Land as a source of power, as a source of sovereignty, needs to be returned to Indigenous communities. We need to build alliances and think through: what does true alliance between Indigenous and Black people look like in this current context?”

The Work of Generations

In the summer of 2022, Myles Lennon brought five queer Brown University undergraduates to Shelterwood for a 10-week fellowship, intending to document the impact of their immersion. One of these students, Victor Beck, used his time on the land to create signs sharing the Indigenous names for many of the plant and animal species. “As an Indigenous student who cares about responsible land stewardship and building queer communities, I wanted to do something that put theory into practice,” Beck wrote in a reflection on for the university. “The Shelterwood Fellowship gives queer people of color a way to do the hands-on work of restoring land in a place that feels welcoming and relaxing, which we sometimes struggle to find in our daily lives.”

Each of the four members that currently make up Shelterwood’s core staff brings their own background, unique expertise, and individual traumas to the land. Retreat director Julia Velasquez, for instance, grew up in South Los Angeles, helped launch the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and organized youth work. “The first time I held a chainsaw was here on the land,” she says.

Camargo, too, realized, “As someone who lives in California, I should have a very intimate relationship with the forest here, yet that felt so foreign.”

As the lead land steward, Alexandre is in charge of the forest. He will use a recent $4.5 million grant from Cal Fire, the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, to thin out the overgrown forest, “do climate-resilient work, and eventually bring fire back to the land on a scale that is unprecedented,” Alexandre says. While many Californians might see “fire as a threat, an enemy that we should be afraid of, it’s also a sacred spirit that we need to have a better relationship with.”

Moncada recalls the neighbors’ concerns when they reintroduced cultural burns at Heron Shadow in 2020, not long after devastating area fires and evacuations. “We spoke with every neighbor we could find and invited them to come look and experience it through our perspective. After they saw the care of the cultural work, they began to ask if we could come to their property next.”

Alexandre, too, says he wants to “bring fire back in very intentional, controlled, ceremonious ways to help reduce the fuel load risk. In this particular spot, fire is as just as important as people, as redwoods; the return of fire will be critical to keep our ecosystems healthy.”

For him, creating a safe space in the woods might mean blasting Beyoncé while working a chainsaw, or learning the native botanical names of the flora.

When Pandora Thomas of Earthseed was asked at a about strategies to further environmental justice and end food apartheid, she mentioned environmental literacy and project-based learning. “We want our young people to understand not just where their food comes from, where their water comes from, how their transportation system works, the clothing they’re wearing, the buildings [they’re in]. … We have found that when they get connected to the earth’s systems they get more motivated, they get inspired to share and translate that information to others.”

Shelterwood Collective, too, wants to adopt similar strategies, but is currently in the initial phase of “rooting, learning to listen.” In December 2021, Shelterwood hosted a community visioning session and asked 150 people from various Brown, Black, Indigenous, and queer communities what they envisioned from this land and community. “We learned a lot about what folks want to do out in nature when they’re allowed the opportunity to be safe, to be away from the gaze of white supremacy,” Camargo says. “That taught us that folks want to play and rest, but they also want to learn. They want to learn their own ancestral ways, what’s rightful in the places they’re at.”

Beyond appreciating volunteers who come to work, and artists who let themselves be inspired by the natural surroundings, Velasquez says, “What we really want is for our communities to just be. And sometimes just asking them to rest is feeling part of the safety. And we’re thinking about, also, access for folks that are disabled. Can they feel safe outdoors and navigate outdoors in a very safe way?”

The collective members all agree this work to heal the land and their community will take many generations—and they hope it will continue long after they are gone. “We don’t want to be the only ones who do this,” Velasquez says. “We actually want to be the smallest land project, and for folks to do the work with us and along with us.”

But the start has been made. In the visioning session, “eight people cried in the first 40 minutes,” Lennon says. “How often does it happen that youngsters cry just because they are overwhelmed by feeling at home? They said it was the first time they felt welcome.”

This story is part of��, an original�������!��series supported by a grant from the��, which encourages the development of burgeoning alternative economies and fresh social contracts in ways that can help artists and cultural communities achieve financial freedom. Reporting and production of this story was funded by this grant, but �����! maintains full editorial control of the content published herein.��Read our editorial independence policy.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:30 PT on Jan. 17, 2023 to remove an inaccurate reference to the maintenance of the land performed by the Christian fellowship from which Shelterwood purchased the property. Read our corrections policy here.

“It’s a fruit that people love,” he says, and the single breadfruit left at his table is a testament to its popularity. “Anything you does make with it, it taste good. If I bring 200 breadfruit here, it sell out and people still coming for it.”

Lucky for Ramrattam, his farm has had no shortage of the fruit this year. The 20-or-so trees on his property can produce as many as 4,000 breadfruits in a single year.

Breadfruit was brought to the West Indies from Tahiti at the turn of the 18th century as a cheap, filling, and abundant food for enslaved people. This starchy round edible, as a result, has grown prolifically in Trinidad and Tobago for hundreds of years.

Breadfruit is a perennial crop; one tree can produce fruits every year for half a century or more. The trees naturally produce as many as 300 fruits per year, without the application of chemical or synthetic fertilizers, according to Omardath Maharaj, a lecturer in agribusiness and entrepreneurship at the University of the West Indies. Plus the fruit is a good source of carbohydrates, dietary fiber, and potassium.

Today, breadfruit is a staple in Caribbean cuisine. Its association with the sinister history of slavery, for many, is no longer its defining quality. The fruit is now the subject of international research to evaluate its potential as a staple crop in a warming world. In Trinidad and Tobago, climate change, inflation, and dependence on imports are drivers of its national food insecurity, which affected nearly half of the population last year. On average, the country imports as much as 85% of its food.

Locals say breadfruit is a key crop for filling hungry bellies. It’s hearty, easy to grow, and locally abundant.

One breadfruit can feed as many as four people for dinner. It can be sliced thin, fried, and seasoned with garlic and salt to produce chips. It can be skinned, chopped, and boiled in a mixture of dasheen bush leaves, coconut milk, and pig tails to make a salty stew called oildown. Or, it can be baked into a belt-busting pie.

“[Breadfruit] does stretch real far,” Ramrattam says. “Just two, three pieces, and your belly full.”

A Food for Future Climates

like Trinidad and Tobago are expected to feel the brunt of climate change’s effects, such as rising sea levels, tropical storms, drought, and changes in rainfall. These could negatively impact crop yields, destabilizing already precarious food systems. Compared to existing commodity crops like rice, corn, and soybeans, experts suggest that breadfruit’s resilience and prolificacy could help create more sustainable food systems and ease global food insecurity.

In a paper published in in August, scientists modeled how different climate futures could impact breadfruit yields around the world. Under the highest emission scenario, they predicted that climate change-driven changes in rainfall and temperature could reduce the overall quality of suitable breadfruit-growing areas on Caribbean islands. The loss of suitable growing areas, however, amounted to less than 2%—arguably good odds under dire circumstances.

It’s worth noting that studies examining how climate change could impact breadfruit-growing in Trinidad and Tobago specifically have yet to be carried out. But the tree’s life history makes it a strong candidate for sustaining Trinbagonians in the long run compared to annual crops like wheat and rice. 

Research and history have proven that these trees can take a beating. Breadfruit can withstand drought for up to four months. When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, breadfruit trees were among the few trees left standing. And while the persistent rains of Trinidad’s 2022 rainy season destroyed scores of crop fields across the country, it brought good fortune to breadfruit growers like Ramrattam, who saw his trees thrive in wet conditions.

“[In my opinion], in stress situations, in times of a disaster, in times of rising cost of living and all these other challenges, there’s no other competitor,” Maharaj says. “And the fact is, breadfruit has withstood the test of time, whether it be climate change or westernization of the Caribbean diet.”

Long-lived breadfruit trees can feed families for generations. At maturity, these trees also sequester more carbon than young trees, making them carbon sinks. Getting young trees to catch can be tricky, but once they’re established, maintaining them is a relatively hands-off process requiring no chemical inputs.

Despite all this, breadfruit production is considered underdeveloped in Trinidad and Tobago. Local breadfruit varieties are blended into species-rich food forests where they provide the necessary shade for crops like cocoa. The breadfruit trees on Ramrattam’s property are interspersed with the plums, cherries, mangoes, and other foods he grows.

Rarely is breadfruit produced on a commercial scale or processed to produce long-lived food items like flour—though doing so could provide Trinidad and Tobago with a greater supply of food for tough times as well as export income.

Some Assurance in an Uncertain Future

In the face of rising food prices, Maharaj says planting trees empowers citizens to feed themselves. That’s why he and his colleague Raul Bermudez started Breadfruittrees.com, an NGO working to get more breadfruit trees in the backyards of Trinbagonians. Over the years, the team says it has donated thousands of young breadfruit trees to individuals, schools, communities, and prisons.

Maharaj sees the trees as assets—ways of ensuring intergenerational wealth “for those of us without financial investment resources.”

By that definition, investing in breadfruit is fairly cheap and generally yields a high return on investment. In Trinidad and Tobago, you can pick up a tree for around $3.50 USD, or $2.30 if you’re buying in bulk, says Fareed Ali, agricultural assistant at La Reunion Plant Propagation Station. He and his colleagues produce some 10,000 baby breadfruit trees each year. Subsidized by the government, these saplings are available for purchase by farmers, private citizens, and the folks at Breadfruittrees.com who get them into the backyards of hungry people. According to Ali, the trees they sell typically begin to bear fruit in just three years.

“The price of breadfruit and fresh food has kind of skyrocketed,” Ali says, “so people who love breadfruit would want to plant at least one tree in their backyard so that they themselves can supply their household.”

Breadfruit trees can bear fruit as many as four times a year, Ramrattam says, depending on temperature and rainfall. During drier, hotter years, the fruit tends to drop early, meaning he has fewer, smaller, and less tasty breadfruits—young fruit can be bitter—to sell at market. Things are good this year at the farmer’s property in Manzanilla, where he says heavy rains have given him bigger and better breadfruit. He expects the harvests will continue to be good in the coming years.

“I’m not worried for me; I’m not worried for my wife,” says the farmer, weighing a bundle of dasheen for a customer as the market’s vendors close up shop. “I’m worried for the kids…for them, we don’t know how it will be.”

With climate change, Ramrattam expects food security to be an increasing problem in the next 20 years.

As Trinidad and Tobago prepares for an uncertain climate future, Maharaj says sustainable food sources like breadfruit should be an integral part of the Caribbean country’s food security contingency planning.

“I think that it’s time we recognize the versatility and contribution that foods like these could lend to our sustainability,” he says. A breadfruit tree can “more than likely feed us for the rest of our lives.”

There are at least 150 such bridges in the state in various stages of use and decay, and the oldest is estimated to be about 700 years old, according to Morningstar Khongthaw, a Khasi youth. He founded the Living Bridge Initiative in 2016 to preserve the community’s living architecture traditions.��

In many cases, the elders who planted the rubber fig saplings on the banks of the river, or those who initiated the construction of a bridge, would not have lived to see or use the bridge they founded. However, thanks to their long-term vision, the generations that follow get to use the bridges to reach schools, markets, farms, and other places of daily importance. 

The rubber fig trees are not only the foundation of the bridges but also help keep the surroundings cool, purify the air, prevent soil erosion, and provide several other environmental benefits that generations of Khasis continue to enjoy. 

Now in his mid-20s, Khongthaw continues working toward being a good ancestor. He, along with community members in seven locations, have constructed bamboo frameworks on which new living root bridges will be built in due course. These bridges will be sculpted and maintained by future generations. 

Knowing that the natural world provides all we need to exist, it is our job as humans to take care of it for future generations.

Dave Kanietakeron Fadden

“These bridges are an outstanding example of a complex, intergenerational, cultural-natural system,” says Ferdinand Ludwig, professor of green technologies in landscape architecture at the Technical University of Munich, who has studied the Khasi bridges for several years. “They are a benchmark for regenerative design, which we urgently need in order to hand over our degraded environment to our children in a better condition than we found it.”

Sadly, at the present time, most decision-making by governments and corporations around the world does not even look at the immediate impact, let alone a few years down the line. President Biden to drill oil in Alaska, even as UN Secretary-General António Guterres referred to the ongoing climate crisis as a “ticking time bomb,” speaking soon after the release of in March. 

Alongside the looming climate change catastrophe, is affecting and . Microplastic particles have also been found in human and , as well as and in —endangering not just the current generation, but possibly the health and development of the next generation as well.

“Why are we not capable of looking beyond five years?” says Maria Westerbos, founder of the , an Amsterdam-based nonprofit that works to reduce plastic pollution around the world. 

Long-term thinking is urgently needed as humankind grapples with climate change and other burning issues, like fossil fuel extraction and plastic use, that will have huge and irreversible impacts for generations to come. Luckily, communities around the world have long shown it is very much possible.

One oft-cited example is the Seventh Generation Principle from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (known during colonial times as the Iroquois Confederacy), which spans present-day upstate New York in the U.S. and adjoining areas in Canada. “The Haudenosaunee believe that what we do in our lives can have either positive or negative ramifications to the seventh generation yet to come,” says Dave Kanietakeron Fadden, an artist and illustrator from the Mohawk nation, one of six nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, along with the Cayuga, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Tuscarora nations.

If your rivers, oceans, mountains, forests, and your land is unwell, then you as a human are unwell.

Dan Hikuroa

Fadden shares how the Seventh Generation Principle translates to daily life for the Haudenosaunee. “Our traditional council of chiefs among the Six Nations deliberate every proposal with this in mind. As individuals, we also keep it in mind as we live our lives,” he says. “Our decisions as leaders and as individuals are made with a great deal of thought of how an action, or lack of an action, will affect those that are not here yet. In contemporary terms, we are transitioning to utilizing as many new carbon-free technologies in our communities, from passive home construction to solar energy.”&�Բ�����;

Fadden says, “Knowing that the natural world provides all we need to exist, it is our job as humans to take care of it for future generations.”

Intergenerational thinking among the Māoris of New Zealand (Aotearoa) is rooted in the concept of whakapapa. The Māoris believe that all living beings—past, present, and future—as well as all non-living entities—like rivers, rocks, and mountains—are born from sky father Ranginui and earth mother Papatūānuku, and hence are related. This kinship is called whakapapa, and from it stems the responsibility of protecting nature for present and future generations. Whakapapa manifests itself at several levels in Māori life, including in law-making and policymaking as well as in the community. 

In 2014, New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant , and . This recognition gave the Te Urewera Forest and Whanganui River the same legal rights as a citizen, and any offenses against them can be taken to court. 

“This was an effort by the New Zealand government to take ancestral ways of knowing and being and doing in the form of whakapapa, and embedding them into the law,” says Dan Hikuroa, senior lecturer in Māori Studies at the University of Auckland (Waipapa Taumata Rau). “At the highest level, there are laws that are being made and passed in the country that include whakapapa.”

Day-to-day decision-making in businesses like —owned by 4,000 families descended from the original Māori landowners in the Nelson region of South Island—is also guided by whakapapa.

The group, which owns several companies in real estate, horticulture, viticulture, and fisheries sectors, has a 500-year plan, . The goal is to achieve intergenerational prosperity while simultaneously conserving for future generations the natural and cultural resources that have been inherited from ancestors. Wakatū’s short-term business plans are aligned with this long-term vision and the values of the original landowners. 

“Knowing your whakapapa link to a place is important both as a motivator for the work you do, and for the sense of responsibility to the place and people,” Hikuroa says. 

, a nature reserve established in 1999 near the country’s capital, Wellington (Te Whanganui-a-Tara), also has a 500-year vision to restore the valley’s forest and freshwater ecosystems to its pre-human state. “Our first 20-year strategy was completely focused on the valley itself and was all about getting a head start on restoration,” says Danielle Shanahan, a landscape ecologist and the sanctuary’s chief executive. “This included planting thousands of trees that will take the longest to mature and bringing in species like kākā [a large parrot] that were absent from Wellington city.”&�Բ�����;

These visionary efforts have led to , with several other native species of birds, insects, amphibians, and reptiles also thriving. The sanctuary is now in its second-generation strategy, which builds on the first, and is all about living with nature and helping the local community reconnect with the native wildlife. 

“T������ is an inextricable link between people and the environment,” Hikuroa explains. “If your rivers, oceans, mountains, forests, and your land is unwell, then you as a human are unwell.”

So it follows that when communities keep in mind future generations as they make decisions, nature and humans can thrive together. 

De Leon is one of 25 immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers gathered on a cold December morning in Sonoma County, California, for the first-in-the-country Spanish-language intentional-burn certification program. Like de Leon, each of these firefighters-(and firelighters!)-in-training has been haunted by fire. During a massive inferno in 2017, de Leon was one of many “essential workers” escorted by vineyard managers through mandatory evacuation zones to harvest grapes while breathing in toxic fumes from nearby blazes. 

“When we arrived at work, there were patrol cars because it was an evacuation zone, but they waved us through to harvest. The skies were red and heavy smoke was in the air. They didn’t give us any protective equipment. No masks,” de Leon says. “T������ was so much ash on the grapes that when you’d cut the grape, it would get on your face. Our faces were black.”

While she didn’t get sick, she says her co-workers struggled with asthma. De Leon recalls harvesting like this for eight hours and getting paid just $20 per hour. 

“They should have paid us more,” de Leon says. “We risked our lives for their profits.”

Today, however, de Leon and her fellow farmworkers are here to learn about “good fire”—a controlled burn land stewards use to reduce underbrush in overgrown forests to prevent the spread of more destructive wildfires. Thanks to , de Leon and her fellow farmworkers are (re-)learning skills many of their ancestors knew well. And they are putting that know-how to work healing a fire-ravaged landscape and people. 

While wine producers often depict their agricultural operations as small, idyllic, and picturesque, the reality is that most are anything but. The wine industry erodes local ecological balance and accelerates climate destabilization through planting monoculture crops, intensive water use, soil erosion, and application of toxic pesticides and herbicides. 

Calling themselves trabajadores de la tierra (land workers), farmworkers like de Leon say they’re tired of having their labor used by the vineyard bosses to deplete the land. So instead, they’re fighting for the training, resources, and job opportunities to restore ecological health and mitigate the worst impacts of climate chaos already set in motion. 

Tens of millions of public dollars have already come into Sonoma County for wildfire mitigation and vegetation management since 2020, and there are many millions more on the way from both state and federal governments. As climate chaos accelerates and unnatural disasters multiply, more county, state, federal, and private dollars for ecological restoration services will become available. What remains contested is what that work will be, who will get that work, how much it will pay, and how it will be governed.

Too often, cost-cutting measures among vegetation management companies—which clear overgrown brush to minimize the risk of wildfires—result in low wages, lack of training, and excessive clear-cutting. Instead, immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers are positioning themselves as the leaders who have the ancestral knowledge, practical skills, work ethic, and heart to do this work, and asserting they should be fairly compensated for it. 

Their fight began two years ago, when these workers on the front lines of climate-change-fueled wildfires started organizing for safety and respect. Through their , North Bay Jobs With Justice farmworker leaders have won improved job safety and training in indigenous languages, and a first-of-its-kind $3 million disaster-insurance fund for frontline workers who lose work during disasters. They’ve also secured unprecedented commitments from growers both large and small to provide hazard pay for workers who harvest when the outdoor air quality is unhealthy. 

Despite these impressive victories, farmworkers say the California wine industry remains ecologically unsustainable. The vineyards’ contribution to local ecological degradation, combined with global climate change, results in heat, droughts, wildfires, and floods that cause for existing agricultural workers. In short, workers know the wine industry won’t last forever.

Instead of waiting for collapse, workers are getting ahead of the impending transitions, assuring they happen justly. 

“If we’re talking about funds for capacity building, we should train the people already working on the land. These workers are the backbone of the ag sector in Sonoma County. They should get a piece of the pie,” says Hannah Wilton, program associate at , a nonprofit center in Sonoma County that develops strategies for biocultural diversity and community resilience at regional scale. “Folks who are working in these industries, how does their labor get reclaimed for restoration, toward something positive for the Earth? They’re helping to bring in the new world. They’re stewarding the transition. We should be following their lead.”

Last winter, the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center hosted 10 Jobs With Justice farmworker leaders for a monthlong workforce-development pilot project with some of the North Bay’s top ecologists. Workers honed their skills in restoring wildlife habitat, identifying plants, mitigating erosion, increasing the land’s drought tolerance, and reducing wildfire risk through techniques, like thinning overgrown understory plants. Workers then used the downed branches, sticks, leaves, and needles to create habitat piles for wood rats, which are prey for owls, and strategically stacked the leftover biomass to help sink and slow water on hillsides to prevent erosion. 

Those same farmworkers spent last summer and fall on an immigrant- and Indigenous-led worker team doing vegetation management, fire mitigation, and restorative land work in Windsor, Cazadero, Healdsburg, Occidental, and Geyserville, California. The work was funded by the county, through a project with the , a nonprofit organization working to restore healthy habitats in the area. For their labor, workers earned $35 per hour, a significant increase from what they were paid by the vineyards. 

Workers cleared brush, thereby breaking up “fuel ladders” that can cause wildfires to spread rapidly along recreational sites and other places in which fires often start. This fuels-reduction work is of critical importance to reducing wildfires and reining in climate change. California’s recent massive wildfires are devastating to state climate goals. A recent study found the California wildfire smoke in 2020 alone put double the greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere as the state’s entire emissions reductions between 2003 and 2019.

Whacking through dense, 10-foot-tall carrizo (an invasive bamboo-like plant, also called arundo) with a machete—or even a chainsaw—is hard, dirty, exhausting work. A crew of 10 workers incessantly hacks at the invasive carrizo growing on a slippery bank leading down to the river—sweating, cursing, and joking as they go. While some workers chop, others haul armfuls of the downed weeds up the steep embankment to a waiting wood chipper.

Despite the physically grueling nature of this undertaking, worker after worker tells me: Whereas in the vineyards their labor is wielded against land, water, and soil, here it is used to heal such harm. Whereas the vineyard bosses treat farmworkers as disposable labor, here workers are well paid, safe, self-governed, and respected for the deep wisdom and relationships with the land they bring to the work. 

“I am an Indigenous woman from Mexico. I speak Chatino. We believe that the land is sacred, that water is life. We deserve respect because of the knowledge we carry,” says farmworker Maria Salinas. “Here, with Jobs With Justice, we encourage each other to drink water and take breaks. They respect our knowledge. At the end of the day, you can go home satisfied, knowing you did something important for the Earth.”&�Բ�����;

Crispín López, an immigrant farmworker from an indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, remembers working in Sonoma County fields as the fires in 2019 sent toxic chemicals into his lungs. When López was young, his grandfather led a project in his community of San Miguel Chicahua to repair erosion to the local farmland caused by the introduction of a highway through their community. López thinks his late grandfather would be proud of his work here.

“The wineries that have destroyed the land never say, ‘We’ve earned so much money this year that we’ll put aside some of that money to care for the land.’ But they should be the ones to pay to heal the places that have burned,” says López. “They should be hiring those of us who know how to do it, and paying us well.”

The fuels-reduction work doesn’t just differ from the grape harvest in what farmworkers are doing, but how they’re doing it. Workers elect from among their ranks a responsable (person in charge for a given period of time) to coordinate the work. At the start of the day, workers stretch together. They take time to tell stories, share food and culture, and learn ecology. They strategize about how to grow an immigrant- and Indigenous-governed fire mitigation and ecological resilience workforce.

In addition to vegetation management, workers are also learning to do prescribed burns to prevent wildfires. Through a first-of-its-kind, weeklong, Spanish-language prescribed-fire training, workers learned about fire behavior, lighting and suppression, and weather patterns. They also gained relevant skills, like hand-tool maintenance and radio use. 

The training earned participants their Firefighter Type 2 certification, a federal qualification standard. But for many workers, the skills were already very familiar. “We use this same strategy in Mexico—burning the ground—but to plant corn. My father taught me how. If there are pests, the pests will die off,” says Santos Jimenez. “Here, we’re using it as a strategy so that if there is a drought, there will be less fuel and everything won’t catch on fire so easily.”&�Բ�����;

José Luis Duce ��������üé��, a prescribed-fire specialist with the , co-led the course. “Many times, people have knowledge of doing this in their own villages. They bring traditional and cultural knowledge of fire,” Duce ��������üé�� says. “It was really beautiful to learn from them—what they used fire for, in what season, at what time of day, which species they’d burn and which they wouldn’t.”&�Բ�����;

Having traditional ecological knowledge doesn’t always translate into job opportunities for Indigenous workers.

“We’re excited to be building these skill sets in folks locally, and getting certification to people who already have this traditional ecological knowledge from their home[s],” says Sasha Berleman, the director of at Audubon Canyon Ranch, which also partnered with Jobs With Justice on the training. 

“The farmworkers come from a difficult job—not just physically hard, but one in which they have used the land,” Duce ��������üé�� says. “This is the opposite. Today is about restoring equilibrium in order to heal Pachamama.”&�Բ�����;

“We learned today that fire is very important for the forest. Some plants need this type of burn in order to grow better,” says de Leon. “This work we’re doing today is very different from what we do in the fields. The vineyard owners don’t teach us this. They just tell us to tend the grapes, because at the end of the year that’s profits for the owners. Here we don’t worka for profit. We work for the benefit of the land, the animals, for us humans too.”

Twenty-five more workers are now deepening their skills through a wildfire-adapted landscaping course at Santa Rosa Junior College. The question, however, is how to do this work at scale: how to transition not just small groups of workers but entire industries and economies out of extractive, exploitative work and into cooperative, regenerative labor that tends to the land and to human needs?

Or, as one of the campaign’s strategists, North Bay Jobs With Justice Executive Director Max Alper, put it: “How do you go from 20 workers to 50 to 100 to 1,000 workers, all having steady, well-paid, dignified ecological restoration work?” 

First, Alper says, workers must organize themselves. Current worker leaders organize house meetings, bring their friends and coworkers to their homes to hear about the campaign, and then invite those contacts to join them at community meetings, pickets, and actions. 

Second, you have to physically labor together in the new work. North Bay Jobs With Justice invites its staff, board, and funders to come cut carrizo with the workers. “People come to work alongside the workers, even if [only] for a few hours, and it immediately changes things. Once you see arundo, you can’t unsee arundo,” says Alper. “They say, ‘OMG this is really hard work. If we don’t do this work, my community will be in danger. Workers should absolutely get paid $35 per hour to do this.’” 

Third, Alper says, “The only way we’re going to reclaim our labor is through a fight. The bosses have shown time and time again that they would be more than happy to take massive amounts of public dollars and use them to double down on their current extractive practices, just with a greenwashed image. The corporations that have exploited workers and the land now need to give workers the resources and access to land to do this regenerative work.”

Sonoma County farmworkers are not alone in advocating for resources to fund worker-led ecological restoration projects. At the national level, is developing business models by and for local workers of color to lead disaster-recovery and climate-resilience workforces.

Farmworkers, like de Leon, Salinas, Jimenez, and López, are the grassroots ecologists with the wisdom and respect to tend the land; they are the voices we need to heed and the workers we need to resource and respect. They are at once on the front lines of both ecological devastation and climate justice. They’ve worked for industries whose exploitation of both land and labor has fueled the fires. 

Now they are not only restoring the land and mitigating future fire risk, they are also building the model for an immigrant- and Indigenous-worker-led climate resilience. 

Quotes from de Leon, Salinas, Jimenez, López, and Duce ��������üé�� have been translated from their original Spanish. 

This story was produced as part of a Just Transition reporting fellowship with .

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:48 a.m. PT on April 27, 2023, to correct Hannah Walton’s name. Read our corrections policy here.

Seluchi runs the operation and modeling sector of the Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (Cemaden), a federal agency based in São Paulo, Brazil. The center is in charge of observing vulnerable areas in about one-fifth of the country’s 5,568 municipalities in which landslides and floods have the most impact. live in these high-risk zones.

Over the past decades, urbanization in Brazil has been largely unplanned and taken place at a chaotic pace. now live in cities and urban areas, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. “Nobody is going to live in a risky area because they want to or because they are stupid,” says Raquel Rolnik, an urbanist from the University of São Paulo. “They are workers whose income does not allow for the purchase or rent of housing in a suitable location.”

Larger populations living in high-exposure areas, combined with more frequent extreme weather events, trigger disasters. that global warming has boosted evaporation, adding more water vapor to the air, which causes more intense precipitation and unpredictable storms. This makes landslides even more common in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, including the Serra do Mar mountains, which extend for 930 miles along the country’s coastline and reach up to 7,700 feet in elevation.

The rocks that comprise these mountains are covered by a thin layer of soil and vegetation, with a natural tendency to slide, explains Fábio Augusto Reis Gomes, a geologist at São Paulo State University. “Heavy rains make water infiltrate this soil, turning solid into liquid.” On these steep slopes, some greater than 25 degrees, this liquid debris flows quickly downhill.

That’s just what happened on Thursday, February 16, 2023, when record-setting rains hit the São Paulo coast in southeast Brazil. That day, Cemaden predicted a heavy rainfall and reported the dangers twice to local authorities. On Saturday night, municipalities received more specific alerts to put their contingency plans in place, having reached the maximum level of risk by midnight, according to Cemaden.

But various local municipalities responded differently to the information, and the resulting range of outcomes shows what’s at stake for communities in future disasters. 

Effective Warning Systems

While Cemaden’s forecasts predicted 7.8 inches of rain, the cities of Bertioga and São Sebastião received more than triple that amount. In Bertioga, 26.8 inches of rain fell in just one day—the highest amount ever recorded by a rain gauge in Brazil (not counting unmonitored areas). Since the city of Bertioga, population 65,000, is relatively flat and doesn’t have residences built in the hills, it was not particularly vulnerable. “The biggest rain in history occurred there, but with no problems in terms of causing victims,” Seluchi says.

The story was different 20 miles east, in the city of São Sebastião, population 90,000. Here in the early hours of Sunday morning, rain gauges recorded 24.6 inches of rain. Storms followed by landslides swept through a working-class complex on the slopes of Serra do Mar called Vila do Sahy, killing 64 people. These homes were built in the 1980s by poor families looking for jobs in the nearby beachside hot spot of Barra do Sahy, where wealthy families from big cities come for the sea-view hotels and well-equipped houses costing millions of dollars.

Despite their differences, these two worlds—Barra and Vila—are closely linked. The only physical barrier between them is a single road. However, precarious housing conditions in the high-risk area ended up concentrating all the victims on the road’s poorest side, while on the opposite side, some moneyed people went so far as to hire helicopters to escape the devastation.

The city of São Sebastião did not release a single statement informing the public about the storms, which came in the days leading up to Carnival—one of the most important holidays for tourism in Brazil. Preparations for the festivities were already in full swing. Normally the city receives 500,000 visitors on Carnival weekend, so ordering an evacuation would have meant losing the income potential from these tourists. Instead, lives were lost.

Twenty miles west of Bertioga, the city of Guarujá, population 322,000, had only infrastructure damage and no injuries in the storms, despite having more than 7,000 families living on slopes and in stilt houses. The city recorded the highest volume of rain in the past 70 years: around 16 inches. The municipality managed to avoid fatalities by listening to the warnings and not underestimating the conditions’ destructive potential—a lesson learned after experiencing landslides and floods in 2020 that left 34 dead.

When the 2023 storm hit, people from high-risk areas left their homes before getting impacted by the rain. The population was notified via social media, SMS, and on-site visits by the Civil Defense. (This is comparable to the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency, , but in Brazil, municipalities and states have their own Civil Defense offices too.) “Teams went to areas of geological risk on Friday and Saturday informing [them of ] the measures to be adopted in case of heavy rain, and community leaders reinforced the alert,” according to an email from the City Hall of Guarujá’s press office.

However, an effective disaster prevention plan has to go beyond warnings.

Convincing People to Act

Across Brazil, to inform residents about possible risky situations associated with heavy rains. Some communities only have sirens, which ������’t enough, according to Reis, who is also a director of the Brazilian Federation of Geologists. “Sound alerts are the last step in the line, because when [a major storm] hits, many people don’t know what to do,” he says. “Before that, it is necessary to do training and simulations, mapping escape routes and shelter points.”

Without an escape plan, evacuation warnings don’t do much good. That’s why Guarujá Civil Defense’s ongoing work includes daily inspections in high-risk areas, climate monitoring, a geotechnical data platform, and lectures given in schools alongside simulations. “Cities are dynamic, and risk areas change over the years, so the mapping must be updated and the population informed about these changes during the training,” Reis says.

The Brazilian Federation of Geologists highlights the problematic ways in which high-risk areas are often a low priority for administrations. “Disasters do not occur due to lack of technical knowledge, but mostly by negligence of local, state, and federal administrations. [The] risk management field has well-known mechanisms and tools and, whenever applied in time, they result in success,” reads a released on February 24 to authorities and civil society.

Many deaths could be avoided if, for example, safe long-term housing was available and affordable for everyone.

One of the most important aspects of any safety plan is to convince the population of the danger. Even when people have the necessary information, some still refuse to leave their homes for fear of their belongings being looted, or they simply distrust the warning. “Some residents say, ‘I’ve lived here for 40, 50 years and [no] disaster has ever happened,’” Seluchi says. “This is a big mistake, because today things that have never happened are happening now—rain with a frequency of every 50 years now occurs every five to 10 years.”

Solutions at the Source

In the face of an evermore-threatening climate future, some communities have found their own means of raising awareness and preventing fatalities. Sítio Conceiçãozinha is a century-old neighborhood on the Guarujá estuary where some of the community’s 6,000 residents live in homes built on stilts. Flooding was a problem for decades until the local community center launched an environmental project in 2020.

Primarily aimed at cleaning up street pollution, the project found that it could also avoid floods by reducing the garbage backing up storm drains. The project offers educational programs for families as well as janitorial services. And the cleanup works as a credit market: For each collected kilogram of recyclable material, such as plastic bottles, a person earns tickets that can then be exchanged for donated food baskets. Every month, more than a ton of recycled material is collected by the community.

“Recently, heavy rains have filled Guarujá up, but not here,” says Cristiane Santos de Lima, one of the women heading the project. “The streets don’t flood anymore because you can’t find bottles covering the drains, obstructing the water evasion.”

These bans “stripped us of our culture, but [were] also an . , leaving the forests full of brush and kindling that, combined with climate-related drought and record-breaking heat, fueled the current wildfire crisis. In the 23 years since Reed was born, California has experienced 15 of its 20 on record. 

Reed is now dedicated to restoring humans’ relationship to fire. He’s a graduate student, Indigenous fire practitioner and wildland firefighter, and he’s teaming up with other young fire practitioners to change the way the U.S. responds to the wildfire crisis.

“T������ needs to be a continuous place for our generation in [responding to] a crisis that we’re most impacted by,” said Kyle Trefny, a student at the University of Oregon and seasonal wildland firefighter.

In 2022, Reed, Trefny and two other students — Bradley Massey, a junior at Alabama A&M University, and Alyssa Worsham, who recently completed her master’s at Western Colorado University — formed the (FireGen, for short), a group that advocates for centering Indigenous knowledge and bringing more young people into the wildfire space. 

That includes diversifying the workforce that responds to wildfires, Trefny said. A recent U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the vast majority of wildland firefighters—more than 80%—identify as male and more than 70% of the workforce is white. Though Trefny is both male and white, he identifies as queer. He said he was struck by the lack of diversity in the ranks and described the culture as patriarchal and militaristic. 

A more inclusive and diverse workforce wouldn’t just lead to a better experience for new recruits, Trefny added, it could also help address the severe of wildland firefighters. Last year, the Forest Service told it was short more than 25% of the workforce it needed heading into fire season; the following months saw an number of wildfires, including the largest and most destructive fire on record in New Mexico.  

The FireGen cohort believes that getting more young and Indigenous people involved in developing wildfire policies can increase support for proactive tactics like prescribed burns. It’s a shift that Tim Ingalsbee, an instructor at the University of Oregon and a former wildland firefighter, said he’s noticed among his students in recent years.

“Young people want to get involved in putting good fire on the ground,” said Ingalsbee. “Thirty years ago, no one asked me that. They all want to be firefighters.”

In November, Ingalsbee traveled with Trefney, Reed, Massey and Worsham, to Washington, DC, at the invitation of U.S. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore. They met with Moore, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden, and officials from the Department of the Interior’s Office of Wildland Fire to advocate for getting more young people involved in wildfire policy.  

“The collaborative is passionate about being a part of the climate change solutions of the future, including work in prescribed fire and as wildland firefighters,” said Wade Muehlhof, a  spokesperson for the Forest Service. “They bring great insights from the best and brightest we are trying to recruit into that workforce.”&�Բ�����;

The group arrived in Washington with a proposal to for young people to connect with the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, the agencies that oversee federal wildland firefighting. Trefny said they looked to FEMA’s Youth Preparedness Council, which recruits young people to serve as and assist in other outreach efforts, as a model for bringing more young people into the field. (Muehlhof said his office was connecting the group with the Biden administration’s , which was created in 2021.)

In addition to its advocacy efforts, FireGen is working to fill a gap in knowledge about young peoples’ attitudes toward – and understanding of – fire. Reed, Trefny and Worsham are developing a research project that will gauge their peers’ interest in various fire-related activities, such as prescribed burning or fireproofing homes, to make a case to policymakers to fund workforce development programs that go beyond traditional firefighting. For Worsham, who became interested in wildfires through her graduate research in prescribed burns, it’s an opportunity to help others discover their own unique paths into this field.

“We need this base of young people who are rethinking how fire fits into bigger things, like land management and climate change,” said Worsham. “We’re aiming for fire happening at the right frequency, at the right severity, in the right vegetation and ecosystems. And that’s all going to take a lot more work on the front end than suppression, which is entirely [an] emergency or reactive response.”

In a contribution to a recent Federation of American Scientists on wildfire responses, Reed and Trefny outlined ways that agencies could integrate Indigenous knowledge into their operations and invest in educating and onboarding young people. For example, they recommend shifting the hiring schedule for seasonal wildland firefighters from the fall to the spring to better accommodate students. 

Massey, who co-captains Alabama A&M University’s student-run forest firefighting team, wants to create more opportunities for students to access forest management and wildland firefighting training. The Forest Service currently partners with a of four historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to establish student-run fire crews; Massey, who has led prescribed burns near his school’s Huntsville campus, hopes to establish a multi-school fire crew that could take on larger land management and firefighting responsibilities.

“Not too many people from my community are familiar with prescribed fire or wildland fire, so just being able to have that knowledge to give and open their eyes to see what else is out there [is my goal],” Massey said. 

Massey and his FireGen teammates have seen, often up close, the devastation of increasingly frequent and severe wildfires. But they also understand that, much like becoming an electrician who installs heat pumps, understanding wildfires, and knowing how to anticipate and respond to them, is a skill set that will only grow in demand. 
“Imagine if in every fire-prone community, the local community college, university or even their local high school had programs where young people can get [prescribed] burn qualifications and get experience in making a house resilient,” Trefney said. “Our generation needs to be part of a cultural shift toward living with fire and not fearing it.”

This article is originally appeared in , an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

The park also encompasses the of , who engage in . These communities maintain no outside contact and live in very close relationship with the environment that sustains them. Yet, alongside Yasuní’s natural wonders, the region also harbors one of Ecuador’s , creating a complex and contentious struggle between preservation and exploitation.

For the past decade, a fierce dispute has raged over the extraction of oil from Block 43, better known as ITT (Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini). Approximately 100 of the block’s 2,000 hectares fall within Yasuní’s boundaries. Since 2013, the three most recent presidents of Ecuador have all campaigned to exploit the block. In response, a passionate group of young people known as Yasunidos emerged to protect it.

Yasunidos have fought for a referendum that would let Ecuadorian citizens decide whether oil extraction should proceed in the ITT block. After a decade-long battle marked by the unwavering determination of grassroots activists and environmental defenders, this August, the people of Ecuador will finally be able to vote whether to leave the oil from the ITT block in the ground indefinitely. The outcome of this historic referendum carries the potential to reshape the future of Yasuní’s biodiversity, while offering an inspirational model for environmental movements far beyond Ecuador’s borders.

The Plan That Failed 

In , the creation of Yasuní National Park served as a beacon of hope for local and Indigenous communities as well as conservation organizations around the world. Its designation as a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1989 further solidified its significance. Within its borders, a total of seven oil blocks, or leases, exist. Most of these blocks have long been subjected to extraction in order to generate resources to alleviate Ecuador’s poverty. Block 43, or ITT, however, remained tantalizingly untapped. 

In 2007, Ecuador’s then-president, Rafael Correa, unveiled a to maintain the sanctity of Block 43’s oil reserves while addressing the country’s deep poverty. Correa proposed that affluent nations compensate Ecuador with $350 million, representing half of the estimated value of the untouched oil, as a form of compensation to Ecuador for its dedication to conservation. By refraining from extracting 856 barrels of oil, the plan aimed to prevent the emission of a staggering 407 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, offering a substantial global environmental benefit.

But the plan . Only $13 million was raised, a mere 0.37% of the anticipated amount, and so the plan was canceled in 2013. Correa said, “The world has failed us. We were not asking for charity; we were asking for shared responsibility in the fight against climate change.” As a result, the Ecuadorian president for crude oil in Yasuní. 

The Emergence of Yasunidos

In the wake of President Correa’s controversial in Block 43, a group of passionate youth, aged 16 to 30, decided to take action. Their multifaceted coalition comprised human rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, and Indigenous people from diverse backgrounds across Ecuador. They converged with a shared mission: protecting nature and preserving human rights in Yasuní National Park. They called themselves , which combines Yasuní and unidos (united) in Spanish.

was 19 years old when he co-founded Yasunidos in 2013. Initially inspired by Correa’s plan, Bermeo’s hopefulness turned into deep disappointment when the president decided to exploit the Yasuní instead. Determined to make a difference, he connected with like-minded activists. “Our common objective was to safeguard Yasuní,” Bermeo recalls. This shared purpose served as a unifying force, and the group was bound by its unwavering dedication to preserve one of the world’s most biodiverse places and defend the territory of voluntarily isolated communities.

Antonella Calle, another of the founding members, was only 16 years old at the time. She emphasizes that Ecuador, as a country of immense diversity, faced imminent threats—an alarming reality that served as her inspiration to take action. “We are a kaleidoscope of faces united by the imperative need to prioritize life over the pursuit of wealth,” she says.

Yasunidos aimed to raise awareness among Ecuadorians in order to propose a popular referendum to determine the fate of Yasuní’s Block 43, the national sanctuary that belongs to all Ecuadorians. For the referendum to take place, they needed to collect 583,000 signatures. More than 1,400 volunteers joined the activists’ efforts, and the message resonated across the nation. As of April 2014, the team had collected 757,623 signatures, far exceeding the requirement.

However, the anticipated victory was marred by the National Electoral Council’s invalidation of approximately 400,000 of those signatures, claiming they were fraudulent. Through peaceful protests, press conferences, and campaigns, Yasunidos expressed their dissent in the following years, demanding justice, signature validation, and respect for public opinion.

Overcoming Adversity: Trials and Perseverance

Since the group’s inception, Yasunidos has been confronted with several challenges. In 2014, the members against alleged persecution by the Correa government. Regardless of the threats they faced, they embarked on the to COP 20 (the twentieth session of the Conference of the Parties) in Peru that year to spread the word about the imminent perils threatening the Yasuní National Park. However, their journey was beset by obstacles as they confronted numerous instances of harassment, and even found themselves detained at times. 

In response, the group with the Attorney General’s Office. The gravity of the situation was further revealed when a leaked intelligence report in May 2015 exposed the meticulous that Yasunidos had been subjected to by the Correa government since 2013.

In reflecting on the challenges they faced during their activism, Bermeo emphasizes its profound impact on their lives at such an early age. “It was incredibly tough to witness intelligence reports, the surveillance, the threats and intimidation I personally faced—all because we were demanding our rights and the rights of Mother Earth,” he recounts. For David Fajardo, a member of Yasunidos who is now an attorney focusing on environmental law, the biggest challenge has been preserving their lives while pursuing a cause that appeared to offer no immediate tangible results. 

Amid these challenges, the indomitable spirit of the movement has not only persevered but also strengthened significantly. Over the past decade, a wave of new movements dedicated to environmental and human rights issues has surfaced throughout the country. Yasunidos has continued to oppose extractivist policies implemented by subsequent governments, irrespective of their political affiliations. Fajardo says, “Our work has never ceased. We have persistently supported all environmental struggles in our country.”

A Global Message of Resilience

In 2021, a journalistic exposed that the verification process led by the National Electoral Council (CNE) had been marred by fraud, and that it was designed to discredit and disqualify a significant number of signatures collected by Yasunidos. Former CNE councilors were accused of forgery and the use of counterfeit filed with the Attorney General’s Office. After recognizing the severity of the situation, the Constitutional Court issued a landmark ruling on May 9th, 2023, declaring that the signature verification process violated the rights of Yasunidos and the people who signed.

paved the way for an extraordinary development toward Yasunidos’ original goal. In September 2022, the National Electoral Council granted authorization for the convening of a historic referendum. The question asked to Ecuadorians will be: “Are you in favor of the Ecuadorian government keeping oil from the ITT, known as Block 43, indefinitely underground?” The vote is scheduled for August 20th, 2023, and it holds immense weight, for its outcome will determine the future course of oil operations within the ITT block. 

According to Ecuadorian sociologist Gregorio Páez, “This upcoming referendum carries profound consequences for Ecuador and serves as an inspiration for all Ecuadorians to have the agency to decide over our natural resources, and to empower people to see that grassroots activism really can have changes in policies.” He emphasizes that the efforts of Yasunidos have played a vital role in shaping the trajectory of Ecuador’s history while “inspiring social movements on a global scale.”

For Antonella Calle, the referendum “has the potential to lead the way in the global ecological transition.” In the face of the current climate crisis, she believes that leaving fossil fuels in the ground is crucial. “We are confident that this will inspire alternative approaches in other countries too, and together we can contribute to combating climate change.”

Throughout these past 10 years, Yasunidos has been characterized by resilience, constant learning, and unwavering commitment. Now, the members eagerly await the decision of the population, hoping for a positive outcome. For them, saying “yes” in the referendum is not just a vote in support of Yasuní; it is a resounding “yes” to life itself, encompassing their own lives and the well-being of humanity as a whole.

Para leer en español, haga clic aqui.

How can climate reparations play a role in fighting for climate justice and potentially addressing historic injustices committed against the most marginalized members of our societies?

No fear— is here to help cut through the noise, with help from five climate activists from across the Global South.

What exactly are climate reparations?

Climate reparations refer to a call for money to be paid by the Global North to the Global South as a means of addressing the historical contributions that the Global North has made (and continues to make) toward climate change. “It is important that the Global North own up to that responsibility of paying what they are due to the Global South,” says Nomhle Senene, a climate activist from South Africa organizing with  MAPA (“most affected people and areas”).

Indeed, countries in the Global North are responsible for . Despite this, countless studies have shown that countries across the Global South are facing the sharpest end of the consequences when it comes to climate change—from  to  and .

“Climate reparations are also about the need for acknowledgment and accountability for the loss of land and culture—and how that has affected us in the Global South—as a result of climate change,” Farzana Faruk Jhumu, a climate activist organizing with Fridays for Future Bangladesh, adds.

Acknowledgement and accountability for the destruction caused by the Global North are inherent to the nature of climate reparations. This element of accountability is what differentiates climate reparations from “climate aid.” “H��storically, the Global North has this debt to us, and that’s why they have to pay,” Farzana tells gal-dem.

What could climate reparations look like in practice?

There are different forms that climate reparations can take. Mimi Sheller, dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, , referring to a negotiation between governments internationally.

Under a corrective justice model, the moral responsibility of those most responsible for the climate crisis (the Global North) paying compensation to those least culpable (the Global South) forms the legal basis for payments to be made. 

Sheller describes one proposed practical mechanism—an “international compensation commission,” which would receive claims from countries affected and provide money that could be used for things like disaster risk reduction, insurance, and adaptation.

She also outlines a second form, which would involve suing multinational corporations responsible for climate destruction—such as oil companies—under international law, with the money recouped being channeled into similar initiatives as above.

Irrespective of the mode in which climate reparations are given, those most affected by climate change in the Global South should have autonomy over how funds are spent. 

“T������ are countries within the Global South that have regimes and military rule,” Ili Nadiah Dzulfakar, co-founder of Klima Action Malaysia (KAMY), says. “We need systems of monitoring and evaluation; otherwise, the money will go into the deep pockets of corruption.”

Why do climate reparations matter for climate justice?

The call for climate reparations is one of the key elements within demands for climate justice—a framing that places justice and the movement toward an equitable world at the core of climate activism. 

“Climate reparations directly benefit those affected by systems of oppression, such as colonialism and racism—i.e., those who are also the most affected by the climate crisis,” Regina Cabrera, a climate activist with Fridays for Future Mexico, says. 

“We can’t talk about reparations if we don’t also talk about inequality and how the economic system destroys communities all around the world, and marginalize—for example—Indigenous communities, racialized communities, and queer people,” fellow FFF Mexico activist Náme Villa del Ángel adds.

“For example, Haiti [was] destroyed economically for centuries by France because of systems of debt. Right now, we are seeing the same stuff over and over again in Latin America. 

“Argentina is a country that has been deprived over and over again by debt in the last 20, 30 years. Mexico is another example of a country where a large percentage of our exports go directly to the United States.”

“Reparations are a way of understanding our political context through the framework of decolonisation.”&�Բ�����;

Climate reparations are not a panacea but are better understood as one key part of a system of wider measures—including , a just transition away from fossil fuels, and ending corporate impunity—to achieve climate justice globally.

Climate reparations can be a starting point for radically reorienting our world toward climate justice. By speaking of reparative justice, we bring the wider injustices inherent to capitalism and neocolonialism into sharp focus.

How can we ensure climate reparations are truly in the service of justice for the Global South?

Currently, the majority of climate finance given to the Global South by the Global North is in the form of loans—. “When we take on loans, we have to pay interest—which means paying extra money,” Farzana explains.

“The emitter countries should be paying us, because they are the ones causing this climate crisis,” she says. “Not the other way round, as it is currently due to interest rates.”

Indeed, the use of loans simply accrues profits for the Global North as it collects interest while exacerbating the already sizable debt of the Global South—further entrenching global inequity between the North and South. 

that low-income countries—many of which are located in the Global South—spend five times more on external debt payments than on projects to protect their citizens from the impacts of climate change.

So, how can climate reparations work to be a just alternative?

“Climate reparations should not be given in loans; they should be grant based,” Nadiah says. Grant-based climate finance would help to avoid further ensnaring Global South regions within these deeply unfair systems of global debt.

What is the role of debt cancellation in the context of climate reparations?

Debt cancellation also plays an important role in the context of climate reparations and justice, and this extends beyond just the debts accrued through climate finance. “If we do want to cancel debt, it should not only be the ones related to climate—we need to look at debt as a whole,” Nadiah says.

“When we talk about debt in the Global South, we need to understand that it will not be canceled just by asking politely,” Náme adds. “[Debt] is intended by the Global North, via the IMF and the World Bank, for dependence from the Global South on the Global North.

“. So, they are not democratic institutions. They are colonial.”&�Բ�����;

We need to stop listening to the Global North, says Náme, and instead actively organize to disrupt its way of controlling our places. This will also mean having to rethink economic policies in the Global South. In addition, she adds, there has to be “community solidarity economics between Global South countries,” which will “put pressure on the Global North to cancel the debt.”

The call for climate reparations must be paired with debt cancellation to achieve a truly equitable climate justice for all. Without radically transforming the economic conditions that keep the Global South indebted to the Global North structurally, reparative justice cannot be realized. 

What is some of the activist work happening in the Global South to support the call for climate reparations? 

“I work with a lot of Indigenous communities here in Malaysia as a grassroots organizer, and I do some policy work too,” Nadiah tells gal-dem.

“We get [the communities] to document as much as they can about what they’ve been losing due to climate change. I think it’s really important to document this, and some of the ways that we show it to the world is ”

Nomhle’s work, too, in South Africa involves creating spaces in the conversation for those most affected by climate change to be heard, and empowerment through education around issues of climate justice.

“I work in an education alliance, talking about climate change. We have poverty, hunger, a water crisis—so sometimes climate change ������’t recognized as the most pressing issue, because there’s so much going on,” she says.

“Obviously, it is a serious issue, and it is affecting countries like South Africa. We need to see that these issues are connected to climate change and wider socioeconomic issues as well.”

How can we show solidarity here in the Global North to support the call for climate reparations? 

Creating change starts with reflecting on your positionality and place in the world. “You need to acknowledge your privilege to show solidarity,” Farzana says. “Don’t have a savior complex, and adopt a mindset of learning and relearning.”

Organizations such as , , and the  have a wealth of resources and do campaigning work around these issues that you can get involved with.

The  also had an exciting array of fringe events and actions—both in-person and virtually—across the duration of the COP26 conference. 

“It is important for us to form alliances between people who have been historically oppressed and marginalized from the Global North and the Global South,” Regina says. “Because we are the people who can create change.”

Crucially, we must continue to center the voices of people and communities in the Global South when talking about climate action.

“The Global South are not voiceless—we are just not heard,” says Nomhle. “We can use our own voices; we don’t need anyone to speak for us.”

This story originally appeared in and is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

“When you have any kind of storm event, it disrupts life totally,” says Michael Taylor, co-director of the Climate Studies Group in Jamaica—a consortium of researchers from universities in the West Indies that aims to better understand the workings of local, regional, and global climate. “Climate is linked so strongly to our ability to develop and achieve the goals we aim for as a region.”

Many people and organizations are dedicated to developing and enacting solutions, including Jamaica’s budding blue-green economy—the informal network of sustainability entrepreneurs, regenerative ocean farms, and sanctuaries incubating on the island. Among them is the Portland Bight Protected Area (PBPA), that, since achieving its designated protected area status in 1999, has been an anchor for communities on the edge—not just of the island but also of the looming climate crisis.

Down by the Bay

“Bight” is an old nautical term to describe a concave coastal landmass that has a shelf and a shallow bay. Back in the 16th century, these characteristics allowed the Portland Bight to receive the first shipment of African slaves to Jamaican shores. The area long served as a health retreat, and one of its beaches, Hellshire, became the country’s premier tourist spot (until its shores receded dramatically in recent years). The Portland Bight has a rich ecological history too, and an array of unique natural resources like Salt River (the island’s only saltwater river). The area’s value to the country’s ecosystems is irreplaceable.

Today, the Bight spans a massive 1,872 square kilometers (723 square miles), including nine islands and cays. It holds 80% of Jamaica’s mangroves. All this biodiversity is contained within just 2 of the island’s 14 parishes—St. Catherine and Clarendon. So while it is the largest protected area in the country, what makes the Bight’s protected area special is its intimate connection and commitment to the local community.

The PBPA is run by its own dedicated foundation, the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation (CCAMF), which operates three fish sanctuaries with the aim of developing job opportunities that don’t involve fishing or burning dry forests. The foundation has a policy whereby all hired work—resource protection, water quality testing, project management, etc.—goes to people living in the community.

“The founding members of CCAMF came up with the idea of selecting an area with an environmental uniqueness and a cultural uniqueness,” says Troy Franklin, the tours and events coordinator for the foundation. “They wanted somewhere where they had both the environment and the people together to sustain it.”

But then in 2004, hurricane Ivan and subsequently hurricane Dean did major damage to the mangrove forests along the Bight. This major blow to the coastline’s protective barrier allowed waves to come further inland during the storms, which destroyed homes as well as property along the coast. Community members who had their own small farms lost crops, and the land became difficult to farm because of the excess salt left behind.

Recovery in the aftermath of climate change-induced disasters is very difficult for small islands and developing states like Jamaica. A decade is often not enough time for full recovery.

Still, the CCAMF and the community continued to come together. On World Wetlands Day, February 2, 2011, the foundation, along with community members, launched a replanting project. Ten years later, the project is considered a success story by many who live along the Bight. This section of coastline now has the largest and densest mangrove forest in the country. “I think the forest is offering more protection now,” says Antonette Davis, a fish vendor in Old Harbor Bay. “We might have less rainfall these days, but whenever it does, it doesn’t affect us as much.”

Communities along the Bight have also found other ways to bounce back from the storm damage. “It was a lot of people that lost their livelihoods. People are still recovering, slowly but surely. People are rebuilding, and some are moving away from the coast,” Davis says

People who have decided to stay in the Bight have been able to benefit from more sustainable income streams such as harvesting wild shellfish, which has increased since the regrowth of the forest.

The water- and wave-absorbing power of wetlands and the salt-absorbing power of the mangrove forests have also provided a kind of economic security for communities. People know their homes and farm fields are less likely to get washed away with the next storm. This has empowered these communities to invest in dry-forest conservation in the Bight as well, which creates income opportunities from things like apiculture (beekeeping).

Alternative Livelihoods

The CCAMF’s alternative livelihoods project has partnered with the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) to impact communities for the better. The partnership has led to an apiculture and honey production support initiative in the Bight, as well as an ecotourism program that will employ community members as guides and boat operators in the mangrove boardwalks and on the Salt River.

“Here in Salt River, we have a couple of people who are bee farmers. Selling honey not only serves as a way to make money outside of fishing, but the extra bees pollinating in the area increase the yield of certain crops,” says Marine Campbell, longtime resident of the Salt River community. “This year, the mango crop was more plentiful, and I believe it was because of the bees.” Even residents in Portland Cottage, one of the more remote communities along the Bight, report a similar but more modest interest in apiculture as a sustainable income stream.

Through efforts like the mangrove replanting, Jamaican communities have proven that commitment and teamwork are critical climate resilience measures. The dry-forest cutting and coal burning that used to be a means of income for many is being discouraged and phased out, with bee farming presenting as a more sustainable option yielding more benefits.

These days cutting down mangroves in the Bight is absolutely illegal and a punishable offense. Still, it’s not only police enforcement that has kept the area protected; an increase in public education plays its own role. According to Campbell, “I remember at one point they had a training by our church and we were invited. They taught us some of the importance of the mangroves and the different types. I would say people are more alert now when it comes to that.”

Community members are vigilant in their protection of the mangroves because they know what they stand to lose without them. The bond between the environment and the community remains strong, and the addition of management entities and government agencies such as NEPA helps to provide additional legitimacy to ensure these efforts continue.

The Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation’s director, Ingrid Parchment, is optimistic about the Bight and the work the organization has in store for it. She expects that the collaboration with the community will continue to grow as they welcome the participation of more community members and donors, as well as government and the private sector. She hopes that more and more people will visit the Bight, not only to learn about Jamaica’s natural history and resources, but also to understand more about climate change adaptation actions—and, critically, to meet the people who continue to call Portland Bight home.

This story was produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center.

“T������’s the gas odors, and then there’s the garbage odors coming from when they open the landfill and are actually dumping, or the trains unloading from New York City,” Gary McNeil  City, a local news site. “That gets a little worse in the summer, you’ll smell a much more pungent waste odor.”

McNeil heads , a nonprofit that has been organizing against the landfill, which residents say emits foul, . The organization  the town in which the landfill resides as well as the waste management company that runs it.

But in January 2022, the group took a new approach. It filed , claiming the site violated residents’ newly enshrined constitutional right to “clean air and a healthy environment.”&�Բ�����;

Just two months earlier, after years of advocacy, New Yorkers had voted 2-to-1 in favor of  to add a green amendment to the state constitution, making New York the third state to do so. (Pennsylvania and Montana passed green amendments through their own political processes in 1971 and 1972, respectively.)

Advocates say these amendments can be a powerful tool in advancing environmental justice. 

“The green amendment necessarily refocuses the government,” said Maya K. van Rossum, an environmental lawyer and founder of Green Amendments For the Generations. “It’s no longer [a question of] accepting pollution as a foregone conclusion and deciding what permit to issue for it. Government actually has to refocus its efforts to ensure they’re not infringing on this constitutional right.”

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued  that limits the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to restrict emissions. The court’s decision drives home the urgency of such constitutional protection, van Rossum said. 

Organizers and lawmakers are currently advancing green amendments in at least a dozen states across the U.S., including New Mexico, Maine, Hawai‘i, Washington, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. 

New Mexico State Sen. Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, who introduced a resolution to adopt a green amendment in her state, agrees with van Rossum. “With the recent West Virginia v. EPA decision, I’m worried about the Supreme Court gutting our federal agencies,” she said. “I think it’s important that the state step up, and this is one of the tools that we can use.”

In order to be most effective, van Rossum said legal rights to a healthy environment need to be included in states’ Bills of Rights. “If you have an amendment that says the people have a right to clean water and clean air, as determined by the State General Assembly, you haven’t changed anything. You just put in place pretty language,” she said. Inclusion in the Bill of Rights would make clean air and a healthy environment an inalienable right, like freedom of speech. (These amendments do not include  defining or quantifying what it means for air to be clean or an environment to be healthy.)

The push to secure the constitutional right to a healthy environment comes amid a growing awareness that pollution and climate change do not affect all communities equally. Black, Hispanic, and Native communities are exposed to higher levels of  than the general population and suffer higher rates of childhood asthma. They are also more likely to live in areas more vulnerable to  and .

In New Mexico, mining, fracking, and drilling operations, such as those taking place in the , are typically sited near communities of color, Sedillo Lopez said. “I actually had a colleague say, ‘Write off the Permian Basin, just call it a sacrifice zone and walk away.’ Well, the [communities near the] Permian Basin are ,” she said, adding that another  facing similar issues is majority Native American.

Sedillo Lopez said a green amendment would obligate the state legislature to assess the potential health and environmental impact of certain activities—for example, installing a fracking pipeline—before they begin. “The state, before granting the permits for a pipeline, would have to examine, is this pipeline strong enough?” she said. “Where is it going through? Is it near schools? Is it near farms? What is the impact if this were to leak? What [would be] the impact if this didn’t just leak, it exploded?” 

In January 2020,  near Carlsbad, New Mexico, contaminating the water on at least one family farm, sickening members of the family and their animals. Sedillo Lopez said a green amendment might have prevented the pipeline from being installed near the family’s water source in the first place.

Like green amendments around the country, New Mexico’s faces a difficult path forward. Sedillo Lopez  the legislation in 2021, and opponents have voted it down twice.

New Mexico’s prominent oil and gas industry poses a challenge to the proposed amendment, said Sedillo Lopez. “Unfortunately, oil and gas revenue is very important to the state. And that’s the headwind we’re facing,” she said, adding that the power of such special interests underscores the importance of transitioning to wind, solar, and other cleaner sources of energy and employing people in those fields.

Sedillo Lopez said she expects the legislation to go before the state legislature again when the next session starts in January.

As in New Mexico, environmental justice advocates in Maryland have been pushing for a green amendment of their own for years. In April, opponents of the proposed Environmental Human Rights Amendment prevented the legislation from advancing beyond committee for the fourth time,  broad language used in the amendment would “unleash a flood of litigation.”&�Բ�����;

Del. Kumar Barve, the chair of Maryland’s Environment and Transportation Committee,  about the amendment to Maryland Matters, a local news site.

“It’s better to have environmental regulations and enforcement handled by the executive and legislative branches of government, rather than the court system and juries decide these things, because these are complex issues that are not absolutist in their nature,” Barve said. 

Supporters of the legislation, like  of the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, say they are undeterred. “For people, especially communities of low income and of color, [a green amendment] is a way to say, ‘You’re not crazy,’” Campbell said. “Your right to clean air is just a basic, bare minimum.”&�Բ�����;

Like New Mexico, Maryland’s proposed green amendment could be brought before the state legislature again when the next legislative session begins in January.

New Jersey’s proposed green amendment has faced similar challenges, with opponents there also saying such legislation could open companies up to frivolous litigation. 

There, advocates like Kim Gaddy of Clean Water Action are pushing to get enough legislative support to put a green amendment on the ballot in the state’s .

“When you think about how we want future generations to be protected, we can’t have environmental sacrifice zones where, just because it’s Newark or a community that is low income or people of color, we can’t protect them,” Gaddy said. “We need a green amendment in the state of New Jersey to bring some relief to these communities who have suffered for too long.”

Montana and Pennsylvania show what is possible when citizens are given inalienable rights to a safe and healthy environment, van Rossum said, adding that those states have not seen a deluge of frivolous lawsuits. In those states, the law has been used, for example, to  and . Youth climate activists are currently , arguing that the state’s energy policy, which relies on fossil fuel exploration, infringes on their constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. The trial of  is scheduled to begin in February of next year.

(According to van Rossum, advocates in Montana and Pennsylvania have only begun to effectively use green amendments to address environmental injustice in the past decade or so.)

Enacting a green amendment is only a first step to ensuring citizens actually enjoy their newly enshrined rights, supporters say. “We can look at the right to free speech and freedom of religion, and we will still see abuses,” said van Rossum. “But because the constitutional right is there, we have a check on that misuse of power.”

Van Rossum said she plans to organize state by state. “[Eventually,] we’re going to reach a tipping point. That’s when we’ll go for the federal green amendment.”

This article originally appeared in and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

On Feb. 3, 2023, a headed to the Pedricktown plant in Southern New Jersey derailed and spilled hazardous materials—including vinyl chloride, a colorless gas that is used to produce PVC for garden hoses, toys, and water pipes—in the small rural town of East Palestine. Though Norfolk Southern cleaned up the site, industrial-size blue tanks still lined the pastures holding millions of gallons of toxic runoff, a stark reminder of the ongoing crisis.

East Palestine is a glimpse into our dystopian neoliberal futures—where a sleepy, rural town of 4,681 (as of 2022) with a median household income of $44,000 can turn into a disaster zone due to corporate negligence. Though most run through historically marginalized communities, any geographic region—rural or urban, middle class or impoverished—can become a sacrifice zone or “collateral damage” for big businesses.

Our activist group traveled to East Palestine to meet with the various community members attempting to hold Norfolk Southern accountable for the train derailment. We were there to connect those fighting Chessie, Seaboard, X (CSX) coal trains in South Baltimore to those holding Norfolk Southern accountable.

We gathered in a local community center, where East Palestine residents shared their experiences on a stage. They described the area before the disaster as “the best in small rural town life,” with streets lined with trees and charming houses and kids playing in well-maintained parks and little creeks.

Over pizza and salad, our activist groups learned from one another, strategized across borders, and mapped future plans for collaboration. It was an opportunity to solidify demands around universal access to health care, which could set a powerful precedent for other overburdened communities.

Disaster Response or Negligence?

Within hours of the derailment, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) deployed a team of trained emergency response personnel to East Palestine to aid state and local emergency and environmental response efforts. The Department of Transportation also arrived within hours to support the National Transportation Safety Board in their independent investigation of the derailment. The Department of Health and Human Services worked alongside state and local health departments to conduct public health testing and offer technical assistance.

However, East Palestine residents say the government response has been inadequate at best and negligent at worst. In our meeting, they often spoke about wanting more government involvement and attention. “We are tired of waiting for the Environmental Protection Agency and federal government to do something,” a weary resident explained.

Shortly after our gathering, in May 2024, Robert Kroutil, a scientist who spent four decades helping to create the ASPECT program, a high-tech plane the EPA uses to detect chemical compounds in the air, became a whistleblower. He argued that the deployment of was the “most unusual” he’s ever seen.

Though EPA Chief Michael Reagan praised the work of his agency, giving specific credit to the high-tech plane they used to detect chemical compounds in the air, Kroutil offers an alternative narrative. Typically, is to have the ASPECT plane in the air within hours of a chemical disaster. Instead, it was deployed five days after the chemical spill.

An East Palestine resident even told reporters that the person in charge of the flight that day had their for several hours, making her unreachable. Once EPA finally did arrive on the scene, residents were told that everything was fine and they could return home even though it still smelled like “sweet bleach.”

To Burn or Not to Burn

Shortly after the derailment, Keith Drabick, East Palestine’s fire chief, said the consensus in the command center was to in order to avoid a massive explosion. A month later, in National Transportation and Safety Board hearings, Norfolk Southern revealed that the real reason for the burning was that they wanted to as quickly as possible.

Ohio residents living within the area of the controlled burn were urged to evacuate and told they might risk death if they stayed. However, residents living 20 miles over the border in Pennsylvania weren’t notified of the upcoming burn or given information to help them make informed decisions about how best to protect their families.

The “” had adverse impacts on community residents in different ways. The health impacts range from skin lesions to cancers. “Unfortunately, the people it impacted the most were usually folks who had chronic health conditions, preexisting health conditions, women, and children,” says Hilary Flint, who lived about four miles away, in Enon Valley, Pennsylvania. While she wasn’t in the evacuation zone, she still decided to be cautious and spend the night in a hotel farther away. “If you looked in the rearview mirror, you could see the black plume from the vinyl chloride tankers,” Flint recalls. “It was very postapocalyptic.”

Flint could not afford to stay in a hotel for more than one night, so she was forced to return home. As she walked through the front door, she said, her eyes started to water and her skin turned red. “To this day, if I’m in my house, I am like a lobster,” she says. Flint later experienced , nosebleeds, headaches, and continuous flare-ups of her preexisting autoimmune disease. The only advice her doctor has been able to give her is to “not be in that home.”

For the first six months after the derailment, Flint worked an extra job so she could afford to occasionally stay at a hotel. Her boss at the time said her clothes smelled, and she would have to shower before she spent time with her boyfriend, who has chemical sensitivities. She calls this time “demoralizing.”&�Բ�����;

Flint, who is a cancer survivor, was afraid that being in her home could impact her remission. A few months ago, Flint’s doctors found non-cancerous spots on her lungs, which weren’t present during her previous scans. Flint now owes $15,000 in medical bills. “I never plan to pay them because it should be on Norfolk Southern,” she says. “If you do have a health symptom, and you don’t get an answer, and you keep getting referrals, it just keeps adding up.”

Flint is not the only person near East Palestine who’s experiencing medical difficulties after the derailment: Zsuzsa Gyenes, who lived about a mile from the derailment site, began feeling ill a few hours after the accident. 

“It felt like my brain was smacking into my skull,” she says. “I got very disoriented and nauseous. And my skin started tingling.” Her 9-year-old son, who has asthma, also became sick. “He was projectile puking and shaking violently,” she continued. “He was gasping for air.”

Gyenes’ family relocated to a hotel, which Norfolk Southern reimbursed for a time. The company also covered the cost of food and other expenses, including the remote-controlled car Gyenes bought to cheer up her son, who was devastated because he missed the Valentine’s Day party at his school. 

However, after several months, Norfolk Southern stopped reimbursing her expenses. Gyenes was continuing to cover the cost of a hotel while looking for a new home, but if she was unable to find a new place, she and her son would likely have to move into a homeless shelter. 

“Every rental application gets rejected due to my lowered income/credit from the mess of the past year,” Gyenes said in an email. “I’ve never been in this kind of position before, and I’ve been extremely depressed and overwhelmed about it.”

Gyenes now has a new apartment. She crowdfunded some of the costs and Norfolk Southern helped with the rest.

Doctors, Debt, and Settlements

On May 23, several weeks after we gathered in East Palestine, Norfolk Southern agreed to a Department of Justice (DOJ) settlement of $310 million. Norfolk Southern will be required to take measures to improve rail safety, pay for health monitoring and mental health services for the surrounding community, pay a $15 million civil penalty, and take other actions to protect nearby waters and critical drinking resources.

The DOJ settlement also allotted $25 million for a that includes medical monitoring for impacted individuals and mental health services for individuals. A separate class-action lawsuit was settled with Norfolk Southern for $600 million. The agreement will resolve all within a 20-mile radius of the derailment and, for those residents who choose to participate, personal injury claims within a 10-mile radius, court documents show.

However, residents feel this settlement is not enough. “I just think that it’s too soon to settle on such a low number, no matter how you were impacted, because you really don’t know what the future holds,” Jessica Conard, the Appalachia director for Beyond Plastics, told . “We really do need Norfolk Southern to take care of this, but also the federal government.”

Flint agrees, noting that the settlement doesn’t cover the debt accrued by families in and around the disaster zone. “Community residents have medical bills well over what they would receive in a class-action settlement,” she says. “This is a miserable settlement.”

Gyenes will not settle for medical costs yet because, as she said, “We got sick and still don’t have answers about the future.” She said she had no access to proper specialists or testing. The routine blood work Gyenes requested will not be covered, and she cannot afford the upfront costs. Norfolk Southern said they will not help offset these costs.

The next phase of relief is still up in the air: In February 2023, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown called upon the state’s governor to declare East Palestine a and authorize assistance for , which is essential for public health incidents. “I’m grateful for all that the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Ohio Emergency Management Agency, local fire fighters, and local law enforcement have done to respond to this unprecedented disaster, but it’s critical we act quickly to supplement those efforts,” Brown wrote. “Additional federal resources can and should play a critical role in helping our fellow Ohioans get back on their feet and ensure that their community is a safe place to live, work, and raise a family.”

For more than a year, East Palestine residents have also been pushing for President Biden to issue a disaster declaration for the area, which would, in turn, invoke . This would unlock a whole suite of federal resources that residents desperately need and immediately guarantee every resident emergency health care in the larger disaster zone.

“The people of this community had their lives overturned by 53 train cars and the negligence of a corporation that cut safety to enrich its bottom line,” Brown said in an . “It’s our responsibility to do everything possible to help them recover,” he continued. “Now it is your time to step up and provide the support that only FEMA can.”

In February, a year after the derailment, Biden visited the site, where he praised for their courage and resilience and called out Norfolk Southern for not taking proper precautions. However, his administration has still not invoked . Instead, in September 2023, Biden issued a different that directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to appoint a federal disaster recovery coordinator to oversee community cleanup.

“Now it’s more about the long-term systems that we need to rearrange so that no other community has to go through this,” Flint says. “How do we make sure there’s great health testing in the very beginning of things? How do we make sure there are good checks and balances? How do we make sure that other communities don’t have to look at the person who harmed them and beg them for money?”

Residents have formed the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers Coalition, a coalition of nearly 80 people who are mobilizing to pressure Biden to invoke the Stafford Act. Labor unions are also demanding Biden open up the Stafford Act to provide universal health care coverage to the entire impacted area, setting a precedent that would also open up possibilities for other communities impacted by environmental injustice to receive health care.

More Than Lip Service

The same corporate negligence Norfolk Southern displayed in East Palestine is happening in South Baltimore. Since a at the Coal Pier in Curtis Bay in 2022, the (a group of which I am a part) has been working with residents to organize against CSX open-air coal trains and piers that are compromising the health of the community of South Baltimore. We are utilizing , qualitative research methods, and other tools to hold CSX accountable for negligent practices.

Since our trip to East Palestine, Baltimore activists have been holding weekly meetings with the Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers to discuss the settlement and collective responses. The group plans to travel to Washington, D.C., on October 8 to continue demanding the federal government step in and provide fully funded health care to those who have been affected by the derailment.

Justice is not simply a payout; that is charity. Justice is working together across borders to envision new localized economies that protect human health and lay the framework for a transition away from fossil fuels and plastics.

After a year of feeling sick and searching for answers, Flint is not done.

“I’m delusionally hopeful,” she says. “I think it really helps to surround yourself with people who fight for the common good instead of what’s good for them [individually]. We, the people, in the end, will change the systems that hold us back right now.”

“It kind of looks like the end of the world at times,” said Elida Castillo, program director of Chispa Texas, a Latinx grassroots organizing program. This apocalyptic scene from 2021 plays out regularly in San Patricio County in Texas at a plastics manufacturing plant operated by Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, a joint venture between ExxonMobil and Saudi Basic Industries Corporation. 

The Growth Ventures plant is the largest ethane steam cracker facility in the world, making nurdles—small plastic pellets—that are the building blocks for plastic manufacturing. Gulf Coast Growth Ventures did not respond to a request for comment, but , these ground flares are compared to “a giant barbecue” used to burn off excess gas whenever nurdle production is started or stopped.

Castillo says the flares usually last about two days, during which time local community members have reported their windows shaking. Community members see a correlation between the plant and worsening health, too. “We have people who are dying from all types of cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, lung disease,” Castillo says. “The amount of kids with asthma in our communities … it’s always been high, but it just seems to increase every year.”&�Բ�����;

That’s in addition to the environmental impacts of plastic manufacturing. Castillo says most of the nurdles produced at the Texas plant are exported to China, where they are turned into plastic products. But in the past four years, in the Gulf of Mexico after having leaked from production facilities like Gulf Coast Growth Ventures. 

Gulf Coast Growth Ventures alone consumes to operate in the region, which has been under for the past two years. In March 2024, the region advanced into , which limit residential use of water sprinklers to one day every other week. Meanwhile, industries use up in Nueces and San Patricio Counties, according to the Texas Water Development Board.

The harmful intersection of environmental justice and plastics is keenly felt in communities of color like Castillo’s, where these industries are disproportionately concentrated. Around the world, frontline communities like this one are paying the price for plastics every step of the way: the production, manufacturing, purported recycling, pollution, and ultimate disposal of single-use plastics. 

of plastic is produced from chemicals that come from fossil fuels. In addition to nurdles, San Patricio County is also a major exporter of liquified natural gas, . , in the name of energy security, locking countries into an even longer term commitment to fossil fuels (and their emissions and pollution).

, but its contents are still murky and hotly debated. 

Marce Gutiérrez-Graudiņš is the founder of , a grassroots organization that works with Latinx communities to protect coasts and oceans. She has participated in the plastics treaty talks and says that has become a symbol of the plastics crisis in the public’s mind, but the problem is much, much more pervasive.

“The fact is, by the time that straw gets stuck in that turtle’s nose, it has left a wake of destruction in its path,” she says. “It is very sad, but that is only the last part of it.”

Can Countries Agree on a Solution?

Nearly 500 miles east of San Patricio County, between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and New Orleans, an industrial corridor along the lower Mississippi River has come to be known as “Cancer Alley” because of the concentration of petrochemical plants and refineries—about 150 industrial facilities—and the resulting , including cancer.

“Those communities are 47 times more likely to have cancer. So for them, what they need is for us to produce less [plastic],” says Erin Simon, vice president of Plastic Waste and Business at the World Wildlife Fund and —the fourth of five rounds of treaty discussions, which took place in April 2024 in Ottawa, Canada.

The talks have been taking place since 2022, when the United Nations adopted a to develop a legally binding instrument on plastic pollution. Confoundingly, the talks in Ottawa and were afforded more access than journalists. By the end of the negotiations, there was : reducing new plastic production. .

“When you walk into a bathroom and a tub is overflowing, you don’t start mopping. You have to turn off that tap,” says Jackie Nuñez, the founder of The Last Plastic Straw and advocacy and engagement manager for the Plastic Pollution Coalition.

Activists see any form of recycling without reducing production as deeply ineffective at addressing the underlying injustices of plastic. Chemical recycling, for example (which is being touted by in Washington), breaks down plastic waste and can potentially remake it to the same quality as virgin materials—an arguable material improvement over . But critics the process is just , creating more toxic output—along with all the negative health effects that accompany it. 

Many advocates say there is no place in a circular economy for single-use plastic, decrying plastic recycling as the recirculation of toxic chemicals, which then accumulate and exacerbate the problems. 

Recycling can only be a small part of the solution—if at all—because it is premised on magical thinking, according to Vivek Maru, founder and CEO of Namati, which aims to advance social and environmental justice through the law. “The U.S. has such an outsized influence on the global economy, and so I think it’s absolutely crucial for justice for communities here, and for communities abroad, that the U.S. take a bold stance and support a strong plastics treaty that is about reduction.”

“I want to see everyone on the same page”—whether that’s banning plastics, or putting fees on plastic bags, or otherwise regulating them out of the picture—“because then we can see a real shift in the market-side dynamics of those materials,” says Trey Sherard, the Anacostia Riverkeeper, who leads advocacy and outreach work to restore the Anacostia River in Washington D.C.

Maru and other environmental justice advocates, as well as environmental groups like Greenpeace, are calling for a strong treaty that will cut plastic production by by 2040. That means going a lot further than chemical recycling, which Gutiérrez-Graudiņš says “is wishful thinking at best and predatory at worst.”&�Բ�����;

Global South Impacts

On the other end of the plastic process, countries in the Global South have long borne the brunt of plastic waste. The World Wildlife Fund that low-income countries incur a total lifetime cost of plastic 10 times higher than that of rich countries, despite consuming almost three times less plastic per capita. 

Another pressing question in the ongoing treaty negotiations is whether higher-consuming countries will take commensurate responsibility for the plastic they create, consume, and throw away. Despite accounting for only 15% of the world population, consumers in the Global North account for

“One of the things we hear a lot is that we have to get this [treaty] done very quickly,” says Gutiérrez-Graudiņš, who attended all four sessions of negotiations to date—in Uruguay, Kenya, France, and Canada. “And I understand that it is a crisis, but I think that we have to do it the right way. Are we actually listening to the voices that are the most impacted? We have to look at the whole context of—I don’t like to say life cycle—the death cycle of plastics. We don’t want to be here 30 years from now looking at what could have been.”

The last day of talks in Ottawa went until 3 a.m. Many hours of deliberation were spent in working groups on particular issues so the following plenary, where decisions can be made, started late and ran long.

“We were all very tired and very hungry. But, at the same time, there’s a lot of excitement,” says Gutiérrez-Graudiņš. “All options are on the table. We can still—and we should—do right not just by our current generations but our future generations.”

Gutiérrez-Graudiņš remains optimistic for a binding treaty that could put a cap on plastic production. At the same time, she is concerned that the process requires a consensus, not just a majority vote. 

“We have 170 parties, and we can have one or two that are just very vocal and throw a wrench in the work of everyone else,” she says. 

With the last round of treaty discussions scheduled to take place in Busan, Korea, in November, the UN aims to have an agreement in place by the end of 2024, but there is a long way to go. It remains up in the air whether the treaty will include provisions to drastically reduce plastic production and address calls for distributive justice within and among communities disproportionately impacted by plastic.

Maru is advocating for a just transition, including a 75% reduction in plastic production that involves countries most burdened by plastic waste.

“T������ could be a real flourishing of industries that are more harmonious, more sustainable, to rise up and take the place of this toxic disposable industry that is poisoning all of us,” Maru says, pointing to the examples of raffia bags and gourds informed by his work in Sierra Leone.

Gutiérrez-Graudiņš continues to work toward solutions to the plastic problem in her community, including by advocating for a reusable bag initiative. She recounts the mock concern, the “condescension and paternalism” she and her fellow activists faced as lobbyists and pollsters told her that “people are too poor to care.” But these are the same people most affected by plastics, and

Back in San Patricio County, Elida Castillo and her community are fighting for more of a commitment to environmental justice. She said she is fighting against decades of misinformation and manipulation from the oil and gas industry, and now the petrochemical industry.

And the pushback is becoming more sophisticated everywhere, says Gutiérrez-Graudiņš. “In our everyday lives, we need to question things. Why are they speaking? What are they profiting? Where is this coming from? From me to you to everything we see, we have to become very critical and well-versed citizens and people.”

The imperative of persisting through pushback to make solutions happen is universal. That’s true for everyone, not just those in communities feeling the harshest effects of these plastic injustices.  “Just because we have these facilities where we live doesn’t mean your voice can’t also help us,” Castillo says. “What is happening where we live is impacting the world.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 4:06 p.m. PT on July 23, 2024, to clarify that Gutiérrez-Graudiņš has attended all four treaty talks, not just two.��Read our corrections policy here.

Officials feared runoff from the toxic ash could pollute local creeks once the rainy season hit, potentially tainting the drinking water supply for the region’s 700,000 residents.

In the aftermath of the fires, federal and state workers . But then, in Sonoma County, a coalition of fire remediation experts, local businesses, and ecological activists to cleanse the foundations of burned-out buildings with … mushrooms. The Fire Remediation Action Coalition placed more than 40 miles of wattles—straw-filled, snakelike tubes designed to prevent erosion—inoculated with oyster mushrooms around parking lots, along roads, and across hillsides.

Their plan? The tubes would provide makeshift channels, diverting runoff from sensitive waterways. The mushrooms would do the rest.

The volunteers, led by Sebastopol-based landscape professional Erik Ohlsen, are advocates for “mycoremediation,” an experimental bioremediation technique that uses mushrooms to clean up hazardous waste, harnessing their natural ability to use enzymes to break down foreign substances.

In the last 15 years, fungi enthusiasts and so-called “citizen scientists” have deployed mushrooms to clean up in the Amazon, in Denmark, in New Zealand, and polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as , in Washington state’s Spokane River. Research suggests mushrooms pesticides and herbicides to more innocuous compounds, remove heavy metals from brownfield sites, and . They have even been used to heavy metals from contaminated water.

It’s the root mycelia that do all the work, says Daniel Reyes, founder of the Austin, Texas-based science and education company MycoAlliance, referring to the threadlike network of roots that connect species of fungi. “Compared to an apple tree, the mushroom we see growing above ground is the apple, and the mycelium is the tree itself. Mycologists focus on the mycelium,” he says.

Mycelia consume their food externally, by secreting powerful enzymes that break down molecules. In other words, they “digest” whatever substrate, or surface, they’re growing on, converting it to nutrients and—depending on the substrate—edible mushrooms.

Proponents say it’s a natural, more benign, and potentially cheaper alternative to the “scrape-and-burn” approach to environmental cleanup, which involves digging up contaminated soil and incinerating it.

The problem with that traditional approach is that it can remove potentially fertile topsoil, says Theresa Halula, who teaches mushroom cultivation at Merritt College in Oakland, California. Mycoremediation, on the other hand, she says, can help clean up toxic sites while actually improving soil fertility.

So why isn’t mycoremediation a more common practice?

Current mycoremediation solutions simply work too slowly to be embraced on an industrial scale.

One reason, Halula says, is that federal regulations require the removal of 100 percent of targeted contaminants within a short time frame. Current mycoremediation solutions simply work too slowly to be embraced on an industrial scale. “In nature, mushrooms break down all kinds of substances, and we’re just beginning to look at this more closely in the lab and in field studies,” she says. “But we don’t yet know the speed of the breakdown, and how effective that breakdown is.”

As a result, most mycoremediation projects are undertaken at the local level, like the Sonoma County project.

“Mycology is very neglected as a science, and mycoremediation is currently very site-specific,” says Peter McCoy, a self-trained mycologist viewed by many of his adherents as a founder of the . (His book, Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing and Working With Fungi, helped give the movement its name.) McCoy says there’s no one-size-fits-all method for applying mushrooms to biohazard sites. Reactions vary depending on species of mushroom, contaminants present, and local growing conditions, which means treatments must be customized and that further exploration is likely necessary.

“Hopefully, we’ll develop enough anecdotal evidence for certain common pollution scenarios that we can build off-the-shelf protocols. But we’re not there yet,” McCoy says.

Like other subfields of bioremediation, mycoremediation has failed to attract much investment. “This is an inherent problem in the bioremediation industry,” says William Mohn, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia who specializes in microbial degradation. “We are not producing a product that people want to buy. We are producing something that companies are sometimes forced to do. It’s hard to make a great business case for it. Or, quite frankly, a case for academic research.”

Funding is so hard to come by, Mohn says, that he left the bioremediation field. “It’s easier to find funding for other types of research,” he says.

That means, as McCoy puts it, “it falls on citizen scientists and garage researchers to do the work.”

Some of those citizen scientists are recruited by Tradd Cotter, a microbiologist who travels the country spreading the gospel of mycoremediation. “I tell people that the first thing we have to do is find mushrooms that break down the stuff we want to break down. And when we find mushrooms doing extraordinary things, we want to clone them,” he says.

During one of his presentations, a participant said he had seen a mushroom growing on a bowling ball. Cotter asked the class, “Is this a mushroom we want to study, and why?” A young boy piped up to say, “Yes! Because it eats plastic!”

A DIY spirit of informality pervades mycology culture, in part by disposition and in part because there is no other choice. 

Cotter, who runs Mushroom Mountain research lab in South Carolina, says he receives packages almost every week—usually dried mushrooms along with letters describing where they were found—from people hoping to contribute to his research. “There are thousands of people out looking for mushrooms doing strange things. People really do want to help. It gives them a sense that they are contributing, even if they’re not a microbiologist.”

He likens effective mushrooms to janitors with giant sets of keys—enzymes—that break down molecules. “If you have one key, you might be a mushroom that will only grow on a very specific type of wood. Another mushroom from the same species could have a huge key set—perhaps it can grow on oak, plastic, or oil,” Cotter says. “We want to screen the fungi with huge key sets to see what they can eat: oil, herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic compounds.”

Beyond the work being done in these independent labs, enthusiastic amateurs are conducting their own projects in the field. According to Cotter’s lab partner, Leif Olson, “It’s happening out of necessity. People see all these environmental issues, and they want to do something about it. They hear that oyster mushroom mycelia can clean contaminated water, and they are eager to practice this knowledge.”

McCoy founded the Radical Mycology Mycelial Network, an online community of so-called “mycoevangelists,” in an attempt to harness that enthusiasm. Members exchange information, uploading geotagged photos of mushrooms taken in the wild for public research. While the decentralized nature of the group makes it difficult to gauge the size of the community, McCoy’s Mycelial Network contact page lists groups in California, North Carolina, and Washington state; “nodes” in the U.S., Canada, and United Kingdom; and “hyphal tips” of individual mycoevangelists in 14 states. Sometimes, they even get together in person. This past summer a group of over 600 radical mycologists gathered in the hills of rural Oregon to talk mushrooms, share knowledge, and, as New Food Economy contributor Doug Bierend it, generally “let their fungus flags fly.”

Despite their zeal, many fungi enthusiasts treat empirical design and data collection as an afterthought. In its December 2018 progress report, Fire Remediation Action Coalition’s Ohlsen said that the team didn’t take the time to implement scientific design principles, such as setting up control areas, measuring pretreatment toxin levels, or developing and following protocols like measuring and controlling the amount of mycelia in each wattle. Furthermore, the volunteers were not trained scientists, and the coalition didn’t have the resources to design and conduct a scientifically valid study.

In other words, a DIY spirit of informality pervades mycology culture, in part by disposition and in part because there is no other choice. But if the movement is going to realize its potential, its loose community of adherents may need to find ways to formalize their work.

Ohlsen expressed the hope that more scientists will bring empirical design expertise to future mycoremediation projects and encouraged nearby communities to start planning now for the next wildfire season so that data collection can be cemented into future fire remediation protocols. Unfortunately, he predicts, coming fire seasons will provide plenty of “tragic opportunities” to do so.

This article was originally published by . It has been edited for è������! Magazine.  is a nonprofit newsroom covering the forces shaping how and what we eat.

It was 2007, and the fracking industry was just beginning to take hold in southwest Pennsylvania. The then-fledgling industry was not really on Lynch’s radar; between raising a daughter and working full-time as a therapist, she had her hands full. Things got even busier when she had her son in April 2009 and he began suffering from frightening wheezing spells when he was 6 months old, requiring periodic medical attention.

“Honestly, I really had very little understanding of what was going on in the region,” she says.

Just before her daughter was set to start kindergarten, Lynch and her family moved half an hour away to Indiana Township to be close to a good school and have more space to play outside. The neighborhood had everything the growing family could hope for, with a park to play soccer and softball and a creek for summertime wading.

A couple of years later, however, she learned via a neighbor’s Facebook post that the fracking industry had quietly placed a in her community, just above the local park. Infuriated and inspired to act, in 2018, Lynch joined up with the local chapter of the national environmental advocacy group , where she now works as a part-time organizer.

Lynch and her fellow organizers were not able to shut down the well pad, but they did win more protective ordinances for the township, shielding approximately 85% of its land from future drilling.

Now, though, there’s another threat lurking at Lynch’s door: a plastics manufacturing plant that Shell Oil is constructing just an hour away, on the banks of the Ohio River.

Shell’s ethane-cracker plant, which it began building in 2017, is set to open later this year, but the company has not yet announced a firm date and did not respond to a request for comment. The first facility of its kind in Appalachia, it will use extreme heat to “crack” ethane, a byproduct of fracked gas, into ethylene, a building block for manufacturing plastic.

The facility will produce more than 1 million tons of plastic pellets per year, which will be used to make products ranging from phone cases to auto parts. As it does, the facility will spew hundreds of tons of dangerous compounds into the air while also emitting . And it will be fed by the fracked gas from thousands of wells peppered across Appalachian communities—communities like Lynch’s.

From Gas to Plastic

The fossil fuel industry is a powerful political and economic force in Pennsylvania, and Lynch’s organizing has been an uphill battle. In recent years, though, the market has been on her side.

In the roughly 15 years since fracking first came to Appalachia, gas has become a far riskier investment. Until Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, growth in global demand was on the decline, especially amid the spread of COVID-19. One even found that Appalachian gas may never be profitable again.

In plastic, however, the fossil fuel industry sees a chance to turn itself around, solidifying demand for fracked gas in the region for decades to come. Local officials are on board with the scheme—they awarded Shell one of the in national history.

Advocates are particularly concerned because the Shell cracker plant ������’t meant to be the sole plastic plant in the region. Rather, it is part of a plan to transform Appalachia’s Ohio River Valley into a plastic and petrochemical hub, with cracker plants, storage facilities, and gas pipelines erected across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky.

“These plants don’t stand alone, and they require a high volume of natural gas to do the work that they do,” Lynch says. “So when you think about the Ohio River Valley and the potential for these sorts of very large polluters to become more and more common, it really does become a more concerning story.”

Health Impacts

In Lynch’s township, gas companies are currently extracting gas from . But six more are permitted for future use if the industry decides to develop them, and as demand for ethane increases to supply the cracker plant (or plants), she is concerned that the number could rise. 

Nearby areas, many of them more economically depressed, are far more open to drilling than hers. The most fracked county in the state is Washington County, where the poverty rate is higher than it is in . But as demand grows, Lynch says, fracking is expanding.

“[Washington County] is where fracking really started in southwest PA, so it’s the most concentrated,” she says. “What we’re finding is, as they’re looking for places to expand, we’re the next generation of areas that they’re coming to.”

Since emissions don’t respect borders, pollution from nearby municipalities could spread across the region. The air in the area is already : A found that Allegheny County, which comprises the greater Pittsburgh area, including Indiana Township, is in the top 2% of areas in the U.S. for cancer risks from air pollution. 

Fracking—shorthand for “hydraulic fracturing”—involves pumping chemicals, such as benzene, antifreeze, and diesel, deep underground to fracture shale deposits and release the gas stored within them. The process releases airborne benzene, formaldehyde, particulate matter, and ammonia, which have been to respiratory ailments and other illnesses.

There is no way to determine whether fracking contributed to Lynch’s son’s lung issues due to his proximity to fracking operations, but the practice has been to shortness of breath, worsened asthma, and other respiratory ailments.

There are other health impacts to worry about too. Used fracking chemicals often get —a concern that some and authorities have ignored. 

Drilling into shale for gas can also release radioactive materials, like , that have been buried for millennia. In recent years, of children have contracted rare cancers, including Ewing sarcoma, in southwest Pennsylvania. Researchers exposure to radiation could be responsible.

“Fracking makes people sick. It makes people very sick,” says Ned Ketyer, a retired pediatrician and board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, a physician-led organization focused on environmental health.

With the imminent opening of Shell’s cracker plant, Ketyer says there will be even more risks to health on the horizon from the plant’s emissions, including nitrogen oxide, ozone, and volatile organic compounds, as well as the increased demand for fracked gas.

Ketyer has spent years raising the alarm about the dangers of fossil fuels, but despite the evidence that gas is harming locals, he’s found that not everyone is interested in pushing back.

“This is an area where people have lived for generations, extracting fossil fuel and supporting the industries that extract fossil fuels,” he says.

Challenges

Growing up in the Pittsburgh suburbs, Lynch didn’t think much about pollution. Neither, she says, did her family members—even those who were exposed to it each day at work. Her grandfather, for instance, was an electrical engineer in the steel industry.

“He used to tell a story about how when he would get up in the morning, he would put on his white shirt to go to work, and when he would come home in the evening, the shirt would be gray,” she says.

Polluting, fossil fuel-based industries—coal, steel, and now gas—have long formed the backbone of the region’s economy. The resulting public desensitization to pollution has posed difficulties in local environmental organizing. So have Shell’s claims that the plastic industry will put people back to work. In southwest Pennsylvania, the unemployment rate is significantly .

“We are often prepared to trade our health for jobs,” says Lois Bower-Bjornson, field organizer for Clean Air Council, who lives in southwest Pennsylvania’s Washington County.

Amid , local unions have been overwhelmingly supportive of the cracker plant. But while Shell once claimed the facility would create of jobs, that projection later dropped to . 

Matt Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project, a coalition of environmental and public health groups focused on the Pittsburgh region, says that even some residents who are skeptical of the fossil fuel industry’s expansion plans are nervous to publicly take a stand. They fear backlash not only from their neighbors, but also from the industry or its government allies.

“T������’s a cultural history where people have learned through multiple generations that it’s better to just go along and get along and not raise up these issues—that if you want to be able to survive in this county, you keep your mouth shut,” he says. “That’s what we run up against. That is a legacy of [the region’s] industrial past.”

Resistance

Despite the challenges, a small yet vibrant movement in southwest Pennsylvania is fighting plans for gas and plastic expansion: holding , and , and mobilizing of people to testify at hearings.

They have achieved some wins, including the fact that the cracker plant will on-site.

taken emissions tracking , using both naked-eye observations and low-cost monitors to track pollution to ensure Shell is complying with regulations.

Beyond fighting the Shell plant itself, Lynch has also been advocating for a fairer regulatory environment, pressuring the federal government to keep its promise to instate and advocating for the state of Pennsylvania to join a , two measures that could lessen local pollution.

Activists are also working to boost public awareness of the dangers of fracking and plastic. Bower-Bjornson of the Clean Air Council, for instance, tours to introduce the public to the human impacts of fracking, showing attendees well pads and compressor sites and introducing them to people impacted by their pollution. 

Like the planned petrochemical hub, the movement for a healthier and safer environment . This varied opposition is necessary, since there’s no single policy that can take down the fossil fuel industry, says Dustin White, a senior campaigner on plastics and petrochemicals with the Center for International Environmental Law.

“T������’s no one thing that’s absolutely gonna stop it all,” he says, instead calling for a “death by 1,000 paper cuts” approach.

White, who lives in West Virginia, says this approach also includes thinking bigger by advocating for a total ban on a petrochemical build-out. Just as important is helping people envision more just and sustainable systems, where neither communities nor materials are treated as disposable: “A more regenerative economy,” he says.

It’s clear the current economic system for most working-class people in Pennsylvania. It may not even be sustainable for the fossil fuel sector. and alike have predicted that, due to a variety of market factors and increasing concern about the climate crisis, the petrochemical build-out is far from a safe financial bet.

Rather than pouring public money into projects that put Pennsylvanians’ health and the climate on the line—and that could be doomed to collapse anyway—activists say officials should invest in more sustainable industries. Research shows that investments in renewable energy, for example, could create each year in the state.

Lynch fears that if her local economy doesn’t change quickly, the region—and the planet—she calls home could become unlivable by the time her kids are grown. But she gains motivation from knowing there’s another path.

“I think about the oil and gas industry in Pennsylvania, but I also think about all the amazing opportunities we have to protect this region and to remind people that our health and our well-being [have] value,” she says. “It’s the project of a lifetime.”

The Byhalia Pipeline planned to run through my childhood neighborhood—a predominantly Black community. We are already suffering from 17 toxic facilities and have a . Both of my grandmothers, who lived in southwest Memphis, have died of cancer. 

The pipeline company’s spokesperson went on record saying that they chose my home for a pipeline because it was “the point of least resistance.” Or, in other words, they believed my community—because it was predominantly Black—would not have the power to fight.

I had never fought a multibillion-dollar crude oil pipeline company, let alone two. I had never even called myself an activist before. But I had to do something. And so I galvanized, organized, and mobilized resistance, along with my family, leaders of the southwest Memphis Black neighborhood associations, and two landowners who refused to sell their property to the pipeline company: Clyde Robinson and Scottie Fitzgerald. 

We launched our movement to breathe clean air and end the reign of corporate power and pollution amid the Movement for Black Lives chanting “we can’t breathe” and a pandemic disproportionately killing Black people and lower-income people. After months of multiracial and multi-socioeconomic coalition building across the country, fierce pipeline opposition from Memphians, negative national press coverage about the pipeline and environmental racism, legislation being proposed at the county and city level, and court cases challenging eminent domain, the companies canceled the project. 

This cancellation sent shockwaves through the oil and gas industry. There was, in fact, strong resistance to pipelines and fossil fuels in Black and Brown communities.

This story is not just about me or my community. Yes, we care a whole lot, because it was our hometown at stake. But we aren’t the only ones who live on planet Earth. We did it because we care about everyone. The Byhalia Pipeline win is about a bigger pattern happening across the country: Everyday people, who had no plans to become activists, are securing wins to keep oil and gas pollution out of their communities and our climate.

Take for example, local and Indigenous groups, like 7 Directions of Service, POWHR, Appalachian Voices, and West Virginia Rivers, who have formed massive opposition to the proposed 304-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) that would cut through the heart of their homelands in Appalachia. If approved, the pipeline would carry annual emissions equivalent to . These protesters have been organizing for eight years, and the pipeline has had the backing of one of the most powerful men in Washington in 2022: Sen. Joe Manchin. 

In late September, Sen. Manchin of his proposed permitting reform bill, which would have allowed the MVP to go forward. The bill also would have gutted the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) and made it easier for other oil and gas infrastructure to be built.

Sen. Manchin is not known for giving up easily. It took months to get him to reverse course and support the Inflation Reduction Act, the largest piece of climate legislation in the country’s history. And that was only agreed to on the condition that permitting reform would follow. So what caused him to abandon the permitting reform bill so quickly? 

Within weeks of a leak of his proposed bill, local and Indigenous groups had mobilized their powerful multiracial and economically diverse regional and national coalitions fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Leaders organized from the front lines, and we were joined by some of the biggest environmental, progressive, and climate justice groups in the country.

Bold leaders, like Sens. Sanders (a Democrat from Vermont), Merkley (a Democrat from Oregon), and Kaine (a Democrat from Virginia) and Reps. Grijalva (a Democrat from Arizona), McCollum (a Democrat from Minnesota), and Cohen (a Democrat from Tennessee), had our backs. MVP is now on a lifeline thanks to thousands of people participating in dozens of public rallies, direct actions, lobbying and advocacy, coordinated sign-ons, and media traction. Together, we forced Sens. Manchin and Schumer (a Democrat from New York) to remove their dirty side deal from the Senate floor for a vote, and renewed our fight to end the Mountain Valley Pipeline.

Some commentators have argued that environmentalists made a mistake by forming opposition to the MVP, because the permitting reform could have also helped clean energy infrastructure. But the National Environmental Protection Act doesn’t impact the vast majority of renewable energy projects. Instead, activists just showed the world that Manchin’s bill was a false choice. We don’t have to build more pipeline infrastructure to expand clean energy infrastructure. We can secure responsible permitting reform that ensures communities of color and poor communities are not sacrifice zones. At the same time, we can rapidly build the clean energy infrastructure we need in America. 

The Byhalia Pipeline win and successful setbacks to MVP’s development show that frontline groups are gaining against oil and gas companies. We all have power. When we work together, combining forces—the grassroots and big greens, East Coast and Deep South, Black and Indigenous—we all win. And that brings us closer to building a livable climate and an environmentally just future. 

But make no mistake: Fossil fuel companies will ensure this permitting reform bill will rear its ugly head again. Some Democrats and Republicans are already planning to reintroduce it later in the year. 

We will not be their path of least resistance. We will be ready.

The Om Sleiman farm in the village of Bil’in is part of a growing agroecology movement in the occupied West Bank that is turning to sustainable farming as a way to resist the Israeli occupation and stay rooted to the land. Established in 2016, Om Sleiman—Arabic for “ladybug”—aims to connect Palestinians to the produce they consume and to promote food sovereignty.

“We share the yield of the farm with 20 to 30 members, depending on the season,” explains Loor Kamal, a member of Om Sleiman, as she prepares raised beds where eggplants, tomatoes, watermelons, peppers, and beans will be sown. The farm operates on a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, model in which members pay for their share of the produce at the beginning of each season, sharing both the yield and the risks of production.

One day in April, Kamal shows us around the property, which is located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli military control. Here vegetables are grown alongside olive and fruit trees, but Kamal, who works at Om Sleiman with a team of five other women, mentions that a part of the land is inaccessible. “In March, we were walking around the farm, checking the carob trees inside our land, and suddenly soldiers started shooting at us,” she recalls.

Growing food under military occupation has become increasingly dangerous as settler violence and repression escalate. Even with the world’s attention focused on the war in Gaza, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed since October.

Despite the dangers, Om Sleiman’s team is determined to continue their work. “We have to go on, even when there is fear, because our presence here is important,” says Kamal as she picks eggplants, apples, and mulberries from the farm.

The land on which they grow organic produce has special significance. The concrete wall that cuts through the West Bank expropriated hundreds of acres of Bil’in’s agricultural land in 2005. After years of protest and legal action, residents managed to regain about half of the lost farmland, a victory that turned the village into a symbol of popular resistance.

A part of the reclaimed land was donated for the establishment of this agroecology farm. For members of Om Sleiman, growing food in defiance of the encroaching wall and settlements is a way of continuing the struggle for freedom.

Agroecology As a Tool for Liberation

“If we want to be free, we need to plant our own food,” says Angham Mansour, who is from Bili’in and joined Om Sleiman two years ago. The farm aims to promote independence from the occupier’s economy but also to reconnect Palestinians with the land. “Farming is part of our heritage. Going back to the land is going back to our roots, to our identity,” she says.

Palestine is part of the historical region of the Fertile Crescent, seen as the birthplace of agriculture, where people started cultivating grains and cereals as they transitioned from hunter-gatherer groups to agricultural societies.

For Saed Dagher, a farmer and agronomist who started working with agroecology in Palestine in 1996, sustainable farming is a crucial tool for liberation. “As a farmer I am free when I don’t depend on outside inputs, when I produce the food in my land the way I see fit, with my own seeds, and the inputs that are locally available. I am not dependent on seed and chemical companies. And I don’t depend on the occupation,” he says.

Dagher is one of the co-founders of the Palestinian Agroecology Forum, a volunteer group aiming to spread ecological farming in Palestine. In the past decade he has noticed a growing interest in, an approach that tries to minimize the environmental impacts of farming by using local, renewable resources. This method reduces dependency on purchased inputs and prioritizes soil health and biodiversity.

According to Dagher, Palestinian farmers have practiced forms of agroecology long before the term was invented. “Traditionally, Palestinian farmers would plant olive trees with wheat, barley, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and garlic. In the same field, we would have fig trees, grapes, almonds. It was diverse,” he says. Palestinian farmers used to rely mostly on local resources and rain-fed agriculture, helping preserve local varieties in the fields, orchards, and terraced hills.

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948—through a violent process that entailed the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians—meant farmers lost most of their lands and livelihoods.

Since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, the remaining Palestinian territory became a for Israeli products. The local food system was transformed from a food-producing to food-buying one, deepening Palestinian dependence on the occupying forces.

In the decades since then, Palestine’s diverse agricultural heritage has been in decline, as Palestinian growing traditions have been increasingly displaced by monocultures and industrial agriculture, which are reliant on agrochemicals and genetically modified seeds, particularly after the Oslo accords signed in 1993.

“Israel wants to destroy Palestinian agriculture, so [Palestinians] become dependent on them and on humanitarian assistance,” says Moayyad Bsharat, project coordinator at the Union for Agricultural Work Committees, or UAWC, an organization supporting Palestinian farmers. “If Palestinians are food secure and don’t depend on Israeli products and Israeli markets, they will dream of freedom, and Israel doesn’t want it. It wants Palestinians as slaves working for them.”

The importance of food sovereignty has been highlighted by the catastrophic situation in Gaza over the past 10 months. According to human rights reports, Israel has been using starvation by deliberately blocking the delivery of food and by destroying farmlands.

As dependence on Israeli produce and agribusiness grows under occupation, so does the land grabbing. This year, Israel has 2,743 acres of land in the occupied West Bank to be state-owned—a move that paves the way for continued settlement construction.

“The occupation keeps trying to take the land from us, to restrict our access to it, and prevent farmers from reaching it,” Mansour says. “The goal is to make our lives here impossible, to make us leave. They want to uproot us.”

The systematic appropriation of land and water resources by expanding Israeli settlements, the separation wall, and the military have all alienated Palestinians from the land and caused the loss of native seeds and traditional practices. 

But despite farmers’ continuous dispossession and the widespread destruction of agricultural land, Bsharat says farmers haven’t been defeated. “We will rebuild again. We will support farmers with local seeds and continue our projects to build food sovereignty. We will use all our efforts to dismantle the colonial project by sowing local seeds, taking care of the land, and teaching our children not to forget.”

The Union for Agricultural Work Committees is collecting and distributing 60 varieties of heirloom seeds and is working on the rehabilitation of agricultural land in Gaza and the West Bank. In recent years, it has helped establish agroecology projects and trainings in some of the villages most affected by settler violence.

“We are still present in the land, despite the restrictions imposed on us and the violence of the settlers,” says Ghassan Najjar, who manages an agroecology cooperative in Burin, a village surrounded by extremist Israeli settlers who regularly attack Palestinian farmers, burning orchards and uprooting olive trees.

“Agriculture is resistance,” says Najjar, standing in a greenhouse where members of the cooperative grow cucumbers and tomatoes using agroecology techniques.

Despite the growing settler violence and repression, Dagher says he is motivated to “do more and more.” He considers the fact that many Palestinian workers have lost their Israeli jobs since last October to be “an opportunity to encourage more people to work in agriculture.”

The farmers at Om Sleiman will keep sowing the land, spring after spring. “These days when the situation is so difficult, we feel this project is even more important. We feel we have to continue, we have to be present,” Mansour says.

“Every day we come and we work the land because we have hope,” adds Kamal. “Because we believe that we will be free.”

These centers, which are used by cities such as New York to provide air conditioning for residents who don’t have it at home, are the result of a decadeslong fight against “environmental racism,” a term which refers to environmental injustice that occurs both in practice and policy. Factors like rising temperatures and a pandemic affect how comfortably people can live in their communities, and more often than not discomforts fall disproportionately on communities of color.

Young people have advocated for an intersectional approach to the climate crisis that addresses the realities of environmental racism. Here’s what to know about the unexpected effects of discriminatory environmental policies.

1. Living amid industry can affect mental health.

While it is acknowledged that living near landfills or toxic dump sites can disrupt physical health, less research is available on how this affects mental health. However, a 2007 study from Social Science Research found “sociodemographic, perceived exposure, objective exposure, and food consumption variables are significant predictors of physical health and psychological well-being,” and that there was “a significant relationship between physical health and psychological well-being,” specifically in low-income, Black communities near a hazardous waste site.

A 2005 study published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior also found that perceived exposure can affect the mental well-being of communities of color. “Residential proximity to industrial activity is psychologically harmful because many individuals perceive industrial activity negatively, as a potential health threat or a sign of neighborhood disorder,” the authors wrote.

2. Areas with higher temperatures within cities are the same areas that were segregated decades ago.

Neighborhoods with higher temperatures are the same areas that were subject to the racist practice of redlining, in which banks and insurance companies systematically refused or limited loans, mortgages, or insurance to communities of color.

According to NPR, in a study of 108 urban areas nationwide, the formerly redlined neighborhoods in nearly every city studied were hotter than those not subjected to redlining. The temperature difference in some areas was nearly 13 degrees.

In fact, according to analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, “counties with large African American populations are exposed to extreme temperatures 2 to 3 more days per year than those counties with smaller African American populations.” Those same counties are projected to experience about 20 more extreme-heat days per year by around 2050, according to the analysis.

“[Formerly segregated communities] tend to have less green space—fewer trees along the street, less access to parks,” Gerald Torres, a professor at Yale Law School and the Yale School of the Environment, tells Teen Vogue. “Urban areas tend to be hotter, in general, just because there’s more concrete that stores heat. But where they store heat and they don’t have the mediating environmental amenities, the places just get hot.”

This phenomenon explains the “urban heat island effect,” meaning areas are much hotter with fewer places to cool down. In 2019, Los Angeles hired the city’s first forest officer to increase the amount of shade in underserved areas by planting more trees. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti has described shade as “an equity issue.”

3. Environmental racism is a leading cause of death in communities of color.

Many factors threaten the well-being of minority communities, such as discriminatory policing and housing availability, but environmental discrimination is actually a main cause of mortality for these residents.

“Air pollution and extreme heat are killing inner-city residents at a higher rate than almost all other causes,” Scientific American reported. “And as average temperatures continue to rise—contributing to what scientists call the ‘urban heat island effect’—death and illness from the effects of climate change are expected to rise further.”

4. It is cheaper for a corporation to pollute communities of color than white communities.

“Research has shown that if you have a corporation who has violated environmental laws, the corporation is going to be fined. The fines tend to be lower in communities of color, especially Black communities and poor communities,” Dorceta Taylor, professor at the Yale School of the Environment and author of Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility, tells Teen Vogue. “Corporations, they’re not idiots—they can see this difference.”

Lower fines lead to more pollution, which often decreases the land value of existing homes near a factory or landfill. As a result, more industry moves into the area, creating a vicious cycle. Left with little opportunity for mobility and sparse political clout, the remaining residents are subjected to continually worsening living conditions.

“One factor that might be playing into this is whether or not the communities are able to organize and mobilize to push for the cleanup that they should be getting,” Taylor says, “or even know when these [cleanup] cases are going to court.”

5. Many environmental conservation organizations have racist founders or namesakes.

Some of the best-known environmental conservation groups have racist histories. For example, John Muir, known as the “father” of the national parks system and founder of the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Sierra Club, used offensive slurs and called Indigenous people he encountered on a walk “dirty.” John James Audubon, namesake of the famous bird conservation group, was a slaveholder. Henry Fairfield Osborn, a founder of the Save the Redwoods League, supported eugenics.

6. A lack of government and organizational diversity perpetuates the problem.

In a similar vein, many argue that a lack of diversity at climate conservation organizations and in government sectors affects whether or not an entity will rightfully put communities of color at the forefront of the conversation about climate change.

Larger environmental, nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) typically receive the most funding. These same organizations, across the board, are predominantly white.

“Where you have people from marginalized communities [in leadership], they’re going to cause you to ask questions you might not have considered,” Torres says. “You can think of it as, essentially, improving information flows so that decisions are better.”

7. Environmental racism doesn’t affect only low-income communities.

“Even if you are a middle-class, highly educated Black person in this country, you’re more likely to still be living beside or close to communities with hazardous waste sites than if you are white, working-class with low educational attainment,” Taylor says. “So, however we slice it, there is a ratio that is more correlated with exposure to toxics and hazards with race than with the class.”

In the notable 1978 court case Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., a Black neighborhood of homeowners in Houston sued a waste management company, arguing that a permit for a new facility violated their constitutional rights. A judge ruled in favor of the waste management company. According to sociologist Robert Bullard, who collected data for the lawsuit and has since been dubbed “the father of environmental justice,” of the plaintiffs in the case, 85% of the people owned their homes and were considered middle-class.

8. Minority communities often live in affected areas before hazardous facilities are built.

A study by University of Southern California sociology professor Manuel Pastor reviewed data for minority populations and move-ins before and after the arrival of toxic storage and disposal facilities in Los Angeles County from 1970 to 1990. Areas scheduled to receive waste factories were mostly minority communities; after the facilities arrived, there were no significant increases in the minority population.

A 2003 United States Commission on Civil Rights report also concluded: “It appears, therefore, that minorities attract toxic storage and disposal facilities, but these facilities do not attract minorities.”

According to Bullard, in Houston during the time of the Bean v. Southwestern case, all of the city-owned landfills and 75% of the city-owned incinerators were in Black neighborhoods, even though they made up only 25% of the population during that period of time.

“T������ is a deliberate attempt to move into people of color communities. So that path of least resistance tends to run through people of color communities—if you look in the South, you’ll find Black communities, Latinx communities, Native American communities that were there before,” says Taylor. “That big polluting factory came just before the waste dump was put beside their neighborhood.”

9. Environmental racism can also be expensive for people of color.

Energy and utility bills are a more subtle indicator of the ways that environmental policies can affect people unequally based on race. A paper from the University of California, Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas found that, when controlling for year, income, household size, and city of residence, Black renters paid $273 more per year for energy than white renters between 2010 and 2017.

Additionally, an American Public Radio report found that residents in Detroit and other cities near the Great Lakes with large Black populations pay a lot more for their water than those in a city like Phoenix, which pumps its water from 300 miles aways.

“[Communities of color] get higher bills because their houses are not as weather-tight and therefore use more energy to heat a similar space [as their white counterparts],” says Torres. “To reduce [energy] bills to marginalized communities, you would put in new weather stripping around the doors or double-glaze windows—things that are really low-tech. But [without these measures], the course of a year [can] generate enormous costs because of the loss of energy.”

10. United States policies aren’t just a United States issue.

Discriminatory environmental policies within the U.S. extend far beyond the borders of our country. According to reporting from Mother Jones, in Ipoh, a city in Western Malaysia, only half of the waste found at a dump site appeared to have originated in the country. The other half came from a variety of other countries, including the U.S. Much of the overseas waste was comprised of items collected for “recycling.”

Other countries, such as Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Thailand, and Taiwan, are subjected to similar waste dumping. Without a coordinated effort to combat dumping in the Global South, marginalized communities overseas are disproportionately affected by the polluting practices of the United States and other countries.

This story originally appeared in  and is republished here as part of , a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

“Working in a garden develops your relationship to the land,” says Aubrey Skye, . “Our ancestors understood that. Look at the old pictures. It’s etched on their faces. When you understand it as well, a sense of scarcity and insecurity transforms into a feeling of abundance and control—something we all need these days.” For several years, Skye ran a on Standing Rock, a reservation that straddles North and South Dakota. He created hundreds of productive plots, large and small, for fellow tribal members.

Tribes’ food-scarcity problems developed after signing treaties with the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. Under these agreements, tribes typically transferred land to the federal government in return for education, health care, and other services. The diminished tribal homelands that resulted, along with continual federal efforts to decrease Native land holdings, severely restricted the hunting, fishing, and other activities with which tribes had fed their people since time immemorial. To force tribes onto reservations, Skye adds, the United States purposely destroyed critical food sources, such as the huge buffalo herds that once roamed the Plains.

were decimated. Starvation and death ensued. Massacres, such as Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, killed additional American Indians, as did forced removals from homelands, with the Cherokee Trail of Tears and the Navajo Long Walk among the best-known. The injustices continue today. Oil and gas pipelines, mines, industrial animal farms, and other projects may be sited to imperil tribal lands rather than those of other peoples. Poverty, limited health care, and, in some areas, lack of running water for frequent anti-virus hand-washing, means the COVID-19 pandemic has hit certain tribes, notably the Navajo Nation, hard.

Growing Strength

Incessant disasters have created economic and social burdens, including hunger, that fall heavily on children. “These tragedies are so hard on kids,” says the Cheyenne River Youth Project’s director Julie Garreau. The project is on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, in South Dakota, just south of Standing Rock. “Don’t ever let people tell you children don’t know what’s going on,” she says. “The pandemic is creating enormous additional stress, beyond what they were already struggling with.”

Her program works to make up the difference. With its 2.5-acre garden, café, gym, and library, the organization has long provided children with good food and a safe place to learn and have fun. Now that tribal children are sheltering at home, the youth project’s garden and the sack meals her organization delivers ensure that, at the very least, they have healthy food each day, says Garreau, who is a tribal member.

“I’m so grateful,” she says. “We’re a nonprofit, and our funders contacted us—we didn’t go to them—and gave us support for meals with a hot entrée, juice, and a healthy snack like fruit or nuts. We started driving around in our pickup with food for 35 kids, then 50, then 75.” The youth project is working to get the word out. “We hope to reach 250 kids,” Garreau says.

Dream of Wild Health also focuses on youth as it restores the multitribal urban-Indian community of Minneapolis and St. Paul to physical well-being and a spiritual relationship to the Earth. “We grow leaders and seeds,” says Community Outreach and Culture Teacher Hope Flanagan, who is Seneca. “An urban upbringing can mean our youth lose track of our old way of walking on this Earth.” Dream of Wild Health helps the children relearn this knowledge, she says.

In the process, the group’s activities help the community reclaim food sovereignty—ready access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food—according to Executive Director Neely Snyder, a St. Croix Chippewa tribal member. Dream of Wild Health meets this need by distributing crops that it grows on its nearby 30-acre farm: It participates in a farmers market, delivers household shares of farm produce to locations in Native neighborhoods of both Minneapolis and St. Paul, and partners with other community organizations, such as the Minneapolis American Indian Center.

“Gardens represent so much more.”

Since the COVID-19 challenges began, innovation has been key. To continue to offer chef-led cooking lessons for youth, yet maintain social distance, Dream of Wild Health delivers ingredients to the children’s homes and runs the program via a video link. Virtual activities have proven popular. When a seed-saving and sacred medicines moved online, the typical 40- to 50-person audience for a live event burgeoned to some 220, Snyder says.

To grow real crops in a real garden requires getting out on the land—with a difference nowadays. This summer, Skye anticipates, reservation gardeners will either work alone or in groups practicing social distancing. Dream of Wild Health farmers are figuring out how student interns, whom they call Garden Warriors, can work on the group’s farm and maintain distance.

While gardening, Skye says, tribal gardeners will put into action traditional practices that arise from close observations of nature and the belief that humans, plants, animals, and other aspects of the natural world form a mutually reliant community. We are all related, Skye says. “Gardening and eating food you’ve raised give you a direct connection to Mother Earth.”

Gardeners are necessarily optimists. At a time when our world is so dangerous, the garden is a place of refuge. “We will come out of this crisis,” Garreau said in an email. “To do so, we must not stop planning and planting.” Taking cues from Native gardening practices can help even novice gardeners get growing in these difficult circumstances.

Follow Indigenous gardeners’ advice to grow your own plot, however small or experimental. At a time when stay-at-home orders continue to try and keep populations healthy, Garreau sums up the importance of sinking your hands into the soil: “Gardens represent so much more,” Garreau continued. “Food, yes, but a belief in our future. Gardens represent resiliency, strength, wellness, culture.”

1. Plot Your Success

Experienced gardeners may be comfortable planting big fields of their favorite crops. Skye has a nearly 1-acre plot just downhill of his Standing Rock home. But if this is your gardening debut—as it was for some tribal members he provided with gardens through the CDC project—ensure success by starting small. Try a few pots or raised beds, or perhaps a small in-ground plot, with easy-to-grow plants, he says. Good options might be tomatoes, peppers, green beans, radishes, summer and winter squash, onions, or leafy greens. “Don’t bite off more than you can chew!” Skye quips. 

2. Cultivate Plant Friendships

Many American gardeners know about the Three Sisters—in the celebrated trio, cornstalks serve as trellises for beans, which in turn fix nitrogen (fertilizer), while big, flat squash leaves conserve soil moisture and keep down weeds. Such plant groupings, also called , are expressions of cooperation and sharing, says the Mohawk director of the Traditional Native American Farmers Association, Clayton Brascoupé. “Your garden should be like a healthy forest, which has trees of various sizes,” he says. “Look at nature, and figure out combinations that mimic it.”

In his gardens at Tesuque Pueblo, north of Santa Fe, you can see peas twining up corn plants and basil rising above the broad, flat leaves of watermelon. “Experiment!” he says. “Plants can surprise you. One year, we discovered that garbanzos and corn really enjoy each other.”

3. Make Room for Hard-working Beauties

Embellish your garden with colorful flowers, particularly . “They attract bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other pollinators,” says Skye, adding that pollinators are an integral part of a plant’s life cycle. “Without them, the harvest wouldn’t happen, and we would be looking at extreme food shortages, not just occasional gaps. By giving pollinators flowers they like, we support them, just as they support us.”

4. Keep Crops Cozy

Got a plant that’s struggling? Give it a rock! Brascoupé explains that in Southwest Native gardens, rocks are commonly set next to seedlings or plants that need help. They act as heat sinks, smoothing out day-night temperature variations as they soak up the sun’s heat and release it in evening’s chill. The practice may have been more widespread, he says, appearing as far north as Iroquois gardens in the U.S. Northeast. It makes sense, he says; in a cold region, rocks protect seedlings from unexpected early-season frost.

5. Source Materials Locally and For Free

For no-cost drip irrigation, Brascoupé uses a fine needle to poke a hole in the neck of clean soda-pop bottles or milk jugs. He then fills the containers with water, replaces their caps, and pushes their pierced necks into the soil.

Conserve soil moisture and keep weeds down by surrounding the plants with mulching materials that would otherwise have been discarded. People spend time and money getting rid of cardboard, shredded office paper, lawn clippings, and leaves, Brascoupé says. “Tell neighbors, ‘I can take that off your hands.’ Build human relationships.”

6. Embrace Dandelions

Don’t banish dandelions. Welcome these supposed weeds! Their leaves are delicious and nutritious, and their taproots break up hardened soil, I learned from Native gardeners. My New York City backyard used to be so compacted, little grew there. I tried scattering dandelion seeds around the yard. They grew and blossomed, and soon earthworms moved in. The soil became soft, friable, and plant-friendly. Earthworms are at it 24-7, working on your behalf, according to Skye. “What more could you ask for?” he says.

7. Include Healing Herbs

Skye has a small medicine-wheel garden by his home, where he delights in growing echinacea, chamomile, comfrey, and other medicinals from seed he saves from one year to the next. Such circular plots are traditionally places to grow herbs, thereby experience their delectable flavors and the .

8. Save your Seeds

At the end of the season, of plants that thrived—and that you enjoyed—in your garden. You can help ensure your future food supply and, if you include unusual or heritage varieties, do your part to sustain biodiversity.

Seed-saving preserves history as well, Skye says. He called seeds time capsules. “We Native people have always saved them. As we plant, and save, and replant, the seeds go through all we are going through, the good times and the bad.” The Dream of Wild Health seed collection, for example, includes a Cherokee family’s gift of corn that survived the tribe’s deadly Trail of Tears, a forced march that displaced their ancestors from their original homelands.

Today, danger confronts all of us on this Earth. “We were already facing climate change, and now there is the pandemic,” Skye says. The seeds will always be there, to provide both food and a spiritual connection to the Earth, he says. “They are how we will survive.”

Garreau echoes this sentiment: “When we come out of this terrible pandemic, we will have learned to be stronger. We will be invincible.”

Once the bison settles, Thomas approaches again with caution and determination. She closes her eyes and dips her chin, her lips slowly moving as she whispers an Aaniiih prayer over the bison—the animal with a deep cultural connection to her roots as an Indigenous woman. A tear slowly rolls down her cheek before the machine operator nods that the bull is ready to be released. 

“Working with the buffalo really pulls at my heartstrings,” Thomas says. “It is such a healing experience, especially for people living here on the reservation. It just makes me feel reconnected.”

Thomas is an intern visiting the American prairie in north central Montana, from the Aaniiih Nakoda College on the nearby Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. This bull is one of the more than 200 bison from the surrounding prairie getting hair and blood samples collected and tags put in their ears. 

This internship is associated with the newly created Buffalo Center at the Tribal college, which offers students the opportunity to work alongside visiting and local scientists to learn the skills necessary to manage the land and wildlife on their reservation. The hope is to train the next generation of stewards for this recovering ecosystem—its land, animals, and people.��

“Before colonialism, buffalo were our life source. They’re powerful and they gave us food and shelter,” Thomas says. “They were taken away from us and we are still trying to heal from that.”

“The buffalo have that trauma too. The buffalo almost went extinct, like us.” But now, she says, people and bison are recovering together. “We’re thriving. We’re emerging out of that difficult time.”

The Necessity of Landscape Connectivity

Fort Belknap is located along Montana’s Northern Hi-Line, which runs parallel to and about 50 miles south of the Canadian border. The militant rows of wheat and dusty cattle lots are evidence of the agricultural revolution that enabled humans to move away from hunting and gathering, toward farming and ranching practices. But it does not reveal the holistic ecosystem-wide food management that Indigenous peoples practiced in the region for tens of thousands of years. 

With the Dawes Act of 1887, the federal government subdivided Tribal lands and tried to force Indigenous people to assimilate into an increasingly industrial United States economy. With this came the destruction of the prairie ecosystem, creating inhospitable environments for the species that once called the landscape home. Government-sanctioned poisoning campaigns decimated prairie dog colonies, subsequently driving the black-footed ferret to near extinction. 

As more prairie was plowed for agriculture, the wild landscape fractured, and ecosystems became more and more fragmented. The grizzly bear, who once wandered the Northern Great Plains, retreated into the mountains, adapting to an entirely new way of life. The far-ranging swift fox, who relied on landscape connectivity to thrive, disappeared from Montana entirely.

And, most notably, the bison vanished. There were once an estimated 20 to 60 million bison roaming across what is now the contiguous U.S., and Plains Indians lived in harmony with the animals. They relied on the bison for every aspect of their lives, including food, shelter, and tools. 

During settler colonialists’ Westward expansion, between 1820 and 1880, millions of bison were massacred. “It was a military strategy to eliminate the buffalo,” explains Mike Fox, director of fish and wildlife for the Fort Belknap Tribes. “[General Phillip] Sheridan famously said if they take away the buffalo, then they can starve the Indians into submission. They saw it as a solution for dealing with the Tribes.”

Beyond viewing the animals as “pests,” the U.S. military recognized the profound connection that Plains Indians held with the bison, and that by significantly reducing the animals’ population, the Tribes would be severely weakened. The U.S military sanctioned bison slaughter as part of the war effort against the Tribes. This, along with the introduction of European disease and competition from cattle, caused bison numbers to plummet to fewer than 1,000.

“It was devastating to the tribes for many reasons. We used to follow the buffalo and relied on them as our primary food source,” Fox says. “Then we had to transition to a sedentary lifestyle full of fat and beef. It’s had long-term health effects, and that’s why we’re trying to get them back.”

Today, thanks to tribal reintroductions and efforts from organizations like American Prairie, there are approximately 20,000 Plains Bison in conservation herds, managed as wildlife. Another 400,000 bison live in commercial herds across the country, managed as cattle. According to the guidelines set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, only the bison in conservation herds function as wildlife and are considered ecologically restored.

“We are morally responsible to bring back such an important part of the landscape,” Fox says. “To let something as important as buffalo go extinct is unthinkable. And to bring them back to their homelands, it’s something that we have to do. And for Tribal members it’s something that has to be a part of our daily lives.”&�Բ�����;

Students As Future Stewards

In 2021, the Aaniiih Nakoda College received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create the ʔíítaanɔ́ɔ́nʔí/Tatag ́a (“buffalo” in Aaniiih and Nakoda) Research and Education Center. The goal was to offer students the opportunity to study the relationship between the Fort Belknap Indian Community, the Tribal bison herd, and the prairie ecosystem. By providing opportunities for ecological research on the bison herd, paired with academic training to increase community knowledge of sustainable land management practices, the center’s goal is to create a sense of connection for students. 

The Buffalo Center not only provides unique educational opportunities to local students but also paid internships to work alongside employees in the field. Partnerships with World Wildlife Fund, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, and Little Dog Wildlife LLC offer students the opportunity to learn from working scientists. 

World Wildlife Fund biologist Kristy Bly says 12 years ago, before the inception of the Buffalo Center, her team was unsuccessful in recruiting individuals to assist with fieldwork. “Now more students want to help than there are spotlights and GPS units,” she says.

In 2013, after years of fighting against anti-bison legislation in Montana, the Fort Belknap Tribes welcomed 31 genetically pure Yellowstone bison to their land. These animals were at risk of slaughter if they wandered beyond the national park’s boundaries. Despite opposition from nearby ranchers concerned about disease transmission and anti-bison bills in Montana seeking to prevent the transportation of the animals, the Tribes ultimately succeeded. The 31 bison became the foundation of a genetically pure herd on Aaniiih and Nakoda land. The herd has since thrived, growing and roaming freely across 3,500 acres of prairie grasslands.

They are one of two separate herds the Tribes now manage. Bison were originally returned to the reservation in the 1970s, but the animals were not descendants of the original bison that used to roam the Great Plains, meaning they are not genetically pure. The Snake Butte herd contains genes from European cattle and therefore are kept in a separate pasture to prevent genetic crossover with the Yellowstone bison.  

In addition to successfully reintroducing bison twice, the tribes are also reintroducing other prairie species to their land in hopes of re-creating an intact prairie ecosystem. Fort Belknap is now the only place in Montana where bison, critically endangered black-footed ferrets, and swift foxes have all been successfully restored. The Buffalo Center is working to ensure that the younger generation receives the opportunity to learn from these partnerships in order to foster a sense of passion and responsibility for the prairie, as future stewards of their land. 

“I think the biggest enjoyment for me is seeing the students on the prairie, making a difference,” says Teri Harper, buffalo research coordinator at the college. “They are able to tell fellow Tribal members about what they are doing. They’re the ambassadors of the prairie for our Tribes.”

Saving Prairies From Habitat Destruction

In the northeast corner of the reservation, Snake Butte stands proud within a sea of golden prairie grasses. The 22,000 acres of the sacred site are now home to more than 1,800 buffalo introduced in the 1970s and at least 40 black-footed ferrets. The site offers an example of what can be achieved with community support and determination: a nearly intact prairie ecosystem in the land of conventional agriculture.

The World Wildlife Fund’s annual Plowprint Report found that 32 million acres of grasslands have been plowed for agriculture since 2012, and 1.6 million acres were plowed in 2021 alone. Prairie destruction is happening at a rate faster than deforestation, the effects of which will include increased carbon in the atmosphere, increased pollution, flooding, and loss of wildlife habitat.

Intact North American prairie is often referred to as the “American Serengeti” because of the abundance of biodiversity found on the landscape. As a keystone species, bison are integral to creating habitat for other prairie animals. Bison’s saliva, feces, and urine all contain important nutrients necessary for grassland health. Their hooves evolved with the landscape, so rather than trampling the prairie grasses their footprints help break up the soil, creating a healthy environment for new plants to grow. 

Driving through the Snake Butte pasture, the barks of prairie dogs and sparrow songs fill the air. Antelope prance on the horizon while bison stand stoically along the butte’s ridge. The area buzzes with activity even after the sun goes down. As the prairie dogs retreat into their burrows, badgers, coyotes, and black-footed ferrets emerge to hunt in the moonlight.

In late October, long after sunset, six students from Aaniiih Nakoda College gather in the Snake Butte pasture as they await their instructor. Teri Harper’s headlights illuminate their outlines as she pulls up in a white truck. She hops out of the driver’s seat with her toy-sized blue heeler, Kingston, in tow, and points to some of the students: “You three are coming with me,” Harper says.

Dawn Thomas climbs into the back of Harper’s truck with her fellow students Colten Werk and KateLyne Goes Ahead. Thomas reluctantly rolls down her window, letting in the cold air in order to get a view of the nighttime prairie. As Harper drives along the bumpy dirt road, the students shine spotlights out their respective windows, scanning for emerald green eyes shining in the darkness.

They are hoping to see a black-footed ferret, an unfortunately rare opportunity given the animals’ status as extremely endangered.

Then Werk hollers, “I see one!” Harper quickly stops the truck and everyone cranes their necks to see the shape in question. “It’s not a rock!” Werk asserts. “It’s a ferret! It’s moving!” Goes Ahead and Thomas giggle in the back seat as Harper slowly drives toward what indeed turns out to be a rock.

Over the course of the night, Harper and the students do correctly identify four black-footed ferrets, an exciting feat considering the rarity of the animal. This is a unique experience available to students at Aaniiih Nakoda College through the Buffalo Center. And one that the students do not take for granted. 

“The black-footed ferrets and the swift fox, they are so important to us,” Thomas says. “It’s a slow process, I know, but they are slowly growing. We are all slowly growing and reconnecting.”

Disclaimer: The author was interviewing for a position with the Aaniiih Nakoda College while this story was being produced.

The book is also a window into the radical potential of parenthood—and nurturing more broadly—for bringing us together into the future. Raboteau writes, “It was my ambition, in gathering our voices, to suggest that the world is as interconnected as it is unjust.”&�Բ�����;

While some chapters bring the reader along with Raboteau to Palestine and the Arctic, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” (Henry Holt and Co.) focuses most intently on the author’s shifting perspectives and interpretations of her home environment in New York. When Raboteau and I spoke on the phone in March—on the momentous day when she birthed her latest book into the world—she tells me she did not always identify as an environmental writer. The professor of creative writing at City College of New York in Harlem says she began to reconsider the notion after reading . This and other works of “nature” writing by authors of color helped her see that nature is not limited to forests and grasslands and wild places. Her urban neighborhood, too, cradles wildness and life in abundance.

Raboteau tells me her teaching—and her parenting—now include climate change explicitly. “It no longer felt appropriate to just teach creative writing without making space for this thing that is of great concern to my students,” she says.

Each of Raboteau’s identities—writer, photographer, professor, mother—shapes her perspective as she explores the changing nature of her relationship with her environment. Early in the book she describes how, when she was single, she got a used bike and developed a cyclist’s-eye view of New York. “The bike lanes became a network in my mind, a nervous system. Manhattan was an island whose spine I could navigate in a day, with bridges poking off it like ribs,” she writes. “My rides were epic, and seemingly endless.”&�Բ�����;

I read this section with intense, bittersweet feelings. I, too, thrived on two wheels when I lived in New York. I actually looked forward to my daily commute, riding from my fourth-floor walk-up in Crown Heights over the Manhattan Bridge and up to my office on Park Ave. I would weave my bike around the cars stopped in traffic, feeling like my quads could take on the world (and save it from a fossil-fueled demise in the process). 

But Raboteau ends that section with a brief sentence that fells me: “Then I traded that ride for a stroller.”&�Բ�����;

Parenthood shifts Raboteau’s perspective from a cyclist’s-eye view into a parent’s-eye view of New York. As she maps the city now using playgrounds rather than bike lanes, the environment around her again changes. It shrinks to the size of her neighborhood. 

“I felt at first a little bit stuck … by the condition of motherhood,” she tells me. And I get that. I often struggle with the label of mother and all the things that society (and my children) expect of me as a result. For me, the book’s most resonant metaphor is that motherhood is a cape with two magical but contradictory powers: invisibility and power. 

As we commune over the ups and downs of this shared role, Raboteau tells me her children are now 11 and 10. Mine are 5 and 2. 

“You’re in it!” she offers with empathy. Parenthood is many things, simultaneously “tedious as hell,” Raboteau writes in the book, but also tender and so, so sweet. She tells me she misses having a 2-year-old and recalls with fondness how her son used to call his bathing suit a “bathing soup.” In much the same way, I can’t bring myself to correct my daughter when she asks for “mac and roni” for dinner. 

Raboteau describes her heart and hurt in searingly beautiful detail in the book. She writes, “My spine was either the sum of my moods, a barometer of the era, or a vertical timeline of historical abuse.” The relentless pain she was experiencing, while seemingly impossible to diagnose, in some ways came as no surprise considering the roles she played and the ways they aligned with the health and body of her relationships: “I am the backbone of my family … I am the backbone of my community,” she writes. “I birthed two babies at home without drugs because I trusted my own body to be a mammal more than I trusted in a healthy outcome from the medical machine.”&�Բ�����;

To navigate feelings of depression and despair, Raboteau writes that she started seeing public art pop up along the 2-mile stretch of New York between her apartment and her office. “It’s like a gallery, actually, if your eyes are open to it.” She chose to layer on a photographer’s-eye view of the city, bringing her camera with her as she walked the streets. 

“My gaze shifted,” she writes, and that feeling of stuckness eventually gave way. She fell in love with the world in a whole new way, one that no longer relied on her former freedom of movement. She realized that she could live hyperlocally with just as much joy and curiosity.

Raboteau explores murals about knowing your rights, co-opted road signs about climate futures, and birds. The opening section is a guided birdwatch unlike any I’ve encountered. She introduces readers to a burrowing owl in Harlem and a glossy ibis in Washington Heights. These birds alight on walls and storefront gates across the boroughs of New York. And she would document how they do (or don’t) interact with passersby. Raboteau says she would explore the city in search of these wild beings, “to balance my sorrow.” She writes, “I needed the birds because I was in pain.”

The intensity Raboteau elicits through the written word stops me in my tracks again and again while I’m reading the book, because she puts words to stark realities with incredible tenderness. “I am the mother of Black children in America,” she writes. “It’s not possible for me to consider the threats posed to birds without also considering the threats posed to us.”

Raboteau writes with equal poignancy in describing solutions. Across her essays, she repeatedly comes back to the ways we might collectively move forward: political will, communal action, and care. The last is a quality she says is attached to motherhood, but not necessarily in a biological sense. 

“I feel hope whenever I witness or participate in even small acts of care,” she tells me. She says taking care of each other is something she views in a broad sense: both a stance and a way of being. Raboteau, like so many caretakers, knows firsthand that nurturing is not remunerated and it’s not supported by our social safety net. But that doesn’t diminish its importance to her. “It’s really revolutionary,” she tells me. “T������’s a lot of revolutionary potential.”&�Բ�����;

And a revolution is necessary because Raboteau is also extremely tuned into yet another map overlain on the city: One of public health, environmental damage, and social injustice. She points to the neighborhood of Washington Heights in uppermost Manhattan, where she birthed both her sons, as a case in point. Raboteau describes the neighborhood as vibrant and wonderful. “It’s known as the second biggest city in the Dominican Republic, which I love,” she tells me. Here, her children were able to attend Spanish-English immersion schools, but they developed asthma too. “It’s also a neighborhood that’s really choked by poverty and also by highways,” she explains.

This poisoning infrastructure is often placed in poor Black and Brown neighborhoods like hers by design. And this is top-of-mind in her parenting. “My kids aren’t so little anymore,” she tells me. “I can speak with them a little bit more honestly and truthfully about these kinds of threats.”

But knowing how to talk about climate change and the related injustices ������’t always clear or easy. “I’m still learning because we weren’t taught this,” she tells me. “My husband and I, to a degree, we were prepared for racial trauma by our parents. We were given ‘,’ right? But they couldn’t have prepared us for this, because it wasn’t part of their reality.”

I am a white woman who grew up in a white family, and my parents didn’t discuss racial trauma with me, nor did we broach climate change. But the subject has already come up with my young kids, I tell Raboteau. Last year, we visited family in Wisconsin over the holidays, and the landscape was strangely devoid of snow. My daughter asked worriedly, “Mom, what happened to winter?” The inquiry cut to the core of the issue I spend my days trying to address as a climate journalist. It really brought to the forefront, for me, the responsibility of nurturers, caretakers, and parents like myself to address these existential questions.��

“You can’t really lean on an answer that was given to you by your parents, because you didn’t ask them that question,” Raboteau tells me. “Because we had winter when we were kids. We were born at whatever parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere that it was. It’s just accelerating so fast that even within your own 5-year-old daughter’s lifetime, she’s either witnessed that shift or knows from the culture that that’s not what it’s supposed to look like at Christmastime.”&�Բ�����;

Raboteau points to a similarly gutting exchange in her family, in which her husband remarked that they didn’t have to wear jackets at Halloween anymore because it’s no longer seasonably cold like it was when they were kids. Raboteau says her son responded frankly, “Yeah, that’s because of climate change.” And Raboteau could only agree. 

Neither Raboteau nor I have figured out the answers to these crushing questions from our children. But we’re both actively trying to find them. And Raboteau’s book is a resonant meditation on her efforts. 

In so many ways, the situation we are in is unprecedented: We have added so much CO2 to the atmosphere that our are higher than ever before in human history. As a result, we have put so many communities in incredibly precarious situations, and forced them to adapt. And yet they’re still here.

“People have lived through existential crises before and come out the other side of them,” Raboteau reminds me. And she emphasizes that those experiences—and the people and communities that survive them—have lessons to impart. That’s why she’s a strong believer in intergenerational friendships and intergenerational justice. She invests in it deeply in her life, including through her participation in a group called the .

The small group is led by two septuagenarians—a Buddhist and a moral philosopher—and Raboteau says they mostly just ask questions that don’t have answers. The tenor of the inquiries is “What are we being called to do at this moment of great uncertainty and change?” This shared space on Zoom offers Raboteau a practice of reflecting and deep listening. And that is something she holds dear as she navigates how to have “the climate talk”: balancing the wisdom of elders with listening deeply to children. 

“I think that’s what we’re being called to do,” Raboteau tells me. “Really listen to their questions, take them very seriously. Have them participate in the solutions.”&�Բ�����;

She shares the example of efforts to as an act of climate mitigation. “New York is a city of buried streams,” she tells me. “I didn’t really know that before we bought this house that’s sited on top of the buried stream.”&�Բ�����;

Raboteau makes clear that the city ������’t prepared for what’s to come: She describes how the infrastructure can’t handle the increased rainfall that has resulted (and will continue) from climate change. The subway system can’t handle it, nor can the sewer system. And the same goes for wastewater treatment plants, which get overwhelmed and end up releasing raw sewage into the rivers, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods like the ones her family has called home. 

Raboteau says she’s excited about daylighting the brook, but she worries what will happen if it comes to pass. If the brook beautifies the neighborhood, welcomes more wildlife, adds a waterfront bike path, and boosts the property values, are her neighbors going to be able to afford to stay here and enjoy it? In many ways, birds and people are both endangered by climate injustice in New York. 

But she doesn’t stop there. “Or is that question even short-sighted?” Raboteau asks me, rhetorically. “We don’t know how fast and how soon the waters are going to rise and overtake this part of our coastal city, which is quite low-lying. Does it even make sense to spend many, many millions of dollars unburying a brook that maybe, sooner than any of us would like to conceive or imagine, is going to be underwater anyway?”

We can’t know the answers to these questions. Not elders. Not parents. Not nurturers. Not children. But each one of us is implicated in the outcomes and therefore should be striving to find our own ways of coming to some sort of clarity about how to move forward. We can shape our responses. And we can find solidarity in asking these questions in good company, as I was privileged to do with Raboteau. 

For her part, Raboteau says, “I feel deeply invested in trying to learn the names of things right now, whether that’s the names of endangered birds, or the name of Mosholu, the original name of this brook that our house sits on.”&�Բ�����;

In her commitment, I see the confluence of climate and racial justice bubbling back up to the surface: Saying their names has always been an important part of doing the work.

What Nieuwjaer couldn’t eat right away, she preserved—as fig marmalade, apricot jam, pickles. Reaching into the depths of her refrigerator in September, past a jar of diced beets she’d preserved in vinegar, she tapped a container of chopped pineapple whose shelf life she’d extended with lemon juice: “It’ll last all month!” she exclaimed. Just a few inches away, two loaves of bread that a nearby school was going to get rid of lay in a glass baking dish, reconstituted as bread pudding. A third loaf was in a jar in the cupboard, transformed into bread crumbs that Nieuwjaer planned to sprinkle on a veggie casserole.

With everything she’d stocked up, Nieuwjaer was all set on groceries for the next few months. “I’m going to eat for free all winter,” she said, beaming.

Nieuwjaer is part of a worldwide movement known in French as zéro déchet, or zero waste. The central idea is simple: Stop generating so much garbage and reap the many intertwined social, economic, and environmental benefits. Rescuing trash-bound produce, for example, stops food waste that can release potent greenhouse gasses in a landfill. Making your own shampoo, deodorant, and other beauty products reduces the need for disposable plastic bottles—plus, it tends to use safer ingredients, meaning less danger for fish and other wildlife.

But Nieuwjaer didn’t just decide to join the movement one day; she was drawn into it as part of a local government experiment in waste management. In 2015, Roubaix launched a campaign to reduce litter by teaching 100 families—including Nieuwjaer’s—strategies for cutting their waste in half. Similar efforts may soon be repeated across France as cities and regions strive to meet (and exceed) the country’s ambitious waste-reduction goals. A fundamental question is at the heart of their efforts: How do you get citizens to change their behavior?

France is famous for its fine wines and cheese. However, among a more niche audience, the country is also known as a zero-waste leader. Besides producing one of the world’s most famous zero-waste influencers, —the “priestess of waste-free living,” according to —France has passed some of the developed world’s most ambitious waste-reduction policies. It was the first country in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away unsold food and one of the first to enshrine “” into law, making big polluters financially responsible for the waste they create, even after their items are sold.

In 2020, France passed a landmark anti-waste law that laid out dozens of objectives for waste prevention, recycling, and repairability, including a national goal to eliminate single-use plastic by 2040. The law banned clothing companies from destroying unsold merchandise, required all public buildings to install water fountains, and proposed . At the time, the law was praised as “,” and several of its provisions were hailed as the first of their kind. 

According to France’s , finalized in March by the administration of President Emmanuel Macron, cutting waste will yield a myriad of co-benefits, from boosting biodiversity and improving food systems to mitigating climate change. One from the nonprofit Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives says that a comprehensive zero-waste strategy that includes better material sorting, more recycling, and source reduction—in essence, producing fewer unnecessary things—could reduce waste-sector greenhouse emissions by 84% globally.��

Achieving all these benefits, however, will require more than proclamations from Paris. According to France’s Ministry of Ecological Transition, the national anti-waste plan is meant to filter down through the levels of government before ultimately manifesting at the local level. The national plan requires regions to develop their own sub-plans and asks small-scale waste management authorities to “enable the implementation” of France’s bigger-picture waste agenda. 

However, the transformation France’s zero-waste advocates envisioned requires even more granular action—from boutiques, supermarkets, and restaurants. Keep peeling back the layers, and you end up with individual people like Nieuwjaer, who must be nudged, incentivized, or told to change their behavior to accommodate waste reduction—even if they’re not all as enthusiastic as she is. As the country’s 2021 to 2027 action plan says, “Reducing our waste requires everyone,” suggesting that an all-encompassing culture shift will be needed to achieve the national government’s goals. 

This is the task that many French cities and waste-collection authorities are now confronting—how to change individual people’s behavior so that it conforms with France’s vision for waste reduction. Some of the most ambitious places have become incubators, notably Roubaix, whose voluntary, education-based approach has drawn international attention. Last year, the European Commission named Roubaix as one of the top 12 places in the European Union with the ,” a term referring to systems that conserve resources and minimize waste generation. 

There’s also the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region north of Bordeaux, where a regional waste-management authority called Smicval is experimenting with more structural interventions like moving garbage bins and charging people differently for waste collection. Pauline Debrabandere, a program manager for the nonprofit Zero Waste France, called Smicval one of the country’s “biggest pioneers.”&�Բ�����;

The projects illustrate the need for complex behavior-change strategies that both educate people and alter the social and environmental contexts in which they make their decisions. And they hold lessons for communities across the globe looking to implement their waste-reduction programs. Debrabandere put it this way: While you need rules and incentives to “create the conditions” for waste reduction, you also need to convey its benefits and ensure widespread participation. “You have to raise awareness.”&�Բ�����;

When Alexandre Garcin dreamed up Roubaix Zéro Déchet as a candidate for city councilor in 2014, it wasn’t so much sustainability that inspired his vision; it was cleanliness. Roubaix’s litter problem was top of mind for everyone that year, and Garcin’s big idea was to address it through waste reduction. Rather than cleaning up more and more trash off the city’s streets, why not produce less garbage in the first place?

This was easier said than done. Roubaix is a famously that belongs to the Métropole de Lille, a network of communities organized around the major city of Lille in northern France. This superstructure coordinates infrastructure that crosses town lines, such as public transit and waste management. According to Garcin, the métropole wasn’t interested in funding and implementing his zero-waste initiatives. To cut down on waste generation, Roubaix would have to get creative—by asking residents to volunteer.

Once he was in office, Garcin mailed leaflets to Roubaix residents seeking 100 volunteers to participate in a free, yearlong pilot program that would teach them how to live waste free—or, at least, with less waste than usual. These familles zéro déchet would receive training and attend workshops on topics like making your own yogurt and cleaning with homemade products, to halve their waste by year’s end. Volunteers weren’t offered any direct financial incentives to participate—only the promise of helping solve the litter problem and protecting the environment. Using a luggage scale—a “really, really, really important” part of the program, according to Garcin—they would periodically weigh their weekly trash and report it back to the city.

The luggage scale forced people to recognize the impact, and literal weight, of their consumption choices, Garcin explained. “Physically, you have the sense of how heavy it is.”&�Բ�����;

The program Garcin designed exemplified what behavioral scientists call an “information-based” approach to change, which builds understanding and awareness through unambiguous instructions, forums, meetings, training, and feedback. Philipe Bujold, behavioral science manager for the international environmental nonprofit Rare, described this as a “tell them” strategy, in contrast with other tactics to induce behavior change, including through incentives (“pay them”) or rules and prohibitions (“stop them”). Josh Wright, executive director of the behavioral science consulting firm Ideas42, also lauded Roubaix Zéro Déchet for creating an identity around zero waste and assigning families quantitative waste-reduction targets—strategies that have proven effective in other contexts. 

Much of what Roubaix told residents to do was actually pretty straightforward—for example, “Don’t buy more food than you can eat.” But that was the point. According to Garcin, it’s actually “not that difficult” to halve a household’s waste production. Composting alone is enough to get you most of the way there, since organic waste makes up about of the average French family’s municipal waste by weight. Another third is glass and metal, a significant chunk of which can likely be kept out of the landfill through recycling, and 10% is plastic, much of which can be avoided by finding reusable alternatives to plastic grocery bags, cutlery, packaging, and other single-use items. According to the , half of all the plastic produced worldwide is designed to be used just once and then thrown away.

“The idea was to help everyone change his consumption at the place where he’s ready,” Garcin explained, whether that meant eating fewer takeout meals or switching to homemade laundry detergent. Through these minor lifestyle changes, the earliest participants in Roubaix Zéro Déchet’s family program saved an average of 1,000 euros per year, according to Garcin. Seventy percent of them cut their waste generation by , and one-quarter reduced it by more than 80%.

Of course, some participants embraced zero-waste more enthusiastically than others and therefore reaped even greater rewards. Nieuwjaer, for example, would eventually cut her landfill-bound waste by so much that nine months’ worth would fit on her kitchen scale. All told, Nieuwjaer says she saves about 3,000 euros a year because of her zero-waste habits. 

One drawback of an information-based strategy for behavior change, however, is that it tends to have limited reach while working very well on a small slice of the population—the “pioneers,” as Garcin called them, in this case referring to people who are exceptionally attentive to their health, environmental footprint, or personal finances. Since 2015, many of Roubaix Zéro Déchet’s most enthusiastic participants have been those who were already interested in wasting less, even before they heard about the program.

Amber Ogborn, for example—an American who moved to Roubaix with her family in 2012—said her decision to sign up as a famille zéro déchet in 2019 was influenced by a trip to a waste incinerator, where she saw garbage trucks unloading a “mountain of trash” to be burned. Ogborn is now all-in on zero waste, thanks in large part to the training she received from Roubaix Zéro Déchet. In addition to other new habits, she now maintains three separate composting systems, including one dedicated to the cat litter and dog droppings that she was tired of having to throw in the trash.

“It’s kind of gross,” Ogborn said. “But I thought, ‘You know what? This is one small thing that we could do.’”

Another die-hard participant is Liliane Otimi, who was already running a Roubaix-based environmental nonprofit called Lueur d’Espoir—“glimmer of hope,” in English—when she enrolled her 10-person household in the city program in 2018. Otimi was passionate about climate change and resource conservation and wanted to embody more of her values in her daily life—especially after a trip back to Togo, the West African country where she grew up. In Lomé, the capital, Otimi said she was “shocked” to see how quickly people went through plastic water bottles and littered them onto the street. Through Roubaix Zéro Déchet, Otimi learned how to buy cleaning products in bulk, how to do weekly meal prep, and how to plan her grocery shopping so she only buys as much food as her family will be able to use. 

“It’s beautiful to live in line with our values,” said Michaela Barnett, a behavioral scientist and founder of KnoxFill, a startup focused on reducing waste. She acknowledged Roubaix Zéro Déchet’s allure among a particular demographic.

However, it’s one thing to give “pioneers” like Otimi and Ogborn the tools to live their best zero-waste lives and quite another to bring all of Roubaix’s residents into the movement. Not everyone will value resource conservation—let alone act on those values—even if you tell them why they should. This is a key reason why behavioral scientists advocate for behavior-change strategies that are more complex than just “tell them” alone. “We generally think of education as a necessary but not sufficient type of intervention,” Wright said. (Incidentally, scientists used to think that an information deficit was the reason for climate inaction. Unfortunately, this has proven .) 

The 800 families Roubaix has trained since 2015 likely represent the most easily convincible slice of the city’s population—an estimated 1.8% of its 100,000 residents, assuming an average family size of 2.3 people. It’s taken Roubaix nine years to reach this many people, and the rest of its residents will likely be harder to convert.��

To be sure, there is more to Roubaix Zéro Déchet than “tell them,” and the city is doing what it can to broaden its reach beyond those most inclined toward zero waste. For example, the program leans on social influences through advertisements, festivals, and community meetups, and spokespeople like Bea Johnson, the zero-waste social media influencer. (When she was invited to give a talk in Roubaix in 2015, the event was so popular that the city had to in order to accommodate more attendees.) Roubaix also promotes the stories of its most successful familles zéro déchet in local, regional, and national media outlets—a strategy that has drawn so much positive press that the city’s communications director said in 2016 that zero waste had become “.”

What’s more, City Hall has brought zero-waste practices and education into all of Roubaix’s public schools and is trying to nurture a network of zero-waste merchants—including restaurants, grocers, copy shops, and more—that adhere to a set of best practices for waste reduction. The municipal government is also expanding a independent from the métropole and is turning two buildings into zero-waste incubators—essentially, hubs for small and growing businesses that are focused on waste reduction. One of the buildings, , already hosts a company that saves bicycles from being sent to the landfill.

Debrabandere, with Zero-Waste France, said Roubaix is remarkable for what it has accomplished with such limited means. Despite its tight municipal budget and lack of control over waste-collection services, she said, the city seems to make every decision with zero-waste in mind. It has even helped launch copycat programs in 26 nearby communities that, altogether, offer more than 300 free zero-waste workshops each year. “Roubaix does things at a level we wouldn’t expect them to do,” Debrabandere told Grist.

Still, she wishes it had the authority to do more.

Some 500 miles south of Roubaix, in a small town called Saint-Denis-de-Pile in the French region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Clémentine Derot shimmies into a neon-pink construction vest. She’s about to begin a tour of the headquarters of Smicval, the waste-management company that serves 210,000 people across 137 municipalities north of Bordeaux.

Waste reduction is “in our DNA,” Derot says, pointing out industrial-sized piles of compost and a warehouse for sorting plastics into bales of recyclable material. There’s also a donation center where residents can drop off toys, dishes, furniture, electronics, and other items they no longer need and take home other people’s items for free. At one end of the facility, above a chute where dump trucks offload unrecoverable waste, is a massive billboard showing trash building up at the nearby Lapouyade Landfill. “Your trash doesn’t disappear, it’s buried 15 kilometers from here,” the billboard reads, apparently addressing Smicval’s workers since the chute ������’t public.

According to Derot, this reflects Smicval’s transformation from a company that simply picks up the trash to a more sophisticated waste-prevention and management service, in line with France’s 2021 to 2027 action plan. She describes the status quo waste-management model as “totally out of breath”—in need of a complete overhaul—due to escalating concerns over the environment, as well as France’s sharply increasing . In 2019, it costs 18 euros to send a metric ton of waste to the landfill; in 2025, the cost will be 65 euros.

Like Roubaix Zéro Déchet, Smicval envisions a “drastic reduction” in waste generation. But as a regional waste-management authority and not a small municipality, Smicval has a very different toolbox at its disposal. Where Roubaix has largely asked residents to opt in to waste reduction, Smicval can experiment with more systemic means, like changing the way trash is collected or the way people are charged for disposal services.

The goal, according to Hélène Boisseau, who is overseeing the deployment of Smicval’s new waste-management strategies, is to create an environment that is conducive to waste reduction. “We don’t ask for people to become masters in zero waste,” she said. Rather, “We design the path” and then guide people along it.

In behavioral science, this is referred to as “contextual change,” where you alter the context in which people make decisions. Instead of merely asking people to do things differently, contextual changes make it easier or more convenient to perform the desired behavior—perhaps by presenting the existing options in a different, more strategic way. Take a middle school lunch line, for example. To get students to eat more vegetables and less pizza, you could either tell them all about the health benefits of broccoli and carrots—or you could move the vegetables to the front of the buffet, so they’re the first things hungry kids see. Many behavioral scientists prefer this type of strategy because it can change lots of people’s behavior all at once—rather than one by one. Plus, it’s better attuned to the of most decision-making. 

Smicval’s two biggest strategies revolve around the way waste is collected and how people pay for it. Last October, Smicval began a yearslong process of transitioning away from door-to-door waste collection to a model in which people travel to a centralized location, likely within a few blocks’ distance, to drop off their trash. Large bins for trash and recycling—one for every 150 residents—will be openable using a special key card. Community compost bins will be distributed at a rate of one per 80 residents.

According to Boisseau, this model will encourage people to reduce waste simply because it’s inconvenient to haul heavy trash bags down the block. But the longer-term objective is to use those key cards to implement a pay-as-you-throw scheme, in which people pay for waste disposal based on the amount of trash they want to dispose of. Rather than funding Smicval through taxes, families would directly pay the company for different tiers of service, represented by the number of times their key cards will allow them to open the garbage receptacles. The more openings, the more expensive the service, so that people no longer think of waste collection as a limitless public service.

Boisseau compared it to the way people get their electricity bills. Because they can see the charge fluctuating based on their consumption habits, they’ll be incentivized to waste less to pay less. “The best way of making sure that people are very concerned with what they put in a bin or a container is to pay for it individually instead of [through] taxes,” she said. Indeed, this principle has been put to use in thousands of towns worldwide, from Berkeley, California, to Austin, Texas, some of whose pay-as-you-throw policies have contributed to municipal solid waste reductions of . Waste experts say these policies are some of local governments’ “.”

Smicval is still sorting out the details of the new system, which is unlikely to be fully adopted until at least 2027 or 2028. In the meantime, Smicval expects to see significant cost savings from fewer and shorter garbage truck routes, which it will use to fund some of its other waste-reduction projects: things like a pilot program for reusable diapers, political advocacy for a bottle deposit bill, a asking grocery stores to eliminate unnecessary plastic packaging, and a Roubaix-esque “zero-waste cities” program, in which Smicval distributes reusable cleaning products and informational pamphlets to the residents of participating municipalities.

Barnett, the behavioral scientist, applauded Smicval for using a broad range of strategies to encourage zero waste. “They are attacking this from different angles,” she said.

Still, she and the other behavioral scientists Grist spoke with noted the risk of backfire. Although small hassles can be “quite impactful” in catalyzing behavior change, Wright, with Ideas42, said they can also go too far and encourage noncompliance. For something like centralized waste collection or a pay-as-you-throw system, this could mean people dumping their waste illegally or finding a work-around to open the trash receptacles more often than what they’re paying for. Wright said the program’s success will hinge on specific design considerations, like how direct invoicing is presented to customers.

If Smicval’s waste-reduction policies are particularly unpopular, Boisseau said it’s even possible that a conservative slate of candidates could be elected to the organization’s board and walk back or weaken its environmental initiatives. Already, Smicval has gained critics who say that centralized waste collection is too onerous. These include the mayor of Libourne, the largest city in Smicval’s territory, who at a meeting last year predicted that the organization’s strategy would turn Libourne into “,” with people dumping garbage on the streets. If these critics were to mobilize the population against Smicval’s agenda, Boisseau said, “We know they would fight hard.”

A similar problem was unfolding on a national scale in December 2023, as France prepared to meet a January 1 deadline to equip all of its households with composting receptacles. Observers were afraid that the rollout would be a “,” and that “a lot of people wouldn’t want to take part.”

Smicval is aware of the obstacles it faces and has been proactive in its efforts to preempt or overcome them. As it slowly transitions to centralized waste collection, for example, the organization is going city by city and saving Libourne for last, hoping that a successful rollout in some of its more supportive municipalities will assuage fears in Libourne. To avoid backlash, it has also consulted with individual citizens to hear their concerns, act on their feedback, and—in some cases—design project proposals to be presented to Smicval’s board. 

We try to work with citizens, rather than for them, Derot said. “They know what they need.”&�Բ�����;

Despite the many overlapping benefits of zero waste, the movement sometimes gets a bad rap because of its focus on consumers, rather than manufacturers. Why ask individuals to shop in the bulk aisle or pay more for trash disposal if the petrochemical industry is just going to plastic production by 2050 anyway?

“We are kind of tired of everyone saying it’s on the citizens’ part” to reduce waste, Debrabandere, with Zero Waste France, told Grist. She and other environmental advocates agree there’s an urgent need for waste-reduction policies that are even more aggressive than France’s current ones—for example, mandatory waste sorting in all restaurants, as well as more stringent requirements for the use of post-consumer recycled content and a faster phase-out of single-use plastics. 

But the zero-waste policies of advocates’ dreams will require even more intensive behavior shifts than those that Roubaix and Smicval are trying to navigate. For example, imagine a world where France—or any developed country, for that matter—bans products from being sold in disposable containers. This would require people to deal with new enforcement infrastructure at the local level and to shop at new businesses that can accommodate reusable and refillable product systems, and lug around their own jars, jugs, and bottles.

There are many, many other routine habits that consumers will have to dispense with or fundamentally alter to , like buying plastic toothpaste tubes and getting takeout in throwaway packaging. The work that Roubaix and Smicval are doing in France is an early part of that process. By figuring out how best to engage their citizens in behavioral change, they are helping to create a smoother path toward the deeper, more radical changes that advocates hope are coming in the near future.

Barnett said there’s also value in the work Roubaix and Smicval are doing to understand zero-waste behavior in their respective regions. Behavioral scientists used to think humans could be characterized by a set of “universal truths,” Barnett said. But that’s less the case now: “We need to go in there and figure out more about the environmental context, the people that are there,” she explained. 

Meanwhile, as Roubaix and Smicval continue to try to win over new residents, they both have the benefit of an unusually enthusiastic army of supporters. Nieuwjaer ������’t the only zero-waste devotee who’s all too eager to proselytize about the simple joys of reducing waste. Chloé Audubert, who has spent the past two years working at one of Smicval’s sorting centers, said she loves helping people sort and limit their déchets enfouis—their waste destined for the landfill. And Otimi, the Roubaix resident who leads a family of 10, could barely find the words in English to express what Roubaix Zéro Déchet has meant to her. “This program changed my life,” she finally said.

This story was co-published with and supported by The Heinrich Böll Foundation.

This story was (United States) and is republished within the program, supported by the ICFJ, .

Typhoon Haiyan—or , as most Filipinos call it—was one of the deadliest cyclones in history, leading to and more than 28,000 injuries. At least are still considered missing. Haiyan hit Tacloban City the hardest, collapsing and flattening the city’s most formidable buildings and infrastructures and causing . 

In November 2023, the people of Tacloban gathered to remember Haiyan—the great mourning and the long journey to overcoming one of the world’s worst climate catastrophes. They’ve risen from deep calamity, modeling how the people of the Global South have been—and continue to be—tenacious and united as they rebuild. There are lessons to be learned here. What has helped this community collectively survive the unimaginable?

An Avenue of Care for Survivors

Jaime Gravador, a news reporter in Tacloban, was 12 when Haiyan devastated the city. In the hours after the storm, which Gravador describes as “dark,” “heavy,” and “apocalyptic,” he and his father roamed neighborhoods where they encountered mass death. “Lahat ng nakikita mo sa daan puro patay [you find dead bodies everywhere you turn],” he remembers wearily. Even after Haiyan passed, he couldn’t look at certain roads without having a flashback of the lifeless bodies that once lay there. “It brings you back to all the deep emotion … memories na hindi mo kayang maalala. Maluluha ka talaga [memories that you can’t bear to remember anymore. You’ll always end up in tears],” Gravador says. 

In the aftermath of the super typhoon, survivors developed severe mental health conditions. Approximately 80.5% of survivors involved in typhoon relief efforts , and the rate of people with mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and depression, .

However, the country wasn’t fully equipped to handle this increase in mental distress. Gloria Enriquez-Fabrigas, an officer in charge of Tacloban’s health office, told the in 2019: “When Yolanda struck, we were all shocked. … The focus [then] was really more on the need for food and basic needs. Mental health was set aside during that time.” Gravador says that some of these survivors became psychologically distressed not just because their loved ones died, but because there were others who were never recovered. For some survivors, the lack of closure, with no bodies to bury and grieve, was too much to tolerate.

After Haiyan, there were only serving Eastern Visayas, even as the . But in 2014, officials in Eastern Visayas implemented , which allotted $90,380 or 5 million Philippine pesos, “to enable government agencies and personnel to respond to psychosocial needs through community-based intervention,” according to .��

Eastern Visayas was the first region in the Philippines to provide mental health support at all levels of care: primary, secondary, and tertiary, assisting up to “384 [patients] in 2017,” , a provincial health officer in Northern Samar. Health workers in Eastern Visayas offered care to communities using the Mental Health Gap Action Programme (mhGAP), an international program that “aims at scaling up services for mental, neurological and substance use disorders for countries especially with low- and middle-income,” according . 

The program is designed for large-scale communities who suffer mental health conditions like depression, suicidal thoughts, and other psychological disorders, especially when there is a great lack of resources. In summary, on destigmatizing mental health issues in the community, suicide and substance-use prevention, community follow-up, human rights awareness, and more.

Health personnel, even those who were not mental health specialists, were trained with the mhGAP curriculum. The implementation of the curriculum aided the national health staff and local communities to identify and manage mental health conditions

Lyra was 10 when Haiyan flooded her Tacloban home. At the time, she couldn’t process the magnitude of the typhoon—until she and her family needed to climb on top of their roof to avoid violent floods.

After Haiyan, Tacloban didn’t have electricity for three months. Haiyan also completely wiped out Tacloban’s water and sanitation services, including the . Lyra recalls drinking baby milk so she could have adequate nutrition. “Siniguro lang nila Papa na may tubig kami kahit water lang na galing sa ulan. Tapos yung mineral water, parang talaga sa mga baby lang, so yung tubig namin, [ay] tubig ulan. [Our dad found ways for us to have enough drinking water, even if it meant rainwater. The mineral water was only reserved for infants].” For Lyra, nothing was ever the same.

When Lyra returned to school, most of her classmates were no longer there. Some died during Haiyan while others moved away. Thanks to the lingering trauma from Haiyan as well as the sudden changes in her everyday life, her social skills diminished: “After ng bagyo, mas naging silent ako. Hindi ako marunong makihalubilo. [After the storm, I became more silent. I didn’t know how to get along with others].”&�Բ�����;

She also noticed psychosomatic effects from climate anxiety: “Pag umuulan ng malakas o’ pag malakas ang hangin, parang natatahimik agad ako o’ natutuliro. Hindi ko ma-explain yung feeling na traumatized, kasi hindi ko siya na-express nung bata ako. [Whenever I see heavy rains or hear strong winds, I get quiet and disoriented now. I couldn’t explain the feeling of being traumatized at the time since I was only a child].”&�Բ�����;

, climate anxiety is “an adaptive psychological response to the actual threat posed by the climate crisis,” which manifests in “intrusive worrying, fear, and behavioral impairment.” Aruta and Guinto found that the Philippines has the highest number of youth who suffer from negative emotions like hopelessness, anger, and frustration in response to the climate crisis.

After Haiyan, communities from different parts of the Philippines and around the world traveled to Tacloban . Some humanitarian organizations, such as , were birthed from these efforts. FundLife, an organization mostly led by youth leaders and mentors, provides relief goods and psychosocial support to climate survivors in Tacloban. The organization utilizes , , and —especially football—to help youth cope with the impact of the climate disaster.��

Lyra, who was one of the organization’s first mentees, is a living testament to the impact of FundLife’s community efforts. “FundLife became a second family to me,” Lyra shares. “I wanted to share the hope I have through sports and play. Yung play, naging forgotten right na ng mga bata [Play has become a forgotten right to kids].” Lyra believes that sports can be an avenue where a young person discovers how resilient they are: “Sa paglalaro… dun mo malalaman na pwede kang bumangon [Play makes it possible for anyone to rise up].”&�Բ�����;

She’s since returned to the organization to work as one of its football coaches. “Nung nag-join ako sa FundLife, hindi ko lang na-develop yung football skills ko, mas na-improve ko yung confidence at social skills ko [Since joining FundLife, my football skills improved, as did my confidence and social skills],” she says. 

The Power of Collective Storytelling

“L�����Dz� are what you call the sediments at the bottom of a tuba jar,” Joanna Sustento says as she welcomes attendees to Larog, a community storytelling project where climate survivors share stories, music, and art to process the tragedies from Haiyan. “Very much like what we have here [in this gathering], the stories we tell are remnants of what has conspired a decade ago: stories, memories—however much we pour out, there will always be something else to tell: the remnants,” Sustento says.��

Sustento, who co-created Larog in 2017, lost her family during the super typhoon. She then became an active frontliner, providing basic necessities to affected communities in Tacloban. While her story was widely known in climate activist spaces, she didn’t have enough time to process the trauma and grieve. “At that time, [I was on] survival mode,” she says. “[I focused] more on finding my family members, kasi noong time na ‘yon, hindi ko pa alam kung sinu-sino ba yung nag survive, and siyempre, find shelter, food [because during that time, I didn’t know who else in my family survived, and of course, I needed to find shelter and food].”

After Haiyan passed, Sustento and her friends felt like something was missing during the annual commemoration ceremonies. “We realized that there’s this gap,” she says. “[There’s no] space for people to come together and share stories. [Only] amongst ourselves, we’d tell stories of how we survived [and] our experiences during the typhoon. Pero wala yung isang space na pupunta yung mga taong hindi magkakakilala [but there was no central space where strangers can gather and tell stories], and we want to provide that.”&�Բ�����;

The first Larog event ended around 11:00 p.m., but people continued to share their experiences until the following morning. “Wala na yung program. Wala na yung microphone. Pero yung audience mismo nag-usap usap na sila [There was no more program. No more microphone. But the audience members remained and kept talking amongst themselves].”

At the 2023 gathering, Kay Zabala, a mental health coach, told her story about losing 11 family members during the typhoon. “I experienced hell because of Yolanda … imagine [losing] only one [family member], what about 11?” she said. After Haiyan, Zabala sought psychological and psychiatric help among other treatments so that she could heal. In turn, she’s become a mental-health practitioner.

While the pain of surviving a climate disaster will never go away, Zabala says our bodies and collective spirit are resilient: “We are capable of surpassing and overcoming anything … because we are naturally capable of doing that,” she continues. “If you get wounded in the morning and [when you get to] the afternoon or evening, makita ka nagsasara na [the wound will close]. You see that it’s already dried.”

When I asked Sustento about the healing power of storytelling, she said that collective grieving helped the community immensely: “Nag-purge kami ng mga trauma namin [We purged out our trauma together]. Nakakalungkot because yun yung pinagdaanan namin [It’s sad because we went through all of this], but at the same time, it’s just so beautiful to know that you’re not alone, [and] to know na may mga taong naiintindihan kung ano yung mga pinagdanaanan mo [to know that there are people who understand you and all that you are going through].”&�Բ�����;

Sustento says that telling her story has restored her sense of purpose. Though Haiyan took everything from her, she knows, “Enough pa rin ako [I’m still enough]. I can still contribute to something bigger.” She desires this for other climate survivors as well: “Hopefully, [they] find it in them [that] hindi ito yung end [This is not the end]. There’s still so much more.”

Walking for Climate Justice 

The Philippines contributes , yet it’s the world’s country and has the highest risk of being impacted by climate change. As the threat rises, a community of humanitarian organizations have been demanding world governments respond to the climate crisis that’s impacting countries, especially in the Global South.��

Members and volunteers of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, Bikers United Movement, DAKILA, FundLife, Living Laudato Si, Philippine Movement for Climate Justice, and various archdioceses in the Philippines walked from Manila to Tacloban City—a journey of more than 600 miles—to uplift their urgent call for systemic change through the Climate Justice Walk.

is a monthlong action that began on Oct. 8, 2023, . The walk highlighted the demand for climate reparations, which urges fossil fuel companies to provide reparations for the loss and damage costs for the areas most impacted by climate disasters, including but not limited to Tacloban City. The walk also supported , including the Philippine Commission on Human Rights’ “that found legal grounds to hold big fossil fuel companies and other corporate entities accountable for their climate-destroying business models that lead to human rights harms.” This meant investigating 47 corporations, including��Shell, Exxon, and BP, for human-rights violations that triggered the climate crisis. However, have shown up to face the communities who filed these landmark petitions.

Greenpeace campaigner Jefferson Chua believes that reparations is “the strongest form of accountability.” Yet he and his team have sensed the resistance from Global North governments when discussing climate reparations: “I do think it’s opening the wound up again that relates to the colonial past of a lot of Global North countries, because we do know that the word ‘reparations’ connotes postcolonial meanings, right?,” he says. “I just don’t think [Global North governments] want to pay. They don’t want accountability in terms of their historical emissions, and also, [they are] not acknowledging the accountability for the expansion plans of [their] companies.”

Beyond the Climate Justice Walk, Greenpeace Southeast Asia has been pressuring governments and companies to account for their complicity in climate change. This includes to the Shell import terminal in Batangas, Philippines, as well as establishing , which displays stories and art by climate survivors. 

Yeb Saño, lead walker of the Climate Justice Walk, says that “Filipinos refuse to accept the vicious cycle of destruction and reconstruction.” As the executive director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, he also said in a : “We also refuse to accept that we are reduced to numbers, so it is our aim to remind the whole world.”��

More than 10 years after Haiyan, it’s important to recognize that there are many ways to process and survive climate catastrophes—with community-led mental health interventions, play, and creative storytelling—while also strategically preventing them from escalating any further.

She’d joined the crew of elders practicing, their moves fluid as the stream that ran by the village. She’d spotted him then, the only other face as young as hers: a thin man with glasses, thick curls of hair, and a gentle smile. Naturally, they’d felt drawn to each other, and Huaxin struck up a conversation.

After that, they met up for tea following each tai chi session. He was a lot like Huaxin: opinionated, particular, averse to vulnerability. He was also impulsive. He picked up new topics easily, researched them with relish, constantly talked to her about how the world was changing.

One day he led her back to the park and removed a ring from his pocket. It was no diamond, but Huaxin still gasped when she saw it: a smooth stone, well-worn like a comforting friend. “The world may be changing,” he said with a cheeky grin, “but I want you to be my constant.”

He moved in with her and she introduced him to her livelihood: beehousing. They shared bowls of noodles, talked about having children, and continued to practice tai chi, nurturing their slowly aging bodies.

And then, nine years later, he left her.

“And why do you need this information again?” Huaxin snapped into the phone.

“Science,” the person on the other end said. This was the third time Huaxin had asked, and now it seemed like the man was going for the simplest explanation possible. “It’ll provide useful data to prevent natural disasters. We know your region is highly flood prone. This will help you prepare for that.”

Huaxin chewed her lip. Did they know how her parents had died? If so, of course they’d come running to her. “And you’re saying the bees will provide this data?”

“Yes. Just click on the link I sent you. Again, I’d like to offer our services to install digital monitoring systems in the hives. It’ll be completely free and will make it easier—”

“No thanks,” Huaxin said, hanging up. On her computer, she clicked on the unread message.

They wanted her to download an app. Didn’t she have enough shit clogging up her phone? Wasn’t there an option to just send an email with whatever observations they wanted her to make? She clicked the “Support” button and typed: i don’t want your fucking app

Huaxin’s phone buzzed. She’d received a text.

Support: 
hey there, can you explain your dilemma to me?

Huaxin eyed the screen in suspicion. Was this an automated response? Or worse, AI? She didn’t want to talk to a robot.

Huaxin: 
are you a human?

Support: 
yes, i am.

Huaxin: 
who are you?

Support: 
i’m a scientist with sichuan resilient. i help implement the nature-based early warning system we’ve partnered with the beijing office of meteorology on. is that what you’re asking about today?

Huaxin: 
i guess

Support: 
may i ask why you don’t want to download our app?

Huaxin: 
too many apps on my phone

Support: 
i understand. do you prefer another method of reporting data?

Huaxin: 
can i just email it to someone

Support: 
you can email it to me.

The scientist sent Huaxin an email address, and Huaxin breathed a sigh of relief.

Huaxin: 
thanks

Huaxin: 
what’s your name

Support: 
my name is anshui. you are huaxin lin, correct?

Huaxin: 
mhm

Huaxin: 
so the guy on the phone said i’ll get paid for this?

Support: 
yes. think of it like a part-time job. we know it takes time out of your day to record these observations and send them to us, so we want to make sure you’re compensated.

Huaxin: 
i still don’t know how bees will help prevent flooding

Support: 
several studies show that some species of animals, including bees, exhibit specific behaviors prior to an extreme weather event. this program is two-fold: by telling us how the bees are behaving, we can predict if something like a flood is going to happen, and we can distribute emergency messaging to your region. on the research side, if we collect enough data that connects certain bee behavior to weather events, we’ll have more ways of predicting disasters in the future.

Huaxin: 
you’re telling me you can’t predict floods already with your fancy science tools?

Support: 
with the unpredictable ways climate events are unfolding, meteorological stations can only do so much. we’re testing supplemental methods by using nature-based solutions. nature is very wise; we just have to listen.

Huaxin: 
sounds like some hippie bullshit to me

Support: 
we’re included in that nature. doesn’t your body sometimes tell you when it’s going to rain?

That was true. If Huaxin didn’t smell it in the air, she literally felt it in her bones. She’d brought it up to a doctor once, who told her that sometimes people with joint issues could feel pressure changes in their knees. She didn’t like the idea of having weak joints. She was 37, hardly ancient.

Huaxin: 
i guess

Support: 
if you have any other questions, please let me know.

Support: 
have a nice day 🙂 

This person seemed like they had the role of a customer service representative plus IT person. Basically, the worst job ever. She put her phone away and went outside.

It was spring. From her home in the hills, Huaxin could see cracks of color speckling into view as new buds bloomed across the valley. The bees stirred from their slumber, buzzing more than they had in the previous months.

Over the years, Huaxin had departed from her family’s traditional beekeeping and veered into beehousing, an emerging practice that was more about providing for bees’ needs than managing bees. She still had one Chinese honey bee hive, but she’d also dotted her garden with bee motels, plant matter, and soil mounds to serve as wild bee habitats. Similarly, she’d filled her garden with a diverse mix of native plants: sweetly fragrant lychee and peach trees, traditional Chinese medicine staples like black cardamom and butterfly bush, native pea shrub and milkvetch, and vegetables like sponge gourd and radish.

Other than harvesting honey, Huaxin didn’t “keep” any of the bees. Certainly not the wild ones. She provided them shelter and food and they pollinated her plants. The bees were gentle with her. She liked this relationship; it was easy to understand. Give respect and receive respect in return. It wasn’t the same with humans.

After collecting data, she sipped homemade jasmine tea with a dollop of honey and took out her phone.

Huaxin: 
6am, roughly 50 bees per hive en route to flowers, determined dance, will report on return times in afternoon

Support: 
thank you.

Support: 
you can send me one report at the end of the day if you prefer, rather than multiple throughout.

Huaxin: 
i won’t remember all the details if i do that

Huaxin: 
would you rather me not text you every hour

Support: 
no, this is fine.

Support: 
determined dance, i like that.

Huaxin: 
thinking of their routes as dances helps me characterize them

Huaxin: 
sometimes it’s a lion dance, sometimes it’s tai chi

Huaxin: 
anyways you’re right, i don’t want to bother you with notifications

Support: 
i don’t mind. i like the frequent texts, i don’t get a lot of messages.

That was … sad. Or maybe not? Maybe it meant Anshui had a rich social life completely offline. That sounded amazing.

Huaxin: 
aren’t you texting other bee people

Support: 
they’re not all beekeepers. and most of them use the app, which automates the data delivery.

Huaxin: 
ah so i’m just a high-maintenance bitch

Support: 
you like doing things your way. which i admire.

Something tingled in Huaxin’s stomach. She bit her lip.

Huaxin: 
are you flirting with me

Support: 
… no. apologies if it came across that way.

Support: 
i can stop if you want.

Support: 
texting you things unrelated to the data monitoring, i mean.

Huaxin didn’t know what to say, so she stashed her phone.

The rest of the day was like any other, with the addition of her data duties. She tended to her garden. She visited the porch when people rang to buy her products. She made lunch: yellow squash from her garden, stir-fried with fermented black beans and tofu from the weekly market. She texted updates to Anshui, who didn’t respond until the end of the day with a “thank you.”

Someone knocked on the door. The sun had set by now, so Huaxin already knew who it was. “H��, Ms. Chen. The usual?”

Ms. Chen gave a curt nod. “And two lychee honey sticks, please. Need something to drown out the medicine tonight.”

Huaxin nodded, fetching the jars and sticks. Ms. Chen was her elderly neighbor—well, if one counted a neighbor as someone who lived two hills away. She’d lived a nocturnal life ever since she lost her job decades ago when countrywide protests caused the country to shut down its last coal mines. Their little town had celebrated. Ms. Chen had not. With no family, she’d taken pride in her work and found her purpose lost after that work disappeared. She’d lived in isolation ever since, except to visit town every once in a while to grab groceries, or buy honey from Huaxin.

Huaxin felt a kinship with her.

“Hot today,” Ms. Chen said as she took the honey. Their few exchanges of conversation had to do with the weather. As it was with people who never talked to others.

�Ԩ�𲹳�.”

“I hope it was worth it.”

��ٴǰ�����?”

Ms. Chen gazed into the distance. “Shutting down the mines. I hope it helped. The heat would be worse, right?”

Oh. She was talking about climate change. Huaxin always avoided the topic with Ms. Chen. It was the global effort to decarbonize that had lost her her job, after all. And yes, shutting down the coal mines was a good thing. But the government had not made sure she’d had another livelihood to jump to after the transition.

Still, it wasn’t bitterness in Ms. Chen’s voice. Instead there was … guilt? Regret?

No. Ms. Chen’s eyes were watery. She’d been forgotten. Abandoned. She wanted to know her abandonment was worth it. It wasn’t the income she would have missed the most; the country’s social programs meant no one needed to work to survive. But Huaxin knew that for Ms. Chen, her job had also provided her a sense of routine, of camaraderie. Ms. Chen mourned the loss of that.

�Ԩ���,” Huaxin said. “It would be worse.”

The next morning, Huaxin woke up feeling empty. She texted Anshui.

Huaxin: 
hi

Huaxin: 
you can talk to me

Huaxin: 
i don’t want this to be weird

Support: 
ok, thank you.

Support: 
sorry again.

Huaxin: 
don’t apologize

Huaxin: 
how did you sleep

Support: 
not bad. it was warm but i have good AC. you?

Huaxin: 
no good AC but i’m used to the heat

Huaxin: 
gonna get started on the bees now, will report in a bit

She went through the motions faster today and poured herself another cup of tea before going back to her phone.

Huaxin: 
6:15am bee workday start. lazy bastards. 40 bees per hive, more like tai chi

Support: 
the bees deserve to rest too.

Huaxin: 
i’m joking, i like bees more than humans

Support: 
what’s wrong with humans?

Huaxin: 
we made the mess that’s making you have to do this whole early warning thing, right?

Huaxin: 
selfishly polluting and not caring about nature

Support: 
we also realized our mistakes and put ourselves on the path to healing the planet. ������’t that a good redemption arc?

Huaxin recoiled. Some people didn’t deserve a redemption arc. But she couldn’t say that. Not good to come off as a bitter divorcee.

Huaxin: 
i guess

Support: 
such as you. i read your hive setup and it’s interesting. one honey bee hive, 3-4 wild bee hives.

Huaxin: 
having too many honey bees can actually hurt wild bees. they outcompete them for the same resources

Support: 
that’s mostly the case with european bees, ������’t it? asian honey bees are threatened, even here in china

Huaxin: 
yeah and the invasion of european bees are the reason for that lmao

Huaxin: 
but wild bees have it worse. people don’t care about them because they don’t make a marketable product like honey

Huaxin: 
wild bees are better at pollinating native plants, but that’s a service that goes unnoticed

Huaxin: 
ok you’re right, i’m biased toward wild bees, what can i say

Support: 
you like supporting the underdog, that’s a good thing.

Huaxin realized that no one had let her ramble on about bees like that in a long time. Her heart was beating fast from the flurry of typing. Or perhaps there was another reason.

Huaxin: 
eh, i’m not the only one beehousing. more people are seeing the benefit of it

Support: 
so there are others. humans aren’t so bad after all.

Huaxin: 
so eager to stifle my inner misanthrope

Huaxin: 
but true. at least humans aren’t robots

Huaxin: 
that AI shit is what’s really going to destroy the world

Huaxin: 
anyways thanks for listening to me monologue

Support: 
anytime. i like hearing your thoughts.

Support: 
make sure those bees stay hydrated.

Huaxin hated to admit it, but she was getting horrifically, deliciously addicted to texting Anshui.

Her routine had changed. After her morning data collection, she’d sit outside for a few hours, sipping her tea and texting. She learned more about Anshui’s role as a scientist—not that she understood all the technical aspects of it—and she answered Anshui’s many questions about bees.

Once, they shared a meal together. At least, they did it the best they could digitally; Huaxin wanted to have a video chat, but Anshui refused. Instead, Huaxin sent Anshui a recipe and they made it individually before eating together. Anshui, who in their words was “vaguely Buddhist,” taught Huaxin how they gave thanks for their food: consider the land it grew on, the hands that touched it, the human and nonhuman creatures who helped nurture it to harvest. Think of it as providing sustenance and strength for your body. Now use your newly given energy and put that care back into the world.

Huaxin: 
that’s hippie as shit

Huaxin: 
but i like it

Support: 
i thought you might.

Support: 
this recipe is really good by the way. you should share it with the center, i’m sure they’re always looking for new vegetarian meals with locally grown produce.

Huaxin: 
the what

Support: 
you haven’t been to the community resilience center in your town?

Fifteen minutes later, Huaxin heard a knock on her door. She opened it, and then stared at the young woman who stood on her patio, grinning under a thin layer of sweat. “H��!” the woman said. “Huaxin? I hear you’re overdue for a tour of the center.”

“How,” Huaxin said, numb.

The woman laughed. “Anshui called me and said you hadn’t heard of us. And then they said you’re a beehouser, and I was like ohhh, I totally know where she lives, I buy honey from her! I can’t believe you’ve never made it down to the center. My bad for not advertising it better.”

Huaxin plastered on a fake smile as the woman talked, all the while discreetly texting.

Huaxin: 
what the fuck

Support: 
go with her.

“It’s only 10 minutes away,” the woman said, pointing over her shoulder. Behind her stood a solarbike with a passenger cart attached to the back. “I can give you a ride.”

And not have a way to leave early if she didn’t like it? “I’ll follow you,” Huaxin said, grabbing her keys.

They biked down the hill, veering toward a large, elevated building near the edge of the town center. As they parked, Huaxin examined the building in surprise. She’d passed this hundreds of times, but always assumed it was some government office. It looked very boring, nondescript save for the giant gong beside it.

“It’s bland, but we have plans to spice it up,” the woman, who introduced herself as Min, said. “We’ve only been running the center for two years. This used to be a utility office, but after they shut down the coal mines, it stood empty.”

“Oh, right. That explains the gong,” Huaxin said in realization. Back when the mines still ran, the gong rang every morning to signal the start to the workday.

Min nodded. “Yes! Now we use the gong to supplement the early warning messaging, for people who don’t have phones. The town agreed to give this whole place to us after communities around here petitioned to repurpose it.”

Huaxin hadn’t heard of any such petition. Had she isolated herself that much?

Inside, the center felt much cozier. It had a huge open space with tons of tables and couches, kitchens, bathrooms with showers, libraries, private rooms for sleeping or other activities, power stations, a clinic, recreational activities like ping pong, playsets for children, and both an indoor and outdoor garden. It felt like a home but meant for hundreds of people.

“Who lives here?” Huaxin asked, examining the photos pinned to a corkboard.

“Anyone who wants to,” Min said. “People who need a temporary place to stay. People who need help. Visitors. Those displaced by—well, anything. We built it initially as a gathering space if another natural disaster happens. Like a flood. That’s why the whole thing’s elevated. Or a heat wave, since we know AC penetration here is low.”

“You don’t have to live here to visit, either,” another voice said, and Huaxin looked up to see a young woman in a wheelchair rolling toward them. Min made a noise of delight and ran over. “The center is a general gathering space. We have all sorts of events here. Open mics, dinners. You can come if you’re just bored.”

“This is Huaxin. She’s never been to the center before, so I was showing her around,” Min said to the woman. She gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Huaxin, this is Kunyi, my fellow cofounder. And my wife.”

The affection with which she uttered “my wife” bit the tender meat of Huaxin’s heart; she tried not to show it. “This is a great place,” she said. She meant every word of it. She was trying to tamp down her jealousy. Couldn’t this have existed eight years ago, after she’d been discarded?

“Please spread the word,” Kunyi said. She touched Min’s hand, and Huaxin had to look away. “It looks like we haven’t reached everyone, despite our best attempts. We’d love for everyone to feel connected.”

Huaxin’s thoughts went to Ms. Chen. She wondered if she could get that hurting old lady to come here.

She zipped home on her bike. She still had data to record.

Support: 
have any pictures of the center to share?

Huaxin: 
i thought you would have seen it already

Support: 
i haven’t been in a while, i bet it’s changed.

Huaxin: 
how do you know what’s going on in my own town and i don’t

Support: 
min is my friend from secondary school. i used to live nearby, you know.

Support: 
i’m glad you got to visit, it’s a special place. somewhere that makes you feel less lonely.

Right. Huaxin felt something bitter in her throat and grabbed a honey stick to swallow it down.

Bees never stopped working. Huaxin liked that about them. They knew the value of discipline and all played a role in their community. One day, as the haze of summer approached, Anshui asked her why she never took a vacation.

Huaxin: 
who will take care of the bees

Support: 
i know a few beehousers near you who would be happy to send staff your way.

Support: 
there are also ecology students here who would love an opportunity to shadow your farm.

Huaxin: 
i don’t trust them. no offense

Support: 
that’s fair. i suppose the bees are like your family.

Support: 
you could also try digital beehousing? that way you can watch them remotely.

The question made Huaxin flinch. She forced down the coldness rising up in her, but her fingers trembled as she typed.

Huaxin: 
eh.

Huaxin: 
i don’t trust tech

Support: 
i’ve noticed.

Huaxin: 
remember that flood? my parents were trying to evacuate and they used one of those dumbass navigation tools

Huaxin: 
drove right into a flooded road and drowned

Huaxin: 
wouldn’t have happened if the tool actually knew our roads. but no, its fancy algorithms got people killed

Support: 
i’m very sorry to hear that, huaxin.

Huaxin: 
whatever, i’m over it

Support: 
i don’t fault you for not trusting tech. we should create a world where tech works with people. if it just tries to replace them, things go very wrong.

Huaxin: 
tell my ex-husband that

She paused. She didn’t know why she brought that up. She hated talking about him. It was a shame that always hung in the back of her mind, made her wonder if she was unlovable. Replaceable. Worse than that—trash.

Hell. She couldn’t hide it forever.

Support: 
what were his opinions on tech?

Huaxin: 
we fought a lot about it. he wanted to, among other things, digitize my beehousing

Huaxin: 
he said tech would save the world and anyone who didn’t adopt every new innovation was going to fall behind and be forgotten

Huaxin: 
and then he proved that prophecy true by leaving me for someone better hahahahaha

Support: 
i’m sorry, that’s shitty of him. you didn’t deserve that.

Huaxin felt her cheeks grow warm. She felt drunk on something. Anshui’s attention, maybe. Unearthed rage from the hurt she’d tried to bury for so long.

And at the same time, something else. A seed of a feeling that nagged at her.

Huaxin: 
why are you being so nice to me

Support: 
i don’t think i am? no one deserves to be treated that way. if he wanted a better future, that should have included a world where no one gets abandoned

Huaxin: 
holy shit

Huaxin: 
you’re not real

Everything slammed into place. Anshui always being so friendly, so available. Anshui never sharing personal details. Anshui refusing to video call.

Anshui was not human.

Support: 
what?

Huaxin: 
you’re a fucking AI

Huaxin: 
godDAMMIT

Huaxin:
you LIED to me

Huaxin: 
i’m so stupid

Support: 
…

Support: 
are you serious?

Support: 
i am definitely NOT AI.

Huaxin:
i don’t know anything about you

Huaxin: 
you never want to call

Support: 
i’m sorry for trying to maintain my privacy.

Support: 
i thought YOU would understand given how untrusting you are of the internet.

Huaxin: 
yeah but we’ve been texting for weeks now???

Huaxin: 
send me proof that you’re real

Support: 
i do not owe you anything.

Support: 
if you think the only reason someone would show kindness to you is because they’re a computer program, then i’m sorry that’s your worldview.

Support: 
but honestly i’m disappointed that after all this time you don’t even see me as human.

Huaxin forced herself to put her phone down and take several deep breaths. She didn’t know what the truth was anymore. All she knew was that she’d broken something that had felt so rare and precious, and she wasn’t sure she could get it back.

Summer arrived in a wave of bright orange feeling, but Huaxin still felt stifled in the gloom of winter.

By habit, she still took bee behavior notes in a long-ass document interspersed with apologies, observations, and recipes for Anshui. Obviously, she never sent it. The last texts between the two were still Anshui’s searing words that made Huaxin’s throat close up every time she read them.

She began to notice more the changes around her: the bees slowing down, Ms. Chen’s visits becoming less frequent as she blamed the heat, more people staying at the center, which Huaxin visited often now. People murmured that this was the longest heat wave in a while, and Min and Kunyi’s team were busy making sure the center was prepared to take care of everyone.

One morning Huaxin trudged into the garden. The eerie silence almost knocked her over. She ran to the hives and checked each one.

Huaxin: 
anshui help

Huaxin: 
the bees aren’t moving

Support: 
are they okay? what do they need?

She couldn’t control her swell of emotions at seeing the first words from Anshui in a long while, but she didn’t have time for that now.

Huaxin: 
i think they’ll be fine if i get a continuous stream of water going

Huaxin: 
but they’ve collected a ton of water for their hives. they stopped fanning the entrances and now they’re clumping outside. they know a huge temperature spike is coming

Support: 
take care of them. i’ll tell min.

Support: 
have you been continuing to take notes?

Huaxin: 
yes, i’ll send them to you

She navigated to the document where she’d been keeping all the notes, apologies, and recipes, and without making a single edit, sent it over.

Then she ran to the hose.

Huaxin had never seen the whole town like this: buzzing with determination, working tirelessly as bees.

By the time she arrived at the center, Min was already waiting out front. “How are the bees?” she asked, handing Huaxin a cold water canister.

“They’ll be fine.” Huaxin was worried, especially for the wild bees; they were more sensitive to heat. She’d set up more shade and hydration stations and just had to trust they could take care of themselves. “How is everyone doing?”

Min grimaced. “Chaotic, but we’ve trained for this. Everyone’s been prepping on what to do if we get a warning, so they all knew to come here. Some volunteers also went to fetch anyone who might have passed out in their homes. The hospital in town and our clinic here is stuffed, but we’re making do.”

Huaxin glanced over at the bike parking, which was fuller than she’d ever seen it. Something occurred to her, and she looked back at the hills. “Has an elderly woman named Ms. Chen showed up?”

Min’s face furrowed in immediate concern. “I don’t think so.”

She began to run toward the bikes and Huaxin grabbed her arm. “No. You stay. I know where she lives.”

“But —”

“Min,” Huaxin said sternly. “Listen to your elders.”

Then she ran toward the gong and struck it with three reverberating strikes: the signal for the start of the work day.

That day, the temperature spiked to 45 degrees C for a sustained five hours. The next day was even worse, with both the mercury and humidity climbing to record highs.

Huaxin had reached Ms. Chen in time. The old woman had been sleeping, but her body had reacted to the familiar sound of the gong, and she was awake by the time Huaxin reached her house. The two had zipped back to the center.

Meanwhile, Anshui had been texting updates.

Support: 
temp should begin to dip tomorrow evening. thanks to you and other monitors in your area, we were able to contact everyone and avoid a lot of deaths.

Huaxin: 
thank god

Support: 
i appreciate the notes you sent over. i retroactively input all the data and the temp-dance curves provide a lot of new information. this will be really helpful for our research.

Huaxin: 
temp-dance curves huh?

Support: 
your metaphors were too useful not to use.

Huaxin: 
i hope you uhhh ignored all the other stuff in my notes that wasn’t bee data

Support: 
how could i?

Support: 
i’ve already tried the recipe for longan honey iced tea, it was delicious.

Huaxin: 
ughhhh

Support: 
but really, thank you for the apologies.

“Who’re you texting?” Kunyi asked as she and another person wheeled by, pushing a cart of wet towels. “You’re blushing like crazy.”

“Shut up,” Huaxin snapped, which only made Kunyi chuckle more. Huaxin retreated to one of the center’s indoor balconies before daring to turn to her phone again.

Huaxin: 
i know this is a sensitive point but you really don’t have to be nice to me. i was an asshole

Support: 
i could have been more open myself. i’m always bad at that.

Support:
but like i told you, people deserve redemption.

Support: 
i’m not going to leave you for making a mistake. love is labor and labor is love.

From this high up, Huaxin could watch the action of the center below: people handing out food, refilling water bottles, playing with each other’s pets.

Everyone, a role. Everyone, now, including her.

She finally broke down and cried.

In autumn, for the first time in years, Huaxin walked to the park to practice tai chi.

She’d been spending a lot of time at the center, teaching others the basics of beehousing. She went there every day now. It had even become more beautiful, thanks to Kunyi hiring Ms. Chen to come up with a mural design that both covered the drab walls and created an albedo effect.

But today, Huaxin needed a break from the place. Sometimes it just had too many people.

She found a shady spot to dance. Every now and then she checked her phone to see how the bees were doing—because she had to admit, being at the center so often meant that some digitization was useful. Just a little.

She remembered to take time to close her eyes and listen. To the stream, the trees, the way the wind caressed the lines of the mountains around her. Nature is wise.

It wasn’t long before she heard a set of footsteps approach, and then a voice said, “You dance just like the bees.”

Huaxin looked up at the unfamiliar face before her and smiled.

This story is part of��Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors,��a climate fiction contest from��Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.��

The kid saw it first. I’ve been paying him to mind the irrigation lines in the orchard now that my legs are talking back. He burst through the door like a bullet train. 

“T������’s paper,” he said, “real paper on the barn door.”&�Բ�����;

I’d been expecting it for years—decades—but when it finally happened it somehow didn’t make sense. I was at the kitchen table, and I just stared down into my empty mug at the little salmon painted on the bottom. 

“How much paper?” I asked. The kid didn’t know how to answer. I tapped the cup on the table and a spray of black coffee grounds turned the salmon into a catfish covered in mud. “How many sheets of paper?” 

“T������’s one white rectangle on the barn door and it’s made out of paper.”&�Բ�����;

Shit. 

The kid was practically skipping as he led me to the barn. I’ve got a couple dozen bonus trees between it and the house and they’re all in bloom, branches thick with white almond flowers like snow. Why does everything turn beautiful right before it goes to hell? 

The kid couldn’t stop chattering. 

“I thought it was illegal. Do you think they had to kill a tree for that paper? Why didn’t they send a comm?” 

“Lot of farmers went dark when the evictions started,” I said. “State can’t serve you a notice if you don’t have a screen. So they resurrected something called a printer to put the bad news on paper.”

“Are you getting evicted?” 

“If you’d read the goddamn thing, you’d know already.” That shut the kid up. 

Sure enough, there it was on the barn door. I ripped the page off the pin and the kid gasped. 

***

Eminent Domain 

Agricultural Modification Notice 

February 20, 2090

Robert Wallace, 

We write to inform you that within the next 24 hours the State of California will breach the levee on your property that stands between your orchard and the Sacramento River. We will create four breaches in the levee wall at 50-meter intervals. Removed stones and earth will be placed in a convenient location for your reuse. Any attempt to block this levee breach or return it to its former state will result in the seizure of this property under Eminent Domain Statute 2815. 

Thank you for your cooperation. 

Cynthia Garcia

Cynthia Garcia 
California Secretary of Agriculture

***

I crumpled the paper in my hands. 

“What are you doing?” The kid yelled. 

I let the ball fall to the ground and get lost in the carpet of white almond flowers. 

It was hard to decide which was more insulting. The letter itself or the fact that the assholes didn’t even say why—had to look it up on the goddamn weather service. An atmospheric river was coming from the Philippines. It would overflow the Sacramento River and the state wanted every floodplain along the river open to receive the water—that apparently included California’s last almond orchard. 

“Diego Rivera painted these trees,” I said.  

“Who’s Diego Rivera?” The kid and I were back in the house, both staring at our screens. 

“It doesn’t matter.”&�Բ�����;

“Will the orchard make it?” the kid asked. 

I read down my screen: Fifty-eight centimeters of rain in 48 hours. Dams will be opened when water levels exceed winter capacities. And then in bright red letters, ALL FARMS SOUTH OF SACRAMENTO REQUIRED TO FLOOD. 

“Depends on how much water we get,” I said. “Hell, next time you see paper it could be from one of our trees.”&�Բ�����;

The kid looked out the window. “I hope I never see paper again.” Bless him. Then he started bargaining. “Maybe it’ll be good. Almonds are a thirsty crop and we’re coming out of a drought. Maybe this is what they need. Maybe you can shut off the drip lines for a whole year and just let the trees drink.”&�Բ�����;

“You shut off the drip lines, didn’t you?” I asked. The kid nodded. 

I put down my screen and looked him square in the face. “State’s been on my ass since I took over this farm. Those trees ����dzܱ����’t even be here. We should be farming rice, or blueberries, something that can flood. But our trees take too much water and when the big rains come, that levee blocks the river from overflowing its banks and seeping back into the ground.”&�Բ�����;

“But there are a million other farms that can flood.”&�Բ�����;

I turned my screen around and showed him. “This says we’re getting a two-day downpour, and that’s probably the last rain we’ll see until next year. If the state doesn’t save that water in the ground, nobody gets to grow.”&�Բ�����;

“You’re talking like one of them.”&�Բ�����;

“Why not? I understand it, doesn’t mean I have to like it.”&�Բ�����;

“But the orchard is a piece of history.” It was what I told him to say to tourists. But now, he said it like he believed every word. “It’s not fair.”&�Բ�����;

I tried to smile at him, the little idiot. Had I ever been that young?

The bulldozer came in the afternoon. I sent the kid home and set up on my porch with a bad bottle of whisky. Might as well watch the show. 

The wind was quiet in the orchard, but I could see clouds amassing in the east. The birds were squawking each other deaf. The land knew something was coming. 

BANG! 

It came from the levee. They must have taken the access road on the other side. Goddamn fusion engine, I hadn’t heard a damn thing. Bang, bang, bang! A shovel punched through the wall like a fist. A long metal arm appeared behind it and the deed was done. 

When the thing finally rolled through the hole, there was no person driving it—no cab, no steering wheel—it was just a giant shovel on tank tracks. Then I watched it clear a perfect 5-meter hole in the wall and stack all the rocks and dirt next to it with a forklift it produced out of its ass. The situation was pretty funny when you thought about it—the orchard I’d tended for 30 years taken down by a soulless machine with a pointy ass. 

It drove up the levee wall another 50 meters, this time on the orchard side because it knew I knew the jig was up. Then it punched its hole and cleared its rocks, and then it did it again, and again. By the time it rolled out my front gate, there were four perfect holes in my levee and I was drunker than a fence lizard. 

Soon, the rain started and I sat there staring at the hole. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. A feeling—a fear I’d shunted down for decades rippled through me. What was going to come through that wall? 

When the sun went down, I didn’t bother with sandbags or pumps, I just got in bed. The house was elevated 4 feet, maybe it would be enough. On the edge of sleep, I pictured the water pouring through the windows, cold and brown, lifting the bed off its frame with me on it. 

It was a fantasy. It was a memory. 

Sacramento, California, 2058

The sentence always starts the same way, but he doesn’t know how to finish it.

The Folsom Dam broke and I don’t know where my kids are. 

The Folsom Dam broke and I can’t reach my wife.

The Folsom Dam broke and my entire life will be underwater. 

The house erupted in sound when the alert came through. Every speaker he talked to throughout the day was suddenly yelling at him. Get to high ground! Sacramento would be inundated in 9 minutes and 38, now 37 seconds. It was not an evacuation order, it was an order to shelter in place. 

There is a banging on his door. He opens it and a family of four charges in. They live across the street. 

“We need to get upstairs!” one of the moms yells. His is the only two-story house on the block. 

“Follow me,” he says.

They run up the stairs and he pulls down the ladder to the attic. The other mom takes his arm. 

“We’ll cross that bridge if we need to,” she says.  

They all end up in the bedroom, and the two kids huddle together in the middle of the big bed the way his own kids do when they’ve had a nightmare. These two are a little older—second or third grade—he can’t remember their names. 

His kids are at a one-story daycare 2 kilometers away. Terror shoots through him. He can’t get there, he can’t get to them in time. Does the daycare have an evacuation plan? They must; he and Ayla paid enough for it. 

Ayla can get them, the hospital is just blocks away. But where would they go? The thought of Ayla—of something happening to Ayla—momentarily paralyzes him. 

He forces himself onto the balcony and holds his phone up to the sky in the rain trying to get a signal. There is nothing. The whole city is clogging up the servers doing exactly the same thing, and yet the clock that appeared on the screen with the municipal alert keeps counting down. 

Six minutes, 42 seconds. 

One of the moms is out there too, phone in the air. Her name is Kalani. He looks at her expectantly. She shakes her head. 

“At least you’re all together,” he says, more jealous than he has ever been. 

“Ayla’s amazing. She’ll be fine, she won’t let anything happen to your kids.” Her words are toothless, but in this moment they are all he has.

“Who are you trying to reach?” he asks. 

“My dad—or my dad’s caregiver. He hasn’t been particularly mobile for a while.”&�Բ�����;

He nods and thinks of his own parents aging safely in Michigan. Kalani hits her phone against her thigh and looks at it. Nothing.

“Dammit!” she tries again. Nothing. “How did this happen?” She means the dam break, the flooding, everything. 

He shakes his head. “Just two wet years.” It’s true. Last year there had been 19 atmospheric rivers between January and March, and the whole state celebrated when the drought was declared over. When it happened again, there was nowhere for the water to go. 

He looks back at his phone—4 minutes. Then the sound begins. 

At first, he can hardly make it out through the rain, a low rumble that seems to come from everywhere. He and Kalani look to the hill at the east edge of the neighborhood. They know this is where the water will come from. They see nothing. 

“Can they swim?” He asks, indicating her kids. 

“They’re Hawaiian, of course they can swim,” she says. He nods. Can his kids swim? The oldest can, can’t he? The sound is steadily increasing, and something changes on the hill. Light crests over it, a little at first, then more and more like a second sunrise. The rumbling rises. This is it. The water is early. 

Kalani runs back to her family, huddled on the bed. He stays on the balcony, and stares at the otherworldly light—could the flood be reflecting it?—he needs to stop it. He needs to will the water to wait. Ayla will need the next three minutes. He grips the railing. He is soaking wet.  

“Stop!” he screams as though the flood can hear him. “Stop!” 

It doesn’t. Angry water crashes over the hill, then buries it—a wall of brown and white carrying cars and sheds—pieces of a city that is quickly ceasing to exist.  

“No!” he screams. But he can’t hear himself over the roar. He looks back into the bedroom. The family already knows. The kids are holding onto their mothers and the women are holding each other. 

He looks back out and the first few houses in the subdivision have been reduced to their roofs. The water is ping-ponging through the neighborhood, downing lampposts and trees and smashing front porches into walls. It’s almost at his door.

“Hold on!” he yells back into the house. Then he hears the flood blow out his downstairs windows. The balcony shakes. He runs into the bedroom and holds onto a wall. He can feel the water tearing his house apart through the floor. A lamp crashes to the ground next to the big bed. A bookshelf drops its contents and falls over. He sees that nothing has fallen on the family, but Kalani is staring at him. They lock eyes. Her nose is in her child’s hair, her arm is around her wife, but her eyes are fixed on him. 

They stare at each other for what feels like hours. They are thinking the same thing—as long as they can hold each other’s gaze, the house will stand, the sickening bumps coming through the floor will not hit a load-bearing beam. As long as they keep staring, they will live. 

Slowly, the crash of water softens below them. The bumps stop coming through the floor, and at last, all that is left is the sound of rain on the roof. Only then do the kids begin to cry.  

“Just shut up and take the canoe,” Kalani says. They are in what’s left of her garage. 

It took the two of them about a half hour to wade through his house and across the street. His ground floor was unrecognizable. The couch had been ripped in half, and framed photos, kitchen utensils, and other bits of his and Ayla’s life bobbed around them like dead bodies. 

The water was up to their waists as he and Kalani crossed the street. It looked placid on top but they could feel it had a current and they took slow, measured steps toward the gaping mouth of her garage. The door had blown off but the Hawaiian outrigger canoe was still hung up on the ceiling. 

Now, he stands under it, staring at the carvings in the wood: a bird with a long beak, a man with arms outstretched, and waves—waves everywhere. 

“It’s a family heirloom,” he says. “It’s a piece of history.”&�Բ�����;

“It’s a boat,” she says, “and it works.” She is loosening the ropes to lower the canoe down. “Help me out.”&�Բ�����;

He undoes the knots with her and soon the canoe splashes down into the water. It looks like it can hold four, maybe five people—his family. Another carved wooden float connects to the main canoe with long poles so it won’t tip easily and there is a rope and six oars inside. 

Kalani stares him down. “This is a loan. I expect you to bring this back to me in one piece with your people inside.”&�Բ�����;

“I will,” he says, forcing himself to believe it. 

They both get in the canoe and Kalani shows him how to paddle—long strokes, one side and then the other. He drops her off at his house and doesn’t leave until she waves to him from the upstairs with her wife and kids. 

Then he is paddling through Sacramento, picturing his children, picturing Ayla, and letting the thought of them blot out any comprehension of what he is seeing around him: people holding each other on roofs—no one attempts to flag him down—an old man’s body face down in the water, his city transfigured. All he can do is row and look for street signs which, when unbent, are miraculously the same. 

Then he is at the daycare building and it’s locked. The water is halfway up the door. He bangs on it from the canoe, yelling his children’s names.

“Conrad! Alice!” He hears nothing on the other side and imagines them floating face down like the old man. He’s about to tear the door off its hinges when he sees the writing on it. 

Evacuated to North Capitol steps, it says in black marker. 

The journey from S Street to M Street is the difference between a city and a rapid. The Sacramento River has overflown its levees and it is spewing water in all directions. He has to paddle as hard as he can to go a few meters. 

An ambulance goes by on a freeway overpass. He hears howling. He looks around and sees a pack of dogs on top of a truck. Their dog walker is holding their leashes and they’re howling at the ambulance like it’s the moon. He catches the dog walker’s eye—a girl in her 20s with a gap in her teeth, and just for a second, the two of them smile at each other. 

“I can come back for you once I get my kids,” he yells to her.  

She shakes her head. “I won’t leave them.” She means the dogs. There are too many to fit in the canoe. She salutes him.  

The Tower Bridge road is completely under water when he turns onto the Capitol Mall. The water is moving fast and he rows with a strength he didn’t know he had. 

He sights the capitol. The steps are filled with people. Children are chasing each other and splashing water but he doesn’t recognize them. He paddles as fast as he can. He hits the steps and he’s about to jump out of the boat when a guy yells, “Tie it off!” He throws him the rope. 

Then he is roving the steps, yelling “Conrad! Alice!” He inspects each child, but they continue to be little strangers.

“Rob!” He hears his name. He turns around but the crowd is dense. “Rob!” A Brown woman in scrubs cuts through. She has never looked more beautiful. He runs to her and takes her in his arms, buries his face in her hair. Then he feels small arms grab his legs. They are together—the four of them—and they are alive. 

“If we make it through this, we’re moving to Vorden and taking over Dad’s orchard,” Ayla says. They’re rowing together with the kids between them. 

“Almonds are illegal,” he says. 

“Ours are grandfathered in. Historical Registry.” She winks at him. 

“What do a doctor and an engineer know about farming?” 

“We’ll figure it out.”&�Բ�����;

“A fish!” Conrad yells and wakes Alice who had been asleep in Ayla’s lap. They all look into the water. He’s right, there are fish swimming around them. They’re the size of his hand and they have silvery spots. 

“Good eye,” he says, and kisses his son’s head. “Are they salmon?” he asks Ayla. 

“Hell if I know.”&�Բ�����;

“They are!” Conrad says. “And they’re babies.”&�Բ�����;

“Where did you learn that?” Ayla asks. 

“In school. The baby salmon live in the river, but only if the river is healthy. They’re a good sign.”&�Բ�����;

“No more salmon,” Alice says, and goes back to sleep. 

They are not rowing home. They are rowing back to the hospital. Every doctor, including Ayla, has been called in. She directs them to the loading dock at the back of the building, which is miraculously dry. 

“When will you be home?” he asks. 

“They can’t keep me longer than two days,” she says. Then she hugs and kisses Alice and then Conrad. The kids protest but they’ve been trained in these partings. Then she kisses him goodbye, and her smell envelops him. 

“I love you,” she says, and climbs out of the boat. 

This is the last time he will see her. In a few hours, half of the hospital will collapse on top of 800 people, and one of them will be Ayla. 

For the rest of his life, good days and bad days will be determined by one of two thoughts: a bad day—I should have forced her back into that canoe; and a good day—at least I got to say goodbye. 

Vorden, California, 2090

He woke with the sun, which was out. The rain had stopped, and when he put his old feet on the floor, it was dry. 

His head throbbed. He went into the kitchen and saw the empty whisky bottle on the table and remembered why. His screen told him his kids were worried about him, and he sent back a comm saying he’d made it. Then he steeled himself and went to the window. 

The orchard was a lake. The trees rose out of it like beams under a pier, their white flowers diminished by the rain, but still there. 

He found his waders in the closet and went out onto the porch. The house was an island above 3 feet of water. He went down the porch steps one at a time, thinking there would be a current, but the water was calm and still and when he sloshed onto the ground the water level was just below his belly button. 

He walked to the closest almond tree, silhouetted against the sky, running his hands along the surface of the water. It was cold and crisp, and the thought that was always near found him again. Ayla would have loved this. 

He put his hands on the tree’s trunk, fingers gliding into the ridges of its bark, and looked up into the canopy. It was a little cloud. Then something splashed him—a fish. He looked down. There were young salmon swimming all around him, and he watched white almond flowers float down and land on them as they swam between the trees.

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate fiction contest from Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.

I’m bundled in a wool overcoat against the 6 a.m. winter chill of Los Angeles. The former New Yorker in me scoffs at how soft I’ve become against the cold—or rather, the “cold,” since it’s a full 50 degrees and I’m shivering. Today’s high is 80, so by noon I’ll have stripped down to a crop top. I know it’s climate change and all, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not just a tiny bit excited for a short reprieve from the monotonous months of 50-degrees-and-rainy that we’ve been having this winter.

The morning frost on my Subaru is tenacious, even after I run the engine for a little while. I’m bordering on late for kathak class, so I pull out of the driveway with icy windows and hurry to beat the rush-hour traffic.

In the studio it’s a steady thrum of the tabla over the stereo system:

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na 

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na—dha

gin na—dha

gin na—dha

And then a relentlessly driving pace of chakkar, or one-count spins:

tig da dig dig ek…

���…

�ٱ���…

���󲹲���…

�貹���Գ���…

������…

�������ٳ�…

And on and on…

After an hour of this, I’m breathless. We’ve been drilling a composition with 31 chakkar, and even after months, I’m losing my balance somewhere around 26.

I leave class and head back to my car, protein shake in hand, sweat gluing my kurta to my skin, a string of profanities running through my mind as I scold myself for tapping out at 26. I’ve just slipped into my driver’s seat when my phone rings. One peek at the screen and my mood elevates. 

“H�� Amma,” I say with unrestrained fondness as my mother’s face grins back at me over FaceTime.

“H�� chinna,” she responds with equal affection. “Just finished kathak?”

“Yeah, about to head to the grocery store on my way home.”

“Shall we quickly call Ammamma before she sleeps?”

“Sure, my parking meter’s out in 10, though.”

“We can just say hi. FaceTime or Whatsapp?”

“FaceTime. Can you add her in?”

“One minute.”

After some shuffling around, a second little box populates on my screen, offering me the stray wisps of white hair otherwise known as the top of my grandmother’s head.

“H�� Ammamma,” I say.

“H�� Amma,” my mom chirps.

“H�� kanna. Bujie kanna re. Sweetie kanna,” croons my ammamma’s forehead. “How are you both?”

“Good, can you bring the phone down?” I say, holding back a laugh. “We only see the top of your head.”

Amma and I call Ammamma together every week. It used to be Sundays, like clockwork, when I was in grade school. Now it’s sort of whenever we catch each other. Every week we remind her to tilt the phone down so we can actually see her face. And every week she insists on greeting us with her forehead.

Ammamma’s puttering around her kitchen in Hyderabad, 8,711 miles away from me in California. My memory conjures up the smell of hearty palakurrapappu and fluffy idli. Chili-spiced tur dal roasting on the tava for homemade podi. The softness of her orange sari, pallu tied securely around her waist so it stays out of the way of her busy hands. 

She’s lived alone in Tarnaka for almost 40 years, ever since my grandfather passed away. She’s 85 now and wobbles about her small flat with the vigor and determined independence of a 20-year-old. My amma got this from her, I think. I swear my amma will be single-handedly shoveling piles of snow as tall as she is (5 whole feet) from her Park City, Utah, driveway until she’s 90 years old.

I tell Ammamma about kathak class and she glows with pride. “Very good, kanna, Very good. I’m very glad you’re keeping up with kathak. Very good.”

“I’ll show you this new composition when I next come, Ammamma.” She smiles the most when I promise this. Every year, when we visit her in India, I dance for her. In those 15 minutes while she watches, she’s filled with more childlike joy, more wonder, more freedom of spirit, than any other moment I see her. My grandma, like many women in her generation, carries a deep anxiety. Kathak transcends that, transports us together, unlocks her. Dance is hardly my profession, but it has a cemented place in my life as a psychosomatic way to stay rooted in culture and family, from half a world away. As a way of staying connected to Ammamma.

“Aim chestunavu, Amma? What are you doing?” my mom asks her mother.

“Aim ledu. Just putting away the food.”&�Բ�����;

“What did you make for dinner?”

“Nothing much,” Ammamma says. “Some pappannam, that is all. Tomorrow I’ll make some cabbage koora.” She pauses in her puttering to pick something up off the counter. “See? Do you see the cabbage?”

Ammamma adjusts the angle of the camera in an effort to show us her cabbage.

“Do you see?” But she’s pointing the camera at her ceiling, and I’m having a hard time repressing my laughter. 

“No, Ammamma, we can’t see. You’re showing us the ceiling.”

Ammamma adjusts the angle again, and now we’re feasting our eyes on a sliver of her ceiling that’s been joined by a section of her wall.

“Now? Now do you see? Do you see the cabbage?” 

Amma is openly laughing. “No, Ma, we don’t see the cabbage. You’re showing the wall.”

Another unsuccessful adjustment, then: “OK, now? Now do you see the cabbage? Do you see the cabbage?”

Ammamma’s excitement is only intensifying, but no appearance from any cabbage thus far. Now Amma and I are both shaking with mirth.

“Do you see it?” Ammamma continues to insist. 

We don’t answer, because we’re too busy gasping for breath. Then, miraculously, we see a sliver of a blurry green leaf flash across her FaceTime camera.

“Oh!” Amma and I both shout. 

“We see it, Ammamma!”

�Ԩ���, yes, we see it, Ma.”

“You see the cabbage? You see it?”

“Yes! Yes, Ammamma, we see the cabbage!”

Now even Ammamma is laughing. 

I screenshot this moment several times, never wanting to forget these small winks of diasporic joy, the three of us spread across three cities and three generations, giggling like sisters together on a sunshine summer afternoon.

It’s not long before Ammamma’s chuckles turn into coughs, peppered by a sort of rough wheezing that I learned as a child is part of her chronic asthma. My parking meter blinks red.

Tuesday, November 19, 2047

I’m in the front yard, doling out carefully measured sprinkles of water to the small garden I’ve struggled to nurture for the last several growing seasons. The water rations for victory gardens have gotten more and more economical over the last 10 years. In our little patch we still get tomatoes and kale and grow some neem, and the occasional surprise potatoes spring out from wherever we’ve last dug in compost. The rest of our food comes from the community garden (which does better some years than others), the local co-op (which is not always well-stocked because it hasn’t quite yet reached financial stability), or with great burden to our wallets (anything requiring long-distance freight costs an arm and a leg now, partially because it’s just too expensive at a basic resource and carbon level, and partially because of the taxes they’ve been trying to institute on non-local food). 

It’s been a tough transition period. Here in California, we have the farming infrastructure but not the water. In other parts of the country, land that’s been monocropped under generations of agribusiness is in various stages of transition to regenerative farming. The question of who pays for this transition, what carbon taxes get charged or credited and to whom, and who leads the proposed solutions that take the place of the old order … well, it’s been a thorny time. But it’s also a time of inspired experimentation. I remind myself of that when the overwhelm hits. I remind myself of the energy:

Where we live, in the historically Black neighborhood of Leimert Park, our family’s borne witness and supported as those who’ve been holding it down here for generations lead the charge on collective care. Community gardens, co-ops, free fridges, heat shelters, communal front-yard victory gardens, shade-tree planting, seed saving, after-school programs, “Buy Nothing” gift economy groups, car shares, and so much more. Funding is a constant issue for these initiatives (right now the biggest source of funding is private donors, but the community is keenly problem-solving for a self-sufficient model). Everything’s decided at our monthly town hall meetings, which are always lively and full of opinions. There’s a small group of us South Asians in the neighborhood, and our agreed-upon job at these meetings is mostly to listen well and provide the chai. 

Out in the garden, dusk is dancing vividly before me, blues chasing pinks chasing oranges across the hazy horizon. I always stop to cherish it, never knowing how many more I’ll savor before the smog swallows up color altogether. 

I pause over the far end of the garden, which has been exceptionally dry no matter how much I try to feed it. It’s honestly a little embarrassing. My neighbors’ victory gardens look far more luscious than mine. The community decided at one of our first meetings years ago that victory gardens would go in the front yard (communal, conversational, open, and engaging) rather than in the backyard (hidden, private, inaccessible). 99 percent of the time, I love that we made this decision. The 1 percent is just the occasional despair I feel when I remember that my garden is on display and not in the best shape, and my ego gets to me. I make a mental note to hop next door tomorrow to Amrit and Hari’s to ask Hari what cover crops are working in his yard these days—his green thumb has always guided mine, and maybe he’ll know how to better nourish this dry patch.

From somewhere inside the house, my phone rings. 

“Amma!” Gita’s voice calls to me. “It’s Ammamma.”

Her 5-foot frame, identical to mine, comes bounding through the open screen door, my phone in her hand. 

Gita’s hair is curly like mine, and I fucking love that about her. She’s smart as a whip, and I love that even more about her. Sometimes I look at her and marvel at the fact that I made that creature. Now I understand what my amma’s always saying about “having a kid is like putting your heart outside of yourself and watching it walk around,” or some shit like that. Sometimes I want to gather Gita up and store her safely back inside my body.

She comes over to me and scoops me into an affectionate hug before setting the phone up flat on the porch table and hitting “answer.” We both activate the bracelets on our wrists. Almost immediately a spark of light projects upwards from the Beam projection port on my phone, and a three-dimensional hologram of my mother takes shape from the light. 

“H�� Amma,” I say.

“H�� Ammamma!” Gita says brightly.

“Hello? Hello?” my mom says. “I can’t see you.”&�Բ�����;

No matter how many times we do this, she always comes in perplexed at the beginning of a Beam call.

“Amma, did you put it face down on the table again?”

“Allari pilla! Troublemaker. I kept it properly face up, I’m not that technologically challenged. But still I don’t see you?”

“Did you turn the brightness back up or is it in night mode?”

“Oh. One minute. How do I do that again?”

“T������’s a control on your bracelet. This is why I was saying you should just leave it on the automatic setting.”

“I can figure it out. I don’t like how bright it is on auto, it makes my eyes burn.”

We watch her hologram-self fidget with something off-camera, before lighting up in delight. 

“Got it!” she says. “H��! Oh, Gitu, you’re looking so nice. Are you going somewhere?”

“Thanks, Ammamma,” Gita says. “I was invited to a prayer circle tonight, in preparation for the burns next week. Elena is leading, and she told me I could bring some jasmine and haldi and chandan as offerings from our family.”

For the past few years, Gita’s been volunteering with the Tongva Conservancy’s ceremonial burns, covering any responsibilities she’s invited to participate in. Fire season has worsened over the last 10 years in California, so many regions, including L.A. County, realized survival depended on working with local tribes to revive cultural burning practices. The prescribed burns that Indigenous folks across the world have practiced culturally since time immemorial kept rampant dry brush under control and created a cycle of nourishment for the forests, until colonialism outlawed the practice. In L.A., the late fall burning they’ve restarted allows for plant life to rejuvenate in the rainy winter season, the goal being to once again transform dry underbrush into verdant vegetation come spring. 

“How are you going there?” my amma asks Gita. “I thought your driving permits are Monday, Wednesday, Saturday?”

“Elena got a Tuesday slot in the community car share, so she’s coming to pick me up. I think she got one of those Rivian two-doors!”

“Fancy,” I say.

Gita goes inside to start gathering her things while I ask Amma what she’s up to.

“Not much,” Amma replies. “Just making your Ammamma’s cabbage koora.”

“Tease!” I accuse.

“I sent you seeds last year!” Amma says defensively.

“Yeah, yeah, but they don’t grow, I told you. The water they need is way beyond our rations.”

We bicker warmly about cabbage koora—a nostalgic but water-intensive vegetable I probably haven’t eaten in 15 years at this point. As the cool night air sets in, Amma’s hologram shines brightly above the porch table. A few stray moths, confused, start circling in the vicinity. I watch their wings disturb the pixels here and there. 

When Elena’s car (indeed a Rivian two-door) pulls up, Gita flashes by me with a kiss and hops in, leaving the divine aroma of jasmine and chandan in her wake. At the same moment, a second set of footsteps tip-tap up the stairs from the street into our garden, and I’m engulfed in a familiar embrace.

“H�� buddy!” a voice coos at me. It’s Aditi, close friend and co-conspirator. She plops her bike helmet and backpack onto a chair on our porch. Seeing that my mom’s on Beam on the table, she grins. “H�� Aunty!” She hits the “join” button on her Beam bracelet so that my mom can see her hologram, then sprawls out in the grass beside me. “How are you?”

“H��, Aditi! Good, good. How are you, how’s Noor?”

“They’re good, they’re still at the courthouse, or they would’ve come by with me.” Then Aditi nods at her backpack and looks at me conspiratorially. “I went to the Indian store today.”

I let out a whoop. This is a luxury we reserve only for special occasions. “Shut up. What’re we celebrating?”

“Wellll, Noor Beamed me from the courthouse today and told me that our permit request for the collective is next in line for consideration. And that they think we’re a sure thing.”

Amma’s hologram gasps. “The housing collective?”

“The one and only!” Aditi says. 

That night, with Amma still on Beam, Aditi pulls out fresh guavas and late-season mangoes, a rare pleasure all the way from the subcontinent, and we twirl around…

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na 

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

…between bites of home.

Friday, July 9, 2077

I eye the box on my coffee table with suspicion. Gita’s had some strange contraption called Iris delivered to me, and she swears it’s worth whatever trouble it surely brings. I asked Aditi and Noor about it, and they agreed that the concept of sticking digital contact lenses in one’s eyes is unpleasant, to say the least. Gita instructed me to be open to it and threatened to call me an old codger if I refuse to even try it out.

“Iris makes your eye a projector, Amma, your eye. Can you believe it? It’ll be like Reyna and I are there with you, 3D, walking and talking and interacting with you and your space. Like we’re literally there,” she’d said when we last talked. 

The idea of feeling like my daughter and granddaughter are physically with me ultimately makes Iris an easy sell, despite my hesitations. Remembering her words, I decide to open the damn box.

After great difficulty and no small amount of grumbling, I’ve finally affixed the small translucent contacts to my eyes, and, scrutinizing the user manual, I figure out how to power on this incredibly invasive piece of technology. I’ve had it on for less than two minutes when the accompanying earbud headphones inform me that I have an incoming call. It is, of course, Gita.

“Amma!” she shouts joyfully. “You did it! You finally listened to me! This is so cool.”

I’m not sure exactly what is so cool, as my vision is blurry and I’m completely baffled by how she could possibly be seeing me right now. But I take her word for it. Gita does some troubleshooting that I don’t understand, laughs at me quite a few times for being a bumbling fool with this new device, and finally coaches me through getting the focus in the lenses calibrated. 

And then I see what’s so cool. Gita has set it so that the simulated world we’re in is my real front yard. I’m really here, right here, right now, lying in the grass. And it looks like they’re here, too, as full-scale renderings of their real selves. They can interact with me, with my garden. On their end, Gita tells me, it’s like being in virtual reality. She tells me that next time, we’ll make the setting her house, where she and Reyna can move around in the real world and I’ll be visiting via virtual reality. Once I’ve quit my grumblings, we settle into our regular pattern of conversation—what we’re all eating, how everyone’s love interests are, whether we’re taking care of our health—except it is quite cool, because the whole time it’s like Gita and Reyna are lounging in the yard with me. I tell them this reminds me of way back when I was a kid in India, loitering outside all afternoon with my cousins.

“You used to go to India every year, Ammamma?” Reyna asks me, eyes wide. 

“Every year. We were very lucky.”

“Do you think you’ll ever go back?”

“With the flight restrictions, it’s almost impossible,” I say. “Now I think it’d take me three trains and a whole-ass ship. No, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back. But sometime in the future … I think you will.”

My girls both reach out to me as glittering pixels in the golden summer afternoon. I like how realistically Iris portrays them, truly as if they’re here in the grass with me, just like Gita promised, reaching towards me to comfort me. But the technology misses what I love most about them: their smell, the warmth of their skin, the calm in my own heart when I’m in their physical presence. 

When Gita told me she and her partner Gloria had decided to move away from L.A. to raise Reyna somewhere that was more climate-stable, I understood. My mother left her mother in India to come to America in search of a better life, an economically stable life, a life that would offer the opportunity of abundance for us—for me—after the literal and metaphorical scarcity that British colonialism imposed on the subcontinent. At the time, who would’ve thought that decades later, rampant consumption and capitalism would finally deliver that same scarcity here to our doorsteps in America? 

Then I moved away from my mother, starting a life in L.A. in community with other South Asian storytellers who were committed to drawing attention to climate and culture. Those of us who’d joined the movement as soon as we became conscious of it saw the writing on the wall long back, but it took the bubble actually popping around the wealthy for those in power to take any real action on what was going on. 

In L.A., most of the mansions in the hills got wiped out by fires long ago. A staccato of winter storms caused irreparable mudslides along Mulholland Drive. The Pacific Ocean claimed Santa Monica. The city was forced to implement retreat strategies, which led to them regulating lot sizes as more people had to relocate to the livable areas of L.A. Predictably, some millionaires really fought against this and did everything they could to rebuild their mansions and add “climate-protective measures,” but no one ever got too far in the process because insurance companies no longer cover houses built in long-designated Hazard Zones, and after a certain point with all the carbon taxes levied on any building project that exceeds Reciprocal Resourcing Standards, the mansions were no longer financially viable. Other millionaires were shockingly supportive of the lot size restrictions, and wound up working within Reciprocal Resourcing Standards to build sustainable collectives.

Of course, some people still went the route of save-myself-at-the-expense-of-others. They built bunkers with the goal of “self-sufficiency.” It’s a seductive idea, until you realize what it means is isolation from any sense of community. We are by definition interdependent. Our survival is predicated on our ability to work together. But I’m pretty sure Elon Musk’s kids are still raising their families all alone in their secluded fortress. Their only outside interaction is probably with the drones that deliver their caviar.

Ultimately, it was the local resilience, the grassroots ideas, the place-based knowledge that allowed us to survive. These days, I live at Aunty Gang Collective (the name was inspired by Gita always calling me and my cherished group of South Asian women friends “aunty gang”). Here, there’s no caviar (never understood the appeal, anyway), but there’s music in the streets every day.

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

After weathering a long waitlist at the permitting office, our little collective of 15 homes was finally greenlit and built with reclaimed and organic material as part of a government-sponsored hyper-localization effort. Over the last 30 years, L.A. was essentially renovated and rewilded by a team of what we would’ve called environmental architects back when I was growing up (today we just call them “architects”), led by a group of Indigenous engineers and designers.

We can’t drive much anymore (even electric cars, which over time proved to be too resource-intensive to continue manufacturing at scale), but it’s OK, because the electric buses and trains are much more connected than they used to be. Plus, Aditi and Noor are original Aunty Gang members and live just down the street. We hobble over to each other’s houses almost every day.

“OK, so India’s off the table,” Gita says, cutting off my thoughts, “but more realistically, can you come here, Amma? I told you, Gloria and I can arrange for the flight permits—we have so many credits from volunteer days with the ceremonial burning crews. The aunty gang can help you pack up, and you can be here by next week.”

I make a face at her. I hope with Iris that she can properly see the extent of my disdain for this idea. 

“Not this again, kanna.” I stick her with an exaggerated eye roll. “Every call, the same thing: ‘Amma, now that Dad has passed what’s left for you in L.A.? You’re allllll alooone, why don’t you leave everything you’ve known for the last 60 years and come here to fucking Duluth, Minnesota, to join us in this commune of white people.’ Chhi!”

“Well, it was either this or Vermont,” Gita quips back. “And it’s not called Duluth anymore. It’s Onigamiinsing—it’s Ojibwe. Anyway, please just think about it.”

“I’ll think about it,” I lie.

“You say that every time, but you never really do.”

“And yet you keep asking.”

“I worry about you.”

“And I worry about you, kanna.”

“About me? I have Glo and Reyna. I don’t like you being alone over there, you’re 82, and that’s not young.”

“OK, first of all, rude. Second of all, I’m not alone! I have Aunty Gang, all my friends within walking distance. The Collective has grown a lot since you last visited. It’s like a mini Wakanda here now. But with less beautiful superheroes and more elderly people.”

“W���첹-�ɳ󲹳�?”

“Never mind, it’s before your time. How’s kathak class, Reyna?” I change the subject swiftly.

“Oh. Good!” Reyna says. “We’re working on chakkar. I’m up to 31 in a row! I can Iris you from our studio next time and show you, Ammamma. It’ll be like you’re watching me dance in person.”

The thought fills me with pride. With longing. With wonder at the fact that so many generations, so many geographic locations and climate-related disruptions later, we preserve this art purely because it makes us happy.

“That would be lovely, kanna.” I pause. “Actually, I wanted to show you something.” I take a few steps over to my left. “Can you see?”

“See what? You’ll have to be more specific, Amma,” Gita says.

I point. “OK, do you see this?” I’m gesturing to the front left corner of my garden, the dry section that insisted on following me from Leimert Park to Aunty Gang Co. The dry section where years ago I’d planted some cabbage seeds my mother had given me, though they’d never grown. The dry section that now was— 

“I don’t see where you’re pointing, Amma,” Gita says. “It must be out of scope. Let’s expand range on your Iris.”

I fidget with the control she directs me toward. 

“OK, did it work?” I ask. “Can you see?”

Gita stifles a laugh and Reyna openly giggles. “No, Amma. I think you narrowed the scope.”

“Oh. What do you see?”

“Your foot.”

“Oops,” I say. I try again, but the touchy control is so minimalist that I can’t tell where on the range scale I am. “How about now? Now can you see it?”

“No, Ammamma,” Reyna laughs. “Now we see your left big toe. In precise ���ٲ�����.”

I mumble some R-rated expletives under my breath. “But I can see you. How am I supposed to know what you’re seeing? I told you I wouldn’t like this Iris thing.”

“OK, let’s stay calm,” Gita says, still chuckling. She talks me through the bewildering device and finally the formerly very dry patch of my garden is evidently in view, because— 

“Is that cabbage?” Gita exclaims in shock.

“Yes!” I exclaim right back. “It’s cabbage! Cabbage!” I let out a loud hooray.

“OK, OK, we see it,” Gita laughs. “We see the cabbage.”

�����Բ�, choodu! Look!” I say. “Baby cabbages!”

Reyna looks perplexed at my joy. “Very cool, Ammamma …”

Personally, I don’t think either of them get the hype at all, so I try again. “These haven’t grown here since I was around your age, Gita. My ammamma used to make cabbage koora all the time. And to think Reyna’s never even seen one!”

“What? I see them all the time,” Reyna protests. “Amma made cabbage koora last week!”

�Ԩ���, kanna,” I say, “but that’s that hydroponic shit you people grow over there. The real stuff is grown in the dirt. Real soil. Real food.”

“OK, Amma, let’s not get into this again,” Gita says, clearly miffed. “Hydroponics have fed a lot of people over the last 50 years. But I’m very happy for you about your cabbages. You can Iris us once they ripen, and we can make cabbage koora together. Reyna and I with our ‘hydroponic shit’ and you with your ‘of-the-dirt’ stuff.”

We dream for a while together about cabbage koora, until Gita declares that it’s bedtime for them over on Ojibwe Land. 

I disconnect from Iris and allow the shimmering afternoon to envelop me. I slip my shoes off and dig my feet into moist soil. I feel my pulse.

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

My back hurts more often these days, and the asthma’s been back for nearly 20 years (one can’t blame my lungs—they put up a heroic fight against nearly half a century of summer wildfire smoke). I’ve had my share of cancer scares, too, like the rest of us. 

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

I think of the two generations before me, who saw the world change so much in their own lifetimes: my ammamma watching India gain independence from the British Raj, and my amma, moving to a completely different continent and building a new life from scratch. 

I think of the two generations after me: Gita, who didn’t see stars for the first three decades of her life until regulations helped clear the smog. Reyna, who’s never seen the snow but can do 31 chakkars and accompanies her mom to volunteer for ceremonial burn support. 

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na

I think of the descendants that follow, from whom I borrow this earth.

And in the cabbage patch, loam between my toes,

tha ki ta tha ki ta—gin na—dha.

      —gin na—dha.

      —gin na—dha.

I dance.

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate fiction contest from Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.

I got my first glimpse of the place today. Drove out there by myself and knelt in the dirt and ran my hands through the dry clods. Nobody else out there, save a few crows picking over some years-old corn.  

I don’t think the seller will be a problem. That land gave all it could give and it won’t give any more. The ground is all hard and rocky, rutted out with old furrows and bits of crabgrass here and there. I’ve seen parking lots with more life. 

It’s the only piece in that area that butts up to Stanton Forest. The guy across the road seems to be going strong, but not too many other nearby farms are. It’s perfect. 

I found this old notebook in a desk drawer at home and started writing about all this. We’ll see what happens. 

April 30, 2022

Everything’s signed. Me, at the age of 58 and only ever worked in the city, now the owner of 94 acres of south Ohio cropland. Or what used to be cropland, at any rate. 

She’d be proud of me, and that made me smile on the drive home from the seller’s office. She was always going on about how we needed to give stuff back to nature. “We have so much,” she’d say, “so, so much. We have to give it back, Daddy. We gotta find a way.”&�Բ�����;

“Sure, sure,” I’d always nod. And now she’s gone and I never gave her an answer. 

Well, Firefly, here goes nothing. 

May 6, 2022 

When I stand next to the road, the trees at Stanton are a green row on the horizon. Behind me is the neighbor. To the left and right my land stretches out for about a half mile. 

Neighbor’s name is Brett. He came by in his truck when I was out there today. “Howdy, neighbor,” he said like a cowboy with his head sticking out the window. 

“What are you growing?” he asked. 

“A forest, if I can.”

He looked confused but tried not to show it. 

“Soy prices aren’t bad these days,” he said. “A hell of a lot more in soy than trees. And quicker.”

“I’m not gonna cut it down.”&�Բ�����;

He shook his head. 

“Well, it’s your place,” he said and then took off. 

May 16, 2022 

Most of what’s left of that forest is in the beams of the old Victorians on Euclid Avenue in Cleveland or in Palmer Woods in Detroit. The rest got burned or blighted and then we plowed it under and grew corn and soy until we couldn’t anymore. It’s gone, save a few patches here and there. 

I’ve been reading. This land used to be a forest, one of the biggest in the world. Stretched from where the swampland ended in south Georgia all the way up to the tundra in Canada. There were wolves and bears and chestnut trees that showered so many nuts you had to wade through them. 

One of those is the Smokies down in Tennessee. We went when Sadie was 8. I thought she’d want to see a bear, but she talked about birds the whole way down—245 species there, she said. We walked all over and I could tell that this was a different sort of woods. Deeper, darker. Smelled like old leather and life.  

Sadie wanted to camp in the park, but I didn’t care to sleep on the ground. Still don’t, actually. I woke up in our hotel room to find her on the balcony, staring off at the mountains, her little hands gripped tight on the railing. 

We can’t do the Smokies here. Sorry, dear, we gotta crawl before we walk. We’re gonna start with grassland and then trees. We could just let it go, let nature take her course. But we’d probably just end up with a haphazard field of soy plants. So, grass. And water. And these people over in England think pigs are a good idea. So maybe pigs, too. 

June 4, 2022 

I don’t know where she got it from. It wasn’t from me. I grew up in the Columbus suburbs. Lived in the Columbus suburbs. Ran the dealership in the Columbus suburbs after Dad died. My idea of interacting with nature is one of those documentaries with the British guy talking about starfish and antelopes. 

But there was a little creek behind our cul-de-sac, and she’d spend hours down there, looking at bugs and toads and building dams with rocks. Come back all muddy and I’d hose her down in the backyard, with her screaming and trying to dodge the water. 

“Why do we have all this grass and nothing else?” she asked me once as we walked through our neighborhood. “What are the animals supposed to eat?” 

Which brings me to the pigs. The pigs can help because they root around and turn up the hard soil. Then they shit everywhere and help fertilize the ground for other plants. Or that’s what this guy I called in England said. 

But right now my land is like those lawns, nothing for the pigs to eat. And that’s saying something, because I’ve learned pigs will eat about anything, even roadkill. So I gotta plant grasses and berry bushes and other plants to create a first layer of food. 

I’ll also build a few ponds to try to attract birds and create a different type of habitat. And I gotta do it all before winter gets here. 

June 15, 2022

It’s not much of a pond, but it will do. Rented a backhoe and dug out a pond at the base of where the land slopes slightly down to the south. It’s about the size of the neighborhood swimming pool by the place Sadie grew up. 

Then I ran a pipe up from the water main and filled it.  It won’t stay, but I’m hoping the fall rains will keep it filled just a bit. 

Today, I seeded half the place with grass, wandering the whole place with a bag of seeds over my shoulder, tossing them everywhere. It took all day, out in the heat, no shade. A few birds swooped in to eat some seeds, but it was lonely otherwise. I’ll come back tomorrow and do the rest. 

I went with a mix of big bluestem, switchgrass, and prairie dropseed, which are all tall grasses native to this area. Big bluestem will be shoulder height in a few years. And I did red clover and buckwheat, which are lower grasses. The clover apparently will restore some of the chemicals we need to grow in the soil. 

Next week, I’ll do wildflowers and shrubs, like black-eyed Susans, butterfly weed, sunflowers, and elderberry bushes. Those will shoot their roots into the dry and compacted soil and break it up, allowing for water and worms and nutrients to get in. 

And next to the pond, I planted a few cattails that I dug up from the stream behind the house. They’ll probably die in a week, but it felt good to have something Sadie would have touched on the land. 

August 25, 2022

The most magical thing happened today. I went out to the land and was walking around like I always do. There’s some green shoots all over from the grass I planted, plus I saw a few flowers that I didn’t. 

Ever since I planted the grass, I’ve been seeing mice scurrying around eating the seeds I threw down. I was near the pond, watching a mouse maybe 30 feet away dip in and out of my sight as it hurried up and down the old furrows. 

And then, wham, a red-tailed hawk shot from the sky and grabbed the mouse in its talons. I was so close I could hear the mouse scream. The hawk swiveled his head, looked at me for the briefest moment and then took off again, heading toward Stanton Forest. 

It all happened so fast that I didn’t realize I was holding my breath. 

October 14, 2022

Fall’s here, and I’m worried. We haven’t had much rain, and not much of the grass has rooted in. The pond is just a muddy puddle. The cattails are still there, thankfully, but I haven’t seen as many ducks as I saw at first. 

I’m afraid I didn’t get things in quickly enough and winter will kill off everything that’s been growing. But I dearly hope it all makes it through winter alright. I could say the same for me. 

I drive by the spot where she hit the black ice on my way to work. Even in the summer, I find my foot hitting the brake a little early. In the winter, I go through it so slow cars behind me hit their horns every now and again. 

The tree she hit still has the scar, this unholy blotch of black. I thought it might kill the tree when I first saw it two years ago. But it’s still hanging in, that old oak. I get a real good look at it in the winter. 

March 16, 2023 

I didn’t go out there much this winter, so there wasn’t much to write about. Just twice, both times all frozen over and snow on the ground, the grass brown and the cattails shivering in the wind. A desolate place, really. 

But now, spring, and melt. And disappointment. Even this early, there’s buds on trees and low lines of green in some of the fields along the road on the drive out there. My place is mostly dirt and mostly empty. 

There’s some tufts of grass, but it’s hard to say what I put there and what the wind did. I must have planted things too late. Or the rains didn’t come. Or something else. The upshot is it’s no closer to being a forest than I am to being a raven. 

Makes me wonder what I’m doing out here. Maybe I’ll just sell the place. 

March 19, 2023

I couldn’t stand the thought of her trapped in the ground. Her mother and I hadn’t talked in a few weeks when we both went out to the river that ran about two miles from our house with the urn. It was spring, a few months after the wreck, and the water was a swirl of snowmelt. 

The stream behind our house ran into this river. Sadie had it all drawn out on a map in her room, otherwise I wouldn’t have known. A summer project, mapping our watershed. She had decided by then that she was going to either be a freshwater ecologist or a zoologist. 

We poured the ashes in the river and watched them float away, just a small patch of gray in a sweeping current of brown. 

March 22, 2023

I was out all day today with my seed sack, getting grass down all over again. By the end my boots were so caked with mud they felt like cement blocks. Too tired to write more. 

March 26, 2023

Today I brought my pigs out. Eight of them, full grown and snorting. The guy I bought them from brought them here in a trailer and everything. 

“You got a place to put them?” he asked when he pulled up. 

“Anywhere is good.”

Guy shook his head and undid the latch and the eight of them trampled out onto the mud. They were all old sows, done producing piglets and set for slaughter when I got them. $150 a piece, a steal, the guy had said. 

I’ll be putting corn out for them to eat, but the idea is that they’ll be able to find their own food by the summer. 

With them out there, I’ll have more reason to come back. I’m excited about that. 

April 5, 2023 

I woke up this morning with a voicemail from Brett. We’d exchanged numbers last fall when we were both looking for a lost dog from the neighbors further down the road. 

Apparently, some of the pigs had gotten into his soybeans and rooted up a few plants. He didn’t sound too happy about it. “Those pigs are feral. If I see them on my land again, I’ll shoot ’em.”

Fair enough. I ordered a couple movable fences today. Instead of having them roaming, I’ll keep them on an acre or so then move them in a week or so. 

But already, I’m seeing more grass, more blooms. When I was out there most recently, there was a whole flock of finches singing and hopping among the green shoots. 

July 15, 2023 

Full summer, as of a few weeks ago. My Lord. I’ve got grass and sunflowers up to my knees. There’s a couple of geese that seem to have taken up residence in the pond. I saw my first deer a few days ago. 

The pigs are basically magic. Anywhere I’ve put them, a few weeks later, it explodes with life. 

For the first time, when I stand on the road with my land on one side and Brett’s on the other, I can really tell a difference. His is all these ordered rows. Mine is haphazard. His is all green. I’ve got yellows from sunflowers and black-eyed Susans, greens in the grass, some orange and red from flowers that I have no idea what they are, and browns where nothing is growing yet. 

It feels like mine, this stretch of land. I don’t know what to call it. It’s not a farm. It’s not a forest. It’s still in that long in-between. But it makes me smile, looking out onto my misshapen kingdom, a kind of patchwork quilt knit by no one in particular. 

August 24, 2023 

The letter came in the mail to my home address. It was all dressed up and on legal letterhead. McCovey and Haines, it said at the top. 

To Mr. Gregory Elroy, the owner of property located at 501 E. Larson Road,

We write to you regarding the nuisance you have created on your property at the above address. Our Client, Mr. Brett Tubbs, of 400 E. Larson Road, has noticed a considerable uptick of deer, squirrels, birds, and other nuisance animals entering his property and disrupting his planting, seeding, and growing of crops. 

Having farmed this land for 17 years, Our Client has never been so disrupted in his labor. We urge you to cease from all activities related to your “re-wilding” of the property at 501 E. Larson Road including the planting of wild grasses, trees, shrubs, and other flora and fauna and the additional lack of maintenance that might further disrupt Our Client’s legitimate farming operations. 

If you do not, we will have no choice but to pursue legal action to remedy this situation in a court of law. 

Sincerely, 
Mike McCovey, Attorney at Law

Rewilding. It’s funny they used that word. Brett had driven by a few weeks back and we’d talked about the weather and the Reds. He seemed over the pigs thing. 

I told him the word for what I was doing was “rewilding,” which I’d only just learned from some YouTube videos. He’d shrugged. “As long as it don’t bother me,” he said. 

It must have. 

My second thought came unbidden. It’s working, I thought. It’s working. 

August 29, 2023 

After a long time thinking, I decided to ignore the letter. What could they really do? I owned the land outright. If they wanted to come and take it from me or sue me over a few deer wandering into Brett’s fields, they could go right ahead. 

I got a call from one of the principals at school when Sadie was 12. Apparently she’d found a baby squirrel on the playground and had been keeping it in her front pocket and feeding it Gatorade with an eyedropper in class. Her teacher had heard it squeaking. 

“If I don’t have it in my pocket, it’s gonna die, Dad,” she said over the phone, her voice panicked and teary. “It won’t stay warm enough anywhere else.”

I begged the principal to let her take it home and we’d take care of it here. I found a shoe box and hooked up a light to keep it warm. 

“That won’t keep it warm enough. It’s gonna die,” she said. “When it’s that little it’s supposed to be next to its brothers and sisters and mother almost all the time.”

I had to drag her to school and we left the squirrel at home. I don’t know what happened, but when we got home the light had gone out and the baby squirrel wasn’t moving much. It died a day later. 

She didn’t talk to me for a week, just slamming doors and scowling. Any time I walked in a room where she was, she’d screw up her face and yell, “Murderer!” And then storm out. 

Look what I’m doing now, Firefly. The opposite of murder. 

September 25, 2023

I got another letter. Said similar stuff but then asked for a meeting at the lawyer’s office, and I went a few days later. The letter said I should bring a lawyer with me, but I don’t know any lawyers and didn’t feel like calling one. 

The office was downtown, with lots of wood paneling and leather chairs. Brett was there, in the guy’s office who sent the letter. He just nodded when I came in. 

“Mr. Elroy, you have been in violation of the county’s land-use regulations,” the lawyer said, his voice oiled and smooth.  

“Your land is intended for use in agriculture, and you seem to be doing nothing of the sort. As a result of your negligence to your land, my client has suffered damages from the excessive wildlife disturbing his crops.”

There was a silence, as I thought about it. 

“What do you mean by excessive wildlife?” I said. 

“T������’s deer out there every morning,” Brett broke in. “They’re eating my seedlings. And the birds, too. So many damn birds. I just had my lowest yield in 15 years.”

I shook my head. 

“But it’s my land,” I said. 

The lawyer smiled a thin smile. 

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want with it. And the law says that parcel is to be used for agricultural use. I hope you understand.”

I didn’t understand. But I didn’t get angry until I was driving home. I looked out the window and at the strip malls and fast food chains and parking lots with little bits of grass and trees in between. And beyond it, for miles, more asphalt and concrete with little bits of green in between. All the way to the ocean in either direction. 

As we walked out of the office, Brett had said, “It’s because of you environmentalists that people like me can’t make a decent living anymore.”&�Բ�����;

I never thought of myself as an environmentalist. But Sadie was right. We did have too much. But, apparently, it was illegal to give any of it back. 

October 17, 2023 

I went out to the land today and just walked around. I wouldn’t say it’s pretty, especially now that it’s fall and the flowers have gone for months. The grasses are all scruffy and brown. The pigs are all brown and muddy and old. 

I think maybe what’s scary to some people is that I’m just letting it go. Brett is out there every day on his tractor, tilling or planting. I’m not. I’m just letting it be. I really don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Maybe that’s a little scary to be next to. 

On the night she died, Sadie was at my place for the week. Her mother and I had just bought her her first car, a used 2014 Honda Civic, after she’d spent a few months learning to drive on ours. Simple, easy to drive. Safe. Good gas mileage. I thought she’d love it. But she didn’t. 

“I don’t want a car, Dad. I only learned to drive so I wouldn’t hurt your feelings. Do you even know what cars are doing to the Earth?” she told me when I first showed it to her a week or two before. 

It’d been sitting in the driveway ever since, the keys still on the counter where she’d put them. Her mother had dropped her at my place. 

And she’d been sulking all week. She’d get like this in the winter. Couldn’t go outside except to tramp around the block in her snow boots. Plus, you know, being a teenager. 

I thought I might take her to the movies or something. She was sitting on the couch, lookin’ out the window. 

“Firefly, you want to go—”

“You call me that, but did you even know that fireflies are going extinct?” she snapped. 

I balked. I didn’t know that. 

“’Cause there’s no more woods for them to live in. They can’t just live on sidewalks and front yards. But that’s all there is around here.”

“Well, can’t we do something about—”

“Sure, we could. But people like you never will. I’m not your firefly, Dad.”

With that, she stormed out of the room. I sank back into the couch. I heard a car start up in the driveway a minute later. Huh, I thought, maybe she wants that thing after all. 

The phone rang 20 minutes later. 

October 30, 2023 

When I pulled up to the land this morning, there was a sheriff’s car in the rut where I usually park. He got out as I pulled in, and he was holding a brown packet in his hand. His name tag said Lt. Briggs. 

“Morning,” he said, as we approached each other, like we were friends. I nodded. 

“I’m guessing you probably know what this is,” he said, handing me the packet. I nodded again. 

I took the packet and could feel the heavy pages inside of it. This must be how all this ended. We stood there for a second, him looking off in the distance, me listening to the breeze. 

“You know, I’ve been driving by here for as long as you’ve been doing this,” Briggs finally said. 

“You think I’m crazy too, probably,” I said. 

He shook his head and crossed his arms and looked out over my scraggly land. 

“I don’t. I truly don’t,” he said after a while. “My family’s lived around here for five generations. My great-great-grandfather was one of the men who cut down these woods and tilled the first farms. I used to take a lot of pride in that.”&�Բ�����;

“But you don’t now?” I said. 

“Oh, I do. But, my kids, they lose their minds when they see a deer. They don’t know anything about anything wilder than our backyard.”

I looked out on the land. I couldn’t say it was much wilder than a backyard, but just then, three ducks took off from the pond and beat their wings over our heads. 

“Well, not everyone agrees,” I said, holding up the brown packet. 

Briggs laughed. 

“No, clearly not,” he said. “But have you talked to the land trust? Or the people at Stanton?” 

I shook my head. 

“I haven’t been talking to much of anyone recently. Just been out here where it’s quiet.”

He laughed again, a deep, throaty laugh. 

“Well, maybe you should give them a call. They might be able to help you more than the birds and deer.”&�Բ�����;

With that, he tipped his hat and strode back to his car, leaving me with the packet in my hand and the wind blowing in my ears. 

February 19, 2024 

Well, it’s settled then. The land is now a nature preserve. And it’s being absorbed by Stanton State Forest. 

The people at the land trust straightened it all out rather quickly. They paid me one dollar for the land. Then they transferred it to the state’s control. But not before they helped me secure the right to live and traverse the land for me and my ancestors for all time.

That last part was their lawyer’s words, not mine. But I like it. For all time. 

I’m building a cabin out there. It might be ready in a year. Maybe one day I’ll move out there.  And I’m finally going to get around to the other pond once the freeze breaks. 

Then, trees. It’s time to plant trees. We’ll have our forest yet, Firefly. Oaks, hickories, maples, dogwoods. I can just see the saplings shivering in the spring air. It’s beautiful. 

And the fence. I’m helping Brett build a fence around his land. It was part of the condition of the agreement for them to drop the lawsuit. It’ll be tall enough to keep out most of the deer. 

I don’t blame him. The fact is, there’s no way for the wild to co-exist next to his rows and rows of soybeans. We wave to each other again. 

And the people at the state agreed to one more condition. They’re going to call this little patch the Sadie Elroy Preserve. 

August 4, 2031 

I watched the sun go down from my little porch in my little forest. The birds were singing: sparrows, mockingbirds, an owl a little later. 

The trees aren’t high or thick enough to block the view and cast much shadow yet, but one day they’ll tower over this place and it’ll be in shade all day long. 

There’s water striders on the pond, and birds dipping through to catch them. I saw two raccoons drinking from the other pond yesterday. A few turtles too, years and years after I’d introduced them. Day before that, it was a flash of fox fur in some of the low bushes. The soil, when I kneel down and cup it in my hands, is soft and loamy. Some nights, there are even fireflies. 

I walk the trails most mornings as the sun comes up and see what I can see. Every day, it’s something. I walk a lot slower these days, but that’s okay. 

Some days, in the quiet of the morning, when my mind is focused on a deer track or a birdsong, I can hear her laughing, off in the distance. 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate fiction contest from Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.

In 2014 when we started , on the rare occasions that climate and reproduction were discussed together, they were always framed the wrong way around: focusing on childbearing’s impact on the climate. As we began talking with people about their reproductive lives in a changing climate, we found that populationist rhetoric was a major obstacle to just having this conversation. In early media coverage we were often wrongly assumed to be populationists. The deeply ingrained population myth has been pervasive in the Global North for so long that it is now largely understood as common sense.

Those of us in the United States are living in a dangerous confusion of policies that both push and pull at all our rights to reproductive self-determination. The narrative is not as simple as “have more babies” or “have fewer babies.” Rather, it is: “Your body is not your own.” Today more than ever, beware of population “solutions,” which are at best ineffective, instrumentalizing, and freighted by white supremacy and classism. Whatever problem it names, the population “solution” punches down, enabling powerful players to evade responsibility while continuing to harm.

As we have learned from justice movements—and faith traditions—the path is the goal. The values we hold dear, of self and community sovereignty, anti-fascism, and human rights, are what we enact to find our way to the world we want to live in. There are no shortcuts through gray areas.

Someone Else’s Babies

Look in the Conceivable Future inbox and you’ll see a folder that Josephine, in a moment of inspiration, labeled “barf.” In it you’ll find some of the worst emails we’ve gotten over the years; trolls and bullies, mostly. But one notable genre of unsolicited communication is a kind of amateur policy paper from aspiring authoritarians about how to control the global population. The authors tend to be from the United States, Canada, or Western Europe, mostly (but not exclusively) men, and although they don’t always share their demographic information, they tend to be white and of retirement age. Their 10-point plans will propose some combination of carrot-and-stick strategies for reducing births, and they typically want us to elevate their plan. Maybe we could send it on to the UN, or share it through our socials?

Some other features these strange missives have in common: The authors think they’ve arrived at an ignored—or unjustly repressed—solution; they think it’s the silver bullet; they think we are an anti-natalist group and therefore simpatico to their program; they’re touting the affordability of this vs. other more popular climate initiatives.

We put these and other letters in the barf box for a few reasons. First, because these individuals fundamentally misunderstand what we’re trying to accomplish, but we save them because they tell us about what we’re dealing with. Second, as should be clear by now, we find these letters deeply disturbing. And third, we have to make some horrors into a joke or we’d never get out of our beds, let alone open the inbox.

We will never achieve a more just world by curtailing people’s reproduction. We don’t get there by control, coercion, or force. The future we are struggling for stands on a foundation of human rights, in which we share and defend full self-sovereignty.

The argument for population control is based on three interwoven and equally toxic assumptions: first, that rapid population growth is the cause of “underdevelopment” in the Global South; second, that policy should persuade (or if necessary, force) people to have fewer children rather than improving the conditions in which they live, and; third, that some combination of finance, managerial, technological, and Western intervention techniques can “deliver” birth control to the Global South in a top-down fashion in the absence of comprehensive health care. In the priority promotion of contraceptives, the premise is clearly that pregnancy prevention matters most.

These days population-focused international aid work ������’t synonymous with human rights violations. The ongoing problem is in the priorities. Jade Sasser, a professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality at the University of California, Riverside, learned this firsthand as a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar, and later as an NGO worker focused on family planning. “It’s not like I am suggesting that these institutions are sending people into poor countries to coercively round people up and sterilize them or anything like that,” she says. “It’s a narrative. But that narrative makes it possible to fund particular kinds of work. And where that work is problematic is, for example, in places where, let’s say, girls and women have all sorts of reproductive challenges and health issues and health concerns. But when they go to the clinic, the only kind of reproductive services they can access are family planning services and maybe STI prevention.”

Population scholar and author Betsy Hartmann describes how contradictory political views have converged on this singular issue: “The early Neo-Malthusians supported birth control as a means of improving the condition of the poor by limiting population growth; feminists and socialists believed it was a fundamental woman’s right; eugenicists embraced it as a way of influencing genetic quality. These strange bedfellows combined to give the birth control movement its unique character: It carried within it the seeds of birth control as a liberating force, as well as a means of coercive population control.”

Unwelcome Interventions

Although this thinking developed as part of an international development agenda, countries have engaged this ideology domestically, plenty. In the United States alone, the government, as well as NGOs, have repressed the reproductive rights of Indigenous women and women of color by implicit and explicit policies for hundreds of years, from the foundational policies of genocide, slavery, and abuse to the present day. Between 1909 and 1979 approximately 20,000 people were forcibly sterilized in California, a practice that continues to this day in Canada and elsewhere. In the United States, the idea of the IUD as a “cure” for poverty has a disturbing hold on public discourse, and as recently as 2017, judges have shaved off sentence time for people who agree to undergo sterilization procedures. Black women are still disproportionately targeted for violent reproductive interventions, including abortion, sterilization, and contraception.

These practices are rooted in a lethal trifecta of sexism, racism, and classism. Cultural attitudes about population amplify beliefs about who is a “fit” mother. And the concept of “fitness,” in turn, derives from ideas about who is or is not a valuable human being or (in the eugenicist tradition) what are “valuable” traits and genes. Around the world we find legacies of reproductive violence and oppression.

The Magdalene Laundries of Ireland are one notorious example. The Laundries were part of an interlocking system of orphanages, industrial schools, “mother and baby homes” for unwed mothers, and church-run institutions in which thousands of Irish citizens were once confined. Roman Catholic orders of nuns ran the (for-profit) laundries, and women and girls were made to work there, nominally as a form of penance for their sins. The laundries were filled not only with “fallen women”—prostitutes, women who became pregnant without being married or as a result of sexual abuse—but also those who simply failed to conform to the expectations of their society. Children born to women in the laundries had their names changed and were adopted out without their mothers’ consent.

As another example: During the early years of the Salvadoran Civil War, which lasted from 1979 to 1992, the military, which had led a coup, took thousands of children from their (anti-coup) families. The children’s identities were changed and they were sent abroad for adoption, primarily to the United States and Europe. In other words, El Salvador also “disappeared” children of people who were identified as insurgents, as a way of controlling adults. These operations were carried out by lawyers with military contacts and foreign adoption centers that watchdogs have since flagged as part of the international human trafficking black market.

As recently as May 2017, a Tennessee judge issued a standing order allowing inmates to receive 30 days’ jail credit in exchange for undergoing a voluntary—for the dubious value of voluntarism while incarcerated—sterilization procedure. The message here was unmistakable: that people who wind up in prison should be bribed to rescind their human right to have children.

As all three of these examples show, when powerful people make moves to determine who is “fit” to be bearing and raising children, these determinations target marginalized people, and women specifically, marginalized communities more broadly, and often reward families from the dominant group, sometimes even with the children of those marginalized groups. Even when those biases are not an explicit policy, wealthy people are more apt to be considered fit parents. These practices have been a weapon used by the powerful to control the less powerful. This is the history of population movements—a history we must learn, and whose wounds are still open.

Populationism and Climate

This kind of paternalistic repression is having a renaissance in the context of the climate crisis. Our movement’s recent history shows us that when our societal focus shifts to policing the behavior of private citizens, we can be handily distracted from the crimes being committed right over our heads. Confronted with an urgent need for change, whom do we pressure for that change: those with the most or the least power? One of those projects is certainly easier than the other.

And since its early days, the mainstream environmental movement has recruited these strategies in service of “conservation” goals. For instance, the best-selling book The Population Bomb, written by Paul and Anne Ehrlich and published in 1968 at the suggestion of then-director of the Sierra Club David Brewer, predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. It also prophesied other major upheavals and advocated immediate action to limit population growth (suggestions in the book included the idea of adding birth control to the food or water supplies). The Sierra Club—one of the best-known environmental organizations then, and now—actually sponsored publication of the book, and during the 1980s some members (including Anne Ehrlich) steered the group into the field of U.S. immigration, arguing that overpopulation was a significant factor in environmental degradation and advocating halting and reducing U.S. and world populations. In 1988, the organization’s Population Committee and Conservation Coordinating Committee argued publicly that immigration to the United States should be limited so as to achieve population stabilization.

When population control and border control efforts converge, it’s easy to see that both programs are built to uphold the inequality of the status quo. And even when the tactics are not explicitly violent, the paternalistic disregard for people’s rights is plainly evident. Overpopulation is an ideology; it diverts criticisms of capitalist consumption and unequal distribution by blaming devalued people—mostly women, and often poor women—for reproducing. It serves to justify a system (capitalism) that creates needs among many while satisfying them only for the very few.

The most notorious and widespread campaign to control population size was China’s One Child policy, which began in 1979 and continued for more than three decades. In some environmental corners this policy is even quietly admired; by the Chinese government’s projections, its population would have been 1.8 billion without it, instead of today’s 1.435 billion. Some scholars dispute this claim, arguing that “as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy” and that “most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.” Aside from the policy’s matter-of-fact disregard for citizens’ human rights, it also caused major societal problems, including the proliferation of sex-selective abortions and the resulting scarcity of adult women, and the emotional scars that people continue to carry after forced abortions, sterilizations, and massive fines and jail sentences for violating the law.

And while this was happening, China’s emissions rose to surpass those of the United States. Turns out that human rights abuses aren’t the key to decarbonization, after all.

To its credit, the Sierra Club has reversed many of its organizational positions on population and done so quite publicly (although there are still groups within the Sierra Club advocating for a return to a population orientation, and the controversy resurfaced when three anti-immigration proponents ran in the 2004 Sierra Club Board of Directors election). But these harmful ideas about population are still firmly lodged in the public consciousness; ideas that logically manifest in racist, xenophobic, and violent ways. The men who perpetrated mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas, cited “overpopulation” as a reason they targeted immigrants, many of whom are fleeing the devastating effects of climate change in their home countries. It is a short step from viewing “overpopulation” as a problem to any number of violent “solutions.”

The Struggle of Parenting in the U.S.

One of the most painful ironies of these ambitions to control women’s reproduction is that they’re functionally unnecessary when the U.S. government offers so little support to women when they actually become mothers. In other words, what all of the emails in the barf box overlook is that the United States is already perfecting anti-natalist policies in all but name. As we explored in more detail in the last chapter, the United States is the least welcoming place out of all the wealthy countries for new parents. Asthma and other diseases are on the rise from deregulated air pollution, fracking chemicals, and other industry contaminants. Health care costs are staggering. An uncomplicated hospital birth costs $32,093 on average. Maternal mortality is higher in the States than it is among peer countries, criminally so for women of color. Food deserts abound in our cities; public schools are shuttering or starving for funds; daycare costs more than college in many places, never mind the costs of college itself.

Even bracketing the climate crisis, anyone considering a family in this place, at this point in time, is already assuming a burden of medical and financial risk. And each of these factors that weigh against people’s reproductive lives are doubly weighted against people of color.

As Sasser found when she interviewed American women aged 20 to 40 about their feelings toward climate and reproduction, her subjects’ emotional experiences were strongly conditioned by race. She spoke with women from across the racial spectrum, and she found a high concordance among all participants’ concerns. But for women of color, “the concerns about climate change, the concerns about mental health issues were heavily compounded by experiences of racism and perceptions, and experiences of racial vulnerability. Meaning: The women of color interviewed strongly perceived that their children would already be saddled by issues of inequality just for existing as Black or Brown, or Indigenous. So that they would have to fight to ensure that they had quality education in school. That their children would at some point potentially have to face the criminal justice system or deal with police, police brutality, police violence, or just being treated differently by police. They knew that their children at some point would have to deal with some kind of racial discrimination that would be very hurtful to them.”

As we mentioned before, most of the population-control epistles in our barf box have come from older white men who usually have a child or two, maybe grandchildren of their own. They tend toward the egalitarian edge of a broader trend because they include white, middle-class American women in the population they intend to control. But the trend is this: They find it easier to imagine reshaping young people’s reproductive lives than to even imagine reshaping parts of the economy. They have had children, but they are here to tell us that we ����dzܱ����’t, for our own good; they made no sacrifice themselves, but they are writing to demand it of their young, while blithely ignoring the toxicity, injustice, and lack of support that already inhibits American reproductive freedoms.

In other words, young people in the United States don’t need any more disincentives to have families—we already live in a country that is outright hostile to parents and children. And indeed, the U.S. birthrate hit a 32-year low in 2018, with Millennials reporting that they are having 1.5 fewer children than they’d like to have, on average. And the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated what was already there; birth rates plummeted in wealthy countries, including in the United States.

This shows us two things: First, many climate-minded people badly need to learn about the reproductive realities in this country. And second, that even people with a wrongheaded but sincere concern about climate change (the writers of these proposals, for instance) seem to think it’s easier to tell a whole generation what to do with our bodies than to put the fossil fuel industry on notice.

A Flawed Climate “Fix”

Present-day population advocates are eager to put distance between the “dark past” and present day “empowerment”-focused family planning programs. And indeed, voluntary access to birth control is a marked improvement from crimes of coercion and violence. But even in its most empowering form there are, to us, three major and connected flaws in the arguments for smaller populations as a “climate fix.”

The first is that these arguments provide cover for eugenicist dogma, whether we consciously espouse it or not. Women in India are having too many babies. New Hampshire trailer trash doesn’t know how to use birth control. These accusations—real-life examples both—are both racist and classist; how many times have you heard a middle-class white woman accused of having “too many babies”? In fact, in the early days of Conceivable Future organizing, we—two white women—were frequently told by white observers, “but you’re the people who should be having children.” (This was a particular irony because Meghan was not always a middle-class person and is from a relatively large family herself. She moved from being told she ����dzܱ����’t have babies to being told that she should, as she moved into the middle class.)

We encountered another manifestation of this bias when at several house parties we met white middle-class women, confident they never wanted to become pregnant, who couldn’t find a doctor that would perform a voluntary sterilization on them. The difficulties some women face in getting a sterilization procedure as a form of contraception are longstanding and well-documented. In this country’s context of involuntary sterilizations for BIPOC women and incarcerated people, the irony is ghoulish. It’s important to note that “overpopulation” is a term used overwhelmingly to describe the demographics of poor areas and/or nations. In punditry about rich countries, we’re much more likely to hear about “underpopulation” and its purported negative effects on the capitalist economy.

The argument’s second flaw is that it offers convenient scapegoats for systemic overconsumption in the rich parts of the world. Population relates to climate harm only to the degree that populations exploit resources and emit carbon. No one has emitted more than Americans. It’s not the number of people alone; arguments about “optimum population” (such as those that Ehrlich is still making) ignore or minimize the systemic nature of resource consumption. Waste is a feature, not a bug in our industrialized systems: look to planned obsolescence, low-gas-mileage vehicles, and the excesses of conventional agriculture. A recent study claimed that every other bite of food in the United States is waste. Nothing about being a human requires this, nor does it correlate with happiness or a high quality of life.

To bring this home we’ve often said that if everyone on earth consumed the way the American upper and middle classes consume, we would need an additional 4.5 to 6 Earths’ worth of resources to sustain ourselves—a fact absent from much populationist rhetoric. But in early 2023 a study published in Ecological Economics broke the population argument down even more finely along consumption inequality lines. We asked the authors of this study to help us put it in plain terms, and Jared Starr obliged in an email:

“The Global Footprint Network estimates that if everyone consumed like the average American we would need 5.1 Earths (in 2018—the latest year I found data for). Carbon emissions alone account for 3.65 Earths. We find that average top 0.1% U.S. households have emissions 23x higher (954 tons) than the U.S. average. Multiplying how many Earths are needed for average Americans’ carbon emissions (3.65) times 23 I estimate that if everyone on the planet emitted carbon like an average top 0.1% U.S. household we would need 84 planet Earths.”

The data gets richer. Starr pointed us to a study about carbon emissions from 20 billionaires, which found that average emissions of those people were 194 times higher than an average American household. Using these numbers, Starr told us, “If everyone on the planet emitted carbon like a billionaire, we would need something like 700 planet Earths.”

These numbers certainly put a fine point on where the culpability for carbon emissions lies. (Spoiler: It ������’t on the shoulders of women seeking affordable health care from international aid organizations.)

So let us be perfectly clear: We need policies that balance a global standard for quality of life with rapid decarbonization and with a progressive focus on dematerialization for the West. No valid policy involves repressing human rights or outsourcing responsibility.

The other big problem with the population climate “fix” is that it instrumentalizes women’s bodies and our health care, especially in the Global South. In other words, this perspective assumes that women should be able to access health care, contraception, and education because those things support the goals of decarbonization. And it’s worse than that: The real point is that if the goal of family planning services is to reduce population growth—rather than to support the freedom of people to determine the number and spacing of their own children—women can expect inferior care. Earlier Sasser described how the narrow overfocus on contraception she witnessed as a Peace Corps volunteer in Madagascar was not serving the sexual and reproductive health of the people she intended to help.

When she returned to Madagascar years later on a research trip for her dissertation, she had conversations with friends working in USAID, who were overseeing the funding of clinics throughout the entire country, that illuminated the central conflict of interest. She asked her friends how USAID was serving reproductive health clinics that might be helpful to the community she served: “‘What are you doing that I could maybe bring back to this town that I had lived in to better help girls avoid pregnancy?’ And I discovered that there was a strategic plan as to where these services would be prioritized, the reproductive health services that were funded by USAID. And it was all around national parks and conservation sites.”

The implicit priority here was to keep population numbers low to preserve pristine landscapes and rare animals, and, presumably, the revenue that these places generate as tourist destinations. In this view, more pregnancies would lead to more demand for land, water, firewood, and so forth, and perhaps eventually more poachers. Sasser continues, “I was like, What is going on here?!? There are not more girls getting pregnant near parks and conservation sites. Why would your environmental agenda be the agenda that organizes and determines the population reproductive health and family planning agenda? Honestly, if there is one moment that I can point to where a light switch flipped on for me, that was it.”

And this was not an isolated situation of conservation policy determining the kind of care women received. In 2019, Sasser and a colleague co-published an article “about the services that are offered to people in health clinics [and] reproductive clinics in Madagascar, in areas that are near marine conservation sites.” Her colleague who did the fieldwork discovered “over, and over again that even when women came into clinics for other concerns, with other needs, wanting other services, they were consistently steered toward contraceptives.” That is: First, these clinics essentially defined “women’s health” as their capacity to get pregnant, and second, they used birth control for their own conservation goals, rather than any health goals belonging to the women themselves.

Educating Boys and Detoxifying Masculinity

In the popular climate solutions handbook Drawdown, “Educating Girls” and “Family Planning” are ranked as #6 and #7, valued at a combined 51.48 gigaton reduction of CO2. The author clarifies that “when family planning focuses on health care provision and meeting women’s expressed needs, empowerment, equality, and well-being are the result; the benefits to the planet are side effects.” Even so, those side effects are the whole point of the book. Access to education and family planning are human rights, and they are rights that women deserve because we are human beings. By treating access to those rights as a means to carbon reduction—or habitat protection—rather than an end unto itself, climate groups continue to behave toward women as though we are second-class citizens, or simply valves to be turned.

In fact, a recent study shows that conformity to masculine stereotypes correlates with environmentally harmful behaviors. “Caring about the environment” is widely seen as a feminine set of behaviors, so a person concerned with appearing masculine is measurably less likely to recycle, value fuel efficiency when purchasing a car, and so on. And it’s not just men upholding a bizarrely fossil-fueled masculine ideal: Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor-Green claimed that “Democrats like Pete Buttigieg want to emasculate the way we drive and force all of you to rely on electric vehicles.”

We are eager for the debut of the Drawdown program’s “Educating Boys and Detoxifying Masculinity” targets.

This kind of discourse—the “let’s support women’s health care only as a means to carbon-reduction” discourse—exists in the context of a culture that’s generally only interested in women’s health insofar as it serves some other purpose. The medical establishment has a well-documented male bias and a tragically consistent history of ignoring women’s health care needs. Dr. Kate Young, a public health researcher at Monash University in Australia, has found that women are often viewed by their doctors as “reproductive bodies with hysterical tendencies”—an orientation from which flow any number of distorted outcomes. Medical experts routinely dismiss women’s health care complaints as invented or psychological, making comments like “T������’s a lot of psychology, just as much as there is pathology [in gynecology].” One doctor claimed that he’d never met a fibromyalgia patient who wasn’t “batshit crazy.”

And these experiences—while present for many women all over the world—are especially present for Black women in the United States. In a now well-known story, tennis superstar Serena Williams had to bring the full force of her stardom to bear before her postpartum blood clot was taken seriously by medical staff. “When you are a Black woman, having a body is already complicated for workplace politics,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom in Time magazine. “Having a bleeding, distended body is especially egregious.” The medical establishment filters Black women through assumptions of incompetence. “When the medical profession systematically denies the existence of Black women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate or treat our pain, health care marks us as incompetent bureaucratic subjects. Then it serves us accordingly,” she concludes.

The point here is that alternately ignoring and instrumentalizing female bodies is a long tradition that is shaped and torqued by race, class, and geography. The current discourse of women’s-health-qua-climate-solution fits neatly within a long-standing patriarchal tendency to view women as simply “reproductive bodies with hysterical tendencies” and to treat us accordingly. That is: Women, and our experience of our health, are routinely dismissed and ignored, except when someone gets the idea that managing our fertility in some way would be good—and let’s be clear, cost effective—for some other social agenda. Other such agendas have included: populating the Fatherland, producing more people to enslave, and preventing the reproduction of those deemed less worthy.

At this moment in time, the desired outcome is cheap and “easy” carbon reduction.

Here is the bedrock belief from which we challenge these views: Women are human beings, and we deserve health care, which includes full-spectrum reproductive care, because we are human beings. Not because many of us have uteruses, or because those uteruses could be requisitioned to produce more—or fewer—people.

This excerpt from��The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change��by Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) appears by permission of the publisher.��

Bok choy, broccoli rabe, and turnip share the same brassica rapa wild relative. They, like almost all produce, have been adjusted by human selection and intervention to be more palatable, appealing, or accessible to consumers. Plants are also manipulated based on the values of the societies they are in. Over generations of growing and eating, the flavors, compounds, and genetics merge into us. 

Human manipulations, however, are not always beneficial to the plant, the future generations of people who rely on them, or the ecosystem of which they are a part. 

Intensive breeding can lead to a spare genetic base. The Gros Michel banana was the only banana distributed throughout the world in the 1800s. It was loved for its sweet, distinct taste, but the banana’s lack of genetic diversity meant it was quickly eradicated when a fungus called Panama disease wiped out every banana plantation by 1950. This varietal has since been lost to commercial production giving way to the Cavendish banana.

This pattern occurs again and again through history. When Irish farmers planted almost exclusively one variety of potatoes, vast swaths of the vegetables died during a potato blight from 1845 to 1852, which pushed many people to emigrate to survive. 

So while resilience has been bred out of countless domesticated crops, an abundance of weeds choke farms and take over unnoticed spaces, like a message. 

Crops’ Uncertain Future

The threats to plants today are many. , or plant diseases, are spreading via new means and into new areas due to globalization and shifting weather patterns. Climate change, too, is palpably impacting crops’ ability to survive in unpredictable weather, elevations of CO₂, and the introduction of pests and fungi as a result of rising temperatures. Approximately $27 billion of insurance reimbursement was distributed to farmers for failed crops between 1991 and 2017, according to at Stanford University and the National Bureau of Economic Research—a number that is projected to go up. 

The states that plants become slower at photosynthesizing and more vulnerable to disease when they absorb many of the substances we’re pumping into our atmosphere, including ground-level ozone and pollution caused by chemical solvents. Plants also suffer when they encounter emissions and exhaust, such as smog, that interfere with their ability to absorb sunlight. 

Farming practices are due for an update in the face of climate change. So researchers, food activists, scientists, and agronomists are to the wisdom of plants that have fallen to the wayside or are growing abundantly without support or intervention—often right beside existing crops. 

Feral plants were once cultivated in farm or garden settings. Then, either by manually crossing or naturally mixing with a wild species, their genetics adapted to the region they were in, which made them more resilient than others. As these plants emerge from the furrows and ditches, with their deep wells of genetic diversity intact, their long-ignored presence may offer a solution to strengthen and prepare vulnerable crops for novel climate conditions.

Harnessing Feral Resilience

In the 1400s, colonization spelled genocide for many peoples in the Americas. These disruptions also affected nonhuman species. Plants were brought with settlers—on purpose or on accident—and forced to adapt to new environments to survive. In many cases these plants have come to thrive in their new environments and, in some cases, are spreading like wildfire over the land, outcompeting native plants who have important roles in their ecosystems. One of them, brassica rapa, incorporated itself into the lives of the Indigenous Rarámuri people. 

In the narrow hills and valleys of the Copper Canyon in Chihuahua, Mexico, a field technician of Rarámuri ancestry, Alejandro Nevares, works with the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity on a plant preservation project with brassica rapa, known in the Rarámuri language as Mekwaseri. 

Thanks to hundreds of years of intentional foraging and cultivation by the Rarámuri in the region, Mekwaseri has become more tender and takes a longer time to bolt, or bloom, at which point it becomes bitter and tough. While other crops like corn and mushroom have suffered unpredictable seasons because of climate change in the region, according to Nevares, Mekwaseri continues to grow reliably. 

Similarly, rice paddies in Arkansas, where more than 50% of U.S. rice is cultivated, hold a secret that has been more of a burden to farmers than a boon. An invasive form of weedy rice known as “red rice” has crept through the crop, mimicking the early stages of cultivated rice, but then shattering its seed, which stays dormant, sometimes for years at a time. So while this “weed in rice’s clothing” was long viewed as a problem for rice farmers, in Arkansas are working to de-domesticate the crop. They are crossing weedy rice with cultivated seed as a way to diversify the crop genetics and create a more adaptive species. 

Crops As Stories

Shelby Ellison, assistant professor and researcher for University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences, spends her time tromping through Midwestern autumnal fields, hopping over fences, and trekking into ditches in search of a plant that has long been elusive among American crops: hemp. At one point, the Midwest was a hub for fiber hemp, used for making rope and canvas. After the criminalization of cannabis, though, these plants were effectively destroyed.

But Midwesterners still know of ditchweed—the common name for a feral form of hemp—which has persisted throughout the Midwest. 

Ditchweed has successfully adapted to its environment and diversified its genome. The plant is now decidedly feral. With all the space, it has grown huge, developing many uniquely long arms and bolstering its seed. These plants are resilient against various pathogens. Having survived many generations on their own, they have adapted to the climates and seasons of the region without human intervention. 

“T������’s this push right now to develop cultivars that are adapted to the places where we live,” Elison says. She pre-breeds these samples in a range of diverse environments to observe how they adapt in various scenarios in pursuit of outcomes that prove the plant to be resilient, or exhibit features that a prospective grower might be interested in.  

With each of the plants characterized, Elison then passes the seeds to Zachary Stansell, who says his “responsibility is to be a hoarder” of germplasm at the USDA Agricultural Research Service’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit. This massive seed bank in Geneva, New York, collects and maintains the plants to be a resource for breeding, education, and research, as well as for cultural preservation. 

After the 2018 Farm Bill passed, taking hemp off of the DEA’s schedule of controlled substances, states and tribes began to legalize the production of hemp. In 2021 the USDA mandated that the Agricultural Research Service’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit also start keeping what has become one of the largest hemp collections in the world, with 600 varieties.

“Conserving the genetic diversity of crops is … an intrinsic good in terms of building climate change resilience,” Stansell says. “These crops are our stories.”&�Բ�����; 

“I like the real junky, weedy, weird things that wouldn’t make sense for a farmer to grow,” Stansell says.“I think of them as a reservoir of unique alleles or variants.”&�Բ�����;

The seeds from old or weedy species hold vast genetic pools and an inherent connection to the past. Scientists are finding that feral species have high resistance to mildews and diseases, which can be bred into the genetics of other species’ seeds to create resistant varieties of plants. 

While the research on incorporating feral genetics is still new, researchers and breeders are already ordering feral hemp seed samples through the U.S National Germplasm system for breeding trials. 

The Danger of Oversimplification

Some plants have been bred to need more help growing than others. So while working with feral plants can genetically diversify and make plants more resilient, cross-breeding is not an agricultural fix-all. 

The Green Revolution was a large-scale gene manipulation project, and an experiment on what it means to separate people entirely from their foodways. The crops pushed across the world starting in the 1960s consisted mostly of wheat and rice, and were intended to feed as many people as possible. However, not only did they require more human intervention and were vulnerable to disease, they were disconnected from the cultures they were meant to serve. 

When a plant is too inbred, it may lose important variants within its genome. That weakens it and makes it more vulnerable. Within a genetically diverse species, however, hidden variants may enable it to adapt to changing local conditions or to enhance nutrition. These adaptations could also prove beneficial to other members of the plant’s ecosystem as shared conditions change. 

Linda Black Elk is an ethnobotanist and food activist who serves as education director at NĀTIFS, an organization that promotes the Indigenous foodways of unceded Dakota lands in Mni Sota Makoce (Minnesota). She illustrates the consequences of breeding—both good and bad—with a picture of a variety of stinging nettle that has been bred not to sting. 

While the species saves humans from mild discomfort, it also eliminates the protection that aphids who shelter in its fibers require for their protection and survival. These aphids are an integral part of their ecosystem, and their disappearance may disrupt the delicate balance.  

That’s why, Black Elk says, Indigenous peoples cultivate plants “not just for their personal benefit but for the world around them.” When humans work with plants through genetic modification and selection, it is important to take into account the needs of the plant as well as the larger ecosystem—not just themselves. 

The Challenges Ahead

Feral plants are not always easy to work with for growers. They are less predictable, more erratic, not uniform as they manifest in the environment, and may not have as high a yield. Ferality might not be considered agriculturally “productive” as it is currently defined. Yet we are already seeing the limits and risks of the status quo in agriculture today. 

Some organizations are using gene-editing methods such as to manipulate germplasms so that they are more predictable, perennial, and sustainable within the environment. There remain unanswered questions about how feral plants can operate for farmers on a larger scale. But there is no doubt that these crops are adaptable, nutritious, and genetically diverse. And such resilient crops may precipitate a shift in approaches to agriculture more broadly. 

Importantly, there are no hard and fast rules with plants. Not all plants are adapted to be feral. They are unique beings whose resilience should not be taken for granted. Nor should we dismiss them. “When a single plant is lost, we also lose a whole set of prayers, songs, and protocols for building relationship with that plant,” Black Elk says. 

This highlights the intrinsic connection between food sovereignty and food resilience. As long as we eat food we are going to be selecting and morphing plants. And the conditions in which we feed and fuel ourselves will continue to change. 

Similarly, the Rarámuri have corrals of sheep and goats, but the true purpose of these spaces is to fertilize the ground for Mekwaseri. In Chihuahua, Nevares teaches his community about storing and preparing the plants and seeds for generations to come. 

Rather than looking at a species as having a single, human-centered function, to understand the feral is to see individual plants with the complexity that seeds entire ecosystems. What would our world look like if we, as humans, learn to adapt to plants instead of making plants adapt to us?

CORRECTIONS: This article was updated at 2:49 p.m. PT on Jan. 23, 2024 to clarify that the Plant Genetic Resources Unit’s hemp collection is one of the largest in the world. This article was updated at 10:55 a.m. PT on Jan. 22, 2024, to correct that Brussels sprouts are not in the brassica rapa family, to specify that the Indigenous Rarámuri people speak Rarámuri language, and to clarify that the study on crop insurance was published by the Institute of Physics but was conducted by Stanford University and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Read our corrections policy here.

We have no passions left to love the spring
Who had suffered autumn as we did, alone
Walking through dominions of a browning laughter
Carrying our loneliness our loving and our grief.

When I read “Second Spring”—with the 2020 global uprising against police violence still relatively fresh and just weeks after the attack on the U.S. Capitol—the poem captured the spiritual exhaustion of the moment, how the Earth sometimes moves faster than our grief does. As a queer Latina writer who had spent years writing about nature, finding Lorde’s poetry felt like a relief. Finally, I had found a writer who wrote about nature in a way that was inextricable from every system of power we lived in. Before, when I had tried to read anything by someone labeled as a “nature writer,” the blatant omission of the forces that so deeply affected my outdoor experiences—white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy—made me feel distant from their work.

When Lorde published her first book of poems, her publisher, Dudley Randall, was quick to clarify, “Audre Lorde is not a nature poet.” I could relate to this impulse to separate her from the genre. Nature writing seemed to be unconcerned with the realities of oppression; it was writing that waxed poetic about the solace of the American landscape without any consideration of the historical context of that land, unbothered by the many communities displaced from it.

Now, however, what counts as nature writing—and who identifies as a nature writer—is beginning to change. In recent years, as the environmental movement has started to grapple with its historical connections to racism and xenophobia, a new generation of poets, essayists, memoirists, and novelists of color is taking up space in a genre that historically has excluded our perspectives. They include Ross Gay, Natalie Diaz, Kim TallBear, Camille Dungy, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, among many others. They have raised their voices in anthologies like��The Language of Trees, edited by Katie Holten, and��A Darker Wilderness, edited by Erin Sharkey. Books like Sabrina Imbler’s��How Far the Light Reaches��embody a nature writing that centers the most marginalized and names the violent histories inherent in shaping our relationship to nature. More importantly, they remind us that oppressed people have always partnered with nature when seeking our liberation.

In his essay “A Family Vacation” in A Darker Wilderness, Glynn Pogue writes about the first seaside enclaves and mountain towns that allowed Black people to own land, and the first Black-owned bed-and-breakfasts that thrived there. In “Concentric Memory,” Naima Penniman writes about how forests, swamps, and brushlands gave sanctuary to maroon communities of escaped slaves in Haiti and Latin America. Carl Phillips’ piece in The Language of Trees describes how forests became his refuge for queer intimacy, a space that provided “a sense of permission at least, to what can feel like—what we’ve been made to feel is transgression; if only temporarily, the trees erase the shame that drove us to seek hiddenness in the first place.”

In these pages, nature is inherently political. It is an active ally in the fight against oppression, a place where marginalized people can experience brief moments of life outside systemic trauma. And it’s a place where we find the examples we need to give us hope for our survival. In How Far the Light Reaches, Imbler compares the “supernaturally hardy” resilience of feral goldfish that took over an entire river ecosystem in Southwest Australia—all descendants of a handful of pets someone dumped two decades ago—to the resilience they and their queer community needed to survive and “how each of our becomings felt like an unthinkable triumph.” Imbler writes, “A dumped goldfish has no model for what a different and better life might look like, but it finds it anyway. I want to know what it feels like to be unthinkable too, to invent a future that no one expected of you.”

In her book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Lauret Savoy writes about the Western Apache (Ndee) word ni, meaning both “land” and “mind,” which illustrates “the inseparability of place and thought.” “In ‘ni,’ earth and thinking converge,” she writes. “What’s crucial is to think and act with landscapes, as well as about and upon them.”

This insight revealed something I appreciate when reading nature writers of color: They write with landscapes, not only about and upon them. In so many of the environmentalist spaces I have worked in, I’ve often heard about “saving” the Earth—a message that implies a human superiority we don’t actually possess. Nature writers of color instead emphasize relating with the Earth. They write with an assumption of partnership and solidarity between humans and nature, both working toward a mutual goal of liberation, rather than an uneven relationship in which it’s humanity’s task to save everything else.

When Audre Lorde’s publisher said that she was not a nature writer, he justified his argument by stating that “her focus is not on nature, but on feelings and relationships”—as if those concepts were mutually exclusive. Today’s nature writers of color know differently, and Lorde knew it long ago: Writing about nature is writing about feelings and relationships, because our relationship with nature is constantly related to how we learn and think about ourselves.

Since reading Lorde’s poetry, I began teaching a workshop called “Reclaiming Nature Writing.” When I ask participants what they received from the course, an answer I hear often is “permission.” Too many writers still believe their stories about race, sexuality, or ancestry don’t count as nature writing. Once they read writers of color who validate their own unique relationship to nature, they allow themselves to write their own stories.

So much of the recent conversation around diversifying both the publishing industry and the environmental movement has focused on giving people of color “a seat at the table.” These new nature writers of color tell stories that change the table entirely. They don’t simply add a new voice to the discourse; they transform what and who is centered, what core assumptions about nature we first must dispel. In doing so, they provoke a radically important question: Who should have the power to narrate what the Earth wants?

In an essay titled “Brutes: Meditations on the Myth of the Voiceless,” best-selling author Amitav Ghosh argues against the idea of nature as a “voiceless” entity needing humans to stand up and defend it. He believes that nature has been telling us stories far before humans ever could. The task of human storytellers is to simply listen and to find ways to “imaginatively reassign agency and voice to nonhumans,” Ghosh writes. “This is a task at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.”

The more I read nature writing from writers of color, the more it’s clear to me that perhaps instead of seeking out new and innovative ideas to address the ecological crisis, we should be returning to ancient stories, the stories Earth has been telling us for centuries. We can confront this crisis not by trying to save the planet but by listening to it. And in doing so, we may discover that Earth’s story—of severed connection and exploitation—is much the same as our own.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

The boat belongs to Rose Piccinini, the Tribes’ Sanpoil district wildlife biologist. She is part of a team that manages the herd of bighorn sheep that the Tribes’ wildlife department reintroduced beginning in 2009. She also leads the Tribes’ efforts to restore lynx populations back into the ecosystem here. 

The animals who shared this landscape were once fully integrated into every aspect of tribal members’ lives. They harvested bighorn sheep and other game for food, tools, and clothing. Intricate myths, legends, and teachings about the animals were passed down by elders to descendants and bound them to who they were—and who, as a result, their descendants came to be. 

But then American settlers brought domesticated European sheep and goats, and with them, diseases that bighorns weren’t able to recover from. The succession of disease exposures, against which bighorns had no defense, significantly reduced their numbers and made them more vulnerable to other impacts they might have otherwise withstood. Save for a few small pockets in secluded locations, the bighorns died off, and the herds disappeared from the landscape and the lives of the tribes. 

As we crane our necks and squint our eyes upward in the hot midday July sun, shadows reveal more than a dozen bighorn sheep on the north side of the canyon, less than 100 feet above the reservoir. Ewes and lambs weave paths through stalks of mullein, leaving their crescent-shaped tracks in the sand, all the while feeding on shrubs that dot the hillside and scree. Their sharp horns curl back from their heads as their amber eyes attend to their surroundings. Two of the animals walk onto a sandy section of the slope, licking at minerals. They kick up dust and cascades of sand, which form rivulets and accumulate into plumes, slowly fanning down the sandy slope to the shoreline below.

For the 12 tribes of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville, whose reservation is located in north-central Washington State, their ecosystem ������’t complete without the animals and plants who have long inhabited the land alongside them. Maintaining these relationships of reciprocity in modern times involves the protection and reintroduction of native species, as well as the restoration of their habitats, an ambitious effort that the Tribes’ wildlife department has been leading since its inception in the 1970s. 

As the Tribes work together to restore more native species like bighorn sheep and salmon to their lands and waters, they bring collective healing with them. This healing is felt by the people who have long endured cultural trauma from the forces of European and American colonization. It further strengthens their enduring resilience.

Bighorns were among the Tribes’ first relatives to be extirpated from the region, but the world-shattering impacts of colonization only intensified henceforth. 

Salmon have always been at the center of the Tribes’ culture and, until the mid-20th century, their diet and economy. The fish fed the people and the land with, among other things, the nutrients stored in their bodies. The fish consumed sea life and later carried this sustenance upstream in their migratory journey inland. Tribal representatives cite reports of 20,000 salmon per day, weighing on average 35 pounds each, swimming up the Columbia. With their death and decomposition, the nutrients brought by the salmon in their flesh and bones nourished the forests, prairies, and riparian areas, as well as the coyotes, deer, elk, bighorn sheep, lynx, pronghorn, buffalo, wolves, eagles, and innumerable other beings interconnected within these systems.

But in 1942, the U.S. government built the Grand Coulee Dam and “ended a way of life,” according to produced by the Tribes. The dam blocked 1,400 miles of salmon spawning habitat and flooded 56,000 acres of land, as well as the ecosystems that supported whole communities of animals and people. This included critical winter habitat for deer and elk, and areas the Tribes relied on for native food and medicinal plants, all of which were drowned by the government’s dam construction. 

No fish passage was built then, nor since.

“Overnight, it was shut off,” says Richard Whitney, a member of the Sinixt band of the Colville Confederated Tribes and the Tribes’ wildlife department manager, who assumed leadership of the department in 2014. All at once, salmon, who were the Tribes’ staple food and the foundation of their culture and economy, were gone.

To survive, the Tribes turned to other species native to the ecosystem, and started a decades-long effort to restore wildlife populations in the area. By 1975, the Tribes had established a wildlife management department with funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in accordance with the Bureau’s trust responsibilities to the Indigenous peoples with whom it had signed treaties. Elk, Whitney says, have, “stepped up to offer themselves so [the Tribes] could persist.”&�Բ�����;

Today, thanks to the Tribes’ reintroduction efforts, their elk herds are strong, going from 481 total elk counted in 2002, to more than double that in 2022. Whitney says elk numbers on the reservation are at a 20-year high, which gives Tribal members additional opportunity for harvest.

With elk reintroduction efforts underway, the Tribes next turned their attention to sharp-tailed grouse in the late 1990s, bighorn sheep in 2005, pronghorns in 2014, followed by lynx, salmon, and buffalo.

Although they have not reintroduced wolves, the Tribes have allowed wolves to recolonize their lands, since evidence of the canines was first identified in 2008. Wolf packs are now managed here at a stable level. 

The Colville Confederated Tribes’ plan to re-establish bighorn sheep began with six translocations that ultimately brought 136 bighorns back to the reservation. Although the herds have continued to suffer from diseases carried by domesticated goats and sheep—which are worsened by drought as it concentrates animals around smaller watering areas—Whitney says the population has since grown to more than 250.  

As Whitney assumed leadership of the wildlife division and took over the restoration of bighorn sheep, it was suggested to him that the Tribes sell licenses for trophy bighorn hunts to non-tribal hunters to help pay for more staff. Some state fish and wildlife departments sell hunting licenses via auction or raffle for a number of species considered to be trophies to the highest bidder to generate revenue. For example, in Washington this year,, while .

Whitney was adamantly opposed to the idea, and his reasoning provides insight into the approach he takes to wildlife management: “That animal is worth more to me than a biologist position. That animal has value and it’s not in dollars,” he says. With so much wildlife management reliant on hunters paying license fees, which in turn fund conservation and management, Whitney says the priorities are off. “If it just comes down to money, then you guys are in the wrong business. You’ll never get it right.”

In addition to providing sustenance for tribal members, the restoration of native species serves to restore a community of species of which people are an integral part. “T������’s a harmony there, and anything that’s missing breaks that balance,” Whitney says. “T������’s still a harmony, but it’s missing a note here and there.” With each member of the ecological community Whitney’s wildlife department restores, the whole community sings fuller-voiced. 

This story is the first in a three-part series produced in partnership with , an editorially independent magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Read part 2 here and part part 3 here.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:19 a.m. PT on Dec. 16, 2023, to clarify that the Tribes are referred to as the Colville Confederated Tribes or the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, not the Colville Confederacy; and to clarify that Rose Piccinini and Richard Whitney’s work is part of larger team efforts. Read our corrections policy here.

This story is the second in a three-part series produced in partnership with��, an editorially independent��magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Read part 1 here and part 3 here.

Soon after taking the position in 2014, Whitney began leading pronghorn restoration efforts for the Tribes. Using knowledge gained from habitat evaluation surveys he’d worked on previously, as well as feasibility reports from the 1990s and early 2000s, he determined the region offered plenty of suitable pronghorn habitat. In addition, he and his team looked at pronghorn reintroduction attempts by a number of other agencies to determine what had worked and what hadn’t. The Yakama Nation, for example, had successfully restored pronghorn in the past, while the state of Washington had tried, but failed.

In January 2016, after determining there was adequate habitat and food on the reservation, Whitney and his team reintroduced 52 pronghorn. Some of those animals died, likely due to stress and overexertion during transport. In the project’s second year, the team introduced 98 pronghorn—earlier in the year (in October, rather than in midwinter) and in smaller groups, shortly after they had been captured. Survival of reintroduced animals greatly improved in year two, providing valuable information on reintroductions for the future. 

Now, on a sunny July day, Sam Rushing drives us in his pickup truck through the hills outside of Bridgeport on the reservation to see the results. He is the Tribes’ Omak-Nespelem district wildlife biologist and is looking for some of the pronghorn the Tribes reintroduced from Nevada seven years earlier. We scan the open, grassy hillsides in the valley, near a wildfire burn scar, until we spot a herd in the flats near a creek bottom, between two tall ponderosa pines. Spooked by our presence, the group of nearly two dozen animals—does, fawns, and one large buck—trot uphill together. Rushing says the Tribes’ herd now numbers 225.

For Whitney and his relatives, animals are friends and often referred to as such. “We don’t rule the kingdom, but are part of it by relating with friends,” he says. “We’re reuniting with old friends. We’re restoring a community, restoring the system.”&�Բ�����;

Following previous ceremonial releases, in late July 2023, Tribal members gather at the Sanpoil River’s edge. As they wait, the sun illuminates the sky, which is blue save a few passing clouds, and shines down through the ponderosa pines and into the river, the rays of sunlight twirling through currents and dappling the round stones below.

Members of the Colville Tribes form a line between a fish-hauling truck and the river. They pass Chinook salmon—one after the other, from one to another—in specially designed rubber bags toward the river, returning the generous offering of life to the salmon, and in turn, the animals and land. At the end of the line, in one continuous motion, Patrick Tonasket, Keller District representative for the Tribal council, gently pulls a large Chinook by the tail from a bag and orients the fish in the current’s flow. He holds his right hand on the salmon’s broad back until the fish feels the current’s rush, then flicks her tail and jets upstream.��

“We’re dedicated to bringing those salmon back,” Tonasket quietly says.

By day’s end, the Tribes will release 70 summer Chinook salmon. Prior to the operation, biologists working for the Tribes had ensured that the fish were free of disease and had inserted tiny monitoring tags before trucking them upriver for the ceremonial release. These releases give tribal members the opportunity to hold ceremony with and for the salmon. With each salmon released, healing and hope surges through those gathered by the river. Later on, the proof that salmon can spawn in this river will most likely reinforce habitat and model assessments, aiding in future reintroduction efforts by proving they can succeed. 

“The salmon used to run strong here,” says Darnell Sam, a descendant of the Sanpoil Band of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Sam is the Wenatchi Salmon Chief, and leads a ceremony for these fish, whom, he says, in the beginning offered themselves to the people so they could survive. Sam is also the great-nephew of Chief Jim James of the Sanpoil, who presided over the Ceremony of Tears, when his relatives’ millennia-old salmon fishery at Kettle Falls was inundated following the construction of Grand Coulee Dam. Now, Sam stands in the river, his shirt adorned with images of mountain lions and white-and-blue ribbons that pulse in the breeze, and he releases a salmon to the river, as birds sing and the sun shines down.

Sam says the salmon have always run parallel to his people, specifically regarding their resilience: “They’ve endured a lot. Our people have endured a lot. … They’ve been colonized; they’ve been oppressed. So has the salmon, but yet, they still endure, and they still survive, and they’re still here.” Recalling the Ceremony of Tears for Kettle Falls, where his ancestors mourned the loss of the salmon from Grand Coulee Dam, he says, “This is an opportunity for us to wipe them tears.”

This story is the second in a three-part series produced in partnership with��, an editorially independent��magazine about nature and conservation powered by the California Academy of Sciences. Read part 1 here and part 3 here.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:28 a.m. PT on Dec. 16, 2023, to clarify that the Tribes are referred to as the Colville Confederated Tribes or the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, not the Colville Confederacy.��Read our corrections policy here.

Not bad for a wastewater treatment plant.

Fed by five million gallons of treated wastewater every day, Fernhill’s constructed waterfalls add oxygen back to the flow. One million reintroduced native plants representing about two dozen species (plus other species returning on their own) remove excess nitrogen, phosphorus, chemicals, and suspended solids, while providing the shade needed to cool the water before it reaches the nearby Tualatin River. During construction, workers installed 180 logs and snags, and even varied the topographies of wetland basins to mimic the region’s aquatic habitats and offer more diverse niches for marsh birds, shorebirds, and other wildlife.

WATCH: Nature Offers a Model for Filtering Wastewater

The natural water filtration system fashioned from old sewage lagoons has become an “” between treatment plants operated by the Clean Water Services utility in western Oregon and an increasingly vulnerable Tualatin River. “I always say wetlands are the kidneys of the Earth,” says Jared Kinnear, a biologist who helped design Fernhill and now manages it and the utility’s other reuse projects. “We’re just harnessing the process that’s been going on for millions of years.”

Constructed wetlands have been used for decades in Europe and as natural water-cleaning systems. Amid the growing threats of the climate crisis and habitat fragmentation, they’re gaining in popularity as a form of nature-inspired infrastructure that can not only prevent pollution but also create vital green spaces for wildlife and humans alike. 

In 2011, after reviewing its options for a needed expansion, Clean Water Services found that an $18 million wetland buffer made good financial sense as well: It cost roughly half as much as a concrete-and-steel treatment system. “Not only did Fernhill cost less, but it certainly offered a whole lot more environmental and social benefits than other options,” says Diane Taniguchi-Dennis, the utility’s CEO.

Constructed wetlands require active tending, such as periodic dredging, removal of invasive species, wildlife management, and even controlled burns. But these semi-wild spaces have proven so popular that the utilities operating them have had to regularly remind visitors of their primary function: cleaning wastewater. 

Wildlife Encounters

Along the Atlantic Flyway in central Florida, the Brevard County Wastewater Treatment Plant similarly back into water-filtering wetlands in 1998. Workers constructed four marshes—each with its own small island and all separated by earthen berms—and then reintroduced more than 200,000 native plants representing 19 species. Arrayed around a central lake, the , known locally as the Viera Wetlands, help purify wastewater that’s reclaimed for irrigation or discharged into the Four Mile Canal and upper St. Johns River during the rainy season.

Retired software engineer and photography enthusiast Steven Winker won a second-place award for a dramatic photo of a . He recalls the thrill of passing within feet of another bobcat nicknamed “Mama”—so named by her many admirers because she had raised multiple litters in the wetlands.

In November 2022, about a month after researchers outfitted her with a radio collar, ; researchers suspect she was struck by a car on a nearby road. Beyond an outpouring of grief, her death sparked a bitter controversy among residents who suspected that the radio collars were changing the behavior of the bobcats and making them more susceptible to harm. Tracking data suggested no ill effects on the animals, though the deaths of multiple collared bobcats pointed to another sad truth: Creating inviting semi-urban spaces for wildlife brings the animals closer not only to adoring fans but also to highways and hunters.

Restoring Nature

The popularity of Oregon’s Fernhill has required Clean Water Services to defuse its own share of potential public relations disasters, like the in 2020. The birds ate fungus-contaminated grain in nearby fields and then expired in the wetlands. “We’re in a fishbowl,” Kinnear says, keenly aware of how the deaths could have been wrongly attributed to something in the treated water if the incident had not been properly investigated and explained. 

At the same time, he has had to continually weed out invasive plants and animals threatening the site’s water filtration function. The utility’s proactive management, though, has created new opportunities to educate the public about the benefits and limits of nature-inspired systems, and to explore how human stewardship might nurture new ecosystems.

The , an international collaboration at a wastewater treatment plant south of Mexicali in Mexico’s Baja California state, has aimed even higher by seeking to improve the flow and quality of freshwater through the Colorado River Delta.

The river’s meager flow by this point in its course, drained by chronic drought and upstream water rights, has effectively concentrated its pollution and threatened its connectivity to the sea at the Gulf of California. “Everything comes back to the lack of fresh water,” says Edgar Carrera, who grew up in Mexicali and now coordinates the Colorado River Delta project for The Nature Conservancy, a project partner.

An initial 250-acre wetland created in 2007 wasn’t enough to accommodate the region’s population growth and the resulting influx of wastewater that is now roughly double the existing plant’s treatment capacity. That wetland, Carrera says, has already become an oasis for migratory and resident birds like the endangered Yuma clapper rail, mammals like bobcats and foxes, and reptiles like chameleons. “So it is now a wildlife refuge,” he says.

In parallel with upgrades to the plant’s treatment process, tentatively slated for 2025, a new series of intermediate water-filtering wetland basins will significantly improve the quality of the 3.5 billion gallons of reclaimed water before it flows into the larger wetland and then into the Colorado River Delta. Improving that flow can lower the concentration of other contaminants—essentially using treated wastewater to help dilute pollution—while nourishing the downstream estuary’s wildlife.

Carrera has alleviated some community concerns that the natural water purification won’t be enough to clean the Colorado by emphasizing that the process will combine the filtering abilities of a more efficient treatment plant and the series of constructed wetlands to aid the ailing delta. “They are very conscious that the water, for them, means income,” he says of local residents who depend upon the river for agriculture, fishing, boating, and tourism.

For many ecosystems, recycled water means life. In a lower stretch of Oregon’s Tualatin River, water released from an upstream reservoir and treated wastewater from the utility’s four treatment plants account for up to 86% of the late-summer flow.

Taniguchi-Dennis believes that creating “river-ready” water and a wildlife sanctuary is just the start of what might be possible with treated wastewater. Providing a foothold for keystone species such as beneficial kinds of algae, for example, could feed a wide assortment of creatures while further purifying and oxygenating the water. “What if we could create the right biodiversity within the wetland that actually amplified what the river needs to restore its health and its waters?” she asks. It’s a question made possible by reimagining how the problem of polluted wastewater can become the basis for a sustainable, nature-inspired solution.

The eight earthworks complexes in central and southern Ohio join nearly 1,200 sites worldwide that UNESCO has said have outstanding value to humanity. The earthworks are now peers of Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, Taj Mahal, and other magnificent places, according to Jen Aultman, chief historic sites officer of the Ohio History Connection (OHC), which shepherded the World Heritage application through an arduous multiyear process. Other sites added this year include temples in India and a 9th-century Tunisian settlement.

Indigenous people built the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks between 1,600 and 2,000 years ago. Their rounded, grass-covered walls rise 14 to 20 feet to define octagons, circles, squares, and other geometric shapes that each encompass many acres. One complex—in Newark, Ohio—covers a total of 4 1/2 square miles. Stonehenge would fit into a tiny corner. Walking through the earthworks’ curving green forms is both inspiring and disorienting.

The monumental figures align precisely with astronomical events as well as with each other, even when separated by hundreds of miles. The major alignments mark the moon’s 18.6-year south-to-north rises and sets. At the gigantic Octagon Earthworks, in Newark, the moon rises through one of its gates, or openings, at the moment of the northern standstill—the northernmost point of the 18.6-year cycle.

In constructing the giant shapes, the earthworks’ builders repeatedly and spectacularly solved a primordial math problem that confounded other mathematicians as far back as ancient Greece. Brad Lepper, OHC’s curator of archaeology and an Ohio State University anthropology professor, has written that some of the earthworks’ huge circles and squares were constructed with equivalent surface areas. This is called “squaring the circle,” an expression that has come colloquially to mean doing the impossible. Other earthworks circles and squares have equal perimeters, called “rectifying the circumference.”

Some of the math is more esoteric than visible. In one case, the distance between two figures’ centers was used as a gigantic measuring stick for laying out the rest of the site. In other instances, connecting forms with imaginary lines creates related hypothetical forms overlaid precisely on the ones we can walk among.

The earthworks’ makers were virtuoso astronomers, architects, and ma­­­­thematicians, Wallace concluded, calling them “uncommon geniuses.” Their “genius lives on today in many descendant tribes,” she said.

Unlike the pyramids of Egypt and cathedrals of Europe, no central authority directed the earthworks’ vast and meticulous construction. Instead, the evidence suggests members of dispersed Indigenous communities built the massive shapes one basket load of dirt at a time. Finely crafted statuary and other objects found in the earthworks were made of materials from both local and distant places. These include Ohio’s multicolored flint and its rivers’ freshwater pearls, along with obsidian from the Rocky Mountains, mica from the Southeast, copper from the Great Lakes region, and shells originating in the Gulf of Mexico.

The geographic range of the materials’ sources indicates how widely the earthworks were valued, according to UNESCO. A representative called them “the center of a continent-wide sphere of influence and interaction.”

The Importance of Homeland

The day following the World Heritage announcement, members of the United States delegation to Riyadh gathered. “It’s an incredible accomplishment,” said Alex Wesaw of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, OHC’s director of American Indian relations. He called the UNESCO decision a win for all of Native America. He pointed out that we don’t know what the “Hopewell” people called themselves; archaeologists dubbed them that after identifying earthworks on a farm whose owner was named Hopewell.

Chief Wallace recalled a soft rain falling during a 2007 Eastern Shawnee visit to the earthworks. The tribe had been expelled from the state during the 19th century following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Many of its citizens died on the approximately 800-mile walk from Ohio to Oklahoma, then called “Indian Territory” and set aside for tribes. As soon as they arrived, the chiefs begged for food for their starving people, Wallace said. “Our pain was so very difficult and so very deep for so very long, it needed a gentle rain to wash it away,” she said. “One woman in the group said our ancestors were weeping with joy because we had returned to the homeland.”&�Բ�����;

“Homeland” is vital as a place and as a concept because it’s “where our stories and our history originate,” said Logan York of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. The Miami civilization centers on the lands in Ohio and surrounding states from which the tribe was forcibly removed in 1846, York explained. “It seems like a long time ago but is a blink of an eye for culture. A lot of our ways of doing traditional things are still centered in our traditional homelands.”

Helping younger generations understand this is critical for removed tribes. Chief Billy Friend of the Wyandotte Nation, another Ohio tribe, has taken young tribal citizens on bus tours of the state. He said Ohio “is where my ancestors stood, partook of ceremonies, and fought.” Teaching youngsters this history, Friend said, “preserves the future of our past.”

Joshua Garcia, media and communications specialist for the Wyandotte Nation Cultural Center and Museum, first joined Chief Friend’s tours when he was just 12 years old. The trips counteract the damage from the decades during which “it was not good to be Native,” according to Garcia. Growing up, his grandmother was not allowed to go to ceremonies because they were seen as “full of supposedly bad things,” he recounted. His mother took it upon herself to help restore traditional knowledge and is now the Wyandotte cultural preservation officer, Garcia said.

Heritage for the World

The idea of proposing the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks to the World Heritage list began percolating some 35 years ago, said Lepper. Early supporters included Newark Earthworks Center officials Richard Shiels, an Ohio State University emeritus professor, and Marti Chaatsmith, who is Comanche and Choctaw. About eight years ago, an application began to coalesce, and in January 2022 the Department of the Interior submitted it to UNESCO. According to Lepper, the tribes contributed mightily to the application and will continue to be involved in OHC earthworks-related decisions; for example in developing site-management plans and reviewing research proposals. “Working closely with our Indigenous partners is what we do now, and we won’t do anything without them,” he said.

Important cross-cultural research includes Lepper’s collaboration with Chief Ben Barnes of the Shawnee Tribe. In 2018, the two published a scientific paper comparing engraved spherical black stones used by the Hopewell peoples with those used by Shawnees of today when constructing ceremonial water drums. “I am so thrilled to have been a co-author on a paper with a Shawnee chief, and Ben said he’s thrilled to have been a co-author on a paper with an archaeologist,” Lepper reported.

Increased publicity for the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks means Ohio anticipates more earthworks-oriented tourism. State legislative representative Jessica Miranda (D-Forest Park) said the World Heritage listing will attract visitors “to see the beauty of our lands and our very diverse state.” Bill Seitz (R-Cincinnati) spoke of recognizing Native contributions and being “respectful to their history.”

The grand complexes named to the World Heritage list are closely monitored by OHC and the National Park Service, but additional earthworks dot the Ohio landscape, having survived centuries of plowing and development. In the rural countryside of south-central Ohio, a hawk surfed the thermals above one of these solitary earthworks. The raptor spiraled gracefully overhead as its avian forebears have likely done since Indigenous ancestors built the site all those years ago.

The heightened publicity won’t change the situation of these earthworks for better or worse, according to Lepper. “Looters already know about the isolated earthworks, off in the woods and fields, with no monitoring,” he said. “They are the ones that are really at risk and always have been.” That’s largely because out-of-the-way earthworks are usually on private land, where the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act does not necessarily apply, he said. A state graves-protection law would be an important next step.

For Aultman, the significance of safeguarding humanity’s special places was driven home in 2019, when fire ravaged another World Heritage site, Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Continual news coverage and social media posts meant the event was witnessed repeatedly worldwide. “We all felt we would be lesser as humans if it were gone,” she said.

The Cultural Center

On October 14, Wallace was the keynote speaker at a celebratory event held in an earthworks complex in Chillicothe, a city in south-central Ohio. Other speakers included Mike DeWine, Ohio’s governor, and National Park Service Director Chuck Sams, an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, in Oregon.

“Chillicothe” is a Shawnee word meaning “the great place” and “the place of chiefs and leaders,” Wallace said in her keynote speech. “This place was the center of North America … the center for spirituality, the center for love, the center for peace.” Disseminating this understanding is the task ahead, according to Wallace.

Addressing Native Americans in the crowd, Wallace said, “It was our ancestors, our geniuses who built these places.” And, she assured them, “the world now knows.”

Pradhan couldn’t help but think of the lasting this dam would have on her local ecology. It was the moment when she resolved to preserve the floral world of her hills with her paintbrush. 

Bhutan, Nepal, and northeastern India—including Kalimpong—are part of a transboundary complex in the Eastern Himalayas called the. It forms a part of what scientists call the ‘Himalayan Biodiversity—one of the biologically richest landscapes in the region.

For the past two decades, Pradhan has dedicated her life to capturing the beauty of eastern Himalayan flora on canvas. Her exquisite paintings of orchids and rhododendrons have been showcased in exhibitions around the world. Her and other botanical illustrators’ work offer a potential solution for preserving the region’s flora in the face of climate change.

“With climate change and fast infrastructural development, there is an ecological change in the hills of Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and as an botanical illustrator, I feel it is important that we sensitize our younger generation to the importance of conservation of the local flora and fauna,” says the 49-year-old artist.

***

Around 600 kilometers west of  Kalimpong, Nepalese botanical illustrator Neera Joshi employs watercolors to bring to life the distinctive Himalayan flowers such as rhododendrons, orchids, and magnolias on canvas. She is recognized for her significant contributions to the study of the local flora, including her involvement in “ III,” which features numerous botanical line drawings for scientific articles.

“Visual communication plays a crucial role in conservation,” Joshi says. “[Botanical paintings] can be used in educational programs, botanical gardens, and museums to raise awareness about the diversity of plant life and the importance of conservation. These illustrations can engage the public and inspire a deeper appreciation for plants and their role in ecosystems.”

For nearly two decades, Joshi, now 55, has been teaching botanical illustrations to artists and scientists, believing that her teaching is contributing to the preservation of the region’s floral kingdom through art.

“At first, I was unfamiliar with botanical illustration as a distinct art form,” says Finnish botanical illustrator Jari Laukka, who has been studying under Joshi’s tutelage since 2020. “However, upon discovering Neera’s impressive portfolio, I was eager to have her as my teacher. During a visit to her studio, I had the opportunity to witness her artwork firsthand, and I was genuinely impressed by her expertise and meticulous attention to detail, qualities essential in botanical art.” He is now preparing an exhibition of his botanical paintings. 

“In contrast to other art genres within fine arts, where artists often have the freedom to be more subjective and emphasize aesthetics,” Joshi says, “botanical illustration serves the purpose of providing a comprehensive representation of a plant, allowing for easy identification. It demands accuracy and patience, which can be a challenge for new artists.”&�Բ�����;

And the stakes are high, too.

Rhododendrons and orchids hold great cultural significance in the local communities, but they are under threat. Rhododendrons are undergoing due to climate change, while orchids are suffering from widespread, harvested for their medicinal properties. 

“Art can serve as a valuable conservation tool,” says Rajendra Yonzone, assistant professor in the department of Botany at Kolkata’s Victoria Institution, “true conservation can occur naturally if we allow these elements to thrive in their natural habitat.” Yonzone, a native of Kalimpong with an extensive background in the study of the flora of the eastern Himalayas, emphasizes that the main challenge arises from unregulated construction and infrastructure development. These activities often occur without adequate planning, environmental impact assessments, or management strategies in place. To facilitate the balance between conservation and development, she says it is crucial to integrate scientific expertise and careful planning into the process. 

Yonzone acknowledges the intricacy, discipline, and hard work involved in botanical art, but he also highlights its limitations. “In today’s technology-driven world, digital display through photography can offer a quicker and more efficient means of preserving plants and their scientific details.” Photographic documentation of plants is faster to capture, easier to store, and simpler to transfer, he explains.

However, Hemlata contends that botanical illustration excels in capturing and emphasizing details that might prove elusive in photos. “Elements like cluttered backgrounds or any plant deformations encountered when photographing a plant in its natural habitat can be completely omitted in a painting.” Botanical illustration, she says, serves a unique purpose in identifying and depicting plants more intimately than photographs.

The group followed a path into the Botanical Garden’s remaining patch of , by the Lenape people. Mushrooms peeked from the leaf rot, latticed the downed logs, and were cradled in the nooks of trees. Fungi grew, too, from the wooden fence meant to keep people on the path, blurring the boundaries between the forest and its visitors. 

“Today, we’re going to move as a community,” said Sneha Ganguly, an artist and mycophile (lover of fungi) in her early 30s. In her “alter ego” as Kali Mushrooms, Ganguly leads online courses, fungi workshops, and forays—group outings wherein mycophiles observe, identify, and sometimes collect mushrooms. Ganguly also founded New York City’s first Fungus Fest in 2022, and continues to organize the festival on behalf of the New York Mycological Society (NYMS).

Many of the 15 or so people in attendance at the festival—ranging from 5-year-olds to retirees—were from the surrounding neighborhoods of the Bronx, and many were members of the NYMS. They are also part of a broader trend of increased public interest in all things mushroom. 

Fungi perform key functions for ecosystems and support collective thriving. Yet compared to their counterparts in the animal and plant kingdoms, they remain poorly understood within mainstream United States society. As a result of institutional disinterest, they enjoy . 

In recent years, however, a coalition of mycology enthusiasts, many from amateur mycological associations across the United States, is changing this. These mycophiles are engaging in community science to identify, document, and protect fungal species, many of which are rare or threatened. 

Mycophiles of color, specifically, are challenging the colonial legacies within the natural sciences. They’re using mycology to reclaim caring relationships with nonhuman life. In doing so, they are creating more collective ways for communities to learn about and steward local biodiversity.

Budding Interest

Western scientists have historically labeled fungi “lower plants.” In fact, they were only officially designated a in 1969, according to Gabriela D’Elia, director of the Fungal Diversity Survey, or FUNDIS, entirely dedicated to fungi conservation. 

As a result of this historical neglect, scientists have cataloged only of the world’s fungal species. While scientists know that many fungi species are , the lack of basic research makes it difficult to estimate . According to D’Elia, it’s likely that “at this pace, especially in North America, we’re losing fungal species faster than we can document them.” Communities worldwide also have their own names and relationships with fungi—knowledge that scientific institutions often , or erase. 

Fungi are difficult to track and protect under conventional conservation frameworks. These frameworks most lend themselves to the study of individual organisms that can be more easily observed and counted, such as polar bears, explains Patricia Kaishian, curator of mycology at the New York State Museum. 

In contrast, much of the fungal organism is invisible to the human eye. Mushrooms, for example, are actually the reproductive parts of a larger organism, whose weblike mycelia burrow into their substrate—a tree, say, or the soil—to feed. It is often where an individual fungus’s mycelia ends and another’s begins. 

Similarly, fungi often form symbiotic relationships with other organisms—including . Around 90% of vascular plants have a relationship with a . Fungal mycelia, intertwined with plant roots, form under the forest floor—“the nervous system of the earth,” as Ganguly metaphorically describes it. 

Fungi are diverse, from the dermatophytes that grow on our feet to the portobellos on our dinner plates. They often feed on dead organisms, recycling the nutrients so other beings can use them. “Their job is to destroy everything and bring it to simple molecules,” says Maria Shumskaya, an associate professor of biology who studies fungi at New Jersey’s Kean University. 

Over the past few years, scientific institutions have begun to devote increased research to fungi’s many incredible applications: their ability to , , and remediate soil by . Yet there are still relatively few professional mycologists—according to FUNDIS there are 1,000 mycologists in the U.S. compared to 17,000 The funding to support the study of fungal biodiversity is similarly limited.

Local mycological associations help fill in that gap. Nonprofessionals are increasingly interested in mycology, as reflected in the growing membership of the New Jersey Mycological Association (NJMA), which reached 1,000 members by the end of 2022 (more than double pre-pandemic numbers). Many people joined mycological associations during the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic; others are motivated to take action by their increasing climate anxiety. 

At the Botanical Garden foray, several participants spoke of their desire to reclaim a connection with the land. Nigel Smith, a landscape gardener from the Bronx, became interested in mycology a few years ago. “Being in the modern day, it’s a lot of worry and uncertainty,” he says. “This feels like a path of our ancestors.”

Journei Bimwala, a clinical herbalist and artist in residence at the Bronx River Alliance, came equipped with a large foraging basket. “I want for us to be able to gain our knowledge and access back,” she says. She is the community outreach coordinator with the New York Mycological Society and educates about foraging at , the only legal public foraging space in New York City. “I’m all about being out, and introducing people, and having them reconnect,” she says. 

Budding mycophiles join peer-to-peer networks whose participatory approach to science takes a cue from their fungal neighbors. “It’s definitely a mycelial community network,” says Katie Crawford, a New Jersey Mycological Association member who is helping to plan the New Jersey Fungus Fest. 

Community Science 

A week after Ganguly led the foray through the New York Botanical Garden, a group of about 35 people from the New Jersey Mycological Association gathered in the parking lot of a park in central New Jersey. Then they dispersed into the trees. 

Noticing mushrooms is an art. “You have to have an eye for it,” says Igor Safonov, the association’s treasurer and membership coordinator. 

One moment, participants were walking along, chatting. The next, one of them shot off the path quick as a deer, squatting to inspect a saucer-sized brown mushroom with a floppy cap and gauzy, labial gills. “It’s ,” they announced. The platterful felt smooth and meaty to the touch, like sweat-cooled human skin, and smelled of the soil it came from. As the participants walked, they stopped frequently to cut and tuck mushrooms into the natural-fiber baskets hanging from their arms.

Participants emerged from the forest in small groups and gathered intently under a covered pavilion to begin identification. They deposited the mushrooms they’d picked into red-and-white-checkered food trays on the picnic tables. 

Mushrooms can be identified by a range of qualities: their location, size, color, odor, and taste. (According to Kaishian, mycologists consider it safe to taste and spit out, but not swallow, a small amount of any mushroom when attempting to distinguish between two closely related species. However, many mushrooms are seriously sickening and even deadly to swallow. When starting out, it is best to do this only with someone who is highly experienced. Don’t use this article alone as a guide.) Some mushroom-hunters huddled over field guides, bending their heads together to inspect the stems and gills illustrated across the pages. Others snapped pictures to upload onto , , or even Facebook, where the broader community can help with identification. 

The most valuable source of mycological knowledge in any region is mycophiles themselves. Some have been coming to the same spots for decades. This kind of specialized, local knowledge ������’t just useful—it’s necessary. Especially considering that some mushrooms are poisonous, Ganguly says, mycophiles must show reverence for the fungus and respect for collective wisdom. 

Participants record information on small slips about each mushroom they collect. Club officers keep the slips and toss most of the mushrooms back into the forest. A designated member then logs the data on a spreadsheet. Occasionally, they dry a particularly rare, new, or interesting mushroom to deposit it in the club’s .

Sometimes, club members send samples for genetic sequencing. PCR (polymerase chain reaction) DNA testing has recently become much cheaper and more accessible, leading to a surge in new mushroom identifications. The neighboring New York Mycological Society lends its members compound microscopes and PCR kits to sequence the DNA of the mushrooms they collect.

Data from mycological associations across the United States enables collaborations between community scientists and their counterparts in the academy. Shumskaya, the Kean University scientist, recently using data from the New Jersey Mycological Association. From 2007 to 2019, Shumskaya reported, association participants identified 1,248 distinct fungi species. The data included 691 species that hadn’t previously been included in the for New Jersey, and four unique to the facility’s global database.

These long-term efforts reveal shifts in local fungal biodiversity. Since 2009, New Jersey Mycological Association member Nina Burghardt has organized a monthly fungal foray to the .

“A lot of the fungi that [were] typically in Florida and Texas are making their way up here,” says Burghardt. Mycologists argue that climate change may be causing a . 

Fungi are often neglected in environmental policy, but they are a source of valuable information. Fungal diversity data can help communities advocate for their local ecosystems, based on the premise that when fungi suffer, ecosystems suffer—and when fungi thrive, ecosystems thrive. “T������ is a symbiotic relationship, that reciprocity,” Bimwala says.

Colonial Legacies—and Collective Reclamations

Institutional neglect of fungi is part of the larger story of environmental degradation caused by the linked systems of capitalism and Euro-American colonialism. Collections from European colonial expeditions formed the core of many early . While the archives mostly name , Ganguly points out, unnamed local people did much of the based on their deep and ancestral knowledge of a given place. Yet colonial authorities frequently erased those contributions, and often from accessing scientific and educational institutions, Kaishian says.

This colonial legacy is evident in the continued from scientific fields, and the ongoing theft and .

Amateur mycological associations are often more democratic than formal scientific institutions. “Being a citizen scientist, there’s really a ton of entry points,” says Sydney Hilton, the New Jersey Mycological Association’s newsletter editor. Yet Hilton and others say that inequalities persist. 

“When you do want to join, you have to face the fact that you will be the only person of color in a mostly white group,” says Ganguly of many mycological societies. “That reverberates into institutional power, and economic resources, and funding.” More mycophiles of color have joined mycological societies in recent years, contributing data to surveys as community scientists. Yet the professional academics who publish papers—and who receive money and accolades—are . 

In addition to being a member of a couple local mycology associations, Ganguly co-founded the with Mario Ceballos and a handful of other mycophiles of color interested in social-justice-centered science.

“We organized in response to not seeing representation,” says Ceballos, who also serves as co-chair of , and who is based in San Diego. “We responded by creating our own organization, our own community—organizing around science, mushrooms, our love for medicine, and community care.”&�Բ�����;

Community mycologists can embrace the tools of science, while criticizing the colonial legacies within scientific institutions, Kaishian says. 

Indeed, there is a long history of radical groups conducting community science—most famously, the and the .

The POC Fungi Community recently opened a community lab, where they’re researching fungi’s potential to clean polluted soil. Ceballos’ research focuses on the reclamation of huitlacoche, a corn fungus English speakers pejoratively dubbed “.” Many Indigenous Mexican peoples, including Ceballos’ community, consider huitlacoche a sacred and delicious staple food. 

But colonial farmers considered it a scourge. The USDA has supported the development of genetically modified corn meant to , while many U.S. agricultural institutions still if they find it. Because of this policy of eradication, fresh, market-rate huitlacoche, typically imported from Mexico, can cost in the United States—many times more than what it would normally cost in Mexico. This prohibits access for many people who have an ancestral connection to the fungus. Ceballos and his collaborators want to support community members in growing and accessing huitlacoche.

Ceballos says he’s faced racist backlash from within the mycology community for his anti-racism activism. Kaishian, similarly, experienced backlash from mycophiles who consider her “inappropriate.”&�Բ�����;

Yet mycophiles in these spaces also see positive changes. More people of color are joining, leading, and creating their own mycological spaces. And more people are interested in connecting mycology, queerness, and social justice.

Mycelial Networks 

Mycology has proven transformative for many. Among the groups featured in this piece, it has inspired people to get involved in their communities; to take a chance on their passions; and to intertwine their well-being with that of their neighbors, both human and nonhuman. D’Elia, from the Fungal Diversity Survey, describes leading a weekend-long mushroom walk that ended with some participants “sitting around the table questioning their jobs.”

Several community mycologists shared similar experiences. One bright June morning I called Katie Crawford, a member of the New Jersey Mycological Association; she was about to start her last day at Google. “Fungi was sort of my gateway to figure out, ‘How can I get more involved in my community?’” she says. Now she’s going to devote herself full-time to environmental-focused work. Similarly, Ceballos, who previously worked in health care, is now a full-time caretaker and community mycologist.

Many who grew up witnessing the effects of climate change consider ecological stewardship a matter of survival. “Now it’s less of a hobby and more of an obligation—more of a commitment, a responsibility,” says NJMA member Hilton. These mycophiles envision a massive shift in our society’s relationship with the more-than-human world—a reknitting of ourselves into webs of life and death, reciprocity and mutual obligation. 

It’s a kind of reconnection that fungi are uniquely equipped to teach us. “Just like a mushroom, everything is community,” says Bimwala. She found these relationships with the plants and fungi she foraged, with other animals, and with fellow human beings. “So when we’re in community, guess what?” she says. “We share. We look out for one another.”&�Բ�����;

This story was produced with the support of  and the .

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9:01 a.m. PT on Sept. 13, 2023, to clarify that the Fungal Diversity Survey is not the only . The Fungi Foundation, too, is a U.S. and Chilean nonprofit. Read our corrections policy here.

The story of Wynn Bruce is not well known. But as it becomes clear that our political system is incapable of responding to the scale of the climate emergency unfolding before us, radical actions like Bruce’s will continue. In the coming years we are going to witness an overall escalation of activist tactics in response to the climate crisis.

In my new novel, , I explore this shift through real, historical actions as well as fictional, potential actions. My protagonist, a lifelong environmental activist named Rae Kelliher, is deeply formed by the nonviolent social change movements of the past four decades, including the efforts to stop construction of nuclear power plants, avoid a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, and prevent construction of a fracked gas pipeline in her Boston neighborhood. In each case, she engages in unwavering tactics of nonviolent civil disobedience and witness, usually after exhausting all legal remedies to preventing harms. But facing down a diagnosis of terminal cancer as she approaches age 70, Rae engages in a shocking act, taking her own life and the life of a fossil fuel CEO whom she blames for delaying society’s response to climate change.

Rae’s husband, Reggie, who is virulently opposed to violent tactics, argues presciently that her action will lead to negative blowback, with the hammer of state repression coming down on social movements and criminalizing dissent. We can see this in our world today, with racketeering charges against Cop City protesters and harsh penalties dealt to water protectors. But as Reggie later observes, it is hard to suppress a “decentralized army of terminally ill patients” who engage in militant acts at the end of life.

While the choice Rae makes in the novel is fictional, the situation she faces is all too real: It is the situation we are facing right now.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report underscores that if we stay on our current course, in terms of carbon and methane emissions, we will blow past the “defense line” of a 1.5 C (2.7 F) temperature increase with disastrous impacts in the form of weird weather, droughts, floods, and challenges to our food system.

We now know from investigative reporting that the largest fossil fuel companies, Shell and ExxonMobil, about the dangerous repercussions of burning coal, gas, and oil. Yet for almost half a century, the industry deployed its considerable assets and power to deny climate change, fund disinformation and doubt about the science, lobby to block energy-efficient alternatives, and delay timely responses. And the industry’s reckless pursuits continue unabated in the face of surging global heat waves.

As you read this, the leaders of a couple dozen global energy corporations are making conscious decisions to build new infrastructure to extract and burn billions of tons of carbon and methane that is presently sequestered. A identified 195 carbon-bomb projects; each will burn a billion tons of carbon over its lifetime.

The largest banks and financial institutions in the world to enable this extraction. They are all betting against humanity, counting on the failure of governments and social movements to stop their activities. The U.S. government is gridlocked between one political party that is entirely subservient to the carbon barons—and another party still mostly captured by energy interests.

Meanwhile, among those who are adamant that major changes are necessary, the debate about what to do reels between magical thinking and defeatism. Proposals range from untested and risky techno-fixes to hyperlocal civic engagement around carbon drawdown and regenerative agriculture. Others have already started grieving the losses they see coming or have withdrawn from civic engagement, believing our political system incapable of forming an adequate response.

However, there is still time to secure a livable future, or at least a “,” as humorist Andrew Boyd describes it. We can still shift the trajectory away from the worst-case scenarios if we act decisively in the next seven years, dramatically reducing fossil fuel consumption and implementing a wide range of mitigation and adaption strategies. But the first step is to stop the pipeline, if you will, of new fossil fuel infrastructure for extraction and burning. 

The fossil fuel industry and its leaders will not voluntarily make these changes. The tobacco industry was the last to admit that smoking was bad for our health. Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal will extract until they are stopped by external pressure. And if they are not stopped, they will destroy the world.

Who will stop them? State actors are unable to meaningfully respond at this point. Witness the Conference of the Parties process, with all the world’s leaders sitting around a table, increasingly cutting deals with polluters. At the same time, corporate defenders of the energy status quo have created a significant propaganda industry—including think tanks, astroturf advocacy groups, and symbolic “net zero” campaigns—to distract us. As Rebecca Solnit observes, the to reinforce the “we are all responsible for climate change” deflection from its own culpability.

The divestment movement has inspired thousands of institutions to out of fossil fuel investments while “revoking the social license” of the industry. One coalition is calling for U.S. lawmakers to the role of the fossil fuel industry in fomenting denial and delay in responding to the climate crisis. But it is hard to imagine the current oil-soaked Congress acting on such an idea.

I am not surprised that a growing number of people have given up on our political system as a path for making change. Instead, they focus on private sector responses or social movement interventions in blocking new fossil fuel infrastructure—such as Standing Rock and the Valve Turners. Other forms of disruptive direct action, such as efforts by and , are critical in drawing attention to the urgency of the fight. 

But ultimately, in the absence of radical, system-wide solutions, these efforts can only serve as delay tactics. What we need is a bold “just transition” program that ends fossil fuels as soon as possible. This should include a declaration of a federal climate emergency; an immediate moratorium on all new fossil fuel infrastructure; an immediate elimination of all fossil fuel subsidies; and a public/government takeover and rapid phaseout of the fossil fuel sector while using its superprofits to fund the transition.

Without such actions, the collision course between ecological realities and our insufficient societal responses will only intensify. The coming decade will see more Wynn Bruce–like acts of desperation as well as acts of eco-sabotage such as those depicted in the new dramatic film,, based on the nonfiction .

As the fictional Rae Kelliher says in anticipation of those who will object to her radical and violent act: If you don’t like what I’ve done, what bold action will you undertake to protect mother earth, our one and only home?

“Something about being focused on climate makes you crazy in a unique way,” Heller says. ​“We are here to win, and we have to seize the power of the state because nothing else can address this global crisis at a scale that can match it.”

Heller was reflecting on a major ecosocialist victory, a phrase that would have seemed oxymoronic five years ago. That victory was New York state’s Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), a big step toward a Green New Deal. While other states have taken steps as well—Illinois’ 2021 labor-led  comes to mind—New York is the first state to do so in a way that explicitly rejects the neoliberal obligation to put corporate profits first. Instead, the BPRA puts the publicly owned New York Power Authority in charge of building renewable energy with a mandate to do so in the interest of working people.

Ecosocialists in New York won because their goal was unabashedly socialist, because they’d built a bench of elected leaders, and because they were willing to try everything—even with great risk—while rethinking strategies that weren’t working.

Where To Start

In 2017, as DSA membership skyrocketed in the wake of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, a handful of DSA members formed a national ecosocialist working group. It seemed clear that capitalist profiteering was fueling the climate crisis, confirmed by a  that found that just 100 corporations had produced more than 70% of total greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.

A socialist solution felt urgent. For decades, leaving the problem to the capitalist elites who caused it had yielded mostly empty greenwashed rhetoric.

But even within DSA, not everyone was convinced climate should be a focal point. The question (shared by centrist Democrats at the time) was whether climate, as a broad issue, could mobilize working-class Americans. ​“It sounds crazy to say now,” says Mike Paulson, one of the leading strategists on BPRA and an early member of the Ecosocialist Working Group, ​“but four years ago, a lot of socialists just didn’t care about climate. So we had to prove ourselves within DSA.”

In 2018, these attitudes began to change quickly. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist bartender and a Standing Rock protester, won a congressional seat in Queens and championed the idea of a Green New Deal. It was the first time a United States elected official had proposed a plan to decarbonize the economy that matched the scale of the climate crisis. 

Meanwhile, more and more young people were painfully aware of the climate crisis. Paulson remembers this time well. ​“I was becoming increasingly despondent,” he says. ​“It’s really dark to confront that without any framework for thinking about how there could be anything other than a totally disastrous future.”

By the end of 2018, it was clear that DSA had a good model for , having won 46 electoral victories that year, from the local to the federal level. And socialists have had a model of how to organize workers for more than a century. ​“So the question was,” Paulson recalls, ​“how would socialists do climate work?”

With Trump as president, demanding a Green New Deal felt too ambitious, potentially demobilizing in its impossibility. They needed an intermediate step. They considered some proposals on composting and on transportation, but to demand something too small could squander the sudden momentum of the socialist movement. Heller recalls the group wondering, ​“What is the biggest thing that we could conceivably win?”

The most powerful idea to emerge from these discussions was a public power campaign. It would be modeled on a fight in Providence, Rhode Island, known as #NationalizeGrid, which was waged by Providence DSA (now Rhode Island DSA) and the George Wiley Center. (That project has stalled because of the chapter’s shift in focus toward Medicare for All and medical debt, but the project did succeed in reducing a proposed rate hike.)

Because utility profiteering affects everyone, and because it disproportionately affects working-class New Yorkers, the issue is a natural fit for a socialist organization. Plus, a public takeover would open the door to a green energy transition.

While Providence was the inspiration, the model for how to win legislation in Albany was closer to home: . Championed by democratic socialist Julia Salazar, the first of the recent wave of DSA-endorsed candidates to win state office in New York, the new reforms made New York’s tenants possibly the best-protected in the country. In a state where the real estate industry is easily the most powerful interest group, the fight was won through targeted canvassing of rent-stabilized tenants to build awareness and organize pressure on politicians.

The New York power campaign canvassed in neighborhoods suffering unreasonably high electric rates and the fallout of climate disasters. The devastating 2019 blackout in New York City left many stranded in elevators and subways, which revealed—according to Amber Ruther, then an NYC-DSA member who was part of the early organizing—that Con Edison (ConEd), a for-profit company with a monopoly, ​“didn’t have the incentive to invest in even basic grid maintenance.” Public power advocates argued that the government, without the profit motive and with democratic oversight and obligation, could do a better job. (Ruther, now of Syracuse DSA, also works for Alliance for a Green Economy, part of the Public Power coalition that worked to pass BPRA.)

The campaign also held town halls in affected neighborhoods. It turned out that ConEd had kept the lights on in wealthy areas but had cut off power in working-class Black communities like Flatbush. Ruther recalls ​“a lot of righteous anger from the community about those blackouts” during town hall events. As one Flatbush resident interviewed for a DSA video put it, ​“Why are we always in the dark?”

Also in 2019, newly empowered progressives in Albany passed an ambitious-sounding climate law requiring New York to reduce its economy-wide greenhouse gasses . The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) wasn’t as groundbreaking as it sounds, accompanied by few enforcement or operational mechanisms. That is typical of many climate pledges in a neoliberal system, which depend largely on voluntary corporate action.

But the CLCPA did hand socialists an argument: At the time, wind and solar made up less than 6% of New York’s energy, and complying with the new law would take massive systemic change. If New York didn’t enact public power, socialists said, the state would be breaking its own law.

Outsiders in Albany

The 2020 elections expanded DSA’s Albany slate to six (and put Jamaal Bowman, who played an unusually vocal role in advocating for BPRA, in Congress). New York’s socialists were in a unique position, with more elected officials than anywhere else in the nation, though far from a governing majority. The evolving idea of the BPRA began to attract support from some other Democrats in Albany, especially as DSA demonstrated more political power.

So DSA began experimenting. During one town hall event, Mike Gianaris, a state senator from western Queens, was put on the spot and asked whether he would support BPRA. With the growing electoral muscle of DSA in Queens, Gianaris agreed.

But not every tactic worked. DSA had previously been successful in some campaigns by organizing constituents to call their representatives. On BPRA, this approach wasn’t effective, perhaps precisely because of those previous DSA successes: Politicians had started to get hardened against mass outreach from constituents.

Still, DSA’s newly elected slate was already learning how to challenge the culture of Albany. One of these new socialist officials, Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, from Astoria, Queens, says colleagues were puzzled by his lobbying for BPRA, since he wasn’t the sponsor—legislators customarily spent political capital only on their own bills. When he called them, they’d say, ​“Why are you calling me? It ������’t your bill.”

Assemblymember Robert Carroll, a member of the relevant committee who had agreed to sponsor the bill, was a committed progressive and an ​“incessant champion” of the bill, Mamdani says, but the socialist politicians saw themselves as a necessary part of the inside-outside pressure required.

Such matters of etiquette were not the only challenges for the neophyte lawmakers. BPRA’s sponsor in the state Senate, Kevin Parker, chair of the energy and telecommunications committee, wasn’t a socialist or a passionate supporter of public power, Heller says, but DSA activists didn’t realize how little good faith Parker brought with him. According to Heller, Parker committed to pushing BPRA if the group could get other legislators to support it. But when the DSA members approached other elected officials, Heller says, they were told no one supports a bill unless the lead sponsor asks them to. 

“He just lied to us,” Heller says. ​“We realized that, even though we’re socialists, we weren’t cynical enough. The Democrats in Albany didn’t want to pass a climate bill because there was too much money on the other side.”

DSA activists analyzed data from the National Institute on Money in Politics and found that New York state’s Democratic campaign committees had taken more than $600,000 from the energy industry since 1997. Parker himself had received more than $110,000 since his first electoral campaign in 2002. (Parker did not respond to a request for comment on this story.)

The activists asked one sympathetic senator (outside of DSA) what they should do. Should they continue playing nicely, or would a negative campaign be more effective? The response: ​“Going negative is always better.”

DSA activists held a sizable demonstration in 2021 with protest signs that depicted some of the politicians standing in the way of BPRA—their faces on Venmo graphics listing all of their fossil fuel donations. The rally won both media and political attention. ​“They were fun, they were funny,” recalls Paulson, ​“and the people targeted were extremely upset.” BPRA did not pass in 2021, but it did move from being a fringe campaign to a focus of media attention.

Throughout this time, the group often discussed and rethought their approach, with many strategy retreats. According to Gustavo Gordillo—part of DSA’s Green New Deal committee as well as its National Political Committee—the questions they asked were, ​“What are the major conditions we’re facing? How much power do we have? Can we win? What do we need to do to win?” The openness, Gordillo says, ​“allowed us to be very honest with ourselves and made the strategy a lot better.”

Making Them Fear You

In January 2022, as the group decided to continue the negative, confrontational approach, DSA organized a big ​“Build or Burn” protest with signs putting new Gov. Kathy Hochul’s face on two fake City & State magazine covers: One, in which Hochul failed to pass BPRA, featured a burning background, while the other depicted a happier scenario in which Hochul did the right thing. The message was, Heller says, ​“If you don’t pass this, you’re evil. You’re condemning our future.”

These tactics made headlines, but the group realized they needed to do more. ​�Ԩ���, you can upset people with the Venmo boards,” says Paulson, ​“but how do you make them fear you?”

To build their bench of socialist elected officials and to strike fear into the hearts of Albany lawmakers, DSA decided to primary Kevin Parker, the BPRA bill’s main sponsor—“not a Sierra Club move,” laughs Lee Ziesche, a DSA member and spokesperson for the Public Power Coalition, who has also worked with Sane Energy. This move was controversial within the organization; turning on people who were, on paper, allies of the cause defied conventional wisdom. But in a series of heated meetings, they hashed it out, and the idea carried the day. They chose to run David Alexis, a serious, charismatic rideshare driver and organizer whose daughters suffered from asthma.

The group ran other ecosocialists for office in 2022, an effort that took enormous organizing capacity. Many quit their jobs to work full-time on these electoral campaigns, all of which were extremely organizing-intensive, with door-to-door outreach throughout the city and upstate. Only two of seven candidates won their seats. The experience led many to wonder whether the diversion of BPRA organizing into electoral work had been a mistake: ​“We did way too many campaigns, and most of them lost,” says Heller, ​“which sucked.”

But the electoral campaigns turned out to be crucial to BPRA’s eventual passage in ways no one anticipated. The political effects became especially apparent during the June 2022 Democratic primary.

Sarahana Shrestha, in her Hudson Valley campaign for state Assembly, made climate and BPRA her main platform planks, defying conventional wisdom that climate was not a kitchen table issue, especially outside of the city. Plus, her opponent was already known in Albany as a climate advocate—not the sort of politician that conventional environmentalists would oppose. But Shrestha won the primary, and her victory became understood as a mandate for BPRA and a warning to politicians who didn’t get on board. Shrestha became the bill’s biggest champion in state government.

In Queens, Kristen Gonzalez, a DSA activist who’d been a leader in a successful campaign to block fossil-fuel giant NRG from building a new gas plant in Astoria, also won her primary, crushing Elizabeth Crowley, an unremarkable mainstream Democrat (and a cousin of Joe Crowley, the incumbent machine boss ousted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018). Gonzalez’s state Senate victory—and the size of it—was a huge show of power for NYC-DSA. It scared mainstream Democrats and was a crucial reason why labor unions began taking BPRA more seriously.

Despite DSA’s efforts to bring unions on board as early as 2018, parts of labor had opposed BPRA, reticent because they did not believe DSA and its allies were powerful enough to ensure strong labor protections in the bill. Within DSA, the question of whether to keep campaigning for the bill without labor’s support was a fraught one.

The strong electoral challenges of 2020, and especially 2022, brought labor to the table. The labor provisions of the final BPRA bill were written by the AFL-CIO and include strong labor standards for the new public renewables sector, as well as an Office of Just Transition to train workers for the new jobs. Equally important, labor’s turn brought many Democrats in Albany on board. The New York State United Teachers’ full-throated endorsement of BPRA in April 2022 was an especially key turning point in winning over many legislators.

David Alexis lost his primary to Kevin Parker, but the campaign served its purpose of instilling fear. In the middle of the legislative session, a few weeks before the primary, Parker decided to bring the bill to a vote in the state Senate, removing what had appeared to be its biggest obstacle. In advocating for BPRA’s passage, Parker even used DSA talking points, insisting that BPRA would allow the state to meet its climate goals and that converting its grid to renewables was ​“imperative.”

The bill passed. DSA’s most maverick move—the primary challenge to BPRA’s lead sponsor—had worked, to the astonishment of many within the organization.

Says Gustavo Gordillo, regarding the Albany establishment, ​“We found out that the way to get them to do what we want is by open conflict that they can understand.”

Although leadership in the Assembly, the lower house of the state legislature, still refused to introduce BPRA, DSA had built enough power that Sarahana Shrestha and other socialist legislators were able to press for a hearing. Shrestha says that hearing in itself was a sign of how far the Albany common sense had evolved, although, she emphasized, ​“that was before the Inflation Reduction Act passed and definitely before we knew what it meant.”

The federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed in August 2022, provides direct funding for any public agency that builds renewable energy. The Public Power Coalition commissioned a report revealing that failing to pass BPRA would cost the state billions of dollars in federal funds, a convincing argument for many in state government. At that point, Shrestha emphasizes, ​“the consensus was moving toward this bill.”

The Assembly still refused to bring it to a vote. But the visibility of the issue continued. #BPRA became a top trending hashtag on Twitter in New York, even ahead of #NationalDonutDay.

In January, confirming the labor movement’s fears, Gov. Hochul tried to remove BPRA’s labor and environmental justice provisions. This watered-down version of the bill became known by activists as “.”&�Բ�����;BPRA-lite took the coalition by surprise. It was clear that the governor was trying to divide the labor, socialist, and environmental forces backing the bill. They couldn’t allow that to happen.

The usual approach in Albany by progressive lobbying forces would have been to take BPRA-lite as a partial victory, but DSA and the Public Power Coalition took the opposite approach. They saw that Hochul was vulnerable and put up a billboard in Albany pointing out that 68% of New Yorkers supported BPRA, while only 52% voted for the governor.

In May, BPRA passed with nearly everything DSA wanted, including the closure of six power plants causing asthma in Black and Brown communities. BPRA creates thousands of well-paid, green, union jobs and imposes annual checks to ensure New York is on track to meet the decarbonization targets mandated in 2019 (70% renewable by 2030, 100% clean by 2040), which had previously seen little progress.

Shrestha emphasizes that BPRA’s passage is ​“not the end” of the fight. ​“Now,” she says, ​“we have to work to make sure that, every step of the way, this is implemented correctly, something that I find very exciting.”

The Horizon of the Possible

BPRA poses a challenge to most people’s modest assumptions about what is possible to win in the United States—how far the government will veer from serving the interests of the capitalist class. Many people want climate action, and many also want more socialist policy. ​“They just don’t think that’s possible,” Heller says. As Gordillo emphasizes, ​“We were able to challenge the ideological consensus.”

Winning a huge victory like BPRA also helps counter ​“doomism,” the idea that it’s too late to fix the climate crisis, which, Heller believes, is ​“the worst” of many prevalent climate narratives because it convinces people that ​“we don’t have to do anything.”

BPRA ������’t precisely replicable in every state. Franklin D. Roosevelt created the New York Power Authority when he served as governor of New York—which became a precursor to such New Deal projects as the Tennessee Valley Authority—and most states don’t have an analogous body. But this barrier ����dzܱ����’t be exaggerated. Gordillo says there are fights socialists can wage everywhere that are analogous to BPRA.

Because the Inflation Reduction Act offers direct funding to ​“any public agency” that wants to create public power, Gordillo explains, ​“any DSA chapter in the country” can campaign to get a school board to build solar panels, or even get a city to create large-scale renewable projects. Indeed, other DSA chapters, including in Milwaukee and Maine, are launching their own versions of the Public Power campaign now.

The BPRA fight shows that socialists can win big on climate, and its organizers hope everyone will take that possibility personally. ​“We’re all total randos,” says Heller. ​“We didn’t know anything when we started out. If we can come together and do this, anyone can.”

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission. Ivonne Ortiz provided fact-checking.

Mangca, a boat captain from Moloka‘i, an island 25 miles away, had been making daily boat trips to Lāhainā since footage of the wildfires began rolling in on social media on August 8th. After the intensity of the previous weeks, Mangca and a dozen others from the neighboring island returned for Labor Day weekend to relieve some of the resident volunteers who were cooking thousands of meals at a few of the community-led distribution hubs, and to help throw a local-style luau to bring people some normalcy and joy after what had happened.

The wildfires, which were started by downed power lines during high winds from Hurricane Dora, rapidly turned the historic town in West Maui to ash, destroying thousands of homes, businesses, and a beloved Native Hawaiian cultural center. According to officials, it also led to the deaths of nearly 100 loved ones, with several still missing more than a month later.��

Government aid has trickled in slowly, so the community from Maui and the surrounding islands have risen up to help one another. 

“For four days there was no food, no water, no supplies, no help,” says Mangca about the lack of government support, which was made more problematic after the National Guard set up checkpoints and blocked delivery of mutual aid going into Lāhainā—something officials later said was to .

Mangca, who initially went in to rescue people while the island was still in flames, then found himself one of several in a fleet of boats, Jet Skis, and catamarans from all over the islands that came in daily to drop off food and other supplies to the Kahana Boat Ramp in Napili—to get around the checkpoints and meet the community’s needs.

West Maui Council Member Tamara Paltin, who had also been on the ground helping her constituents, spoke to the resilience and relationships of the community at a county council meeting, quoting a friend who said, “The kupaʻ�徱�Բ�, the people of this place, are not the passive recipients of aid; they are the navigators.”&�Բ�����;

Kahana Boat Ramp in Napili became one of the core supply centers, even as limited access opened up for those with a Lāhainā ID or pre-approved aid. Volunteers would pick up the supplies from the fleet—sometimes by wading through waist-deep water—then deliver them to several shelters and other community-led distribution hubs all over the island. 

All were run by a vast ecosystem of volunteers, many who had lost everything, all of whom were navigating constantly changing needs.

“Since the beginning of the disaster, it’s been the community helping the community,” said Blake Ramelb . He grew up in Lāhainā and has a lot of family living up the hill from the burn zone. Ramelb has been using social media as a platform to give words of encouragement and address the needs of the community so his followers can help amplify and crowdsource those needs.

He’s been able to secure hundreds of air purifiers and respirators, among other items, and is now looking for independent air specialists to test the air quality since state and federal agencies have yet to release their final results. 

“I’m just a concerned citizen trying to do my best because I have people that I love who could potentially be put at risk,” Ramelb says. “Let’s keep the people that are still here safe.”

Providing Direct Assistance

Volunteers from the organization (HHH) were among those turned away at the National Guard checkpoints on the first day, when trying to supply meals to the West Side. Steven Calkins, one of the co-founders of the organization, whose kitchen is in Central Maui, made use of his contacts and was able to get into the area with someone who had a Lāhainā ID. After that, Councilwoman Paltin tapped into her connections and obtained continued access for the organization.

When other meal charities approached Calkins to see if HHH could help deliver thousands of their meals that had been turned away, Calkins reached out to West Side restaurants and instead asked whether, if HHH supplied the food, the restaurants would make the meals. Several signed on, alongside food trucks. 

Every day now, volunteers pick up and distribute 1,000 pounds of produce from , which works with local growers to supply those kitchens. Calkins says they also ride into communities ice-cream-truck-style for people to come get what they need. Volunteers then pick up more than 400 meals per day cooked by their West Side partners at to deliver to the neighborhoods that need it most, like those living on the edge of the burn zone in Lāhaināluna. 

“They are still without power and clean water,” Calkins said at the end of August, adding that HHH had gotten the community a refrigerated truck to store food alongside big jugs of water to fill up at water tanks. 

“HHH has always been a grassroots project, all directed at people helping people through the heart,” he says. The goal, since the organization began during the COVID-19 pandemic, is to create a sharing economy, with partner organizations donating goods instead of money. Calkins says they never accepted a dime up until a few weeks ago, but with the abundance of donations now coming into the organization, he says they are now accepting and saving these funds to meet long-term goals like funneling money into local farms, restaurants, and businesses to pay their rent and keep them going. 

Several members of the community and other Hawai‘i-based organizations have also stepped up to help get financial aid directly to affected families.

Thus far, families have only received a one-time payment of $700 from the federal government, which some say is blown in one visit to the grocery store, given how high food prices are on the islands. The majority of food in Hawai‘i is imported and prices are .

through direct Venmo donations. Early on, a group of community members worked tirelessly to put together an for donations to go directly to families in need, who have been vetted by the group.

There has also been a community-sourced shared on social media. It lists how much each family or business has received in donations thus far, to help donors spread wealth more evenly. So far more than $20 million has been raised among 250 fundraisers on the document. 

Other fundraisers, managed by local organizations like the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement and the Hawai‘i Community Foundation, have also funneled resources straight to the community. , for example, raised $3 million dollars and put $1 million of that toward the Hawai‘i Community Foundation’s ; the organization delivered $500,000 directly to families and an additional $350,000 to nonprofits.

Staying Home

Lāhainā, once the seat of the Hawaiian Kingdom, has long been home to a deeply rich and diverse population of multigenerational families. The population is not just Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), but, like much of Hawai’i, also includes large Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, and Western populations that integrated there during the plantation era. In West Maui, there is also a large Latino population. This diverse culture of people, Mangca says, always comes together when they need to. 

Once a verdant wetland, Kānaka were upended and displaced by illegal occupation and the plantation era, which eventually destroyed the Indigenous ecology. Water diversions for sugarcane dried out the land, and the introduction of invasive plant species, paired with a changing climate, turned Lāhainā into a tinderbox, aiding the rapid spread of the blaze on August 8th. 

According to officials, more than 2,200 homes, apartment buildings, and other structures have since been destroyed. And the island had already been struggling with a housing shortage prior to the fires.

Mangca says many Lāhainā residents who have lived there for generations have refused to leave because they are afraid that when they do, they’ll lose everything. They fear people will buy up their properties, leaving them with nowhere else to go. Some residents say they fear complete cultural erasure.

Many of those who did leave Lāhainā went to shelters. Some 6,000 people were reportedly housed temporarily in hotels or vacation rentals. Community members are hosting friends and family in their homes, often several together under one roof. Many people are concerned about what will happen next and are skeptical of FEMA, due to longtime government distrust, continuous displacement, and , which FEMA has since refuted. Some residents have already been hit up by realtors and developers trying to buy their properties, preying on them at their most vulnerable. 

Many also found themselves up against Governor Josh Green’s emergency affordable-housing proclamation, which streamlines development while suspending protections for cultural resources, iwi kūpuna (ancestral bones), and environmental resources—as well as suspending the Sunshine Law, which ensures transparent public participation in government processes. 

These actions have resulted brought by environmental law group , which represented Sierra Club of Hawai‘i, ACLU of Hawai‘i, and Kanaka Maoli–led groups such as Nā ‘Ohana o Lele. Due to public pressure, on September 15th, Green decided to reverse those suspensions.

Lāhainā taro farmers have also found themselves in the midst of litigation by prominent land developers that build luxury real estate and have been notorious for trying to —ancestral lands awarded in 1850 to Kānaka Maoli tenant farmers. 

In order to provide further support, the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement just opened up a relief and aid services center in Kahului, called Kākoʻo Maui. It is a culture-based hub providing wraparound services that involve financial support, legal support, and application assistance, with the goal of connecting the community to resources. The center is staffed by Lāhainā residents who lost their homes. 

In order to keep people in Lāhainā, community members and organizations have again been working more quickly than the government by bringing in temporary housing. Local nonprofit Family Life Center flew in 60 quick-assembly modular homes manufactured in Hungary to be placed on a 10-acre lot owned by the King’s Cathedral church.

Farmer Eddie Garcia of Regenerative Education Centers is using his farm south of Lāhainā as a staging area to build 200 self-sufficient tiny homes that will be given, free of charge, to residents displaced by the fires. Garcia is also working with landowners to find locations for the homes. His goal is to keep the Lāhainā community in Lāhainā.

“All the things [that] were saved in the museums here to show what the history of what Lāhainā was, all of that is gone. So what do we have to tell the history of this place? It is the people who live here who survived it, they need to be able to rebuild and reintegrate,” Garcia said on . 

Early in September, the governor called for tourism to reopen on the West Side of Maui on October 8th, but this has received pushback, partly because it will force some families out of the hotels, so Ramelb responded by asking for Lowe’s and Amazon gift cards to help purchase tools to build temporary housing. 

Jon Kinimaka, a Lāhainā resident who lost his home, has been helping run the distribution hub at Honokōwai. He has also helped secure temporary tiny homes that will be able to house some families on Hawaiian Crown Lands property nearby, where residents will be able to stay for two years. Afterward, they’ll be able to relocate that tiny home to their original properties.

Kinimaka also emphasizes the need for more land for immediate shelter, as some people have already been asked to leave the hotels and are turning up at the distribution center. “We’re trying to be as helpful as possible and coordinate between private sector and government so that we can work together as a community,” he says. “We’re going to need immediate shelter, like tent villages, while we’re looking for land for temporary housing.”

Many in the Lāhainā community, particularly Kānaka Maoli, are asking to be centered in the conversation moving forward in order to keep Lāhainā land in Lāhainā hands, and to design a future that is more sustainable for the land and its people—not just for this generation, but future generations as well. 

Processing Grief

First, though, many people say they want the space to grieve. “How do we create space for healing [from] strife and conflict and devastation? It’s a difficult thing to do, but also super critical that we do it,” says Kalamaoka`aina Niheu, a physician and medical director on O‘ahu and in California. “And we’re not just talking about physical injury, but emotional, spiritual, all of that community injury that happens from these types of violent acts.” Niheu is the co-founder of , an organization that facilitates putting medical and traditional health practitioners on the ground, which mobilized the day after the fires.

“T������ was no FEMA, no Red Cross; 911 wasn’t functioning. When you tried to call, they’d say contact Maui Police, and you’d call them, and nobody would answer,” Niheu says. And since they were stopped from bringing supplies to the community at the roadblocks, the group also organized people on Jet Skis and boats to bring those supplies to Kahana Boat Ramp. 

Wanting to be proactive in the prevention of illness, the group’s volunteers went door-to-door to warn about contaminated water and explain why it’s toxic, even before the Hawai‘i Department of Health. The group also provided N95 masks, and explained to those downwind of the fires’ ash why the air was toxic.

Since then, the group has set up hubs with both allopathic and natural care, alongside traditional cultural modalities like lomi lomi massage and traditional mental health care like ho‘oponopono to empower the patients to choose for themselves. The group doesn’t ask for IDs and doesn’t charge for its services.

“At the beginning, everything is 100% a gift we give freely, and we fund it ourselves,” Niheu says. The volunteers cover the cost of supplies and their own flights if they are coming in from another island, which enables them to move in quickly. Then afterward they  and provide leaders in each area of expertise. 

Niheu says the organization currently has 150 people on the ground with another 700 who want to participate. They are prioritizing Maui practitioners first and Kānaka Maoli from other islands.

“When you center the most marginalized, the most impacted, then you are able to take care of everyone else too,” she says. 

Niheu developed this model of care in August 2016 while volunteering at Standing Rock in support of the Sioux Tribe’s protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline. She wanted to support and heal the protectors of land, water, and Native rights. 

Niheu then co-founded the Mauna Medic Healers Hui with colleague Noelani Ahia in 2017 to address police violence during protests against the telescopes at Haleakalā on Maui, and later during protests against the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. She says the model is inspired by a greater journey involving her mo’okū’auhau, or genealogy. 

“The only way we’re able to come this far and do what we do is because our kūpuna, our elders, have laid down their own lives and blood and sweat and tears for a path so we can actually get through here. Because the path is so thorny and so difficult that we can’t do it alone,” Niheu says. “This work requires generations.”

In order to be there for the long haul of the rebuilding process in Lāhainā, Ahia, who lives on Maui and has lineage in Lāhainā, started a sister organization called Maui Medic Healers Hui. Niheu says that it’s important to have people from the area lead, to build people up, and to connect them with like minds so they can walk into the future together. She likes to leave places better than when she arrives; Ahia told her it’s like “planting seeds in the ash.”

It’s hard to know how to act in the face of a global crisis, so I immediately knew the scope had to be narrowed way down. It’s much easier to understand how to advocate for specific, local solutions. That’s the level at which meaningful change originates anyway.

With the clock counting down to the start of COP26 on Oct. 31, I wanted to give listeners a way to support local climate organizers while also urging world leaders to protect our planet and the people on it.

So I created the podcast with as a way to reframe the climate conversation around Indigenous women and women of color who are on the front lines of preserving their homes and communities. Along the way, I expected to find organizations to support or ways to take action. What I didn’t expect to find was that my entire understanding of the climate crisis was wrong.

The Art of Expression

When I was pulling together the podcast, I knew I wanted to speak to people different from the average climate scientist or talking head on cable news—characters who are typically very White and very male. Instead, I wanted to personalize the elusive magnitude of climate change by centering the voices of Native women and women of color.

We know that and women are disproportionately affected by climate change. Not only are women disproportionately displaced by climate change, women hold less decision-making power in global climate negotiating bodies: about 30%, according to the . That’s why .

Still, since so much of the climate crisis feels insurmountable, I turned to an artform to help express the inexplicable: poetry. I wanted to use poetry as a way to set the scene, to help a listener imagine an area they may have never experienced themselves—the Louisiana Bayou, the silent tundras of Alaska, or the receding coastlines of Puerto Rico.

The women in these communities are the ones doing the work of surviving, recovering, and building resilience. Shouldn’t theirs be the voices we listen to and follow?

Everyone Has a Role to Play

Apparently, that feeling of insignificance I was so afraid of? Well, turns out it’s kind of the point. One of my guests on As She Rises is Kimberly Blaeser, a Chippewa poet, scholar, and member of the White Earth Nation. Blaeser encouraged me to embrace the feeling of insignificance. For her, that feeling was crucial for reorienting and reapproaching one’s relationship to the Earth. Acknowledge how small you are, accept it, and now play your small part.

Blaeser also expressed, as did many of the Native poets I spoke to for the show, that humankind’s relationship to Earth has gotten wildly out of whack. In a time of extreme weather, a global pandemic, and racial inequality, that may sound obvious. But it’s more than what’s on the surface. As a society, we’ve forgotten the role that human beings are meant to play in the larger ecosystem.

Just look at the scourge of wildfires that have devoured much of California. On another episode of As She Rises, I had the pleasure of speaking with Margo Robbins, the executive director of the Cultural Fire Management Council, which seeks to facilitate cultural burns on the Yurok Reservation and surrounding ancestral lands in California. Cultural burning is the Indigenous people’s practice of skillfully using low-intensity fires to manage the landscape. It removes the fine fuels on the forest floor, such as fallen leaves and twigs, kills pathogens, fertilizes soil, and stimulates biodiversity and healthy creeks. The Yurok practiced controlled burns for millennia before U.S. forest management policies forced them to stop. In the wake of these devastating fires—such as the recent that is poised to be California’s biggest yet—Robbins and her fellow Yurok are teaching California firefighters how to practice controlled burns.

For Robbins, the ability to control and thoughtfully deploy fire is the unique role humans are meant to play in our planet’s larger ecosystem. To her, the concept of “fighting” fires is entirely misguided to begin with.

It brought me back to Greek mythology, where Prometheus, the god of fire, defies Zeus’ orders and gives fire to humans. As a result, Prometheus is credited with creating modern civilization. For centuries, we have seen the ability to manipulate and use fire for our survival as the defining quality of our species. But we’ve gotten away from that in the last several hundred years, and as a result, our forests are tinderboxes. We’ve mistakenly only seen natural processes as something to prevent and not something to cooperate with. Our outsized sense of importance has distorted the world around us, to our own detriment.

Fortunately, ancestral practices like cultural burning are not entirely lost. A courageous group has kept them alive despite repeated attempts to . In August, by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International found that Indigenous-led resistance efforts curbed the equivalent of 25% of U.S. and Canadian annual emissions.

When Native voices are at the forefront, tangible progress is made.

The Strength of Survival

Indigenous women and women of color have the capacity to lead us out of this climate crisis. At this time of unprecedented challenge, these are the survivors we must turn to. These are the leaders who are creating real results and who hold the necessary understanding of what it means to live in sustainable harmony with the land.

So in a climate movement that is with how to center BIPOC voices, one of the most important things we can do right now is amplify the work and stories of Indigenous women and women of color. In the first episode of As She Rises, released on Sept. 20, we travel to the Louisiana Bayou where I spoke to Colette Pichon Battle, executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy. After Hurricane Katrina, she returned to southern Louisiana to help her community rebuild. As we were concluding our interview she said to me:

“If we want to know how to survive, what is coming, we’re going to have to talk to the survivors. And I’m excited that those survivors are Native American, African American. There’s an acknowledgement that has to come in order for us to survive. And it is that the strongest, most knowledgeable people are the ones that our capitalist society values the least. But if we’re going to survive this climate crisis, we’re going to have to value them the most.”

Now, as the city contends with heat, can New Yorkers once again turn to the rivers to stay cool?

The team behind , an initiative to bring a floating swimming pool to the East River, is betting on it. The organization’s proposed cross-shaped, Olympic-size pool would differ from its historic predecessors in one significant way: filtration. One million gallons of filtered East River water would flow through the pool daily—offering a new, supervised space for New Yorkers to escape the heat. The project was first proposed in 2010, but increasingly frequent heat waves, a result of climate change, have given the project new urgency, its supporters say.

New York has the in the country. On average, its urban heat islands are hotter than surrounding areas. Low-income of color are impacted by extreme heat—a legacy of racist policies that have saddled neighborhoods with fewer green spaces and more heat-trapping asphalt and concrete. And many of these communities to safe swimming spaces.

“The increased instances of extreme heat are only making public [swimming] access more desirable,” says Kara Meyer, managing director of + POOL. Cleanups, new filtration technologies, and sophisticated water-quality monitoring could make river swimming once again an appealing, and safe, option.

A Global Trend

It’s not just New Yorkers who are rethinking their relationship with their waterways. With heat waves increasing in frequency, intensity, and duration because of , a growing number of cities are opening rivers and lakes to swimming.

River swimming is a popular pastime in European cities like Copenhagen, Berlin, , , and . is spending $1.5 billion to clean up the Seine and open it to swimmers ahead of the 2024 Olympic Games. 

Cities like Boston, , ., and Portland, Oregon, have either opened their rivers to swimmers or announced plans to build swimming infrastructure.

“As a climate solution, being able to swim in your local waters just seems like a no-brainer,” says Jake Madelone, senior waterfront education coordinator at , a group that advocates for making New York’s 520-mile shoreline more accessible and resilient to climate change. 

Urban waters across the United States since the passage of the Clean Water Act a half-century ago. The East and Hudson rivers are significantly now than in the past, thanks in large part to investments in the city’s facilities. (The East River is actually a saltwater tidal estuary.) Competitive swimmers in the waters, although still do not meet Environmental Protection Agency for swimming.

“The cities that are really embracing urban river swimming have done massive cleanups,” says Meyer. Copenhagen its sewer and wastewater treatment systems in the early 2000s and has since added and a to its harbor. Boston is some combined sewers, which carry sewage and stormwater, to limit overflow of untreated combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, into its harbor. 

But there are other ways to provide access to waterways while those cleanups are underway. officials have said they plan to use machine learning to forecast contamination in the Seine and deliver mobile alerts to swimmers. , a , mobile floating pool on a barge, already docks in the Bronx.

Building Safer Connections to the Water

Urban waterways are a crucial climate solution—but they’re not equally accessible to all communities. Black Americans are to know how to swim and are more likely to than white Americans, that can be traced back to segregation. drained and shuttered public pools to avoid allowing in Black swimmers—or lacked resources to maintain public pools when white people fled to the suburbs. 

Urban public recreational spaces, including waterfronts and waterways, “have historically, in many ways, been exclusionary,” says , a Portland State University professor who studies urban climate adaptation. Any plan to open up new swimming spaces needs to redress that, he says. “Welcoming people into these outdoor swimmable spaces is really important,” Shandas says. “Being explicit about [their] belonging has to go hand in hand with any physical change of the environment.”&�Բ�����;

For many Americans, are too expensive, inaccessible, or unwelcoming. Lifeguards often teach swimming, but the nationwide lifeguard shortage—due to declining pay and a —means even are available. In New York, the city’s were operating at limited capacity due to lifeguard shortages. 

Volunteers with + POOL have been providing free swimming lessons at pools around the city since 2015, and the organization is creating a lifeguarding workforce development program with Henry Street Settlement, a local nonprofit. “It’s not equitable access to the river if people don’t know how to swim or don’t have the opportunity to learn,” Meyer says. 

Advocates like Meyer may have the political support they need to get more New Yorkers in the water. In 2021, the city’s planning department released a that aims to “promote opportunities to get onto and into the water.” The plan proposes floating river pools in addition to longer-term investments in improving water quality and coastline infrastructure.

Mayor Eric Adams has in support of + POOL, and there are currently before the City Council that would increase access to free swimming lessons, build new swimming pools in , and address the lifeguard shortage. 

If + POOL has its way, some of the barriers between communities and their surrounding waterways could soon disappear. “We should be able to enjoy our natural environment, particularly in New York, where we have this resource all around us,” Meyer says. “T������’s so much opportunity for the taking. We just need to design specific, safe access points.”

This article originally appeared in , an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow 

But repeated flooding has over the years radically remade the private beach. Slaughter has lived in the Windy City long enough to remember when it extended 300 feet. Now it barely reaches 50. Her neighborhood might not be the first place anyone would think of when it comes to climate-related flooding, but Slaughter and her neighbors have been witnesses to a rapid erosion of their beloved shoreline. 

“Out there where that pillar is,” she says, pointing to a post about 500 feet away, “that was our sandy beach. The erosion has eaten it away and left us with this. We tried one year to re-sand it. We bought sand and flew it in. But by the end of the season, there was no sand left.”&�Բ�����;

Recent years have seen high lake levels flood parking garages and apartments, wash out beaches, and even cause massive . It’s a growing hazard, one that Slaughter has been desperately fighting for years. 

“All things considered, this is our home,” she says. 

Lake Michigan has long tried to take back the land on its shores. But climate change has increased the amount of ground lost to increasingly . What was once a The problem became particularly acute in early 2020 when a storm wreaked havoc on the neighborhood, severely damaging homes, flooding streets, and spurring neighbors to to hold back the water. 

“We need to be prepared for higher lake levels,” says Charles Shabica, a geologist and professor emeritus at Northeastern Illinois University. 

Though Shabica says the erosion in the Great Lakes region won’t be on par with what rising seas will bring to coastal regions, he still notes it’s an issue that Chicago must prepare for.

“We’ll see climate impacts, but I think we can accommodate them,” says Shabica.

Beyond flooding homes, that epic storm opened sinkholes and washed out certain beaches, leaving them eroded and largely unusable. But the people of South Shore refused to give in easily. In the wake of Lake Michigan’s encroaching water, residents have organized their neighbors and prompted solutions by creating a voice so loud that politicians, engineers, and bureaucrats took heed. In 2022, state Rep. Curtis Tarver II helped secure from the state of Illinois to help solve the issue. 

“For some odd reason, and I tend to believe it is the demographics of the individuals who live in that area, it has not been a priority, for the city, the state, or the [federal government],” Tarver says.

After years of tireless work, folks in this community have convinced the city to study the problem of lakeside erosion to see how bad this damage from climate change will be—and how fast they can fix it.

Slaughter founded the South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force alongside Juliet Dervin and Sharon Louis in 2019 after a few particularly harsh fall storms caused heavy flooding in the area.

Chicagoans in the predominantly Black and middle-class South Shore had noticed the inequitable treatment of city . Beaches in the overwhelmingly white and affluent North Side neighborhoods received more media coverage of the problem, faster fixes, and better upkeep, according to the group. This disparity occurred despite the fact that South Side beaches have no natural barriers to the lake’s waves and tides, placing them at greater risk of erosion.

“We were watching the news coverage [of] what was happening up north as if we weren’t getting hit with water on the south end of the city,” says Louis. 

The threat is undeniable to Leroy Newsom, who has lived in his South Side apartment for 12 years. Despite the fact that another building stands between his home and the lake, he and his neighbors often experience flooding. The white paint in the lobby is mottled with spackle from earlier repairs. During particularly intense deluges, the entryway can become unnavigable. A large storm hit the city on the first weekend in July, inundating several parts of the city . 

“When we get a rainstorm like we did before, it floods,” he says.

Newsom lives on an upper floor and has not had to deal with the particulars of cleaning up after flooding, but he has noticed it is a persistent issue in the neighborhood. 

Louis, Dervin, and Slaughter have spent countless hours tirelessly knocking on doors and even setting up shop near the local grocery store to teach their neighbors about lake-related flooding. They wanted to mobilize people so they could direct attention and money toward solving the issue. They also researched the slew of solutions available to stem the tide of the lake.

“People were making disaster plans, like, ‘What if something happens, this is what we’re gonna do.’ And we were looking for mitigation plans, you know. Let’s get out in front of this,” says Louis.

Solutions can look different depending upon the area, but most on the South Side mirror the tools engineers have used for years to keep the lake at bay elsewhere. What makes these approaches a challenge is how exposed the community is to Lake Michigan in contrast to other neighborhoods. 

“South Shore is uniquely vulnerable,” says Malcolm Mossman of the Delta Institute, a nonprofit focusing on environmental issues in the Midwest. “It’s had a lot of impacts over the last century, plus, certain sections of it have even been washed out.”&�Բ�����;

The shoreline throughout the city is dotted with concrete steps, or revetments, and piers that extend into the lake to prevent waves from slamming into beaches. It also has breakwaters, which run parallel to the shoreline and are considered one of the best defenses against an increasingly active Lake Michigan.

“The best solution that we’ve learned are the shore-parallel breakwaters,” says Shabica. “And we make them out of rocks large enough that the waves can’t throw them around. And the really cool part is it makes wonderful fish habitat and wildlife habitat. So we’re really improving the ecosystem, as well as making the shoreline inland a lot less vulnerable.”

Shabica also mentions that this ������’t a new solution. The Museum Campus portion of the city, which extends into the lake and includes the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium, used to be an island before .

The main component of the plan to help reduce repeated flooding in the neighborhood is to install a breakwater around 73rd Street using the funding Tarver helped earmark for the issue, according to South Side Lakefront Erosion Task Force co-founder Juliet Dervin. This solution would help prevent the types of waves and flooding that damage streets, most notably South Shore Drive, which is the extension of DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Past damage to the streets has rerouted city buses that run along South Shore Drive and interrupted the flow of traffic. 

One local resident installed a private breakwater at her own expense following the 2020 storm, just a few blocks from Slaughter’s house, and it has tempered some effects of intense storms and flooding. But since this breakwater is smaller, surrounding areas are still vulnerable. Breakwaters can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to millions of dollars, depending on size and other factors. 

Despite funding now being allocated to fix the issue and government attention squarely focused on lakefront-related flooding there are still hurdles to overcome. 

Both the and the Chicago Park District are in the middle of a three-year assessment of the shoreline to determine appropriate fixes for each area. The study will finish in 2025, decades after the last study of this kind was conducted in the early 1990s. This gives Slaughter pause. 

“If I tell you this continuous erosion has been going on for such a long time, then you would have to know, they have looked into it and studied it from A to Z,” she says. “What do you mean, you don’t have enough statistics? We’ve done flyovers and all kinds of things. People who’ve been here filming it, when the water jumps up to the top of the building, they’ve seen it slam into things.”

For her, the damage has been clear but the prolonged period of inaction and lack of attention from outside groups means a shorter window to implement fixes. Slaughter sees this as a fundamental flaw in how we approach issues stemming from the climate crisis. 

“The philosophy,” she says, “is repair, not prevent.”

This story was originally published by and is republished here with permission. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter .

This story was supported by the .

This piece is part of a collaboration that includes the Institute for Nonprofit News, Borderless, Ensia, Planet Detroit, Sahan Journal, and Wisconsin Watch, as well as The Guardian and Inside Climate News. The project was supported by the Joyce Foundation. 

“I’m so speechless right now,” Eva, a plaintiff who was 14 when the suit was filed, said in a statement. “I’m really just excited and elated and thrilled.”

The challengers’ lawyers described the first-of-its-kind ruling as a “game-changer” and a “sweeping win” that campaigners hope will give a boost to similar cases tackling the climate crisis.

In a case that made headlines around the U.S. and internationally, 16 plaintiffs, aged five to 22, had alleged the state government’s pro-fossil fuel policies contributed to climate change.

In trial hearings in June, they testified that that these policies therefore  provisions in the state constitution that guarantee a “clean and healthful environment,” among other constitutional protections.

On Monday, Judge Kathy Seeley said that by prohibiting government agencies from considering climate impacts when deciding whether or not to permit energy projects, Montana is contributing to the climate crisis and stopping the state from addressing that crisis. The 103-page  came several weeks after the closely watched trial came to a close on June 20th.

“My initial reaction is, we’re pretty over the moon,” Melissa Hornbein, an attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center who represented the plaintiffs in the 2020 lawsuit said, reacting to the news. “It’s a very good order.”

Julia Olson, who founded Our Children’s Trust, the nonprofit law firm that brought the suit alongside Western Environmental Law Center and McGarvey Law, said the case marks the first time in U.S. history that the merits of a case led a court to rule that a government violated young people’s constitutional rights by promoting fossil fuels.

“In a sweeping win for our clients, the Honorable Judge Kathy Seeley declared Montana’s fossil fuel-promoting laws unconstitutional and enjoined their implementation,” she said. “As fires rage in the west, fueled by fossil fuel pollution, today’s ruling in  is a game-changer that marks a turning point in this generation’s efforts to save the planet from the devastating effects of human-caused climate chaos.”

The challengers  that they “have been and will continue to be harmed by the dangerous impacts of fossil fuels and the climate crisis.” Similar suits have been filed by young people across the U.S., but Held v. Montana was  to reach a trial.

Among the policies the challengers targeted: a provision in the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) barring the state from considering how its energy economy impacts climate change. This year, state lawmakers amended the provision to specifically ban the state from considering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in environmental reviews for new energy projects.

That provision is unconstitutional, Seeley ruled.

“By prohibiting consideration of climate change, [greenhouse gas] emissions, and how additional GHG emissions will contribute to climate change or be consistent with the Montana constitution, the MEPA limitation violates plaintiffs’ right to a clean and healthful environment,” Seeley wrote.

The legislature had previously amended the law to prevent environmental reviews from considering “regional, national, or global” environmental impacts—a provision the original complaint called the “climate change exception.” When lawmakers changed the provision again in 2023, the state’s attorneys said that should have rendered the lawsuit moot, but Seeley rejected the argument in May.

In her Monday ruling, Seeley also enjoined another 2023 state policy that put stricter parameters around groups’ ability to sue government agencies over permitting decisions under the Montana Environmental Policy Act. That policy “eliminates MEPA litigants’ remedies that prevent irreversible degradation of the environment, and it fails to further a compelling state interest,” rendering it unconstitutional, Seeley wrote.

At the trial in June, attorneys for the state  Montana’s contributions to the climate crisis are too small to make any meaningful contribution to the climate crisis. But in her ruling, Seeley found that the state’s greenhouse gas emissions are “nationally and globally significant.”

“Montana’s GHG emissions cause and contribute to climate change and plaintiffs’ injuries and reduce the opportunity to alleviate plaintiffs’ injuries,” she wrote.

She also confirmed the lawsuit’s assertions that fossil fuels cause climate change, that every additional ton of greenhouse gas pollution warms the planet, and that harms to the plaintiffs “will grow increasingly severe and irreversible without science-based actions to address climate change.”

“Judge Seeley really understood not only the issues of law, but the very complex scientific issues surrounding the climate crisis as well as clearly the impacts on these particular plaintiffs,” Hornbein said.

Michael Gerrard, the founder of Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, praised Seeley’s order.

“I think this is the strongest decision on climate change ever issued by any court,” he said in an email.

Several other states and around 150 other countries have a right to a healthy environment explicitly stated in their constitutions. This ruling may inspire similar lawsuits around the world.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers very effectively put on the stand several young Montana residents who testified how they were personally affected negatively by climate change. Putting a human face on this global problem worked well in this courtroom, and may well be followed elsewhere.

Montana succeeded in narrowing the scope of the lawsuit during pretrial motions. The lawsuit originally challenged the state energy policy, which directs statewide energy production and use, for promoting fossil fuel development, but this year, lawmakers overturned that law and weeks later, Seeley dismissed that part of the case.

The state, which previously vowed to fight the decision if the plaintiffs won, now has 60 days to decide whether to appeal the decision to the Montana supreme court.

The verdict sets a positive tone for the future of youth-led climate lawsuits.

“This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy, and for our climate,” said Olson. “More rulings like this will certainly come.”

Youth-led constitutional climate lawsuits, brought by Our Children’s Trust, are also pending in four other states. One of those cases, brought by Hawai‘i youth plaintiffs, is set to go to trial in June 2024, attorneys announced .

A similar federal lawsuit filed by Our Children’s Trust, 2015’s Juliana v. United States, is also pending. This past June, a U.S. district court ruled in favor of the youth plaintiffs, allowing that their claims can be decided at trial in open court, but a trial date has yet to be set.

“The case in Montana is a clear sign that seeking climate justice through the courts is a viable and powerful strategy,” said Delta Merner, lead scientist at the Science Hub for Climate Litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This story originally appeared in and is part of , a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Over the past six years, Puerto Rico has been hit hard by back-to-back natural disasters: the devastating hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, a series of destructive earthquakes in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2022’s Hurricane Fiona. Many residents are still rebuilding their homes. The disasters have exposed and exacerbated long-standing struggles for Puerto Rico—cultural identity, personal trauma, mental health crises, and challenges related to gentrification and developing tourism—all further complicated by the island’s economic and political status as a United States territory and the ongoing legacy of American exploitation.

Beyond these plights, however, is another reality: People are thriving, and using artistic expression to rebel, create, and heal.

Walking outside that same crumbling seaside building, its sea-facing facade is filled with colorful murals of coquis, the island’s beloved frogs.

In these times of resilience and recovery, Puerto Rican artists are using their talents to express their identities and cultural heritage, and to contribute to their communities in countless ways: beautifying and refurbishing structures, helping islanders recover from the trauma of the disaster, fighting gentrification, and ensuring Puerto Ricans benefit from tourism.

In the aftermath of the hurricanes, the San Juan theater company Y No Había Luz—which in English means “And There Was No Light” or “No Power”—has brought hope and healing through performance and interaction. The company provides art workshops for different communities, encouraging audiences to use paper pulps and recycled materials to make masks and puppets for their performances. The company also comforts and enlightens children and teens through plays like “El Centinela de Mangó” (“The Mango Sentinel”), a show inspired by a beloved tree that fell during Hurricane Maria in the town of Orocovis.

“For us, it’s very important that Puerto Ricans know that the possibility of making society better exists,” says Yussef Soto Villarini, one of the troupe’s founding members. 

For many people on the island, their nightmare did not end when Maria was over—they’re still experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder today, six years later. While the Category 4 hurricane was considered the worst disaster ever to hit the island, that year also saw a spike in suicides: died by suicide in 2017. Isolation and depression also rose. More than one in five islanders reported needing or receiving mental health services, while 13% said they started taking new or higher doses of prescription medication to treat emotional problems, according to conducted in 2018. 

Troupe members acknowledge they themselves need support, but they use their work to help children who are struggling move beyond the traumas they’ve experienced. “We never try to tell them what is right, what is wrong,” says Yari Helfeld, executive director at Y No Había Luz. “We always try to highlight the beauty and the possibilities, the desires and the dreams. We never try to make them remember the bad and feel the pain again.”&�Բ�����;

Self-Expression and Representation

The devastating hurricanes did not sway Afro-Puerto Rican painter and sculptor Samuel Lind from continuing to embrace nature in his works. “We’re not owners of nature, we’re part of it,” Lind says. “When you receive that expression from nature… I found beauty everywhere.”&�Բ�����;

After the back-to-back hurricanes, Lind’s two-story wooden home studio was without power for more than half a year, and some of his paintings were covered in mold. But Lind says that’s not a bad thing: “All this is open. The window inside, the unbroken wall, and the building structure support me to embrace nature. Nature gave me the opportunity to be prepared and to be my best.”

Nature is a central theme in his work. Many of his screen prints are of Loíza, a tropical coastal town in Puerto Rico and his lifelong home, with motifs of palm trees, blue sea, and fishing boats. Lind depicts local residents, bomba dancing, and the annual weeklong Festival of Saint James in his paintings. He also makes clay and bronze sculptures of Afro-Puerto Rican women and gods. 

“In my art expression, I send a message of what I believe our nation is and how beautiful our culture is,” Lind says. “Our expression of identity as Puerto Ricans is important.”

Lind’s efforts at cultural preservation matter. Loíza is the heart of Puerto Rico’s African heritage. Founded in the 17th century by formerly enslaved African people, today of its nearly 3,000 residents are Black. “T������ is so much discrimination against this area,” Lind says. “When I came out here to study art and to show my art [in the mainland United States], I realized that I needed to express our culture in my own way.”

Connecting With Community

Artist Don Rimx also credits art for making him “feel connected with the community” and inspiring the locals to “feel more united.” Born in San Juan, Rimx has been painting murals for 25 years. “For me, art is something everybody carries. It’s good to spread love and civility,” Rimx says. “I’m interacting with the people. I’m sharing knowledge. I learn something from them, too.”

Inspired by the communities he encounters, Rimx has painted large-scale murals around the world, including the Dominican Republic, Panama, Ecuador, and Japan. “I like to paint in public spaces. Because everybody can have access and enjoy it,” he says.

Despite leaving the island in 2009, Rimx says he still wants to “represent and work for the island.” In Bayamón, a community that is deteriorating due to challenges like addiction, he has created murals featuring local boxers outside the Monterey Boxing Club. This is part of his effort to support gym owner Emilio Lozada’s vision to “clean up the space” through sports, by getting more people to train. In April, Rimx returned to Bayamón, interacting with the kids there while completing a basketball-court mural project. 

Though Rimx has always known that public art has a limited lifespan and can be “easily damaged,” he still hopes to leave uplifting, beautiful works for his hometown, the local community, and the public square in interactive and collaborative ways.

“Art should be related to the neighborhood,” Rimx says.

With a similar mission to “clean up and stop vandalism” and “beautify and revitalize spaces” through public art, Santurce-based design company Robiaggi Design + Build has been doing mosaic projects for 20 years. Alvaro Racines, the company’s project manager, says they now have more than 140 public pieces around the island, in the mainland United States, and in other countries. 

While the colorful and durable tiles can withstand hurricanes, mosaics also help preserve the history and people on the island. Creating the projects can take as little as a week to complete or as long as six months. Racines, the company’s owner; local artist Roberto Biaggi; and other members of the company create portraits on street walls of “heroes” in the local community, including local government officials, activists, and others. These giant mosaics educate and uplift the community while also attracting tourists, as many visitors will stop to take pictures in front of them, Racines says.

After the hurricanes in 2017, the Puerto Rican government enacted tax incentives to attract investment across the island. Real estate agents poured in, and the Airbnb and short-term vacation rental industries surged. This flood of gentrification, and increasingly high rents in particular, plagues many Puerto Ricans. 

However, the island still gains something. In 2021, guest spending on bookings through Airbnb produced $872.4 million—almost 1% of the island’s GDP that year—and created 24,000 local jobs, according to .

Boosted by the booming tourism industry, Robiaggi Design + Build has gotten the opportunity to do mosaics for small businesses, hotels, and Airbnbs in Calle Loíza. “Activating a little bit about the neighborhood, and highlighting the different areas there is pretty exciting for us,” Racines says.

Now, members are working with the Municipality of San Juan to reenergize the area of Río Piedras with murals and mosaics. “In Puerto Rico, I see a lot of positive things going on through art intervention and commissions,” Racines says. “T������ are more and more movements of construction, refurbishing, and remodeling.”

Polishing La Perla

Bordered on one side by the Atlantic Ocean and on the other by the historic walls of Old San Juan lies La Perla, a community with beautiful beaches and decaying buildings—and one of the island’s most notoriously dangerous areas thanks to its and . 

After Hurricane Maria, about fled the island for a better life elsewhere. Despite the growing exodus to places outside Puerto Rico, some young people still want to stay on the island and claim a future there.

“T������’s a lot of community effort to bring [La Perla] back to life and nourish it with art,” says Dalila Pinci, an art student at the School of Plastic Arts and Design of Puerto Rico.

Pinci’s mural debut, a portrait of a woman surrounded by tropical flowers and green foliage, is one of dozens of murals in La Perla. Pinci’s mother is Puerto Rican and her father is European, so she grew up on the island but later moved to Switzerland. Pinci moved back to Puerto Rico in 2021 when she was 20 years old, saying that she wanted to be close to her culture and get back to her roots and family.

Pinci returned to the island with “a passion for painting and drawing” that she says she’s had since childhood. She heard complaints from her peers about the lack of support from the government and a sense that “the art culture is dead.” But this challenge, Pinci says, also stirs up the younger generation of creators to fight for themselves. 

Art can breathe new life into an island still recovering from natural disasters, Pinci says, and she hopes young people will continue to push boundaries and create new forms. “At the end of the day, we are the ones who are learning, innovating,” she says. “That can help with the world in this darkness.”

It is a love affair, for sure. But Lohrengel is no tree hugger, out to preserve a special, pristine place. He is a timber harvest administrator, overseeing logging in one of the most remarkable working forests in the United States—nearly a quarter-million acres of trees that occupy almost the entire Menominee Indian Reservation in northern Wisconsin.

“The forest looks pristine,” he says, as a flurry of snow falls through the open canopy. “These big maples and basswoods are around 150 years old. But we have been logging here for over a century, and we still have more trees than when we started.” In June, the tribe’s forestry officials began exploring the potential for selling the carbon accumulating in the forest on the ��.��.’s growing market for carbon-offset credits.

There are probably more than a billion trees today in the Menominee forest, which is an hour’s drive west of Lake Michigan. We were there in late February, the day after the biggest snowstorm of the winter. We were standing near the Menominee’s sawmill in Neopit village, from where trucks move the lumber across America to make everything from basketball courts to domestic furniture and handcrafted toys. But even close to the mill, big healthy trees with the highest potential price tag get to grow old.

The trick, says Lohrengel, is husbandry for the long term. “We come in every 15 years, take out the weak trees, the sick trees, and the ones that are dying, but leave the healthy stock to grow some more and reproduce,” he says. “We don’t plant anything. This is all natural regeneration, and the way we do it the forest just gets better and better.”

Lohrengel is not a Menominee tribal member. He is the son of a pulp-mill worker who has been devoted to the tribe’s harvesting philosophy since first working on the reservation inventorying the trees in 1990. Most U.S. foresters, he says, are trained to cut the best trees and leave the sick ones behind. The result is a forest with deteriorating genetic stock. But the Menominee are “doing the opposite, and making the forest healthier.”

“We make our decisions based on what’s best for the forest,” says Lohrengel’s boss, the Menominee’s veteran head forester Ron Waukau. “Our logging schedules and management are purely for the forest. I am really humbled to be able to work like that. The sawmill knows what it will get and sells accordingly.”

For the Menominee, says head silviculturist Tony Waupochick, it is not just a matter of maintaining the volume of timber. “We are also managing the forest to maintain its diversity and integrity, and to keep it healthy for wildlife.”

The Menominee adopted their enlightened approach soon after the creation of the reservation in 1854. It has worked spectacularly well, says Patrick McBride, sales director of the Pennsylvania-based lumber company MacDonald & Owen, which buys most of the output from the Menominee sawmill. In almost 170 years, the tribe has harvested nearly twice the forest’s former volume of timber, yet it still has  more standing wood than when they started. “And by leaving the best trees, the old and sick lumber they harvest is now better than the best from most everyone else,” says McBride, who pays a premium price for it.

The 235,000-acre Menominee reservation is 93% forested, and visible from space as a dark green block of trees.

Professional U.S. foresters today like to say that America’s shift from blindly clear-cutting trees to managing them more sustainably began in the 1890s, with the founding of the Biltmore Forest School in North Carolina, followed in 1900 by the founding of the Yale Forest School. But the Menominee were decades ahead of them, argues Michael Dockry, who researches American Indian and Indigenous natural resource management at the University of Minnesota. In the mid-19th century, , they already practiced “a new form of forest management that stood in stark contrast to the cut-and-run harvesting occurring through the rest of Wisconsin and the United States.” It was “the first sustained-yield forest management system in the country.”

The 235,000-acre Menominee reservation is today 93% forested and famously visible from space as a dark-green block of maple and aspen, birch and hemlock, ash and basswood, red oak and white pine, surrounded by dairy pastures long since cleared of trees by immigrant farmers. Some trees are more than 200 years old and more than 200 feet high. Around a quarter are left unharvested, mostly in swamp areas, at sacred sites, and in important wildlife refuges, says Waukau. Foresters come from across the world to walk the reservation with him and see how the Menominee harvest the rest. “Basically, we are taking tribal knowledge and blending it with today’s ecological science.”

The Menominee forest was among the first to be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), after its formation in 1993. That recognition of sustainability was a no-brainer, say FSC insiders. The Menominee’s crews currently cut only around a third as much timber as the forest grows each year—8 or 9 million board-feet each year, compared to growth of around 24 million acre-feet.

A  by Nicholas Reo of Dartmouth College and Donald Waller of the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2018 found that, after more than a century of logging, the Menominee forest was “more mature, with higher tree volume, higher rates of tree regeneration, more plant diversity and fewer invasive species than nearby nontribal forest lands.” The FSC  the majority of the forest as of “high conservation value” with large expanses where “naturally occurring species exist in natural patterns.”

The Menominee’s forestry approach was the brainchild of the tribe’s revered 19th-century chief, Oshkosh. After negotiating the 1854 treaty that secured the reservation for his people, he codified how they should harvest its forest. “Start with the rising sun and work towards the setting sun, but take only the mature trees, the sick trees, and the trees that have fallen,” . “When your reach the end of the reservation, turn and cut from the setting sun to the rising sun, and the trees will last forever.” His words are inscribed on a plaque at the entrance to the tribe’s forestry offices.

Menominee forestry practices are underpinned by their cultural and spiritual traditions, conveyed by their ancient language.

Logging techniques have changed since Oshkosh’s day. Handsaws and horse-drawn skids have been replaced by chainsaws and heavy dragging equipment. In an hour, a drone can see what would have taken human eyes many weeks. But Oshkosh’s philosophy persists, says McKaylee Duquain, who runs today’s forest inventory.

Among the mostly older male Menominee foresters, Duquain stands out as young, female, and tech-savvy. After studying conservation sciences at the University of Minnesota, she returned to the reservation three years ago to take charge of the logging schedule. “I decide what areas are going to be cut next, figure out how much is in there, whether the trees are mature enough, and so on,” she says.

Each year, her team surveys thousands of acres of the forest, often delving deep into its history, comparing today’s aerial images with maps hand-drawn on acetate sheets by predecessors who paced out the land, compass in hand. But Duquain and her colleagues also put on their boots to identify and mark individual sick or old trees for harvesting, and to ensure that those with a diameter less than 10 inches are spared. Only then do Menominee and other local contractors bring in their chainsaws—mostly in winter when the ground is frozen hard, so removing the logs does not damage the ground.

Besides this continuous cycle of selective forest thinning, some small areas are clear-cut. This is to help the growth of species such as oak that require plenty of sunlight, says Duquain’s boss, Waukau. Fire is another important tool, he says, burning undergrowth and logging leftovers at the start of the summer to remove material that could fuel major fires later in the season.

The Menominee fire team spends as much time starting fires as stopping them, says Curtis Wayka, who runs the burning program. In quiet times, the team travels the U.S. sharing their expertise. That expertise has a long heritage, says Waukau. “Our ancestors understood and used fire well. We are going back to that.”

Many Menominee forestry practices are underpinned by their cultural and spiritual traditions, often conveyed by their ancient language, which is now being revived in the tribal school. The tribe’s creation story puts its roughly 9,000 members into five clans, each named after animals of the forest: bear, wolf, moose, crane, and eagle, all of which are revered and protected. Don Reiter, the reservation wildlife manager, identified around 25 wolves in the reservation last winter, in five packs. He estimates there could be as many as 250 black bears.

The reservation is estimated to be making a net capture of more than 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually.

Many Menominee craft traditions use materials from their forest: black ash for basketry, basswood for wigwams and rope, and birch for canoes. “The ironwood tree is too strong for our mill to utilize, but we have always carved it,” says Joey Awonohopay, director of the Menominee Language and Culture Commission, who identifies as a member of the bear clan. Traditionally, it made warriors’ clubs. The tapping of maple trees for their syrup each spring remains hugely popular, and some people still gather medicinal plants such as bitterroot and ginseng.

But it is lumber sales that dominate the Menominee economy, accounting for around half the reservation’s economic activity. The business is run by Menominee Tribal Enterprises (MTE), a body elected by the tribe to operate commercially but sustainably. Its newly elected president, Michael Skenadore, says he faces some pressing issues to ensure its future viability. The sawmill, which was erected in 1908 and last refitted in the 1980s, needs heavy investment. And it is increasingly difficult to find young people willing to work as loggers in the forest during the long cold winters. Many prefer employment in the reservation’s other major concern: the casino.

But Skenadore has an eye to the future. He has begun investigating the potential to profit from selling carbon credits generated by the forest’s accumulating timber. “Along with a number of tribes from all over the country, we are exploring our options,” he says. According to , the reservation could currently be making a net capture of more than 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year.

Will the forest continue to thrive? However good the management, there are growing environmental threats. Changing climate is bringing more windstorms, says Lohrengel. The most recent blast, in June 2022, consigned 12 million board-feet—more than a year’s typical harvest—to the forest floor in 20 minutes. The foresters were out the following day flying drones to identify the damaged areas, and for the next nine months abandoned their logging schedules to concentrate on salvaging the downed timber.

Invasive pests can be a menace, too. The emerald ash borer, an Asian insect that has spread to 36 states since its arrival in the U.S. in 2002, finally entered the reservation last fall. “We were the last place in Wisconsin to get it,” says Waukau. He fears the worst. “It’s hard to imagine the ash not being in our forest, but it may be inevitable.” Despite such threats, he believes the large, biodiverse, and sustainably managed forest he oversees is more resilient than most. “Maybe in 30 or 40 years we will have lost some species, but I fully expect the forest will be thriving.”

Back in the forest, Lohrengel points to a clutch of tiny maple saplings reaching up to light streaming through the canopy after recent felling. “They look small now,” he says. “But future generations will be marveling at how big they become.”

This story was originally published in and is reprinted here with permission. Fred Pearce traveled to the Menominee Indian Reservation with the support of the American Hardwood Export Council.

Cooper experienced what she describes as an , feeling terrified of what would happen in her lifetime and worried that it may already be too late to act.

“I needed to be able to talk,” she says, “and express myself about the emotional reaction I was having.”&�Բ�����;

Climate change wasn’t something she felt she could discuss deeply with the people in her life, as is the case for most Americans. Though , and about about it, just 37% say they discuss the issue occasionally or often, according to a from Yale University.

But talking about climate change is important. Researchers have found it can cause of climate science and, among those who already accept the science, inspire action. That, in turn, has been shown to .

Like so many Americans, Cooper felt scared, stressed—and largely alone. “I was reading a lot of articles, listening to podcasts, but I had no real dialogue about it,” she says. Then she heard about the , an initiative created by , who co-edited an anthology book of the same name. Launched when the book was published in 2020, the Circle is a decentralized, 10-course book club aimed at helping readers develop communities around climate solutions. 

Cooper realized she could create a space for the conversations she wanted to have. Using her , word of mouth, and social media, Cooper recruited a group of nine people—some climate activists, others, like her, newer to the conversation—to meet virtually. Over the next six months, they discussed ways they were experiencing the climate crisis and created a shared , including ways they could take action in their own communities.

“Coming together with people who had all kinds of emotions and to see them still [taking] climate action—daily, weekly, or monthly—that was really inspiring,” Cooper says. 

Cooper is part of a growing movement of Americans who are seeking out solace—and power in numbers—in climate conversation groups. More than 3,000 people have formed All We Can Save Circles, according to the All We Can Save Project. The , a nonprofit peer support network on 12-step addiction programs, has more than 50 climate support groups nationwide. , founded by climate psychologist Margaret Klein Salamon, convenes small group conversations online that anyone for free.

These are all aimed at reversing what researchers describe as the “” around climate change.

“We know that humans avoid uncomfortable emotions,” says Sarah Schwartz, associate professor of psychology at Suffolk University, who researches climate anxiety. She explains that climate change is stressful in ways direct (not being able to breathe the air in your city, for example) and indirect (like constant worry about an uncertain future). 

“But when we talk about grief processing [or] trauma—we need to turn towards rather than away from these hard emotions,” she adds.

Schwartz co-authored a 2022 that found that collective climate action may mitigate climate distress. But, she says, “If you just jump into action and don’t make any space for conversations, support, and sitting with the uncomfortable emotions—that’s a recipe for burnout.”

Conversations, support, and collective action all require building community, which is key in addressing challenges that seem insurmountable, Schwartz says. “The role of relationships and social support is huge in the difference between ‘we can do something’ and ‘let’s all just hunker down and isolate in our own anxiety and paralysis,’” she says.

According to an internal 2023 survey conducted by the All We Can Save Project, 89% of Circle participants reported feeling an increased sense of community and 90% said they took climate action, such as switching to climate-focused careers, after joining a conversation group. 

For Inemesit Williams, former co-leader of the social justice working group at (CANIE), being part of a Circle inspired her to advocate for public transit funding and spread awareness about local bus routes. “I’ve never owned a car—I’ve always taken public transit, ridden my bicycle, walked, carpooled,” she says. “So that’s something I’m really passionate about: transit equity.”&�Բ�����;

Williams, who identifies as “a queer, Black American descendant of chattel slavery,” says she is the only participant in her Circle who identifies as Black. It’s a problem, she says, that is reflective of the broader among leadership at environmental organizations. 

Williams was familiar with most of the members in her Circle and felt comfortable talking about the ways the climate crisis disproportionately impacts communities of color. “I already had a feeling of safety with this group,” she says, but adds that her experience might be an exception. “You can’t really engage in that kind of space if you don’t feel like what you have to say is going to be welcome.”

Creating that safe space is why psychotherapist Taryn Crosby, who is also Black, co-organized , a climate conversation specifically for Black women and nonbinary people.

“We want to create a space where our experiences are prioritized,” she says, adding that generations of trauma in nature due to slavery and lynchings, segregated state and national parks, and economic oppression have pushed and from the outdoors.

She says she hopes We Outside helps attendees understand and value their own connections to nature, and prepares them to take part in broader conversations and influence greater climate action.

“Because we haven’t felt necessarily welcomed or invited into other climate conversations, we kind of need this to build that muscle,” she says. “And that can equip us to have these conversations before mixed company.”

Leaders from the All We Can Save Project and Good Grief Network, two of the largest climate conversation networks, acknowledge that the majority of participants are white and say they are currently taking steps—including partnering with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)–led organizations and aiming to train more BIPOC facilitators—to diversify their ranks.

“As we think about plans for addressing diversity and inclusion in Circles—across the Project and climate movement broadly—we think partnerships, intentional outreach, and relationship-building are vital,” says Amy Curtis, learning and community lead of the All We Can Save Project.

Crosby says she hopes initiatives like We Outside will be a starting point for more inclusive conversations about climate change. The goal, she says, is to hold space “where people can be open and curious about the way that they are affected by their environment and nature, and [also] how they affect their environment and nature—ultimately encouraging them to move that into action.”

This article was originally co-published by and . is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

“We’ve been crossing our fingers and toes that [wouldn’t] dry our well up. Due to the fact that we live in an agricultural area and this is a little community, we would be devastated,” he says. Prado worries that if the town’s remaining up-to-standard well dries up, even more residents will have to before using it or rely on bottled water. “We are in dire need of a new well,” he says.

Prado’s neighbors are far from alone. Millions of people in the to safe drinking water. Rural communities of color like Sultana, which is Hispanic, are disproportionately affected by this crisis. There, some families spend up to 10% of their monthly income on water. And yet the federal government underfunds communities of color when it comes to water infrastructure, according to a recent from the , a California advocacy group. 

“These racialized disparities in access to safe drinking water and effective wastewater services are occurring because of decades of disinvestment,” says Jenny Rempel, co-author of and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. In California alone, 300 towns do not supply safe drinking water to residents, the report found. 

Advocates say the Farm Bill, a massive piece of legislation that is voted on every five years and determines how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) disburses billions in federal funding, is a chance to finally invest in these communities’ water systems.

“The Farm Bill has funding that can really help address a lot of these gaps,” says Susana de Anda, executive director of the Community Water Center. She says the legislation should increase investments, particularly grants, in rural Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities; fund an annual audit of the USDA to determine which communities actually receive water infrastructure funding; and push the agency to deepen relationships with community-based organizations to ensure long-neglected populations have a voice in the planning process. 

“It’s clear that [low-income people of color] have been left out of water planning, and more importantly, they’ve been left out of intentional funding designed for them to really meet their needs and solve the issue,” de Anda adds.

When reached for comment, a USDA Rural Development spokesperson said that the administration is “committed to addressing the infrastructure needs of America’s most historically underserved communities” and added that the agency is “strengthening its efforts to provide technical and financial support to BIPOC communities and historically underserved areas that need it most.”&�Բ�����;

The racial and rural water gap has its roots in historic neglect. For decades, the Central Valley has attracted migrant farmworkers, many of whom were without basic resources like electricity or running water. Many of these settlements, like Sultana, became permanent, but never received municipal services.

Rural communities of color were historically excluded from being annexed into cities with utility services, a phenomenon known as “,” says Camille Pannu, an associate clinical professor at Columbia Law School who has water access issues in California.

This led to communities like Sultana remaining unincorporated and lacking many public services—like adequate wells and water treatment systems. “You end up having this upside-down water system where you have the lowest-income people paying the for terrible water,” Pannu says. She says that weak water infrastructure often forces residents to turn to building their own private wells or purchasing bottled water.

In agricultural communities like Sultana, water ������’t just hard to access. When it comes from the ground, it’s often with nitrates, arsenic, and pesticides; these contaminants are linked to cancer and lung and heart disease, among other ailments. Treating that water to residents’ yearly water and sewer bills, according to a recent report from the Environmental Working Group. 

Federal funds can help ease the burden, but only if these communities are able to access them, says Rempel, the doctoral researcher. “Communities need a lot of capacity and resources to be able to apply for and access these federal funding programs,” Rempel says. “T������’s a huge opportunity for technical assistance to start to close this gap.”&�Բ�����;

Even Prado, who has worked in community services for over 25 years, says he has struggled to navigate the system of applying for federal loans and grants. “Nobody really knows about USDA funding,” he says. 

Despite these obstacles, Prado has seen the benefits of federal assistance. In 2017, the USDA helped to fund a $2.1 million project to drill a new community well for Monson—one of Sultana’s neighbors—supplying with safe water. That same year, Prado, with help from a local nonprofit, applied for $7 million in funding for a well in his town.

Now, more than six years later, Sultana is slated to get the new well it so desperately needs. Construction crews broke ground in May, and the well is slated for completion in May 2024. 

Prado says he’s excited about the new well—but access to clean water ������’t something he and his neighbors should have had to fight for. 

“I keep telling the state what they need to do is get off their chair, come to the valley, and see all the rural communities,” Prado says. “See what their needs are, hold outreach meetings, and start finding out what they need here. I don’t think there’s enough of that really going on.”

This article was originally copublished in Nexus Media News with  as part of a series that looks at ways the 2023 Farm Bill can help address the climate crisis.  is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

The Himalayan region is often called “the water tower of Asia” or “the third pole.” Glaciers, along with approximately 3 million springs and 10 major rivers that flow from these peaks, have historically been the main sources of water in India’s Himalayan states, including Uttarakhand and Sikkim. But many of these water sources have disappeared in the past decade.

More than half of the perennial springs in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand have dried up or become seasonal, according to by the Indian government’s think tank, the . The potential reasons are many: road development, hydroelectric projects, earthquakes in the region, large-scale deforestation, and changes in rainfall patterns and other climate shifts.

The loss of springs affects the flow of rivers as well as the availability of water for community use. Baran Devi, 34, wakes up every day at 4 a.m. in her village in Nainital district, Uttarakhand, India, to make the daily 5-mile trip to a spring to get drinking water for her household. Though this trudge is laborious, her real worry is the summer months, when the spring dries up and she has to look for another source of water. In Uttarakhand, the Himalayan state where she lives, 90% of the drinking water supply is spring-based.

“In Uttarakhand more than 794 villages have become ghost villages thanks to nonavailability of water and migration to cities,” says Badrish Singh Mehra, executive director of the , a development organization based in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand.

Reviving an ancient water-management practice may be just what these communities need to move forward.

Water Temples

Dharas, or natural springs, can emerge from an aquifer through cracks in the Earth’s surface, or they can emerge from rocks and systems that have the porosity and permeability to retain water.

In the past, Himalayan communities held and passed on this local water knowledge. They also designed water-management systems around a deep reverence for water sources. All across the region, the temple-like naula structures were designed to collect water from underground springs.

Local rulers and elite families would dig a hole to access a spring, and then use local stone to construct walls to protect it. Usually, the naulas included a statue of a god like Vishnu and had designs carved on their facades. The tiny, covered structures were usually accessed through a narrow opening and a short flight of stairs, so that cattle could not enter and pollute the water. People were not allowed to wash clothes or dirty the water around these structures either.

In the past, naulas catered to the water needs of local communities, where worship of water was embedded in the local psyche. Many local brides visited the naulas after their weddings to offer their prayers and be blessed. Today these structures are ancient remnants of local architecture, as well as evidence of long-held ecological knowledge.

Mehra says there are an estimated 16,000 naulas in the Himalayan region of India today. But through the years, many of these once-revered water temples fell into disuse, thanks to the advent of piped water to villages and large-scale migration to cities where employment and piped water made life easier.

But climate change is revealing the limits of these modern alternatives. Frequent floods and earthquakes in the region have blocked pipelines and dried up historic water sources. The Chamoli earthquake in 1999, for example, killed more than 100 people, and the shifting ground caused changes in water flow. So, too, with the floods in 2013, which killed more than 5,700 people.

As a result of these growing uncertainties, there is a movement today to revive communities’ naulas.

Ancient Science

Bishan Singh Baneshi realized how acute the problem was while living in a remote village in the Ranikhet district of Uttarakhand in 2017: His mother died, and he did not have enough water to perform her last rites. Along with local women, he started restoring local naulas. They formed the community-based nonprofit in June 2018, and have since been involved in restoring more than 150 dhara-naula systems in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand.

The Naula Foundation is in good company when it comes to organizations rediscovering the value of these structures and knowledge ways—and a deep reverence for water. The Central Himalayan Rural Action Group, too, works to recharge dharas and restore naulas.

“Glacial contribution to water supply is only 16%, and the rest is from springs in the Himalayan region,” Mehra says. “Thanks to climate change and people migrating to cities, water bodies all over the region [have] been declining at an alarming rate.” He says the Rural Action Group was the first to look at the problem from a springshed-management perspective, going beyond a single watershed to identify recharge areas through hydrogeology and community knowledge.

The group’s work to restore water sources starts by addressing potential sources of contamination from uphill grazing, open defecation, or sewage tanks being built in the recharge area. Then they turn to the water itself. “We look at the catchment area of a particular spring, its depth and direction, the nature of the rock bed, and take steps to recharge that with community participation,” Mehra says. 

Community participation is key, and the organization approaches this work with great sensitivity to make sure it meets the needs of the people and doesn’t spoil their sacred sites. “In the past, rampant use of cement in these structures has led to water sources being blocked,” Mehra says. “We also identify the leakages in the system and attempt to plug them.”

So far the Rural Action Group has revived 494 springs and 189 pipelines to villages, as well as improved community water management. Their efforts involve local people in the revival process and provide them with work. Elders and naula makers in the community are consulted for their experience. The group also transfers necessary knowledge to local workers so that the community water sources can be self-sustaining.

While donations from corporations and individuals pay for much of the project costs, villagers contribute 20% to 40% of the funds to ensure that the local community is invested in the project. Thanks to the group’s intervention, one spring, for example, now generates an additional liter of water every minute, adding some 525,000 liters to the local water supply over the course of a spring.

Functional Ecosystems

The Central Himalayan Rural Action Group’s intervention is multifold, starting with an assessment of the health of the spring, its volume of water, and the number of people dependent on its water. Abhishek Likam, head of springshed management for the group, says that the terrain is also important (whether it is rocky, etc.), as intervention in certain areas could lead to landslides.

The next step is to dig either trenches or percolation pits to conserve the rainwater. Finally, Likam says, the group plants indigenous trees like oak and deodar around the springs, as “certain species of trees are good for recharge of groundwater.”

Sheeba Sen of Alaap, a nonprofit organization that does reforestation work in Uttarakhand, says pine forests, which were brought in during colonial times, are the bane of their ecological development work. These introduced tree species led to a decline in the native species that allow for better water percolation and storage.

“As we work in regeneration of indigenous forests and mapping catchment areas, we also work indirectly with naulas and their regeneration,” Sen says. “In many cases, the forest departments own the lands where the naulas are located, and it becomes complex as more permissions are needed to access the naulas.”

Many organizations that work in the region, like Alaap and People’s Science Institute, a nongovernmental organization based in Dehradun that works with sustainable development and natural-resource management, have been engaging with local communities, especially women, to revive these ancient water temples and improve lives. “Any work on these springs has to include financial benefits for the local people—only then it will work in the long run,” Sen says.

Women, many of whom were spending several hours traveling many miles away to get water for their households, play a critical role. Maya Verma, a resident of Chamoli village in Uttarakhand’s Almora district, has revived the naulas in as many as 15 villages with other women from these villages. She organized community meetings and street plays, and formed water-user groups as part of her awareness-raising campaign.

Pooja Arya, 30, and her friend Kiran Joshi, 32, from Raushil village in Nainital district, have been working with the Rural Action Group in the regeneration of naulas in their village the last couple of years. The naulas now support as many as 50 families in their village, and in the summer, even families from other villages.

“We can see the area transformed thanks to working on the naulas,” Joshi says. She and Arya have been involved in the whole process, from digging trenches to working in catchment areas. Excess water is stored in tanks, which can then be used for irrigation to grow various crops like wheat and garlic. “In previous years we used to suffer water shortages in the summer,” Joshi says, “but now we have water throughout the year.”

“Well, the first year was like, ‘OK, it’s my foot in the door. Just get my foot in the door, introduce people to new things, and see how the second year goes.’ The rice at the market is like $3.50, and people are thinking it’s too expensive. But a few customers buy it. And then they come back and they say, ‘Oh my gosh, I paid $3.50, and it’s worth more than that!’”

Seven years later, Lee’s sticky rice—and other varieties she sells with her husband, Tou Lee—has become a hit at farmers markets in Asheville and nearby Black Mountain. It can even be found in several upscale restaurants in the Asheville area.

The Lees, Hmong immigrants born in Laos just before the end of the Vietnam War, own Lee’s One Fortune Farm. Officially headquartered in Marion, North Carolina, about 40 minutes east of Asheville, the farm operates under something like a cooperative system. The Lees grow their rice, and different varieties of fruits and vegetables native to Southeast Asia, on eight small plots, many of them not much larger than an acre. Some of the plots, scattered around McDowell County (where Marion is) and adjacent counties, are owned and leased by relatives, but the Lees harvest everything and sell it under the Lee’s One Fortune Farm name.

Many people are surprised to learn that you can grow rice in the mountains, the Lees say. The vast majority of rice grown in the U.S.—your basic white or brown variety—comes from just four regions: the Mississippi Delta, the Arkansas Grand Prairie, the Gulf Coast, and the Sacramento Valley. The crop has a rightful reputation for growing in hot, flat areas that can be easily flooded.

As it turns out, though, heirloom rice from the Laotian highlands grows very well in parts of the Southern Appalachians, with its similarly hot days and cool nights. An “upland” rice, it grows on drier ground and consumes less water than standard varieties, and it can be planted like corn.

According to the Lees, Laotian sticky rice first came to the U.S. in the late ’80s or early ’90s when a Laotian woman immigrating to California “smuggled” a few ounces of seeds in her coin purse. They made their way to cities in California’s Central Valley, home to some of the largest Hmong communities in the U.S., but the results were disappointing: The rice stalks never grew higher than about a foot or yielded more than a few dozen grains.

“Families gave up on [it] and said, ‘Well, it’s no good. [This rice] will never grow in America.’ So they shipped it up here to some of the families that we know of,” Tou Lee says. “And they give it a shot. The first year it came up, the rice was over 5 feet tall.”

In 2017, the Hmong population of the U.S. was estimated to be around 300,000. North Carolina’s population is concentrated in Hickory, in the Piedmont. Hmong presence in the mountains is tiny—you can count it “by hand,” Chue Lee says. By the Lees’ estimate, every Hmong person in their area is either a blood relative or related by marriage.

As a result, after the Lees first started farming, they focused on satisfying demand for Laotian rice among the greater Hmong diaspora in the U.S., sending freezer bags to Minnesota and California, which have the largest concentrations of Hmong immigrants in the country. At the time, Chue was working as an office manager and Tou as an engineer. Today she grows and manages the farm full time; Tou splits his time between farming and working as a product manager for a pharmaceutical company.

Eventually, however, they started looking for distribution outlets closer to home. This search brought them into contact with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project, a nonprofit based in Asheville that promotes family-owned farms in Western North Carolina and provides resources to farmers. That’s how the Lees wound up at the East Asheville farmers market.

The project’s director Molly Nicholie confirms that  in the region. “It requires specific processing and equipment that most farmers don’t have, or certain know-how.” Local growers, she says, can’t just decide to plant it on a whim, like they would, say, tomatoes. “T������’s so much more involved.”

A grant from, the agricultural endowment created from North Carolina’s 1999 Master Settlement Agreement with tobacco companies, helped the Lees buy a harvester last year, increasing their harvesting capacity twentyfold. Up until then, all of the Lees’ rice was cut by hand, though certain varieties—such as their fragile green rice, picked before it matures—will continue to be.

On the flip side, the lack of locally grown rice in Western North Carolina has contributed to its novelty and appeal, at least in the Asheville area, where, the Lees say, many residents and visitors are well-traveled and willing to try unfamiliar foods. They don’t go to farmers markets in the Marion area because there hasn’t been much demand for their offerings.

“I think that part of what makes their products so unique is that you can’t find it anywhere,” says Nicholie. “Most places don’t have a purple sticky rice or even some of the sweet sticky rice varieties that they brought over from Laos.” As a result, people are “willing to pay a premium for it.”

While the Lees’ story of hard work, sacrifice, and success may feel familiar, their beginnings are anything but.

The Lees, like most Hmong immigrants in the United States, arrived in the country as refugees after the U.S. military withdrawal from Vietnam and the takeover of the Laotian government by the Pathet Lao communist group in 1975. During the twin conflicts, many Hmong villagers, who were concentrated in the highlands in the northern part of Laos, allied with the U.S. against both Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces; Chue’s father was in the anticommunist Royal Lao Army, and Tou’s father worked with the CIA. After Pathet Lao came to power, Tou and Chue (who did not meet until they were in the U.S.) were forced to run for their lives.

Tou Lee was born in Long Cheng, the military headquarters of the Royal Lao Army and the base for a secret CIA-run airline nicknamed “Air America.” Born just before the Pathet Lao took power, he spent the first five years of his life hiding in the jungle before escaping with his family to a refugee camp in Thailand, where he lived for a year and a half. In 1979, his family moved to North Cove, just outside Marion, to live with an uncle who sponsored them. “The first time I ever wore shoes was on the bus to the airport and inside the airplane to the United States,” he says.

Chue arrived in the U.S. in 1984, after two years in a refugee camp in Thailand and “roaming the jungles of Laos” before that. “My dad said, ‘We got to leave. Because once they find out who I am, we’re not going to make it here.’” Her family moved to San Diego to be with an uncle who was sponsoring them.

After the deep instability of his early life, Tou had a regular American childhood in the Marion area, he says, and he never felt mistreated because of his identity. “I was one of the hillbillies here. I felt at home.” And, he says, there are actually lots of similarities between his area of Laos and Marion. 

“If you go anywhere in the villages of Laos and if you need something, chances are people will help you obtain it or provide it. And when I came here, that was the similar feeling that I had, culturally. As far as geographically, the hills [are] very reminiscent of Laos—the heavy, tall trees everywhere, all kinds of little creeks and springs everywhere.”

In 1984, Tou’s family moved to the San Diego area temporarily; he met Chue the year after. They now have six children and a granddaughter.

According to Melissa Borja, a professor at the University of Michigan who researches Hmong refugee resettlement, the resettlement pattern of immigrants from Southeast Asia was very different than it was for previous immigrants to the U.S. from Asian countries. Instead of being concentrated in a specific area (like, say, a Chinatown), Hmong, Vietnamese, and Cambodian immigrants were “spread out” throughout the country “so they wouldn’t locally burden particular communities” and “would assimilate more quickly.”

Eventually, many Hmong wanted to reconnect with others who shared their background and cultural and ritual practices, and distinct communities started to coalesce, especially in California and Minnesota. Nevertheless, Borja says, an interest in farming—a historical Hmong occupation—attracted immigrants to smaller or more rural communities, such as those in North Carolina.

While Lee’s One Fortune Farm is now deeply embedded in the food scene of Western North Carolina, the Lees’ mission goes beyond simply growing and selling unique, hard-to-find food. At this point, they see education as just as much a part of their calling. 

“The best part of marketing is sharing information with my customers,” says Chue. She and Tou say they never tire of explaining the ins and outs of Asian pears, Thai eggplant, sweet sticky rice, and their many other offerings. “I can have 1,000 customers. And about 60% of them asking the same question during the whole market. And I’m willing to explain the same thing, even when the other person is no more than 5 feet behind them,” Tou says.

In fact, their long-term goal is to buy a larger site that doubles as a learning center where groups can come to learn about all of their crops in a single place. Their other plan is to get into the wholesale market and supply rice and Asian vegetables to the mid-Atlantic’s growing Asian population. They may even try growing those more familiar brown and white rice varieties. “We’re crazy enough we might [try],” Tou says.

The Lees’ relationship to their homeland is bittersweet. Although they have dedicated much of their adult lives to carrying on Hmong traditions through farming, neither has returned to Laos since fleeing it as a child. “Because of my family service, I am not a really accepted or liked person over there,” says Tou. “At 3 months old, I was slated to be found and picked up” by communist forces. “At 3 months old.”

“This is hope,” he says, gesturing toward a modest field full of spent sticky rice stalks. “I know that [Laos] is where I came from. I know that that was the original place that I was born, and that was my first home. . . But as far as, you know, how I feel about here versus there? This is more home than that over there is.”

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

Perdue was one of nine comedians who took part in a nine-month fellowship where they learned about climate science and solutions and collaborated on . The Climate Comedy Cohort produced shorts, toured together, and pitched ideas to television networks. Their work is part of a broader effort to bring some levity to a topic that is increasingly present in everyday life. 

For Perdue, that meant bringing race into the conversation about sustainability and clean energy. “[Solar power] is free labor, and the most American thing to do is to use free labor,” he says in one of his sets. “We just have to tell people the sun is Black.”&�Բ�����;

Climate change is increasingly featured in . But comedians like Perdue, as well as higher-profile acts, like Michelle Wolf and Joel Kim Booster, are also . (Wolf, in her HBO special, says “mother nature is trying to kill us in the most passive-aggressive way possible. She’s like, ‘What? I raised the temperature a little.’”)

By talking about climate, even irreverently, social scientists say, they may be helping to combat and boost civic engagement. 

Comedy—even if it’s about heavy topics like climate change—can motivate feelings of hope and optimism, says Caty Borum, a professor at American University and author of . “Those are routes to persuasion because we’re being entertained and because we’re feeling emotions of play—and this is particularly important for climate change,” she says. 

Just because climate change is heavy and important doesn’t mean comedy about it can’t be really silly.

The Climate Comedy Cohort, a joint project between American University’s Center for Media & Social Impact, which Borum runs, and Generation180, a clean-energy nonprofit, announced earlier this month. 

“As it just turns out, the very unique qualities of comedy that allow us to break through taboo, allow us to use social critique and translate topics, all of that really contributes” to people feeling like they can take action, Borum says.

Actor and former Obama aide Kal Penn hosts a on Bloomberg called “Getting Warmer” that focuses on climate technology and solutions “with a dose of humor and optimism,” according to its tagline. And in April, a group of comedians is putting on a show called lol climate change: a show in Los Angeles. 

A say climate change is real and caused by humans, but only about half think there’s anything they can do about it, according to a . 

Borum says programs like hers can help combat and inaction. “The goal of the program is not to have comedians tell more scary stories about climate change, but to really dig in on the solutions,” she says. 

Just because climate change is heavy and important doesn’t mean comedy about it can’t be really silly, says , a comedian who helped create the Climate Comedy Cohort. 

He notes that comedy often draws from tragedy. Marc Maron’s new special, From Bleak to Dark, delves into the death of his partner, Lynn Shelton; in Nanette, Hannah Gadsby opens up about being sexually assaulted.  “It’s the comedian’s job to pull from that,” Gast says. 

On stage, Katie Hannigan, part of the Climate Comedy Cohort, notes that . She says, “I am doing my part for climate change. I have never even used my gas stove … since I started that fire.”

Kat Evasco, one of the lol climate change comedians, has a joke connecting her mother’s skepticism about climate change to her denial about being gay—even though she’s shared a bedroom with a woman for 25 years, Evasco quips. “It’s about moments that might not center on climate change, but can tie back to it,” she says.

“We aren’t big on sharing data and statistics,” Evasco says. “What we are looking for is: How does this show up in human experience? How do you laugh about death?” 

Max Boykoff, a professor in environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, says he believes comedy can help drive the conversation forward on polarizing topics like climate change. (The majority of Americans with their neighbors or co-workers.)

“The comedic approach is not just simply a matter of making someone laugh. It’s actually a way to open people up,” he says. In 2018, Boykoff and Beth Osnes, a professor of theatre, developed a creative climate communication course in which students developed their own comedy skits. At the end of the semester, 90% of students feeling more hopeful about climate change, and 83% said they believed their commitment to taking action on climate change was more likely to last.

Borum says that when comedy is done well, it can change minds on almost any topic—she has studied how comedy can create social change around poverty, inequality, and human rights. “The best comedy that inserts something important about the world is not boring and lame,” she says, “and that’s true from a science perspective, but also a comedy perspective.”&�Բ�����;

This story was originally co-published by , , , and , an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:31 p.m. PT on April 17, 2023, to correct the spelling of Esteban Gast’s name. Read our corrections policy here.

Sage Lenier attended her first environmental class as a high schooler in Corona, California, in 2015. It was an AP course that addressed some of the urgent problems facing the natural world, issues like biodiversity loss, climate change, and the ravages of industrial-scale farming. 

One lecture stood out to her in particular: The teacher told the class about the crisis of topsoil loss, or the layer of dirt where most plants—including the crops we eat—grow and flourish. According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the world is expecting to lose 90% of its topsoil by 2050 if countries don’t take action.

She remembers her teacher talking about this fact almost casually, pointing out that once we’ve depleted the topsoil, people will face extreme hunger. Lenier wanted to know what governments were doing about it, but her teacher’s answer was disappointing: World leaders would need to cooperate politically on an international scale that had never before been accomplished. In short, the planet was screwed. 

The whole class made her feel helpless. 

“I was really, really panicked, obviously,” Lenier said over a Zoom call. “Environmental education as it stands is extremely alarmist, and I was freaking out.”

Her best friend dropped the course because she found it too depressing. Lenier also felt scared by what she was learning about the future of the planet. Instead of ruminating in that fear, Lenier began to wonder what she could do to change things. Her parents and friends weren’t talking about these issues, and this was a few years before the climate youth strikes had raised the profile on the climate crisis. 

“I was really confused, really panicked, and wanted to do something,” she said. “What I realized is that maybe our biggest problem is that no one knows any of this stuff.”&�Բ�����;

After she graduated high school, Lenier began to develop the kind of curriculum she wanted to be taught—one focused on solutions. The University of California, Berkeley, where Lenier attended, offers a unique opportunity for students to teach their own university courses. The classes vary in subject matter from the whimsical—think Harry Potter—to the technical, like computer coding and software engineering, but they all have to meet academic standards to be certified and sponsored by a faculty member. 

Lenier’s class, Solutions for a Sustainable and Just Future, was radically different from the environmental education norm, focused on both explaining the most pressing environmental issues of our time and then offering solutions. 

She taught it for the first time in 2018. It broke records for student enrollment, growing from 25 students to over 300 a semester at its peak. So far, over 1,800 people have taken the course, including 200 students who took the class virtually during the pandemic through Zero Waste USA. Though Lenier has graduated, it’s now being taught by student teachers she’s helped train. It also won a best practice award from the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. 

According to data Lenier collected from her students, two-thirds of those who took the class came from non-environmental majors, and more than 70% said they had been inspired to become, or were becoming, involved in environmental work and activism. 

Now 24, Lenier is aiming to take her curriculum to universities and high schools across the country. She is at the forefront of a growing movement to integrate environmental curriculum into the education system, equipping students with the knowledge they need to help solve some of the largest environmental issues of our time. 

The state of environmental education in the United States can be described as either nonexistent or woefully inadequate. Radhika Iyengar, director of education for the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said most students are having to seek out information on their own through the internet and social media. There is no federal push to teach environmental education, and only a handful of states, like New Jersey and Connecticut, have made strides in incorporating the curriculum in K-12 schools. When climate change is taught, it is often through a side project or a single lesson. 

“This is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re touching,” said Iyengar. “We’re just now trying to integrate climate education when the climate is falling apart, and the Earth is falling apart.”&�Բ�����;

The predominant model of engaging students in environmental work has also overwhelmingly focused on the existential problems at hand. Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor and chair of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, describes the typical style of teaching about the environment—the kind Lenier encountered in high school—as the “scare to care model.”&�Բ�����;

“The vast majority of environmental, climate, and sustainability educators got Ph.D.s under the assumption that nobody cared or knew enough about the environment and needed to get more educated about it, in order for us to fix this problem,” she said. “Like, if we tell them how horrible it is, if we give them a litany of problems, they will know what to do to go out and fix them.”

But instead, it was having the opposite impact, Ray said. “The barrage of problems, the doom and gloom, in general … is having the effect, increasingly, of leaving people more apathetic, more desiring to numb out, [and] more likely to be in denial.”

It is contributing to a growing feeling of despair about the environment among young people. A 2021 survey of 10,000 youth from across the world found that many are suffering from what is known as eco-anxiety, or a sort of existential dread about the state of the planet. Nearly 60% of respondents said they were very or extremely worried about climate change. 

Students are going to school seeking answers. Lenier’s class provides them.

The course itself not only centers solutions, but justice too. What drives Lenier is the people being impacted by climate change and the sometimes faulty response to it. She draws a distinction between capitalism, green capitalism (think Elon Musk and Tesla), and radical environmentalism—the latter being the version she focuses on in class. One that not only upholds care for the planet, but care for the people living on it too. “I care about human rights, first and foremost,” she said. 

The course starts with the history of consumption and chronicles the country’s waste streams, pointing out that most of what Americans consume ends up in landfills. This “linear economy” means resources are extracted, consumed, and then disposed of, leading to a rapidly degrading planet and conflict over its finite resources. 

But Lenier doesn’t stop there. Her class offers an alternative to the status quo, by explaining the possibilities found within a “circular economy,” one in which things don’t lose their value in a landfill, but instead are recirculated as new items, or are in continuous use, without being viewed as disposable. 

Repairing clothing instead of throwing it away, or resoling shoes, could be an aspect of the circular economy, versus the fast fashion Americans have become accustomed to replacing at the smallest tear or hole.

It’s just one example Lenier offers as a window into how an alternative, regenerative future could take shape, one that prioritizes caring for the Earth and helps students imagine how they might fit into making it a reality. 

“It’s really about getting people excited about what a better world can look like,” Lenier said. 

The class offers practical ways students can take steps in their own lives to limit their consumption, by offering alternatives to daily disposables, like paper towels and plastic bags, or providing examples of how to engage in the circular economy in small ways, like composting. 

This method of focusing on individuals’ actions does face criticism from some environmental activists, who say it detracts from the focus on industry players, like oil producers, which are responsible for a majority of carbon emissions.

Lenier sees the argument as a cop-out. “Americans, or people of privilege globally, are so willing and able to just absolve themselves of any accountability,” she said. “But if you can see your power as a person in the Global North, it would be transformative.”

Lenier is advocating for systemic change too. Her class delves into the topics of decarbonization and degrowth—an argument for shrinking the economy—though she thinks individuals, particularly in the U.S., should take responsibility for the harm they are causing to the rest of the world. 

Ray said a focus on providing people a blueprint of what they can do in their own lives to limit their impact on the planet has been shown to alter the way they behave. 

“It has a psychological effect of making people get more engaged,” she said. “It gives them a model of what they might be able to do in their own community. … So there’s sort of multiple psychological buttons that solutions push when [students are] in classes.”

In some regards, American students are just now catching up to their peers in other countries in simply recognizing that climate change is real. This was something that struck Lovisa Lagercrantz, one of the co-facilitators of the Berkeley class, when she first moved to the states from Sweden when she was 15. 

“I felt like my discussions with my peers at school lunches were like, ‘Oh, do you believe in climate change?’ … like it is not something to be believed in,” she said. “The framework in Scandinavia was so far past that. Like it wasn’t a question to be taught, it was a fact. And that was something we were taught in school growing up.”

Ray said there has been an ongoing shift among young people in their awareness of these issues. “Increasingly, the climate is an emotional thing,” she said. “It is intimate, it is a form of trauma, it is a form of fear. It is an emotional topic for many students.”&�Բ�����;

The climate youth strikes, led by Greta Thunberg in 2018, helped bring the climate crisis to the forefront of students’ minds. But Iyengar also sees this activism as a reflection of societal failure to address the problem to begin with. “We have pushed our students to a last resort,” she said. 

Anu Thirunarayanan, another of the current co-facilitators, began teaching the class after they became drained by that kind of activism. 

“I think a lot of environmentalists burn out, in a sense, because they see so many of the negative aspects of what climate problems or environmental problems look like. And they are forced to deal with the underbelly,” they said. “And it’s hard to find hope in that.”

They found out about Lenier’s class through a student club called the Students of Color Environmental Collective, and decided they wanted to shift gears to education and organizing instead of being active in campus rallies. 

As a co-facilitator, Thirunarayanan has added to the course curriculum, creating a module focused on environmental justice. This collaboration and student-led approach is what drew them to teaching the class to begin with, and it differed from most faculty-led courses in an important way.

“The identity of our faculty, a large portion of them are white, and most of them are men. And I think the fact that this class has been entirely taught by women and nonbinary students, and at least around half of us have been people of color, I think, adds that additional intersectional identity to how the course is taught,” they said. 

Now, Thirunarayanan and Lagercrantz are helping Lenier turn the class into an exportable curriculum that could be taught at other universities and high schools through her recently launched nonprofit, Sustainable & Just Future. Her tagline? “Youth-led environmental education for the revolution.”&�Բ�����;

For Lenier, the goal is simple: educate as many millions of people as possible to tackle the problem of climate change. 

While still in the early stages of getting funding and figuring out how to run the nonprofit full time, already she is fielding hundreds of inquiries from students at other universities who are seeking to bring the program to their schools. She has plans to develop a digital version of the course offerings, and eventually would like to see the course integrated into K-12 education across the country. 

It’s about more than providing solutions; in Lenier’s eyes, it’s about empowering students from across disciplines to “dig into their community” and find the ways in which their skill sets can contribute to solving one of the biggest challenges of our time. 

“If we start raising people who have the Earth as a priority and also a knowledge of how these systems impact them, and their role in it, and instead of churning out hundreds of thousands more people with business degrees … we churn out people who are empathetic and curious about the world and looking to make it a better place, genuinely,” she said, “I think that is revolutionary.”

This story was originally published by . To read more of its stories answering the “how” and “why” of the intersection of environment and race news, .

Dead branches were still dangling a month later. But rows of mustard greens were unfurling nearby, and a thicket of green vines reached toward the sun, dotted with tangy orange bulbs.

“These sungold tomatoes were toast,” Gentry said, sounding almost astonished. “But now look at them. They’re coming back. It’s like spring again.”

Over the past four years, Gentry has transformed 2 acres of trash-strewn dirt on Long Island’s southeast coast into a profitable organic farm by betting big on soil. Instead of pumping her crops with pesticides and petrochemical fertilizer, Gentry grows vetch, a hardy pealike plant, and rye to cover the exposed soil between the rows of greens intended for harvest. She layers the soil with specially mined rock dust that replenishes minerals and pulls carbon from the air. And in the spring and summer, she uses a system of crop rotation—shifting around where different crops are planted—so that one plant’s nutrient needs don’t drain the soil. These practices are collectively known as regenerative farming.

Tests of the soil show the organic content is now seven times higher than when she began. The result is produce so flavorful that she can’t keep up with the number of restaurants and home cooks looking to buy shares. 

Gentry’s farm is also resilient, one where healthy soil soaks up rainwater like a sponge and replenishes the crops. She barely missed a delivery after the storm. 

At a moment when fires and storms are wreaking havoc from coast to coast, mounting research suggests that practicing the soil techniques Gentry uses on a much wider scale could remove climate-changing gases from the atmosphere and provide a vital bulwark in the fight to maintain a habitable planet. They’re part of a mix of solutions experts say are needed to keep global temperatures from surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages, beyond which projections show catastrophic threats to our coasts, ecosystems, and food and water supplies. 

Regenerative practices range from growing trees and reverting croplands to wild prairies, to rotating crops and allowing remnants after harvest to decompose into the ground. The techniques, already popular with small-scale organic growers, are steadily gaining traction among big farms and ranches as the chaotic effects of climate change and financial pressure from agribusiness giants eat away at their businesses.

“This is about covering the soil, feeding the soil and not disrupting it,” said Betsy Taylor, the president at Breakthrough Strategies & Solutions, a consultancy that focuses on regenerative agriculture. “Those are the basic principles.”

Countries such as France are promoting large-scale government programs to encourage farmers to increase the carbon stored in soil. Members of Congress have also proposed legislation to push regenerative farming in the U.S., and several states are designing their own policies. Progressive think tanks call for small shifts in existing U.S. Department of Agriculture programs and beefed-up research funding that could trigger the biggest changes to American farming in almost a century. Nearly every Democratic presidential candidate pitched paying farmers to trap carbon in soil as a key plank of their climate platform, including nominee Joe Biden.

“We should be making farmers the recipients of a climate change plan where they get paid to absorb carbon,” the former vice president said during a CNN town hall this past week. 

While the benefits to soil and food nutrition are difficult to dispute, regenerative farming has its critics. They argue that its climate advantages are overhyped or unproven, the product of wishful thinking about a politically palatable solution, and that the focus on regenerative farming risks distracting policymakers from more effective, if less exciting, strategies. 

Industrial Agriculture’s Bill Is Coming Due

At the end of World War II, federal farming policy started to transform the breadbasket of the Midwest into vast plains of corn, soybeans, and grains. The same principles of mechanized bulk production that turned the United States into a military powerhouse capable of fending off the Japanese and Nazi empires were applied to farming. Surplus chemicals from weapons manufacturing found new uses eradicating crop-eating insects, and nitrogen plants that once made components for bombs started producing ammonia to feed fields. 

Geopolitics only hastened the trend, as widespread Soviet crop failures forced Russian officials to buy grain from overseas and the Nixon administration capitalized on the opportunity. Agriculture Secretary Earl “Rusty” Butz, who served under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, directed farmers to “plant fence row to fence row,” and quantity trumped all else. Farmers took out loans to expand operations, turning “get big or get out” into a mantra, as Butz promised that any surplus could be sold overseas. 

The damage to farm soil kicked into overdrive as farmers planted the same monoculture crops year after year and added more chemical fertilizers to make up for the sapped minerals and dead microbes. The cumulative effect has been twofold. The U.S. loses top soil at a rate than it’s replenished. And carbon and other gases seep from the plowed, exposed soil into the air, contributing to the emissions rapidly warming the planet and increasing the frequency and severity of destructive droughts and storms. 

Less than two weeks after Tropical Storm Isaias made landfall over Gentry’s farm, a powerful storm known as a derecho—or “inland hurricane”—formed in Iowa, some 1,100 miles west. The storm destroyed nearly half the state’s crop rows. “This will ruin us,” one farmer told a . Another called it a “catastrophic scenario.”&�Բ�����;

Losses from extreme weather are only expected to grow in the years ahead. Even if warming is kept within a 2 degrees Celsius warming scenario, the less ambitious goal spelled out in the Paris climate accords, U.S. corn production will likely suffer an 18% hit, according to a published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

For many farmers, the federal crop insurance program has been a lifeline in tumultuous times. But it also encourages them to plant in harm’s way by providing incentives to cultivate every inch of land, including marginal acres prone to flooding, and it  by making it difficult for farmers to insure a variety of crops at once. In 2014, the federal  found that, as a result of the insurance program’s policies, farmers “do not bear the true cost of their risk of loss due to weather-related events, such as drought—which could affect their farming decisions.”

“As farmers, we’re trying to make rational economic decisions in an irrational system,” said Matt Russell, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer who promotes regenerative soil practices. “We have externalized the pollution so the public pays for those costs and nobody in the supply chain pays for it, while at the same time, when I do something good, I can’t externalize the cost at all.”&�Բ�����;

‘You’ve Got A Win’

Plans to shift federal incentives to favor regenerative farming aim first to loosen big agribusiness’s grip on the industry. 

The think tank has proposed overhauling the federal crop insurance program to limit the total acreage eligible for coverage, phase out incentives for single-crop planting and create new tax credits designed specifically for family-owned farms, restricting how much corporate giants could benefit from the subsidized insurance. 

With that stick would come a carrot: Under Data for Progress’ plan, Congress would increase the budget for the USDA’s existing conservation programs. 

As farmers, we’re trying to make rational economic decisions in an irrational system. Matt Russell, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer

The Conservation Stewardship Program already provides farmers with cash payments of up to and technological assistance for steps such as assessing which plots of farming and grazing land should be allowed to go natural. With an expanded mandate to sequester carbon dioxide, the program might fund a national assessment to determine which areas are best suited for rewilding or carbon farming and compensate farmers directly to do that. 

The program paid out $1.4 billion last year alone. Data for Progress proposed that the USDA significantly increase funding for both the program and research, and provide employees in all its conservation programs with training to understand and help regulate regenerative farming practices. 

“T������ are so many wins in regenerative agriculture,” said Maggie Thomas, a former climate policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who serves as political director of the progressive climate group Evergreen Action. “You’ve got a win for farmers. You’ve got a win for soils and the environment. You’ve got a win for better food. There’s no reason not to do it.”

The hopes for such changes are dim under the Trump administration, which spent its first three years sidelining climate science and spurring an from the USDA as frustration over political appointees’ meddling with research grew. (A five-year proposal the agency released in February did seem to show a growing acceptance of the need to address climate change, offering what called “hopeful signs.”)

Maryland already pays farmers  for fields maintained with cover crops. Montana state officials collaborated with a nonprofit consortium paying ranchers to adopt that increase carbon storage in the soil. 

In January, Vermont proposed a plan to incorporate by farmers into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade scheme that includes most of the Northeast states. In March, Minnesota officials gathered for a to combat climate change. In June, Colorado solicited input for a state-level aimed at “advancing climate resilience.”&�Բ�����;

Investors see potential profit in the shift to regenerative agriculture. In January, the Seattle startup Nori was able to raise $1.3 million to fund its platform using blockchain technology to pay farmers to remove carbon from the atmosphere. And Boston-based Indigo Ag, a similar startup, announced in June that it had brought in another $300 million from investors, becoming the world’s highest-valued ag-tech firm at an estimated $3.5 billion.

But some fear these platforms offer dubious benefits, particularly because the credits generated by the farmers’ stored carbon could be bought by industrial giants that would rather offset their own pollution than eliminate it.

“It’s right to be skeptical of these companies,” said Mackenzie Feldman, a fellow at Data for Progress and lead author on its regenerative farming proposal. “It has to be the government doing this, and it can be through mechanisms that already exist, like the Conservation Stewardship Program.”&�Բ�����;

Are The Benefits Being Oversold?

But not everyone is jumping on the regenerative farming bandwagon. In May, a group of researchers at the World Resources Institute , arguing “that the practices grouped as regenerative agriculture can improve soil health and yield some valuable environmental benefits, but are unlikely to achieve large-scale emissions reductions.”

“No-till” farming—a seeding practice that requires growers to inject seeds into fields without disturbing the soil, which became popular with environmentalists several years ago—has had only limited carbon benefits because farmers inevitably plow their fields after a few years, WRI argued, pointing to a in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

And cover crops can be costly to plant and difficult to propagate in the weeks between a fall harvest and the winter months, WRI said, highlighting the findings of an . The group also cast doubt over the methods used to account for carbon added to soil.

In June, seven of the world’s leading soil scientists  to WRI’s claims, which they said drew too narrow conclusions and failed to see the potential of combining multiple regenerative practices. 

WRI researcher Tim Searchinger renewed the debate this past month with his own response to the response, accusing the critics of his critique of relying on misleading information from a 2007 United Nations report to inflate the potential for capturing carbon in soil at large scale. 

“The realistic ability to sequester additional carbon in working agricultural soils is limited,” he wrote. “Because what causes carbon to remain in soils is not well understood, further research is needed, and our views may change as new science emerges.”

Rock You In A Hurricane

Some of the latest science sheds light on one aspect of regenerative farming that didn’t factor into the recent debate at all. In July, a published in the journal Nature found that spreading rock dust on soil at maximum scale in the world’s three largest carbon emitters—China, the United States and India—could collectively remove up to 2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air per year. 

The process, known as “enhanced rock weathering,” occurs when minerals in the rock dust react with carbon in rainwater and turn into bicarbonate ions. Those ions are eventually washed into the oceans, where they’re stored indefinitely as rock minerals. 

“The more we looked into it, the more it seemed like a no-brainer,” said David Beerling, a soil researcher at the U.K.’s University of Sheffield and the lead author of the study. 

That’s a leap Thomas Vanacore took nearly four decades ago. The Vermont farmer and quarryman realized in the 1980s that mineral-rich dust from basalt and shale quarries could replenish nutrients in soil without using synthetic fertilizers, which would appeal to his state’s organic farmers. But as he studied climate change, he also concluded that his product could help pull carbon from the atmosphere. 

“You can’t do what modern farming has done for years, where you kill everything and expect to grow life,” Vanacore said, standing before a pile of black shale at a quarry in Shoreham, Vermont. For farmers looking to make the shift to regenerative practices, “rock dust is the jumpstart,” he said. 

This month, he delivered his largest shipment to date to an industrial farm supplier in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Vanacore said he expects to ship an added 245 rail cars full of rock dust over the northern border in the next 12 months. 

His customers swear by the stuff—including Gentry, who started buying bags of his brix-blend basalt when she first started her farm. Without the rock dust, Gentry doubts that her soil would be as fertile as it is today. Her embrace of pioneering techniques is reflected in the name of her plot: Early Girl Farm. 

This story originally appeared in and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.