With the current freeze on federal funding—and its severe impacts being felt across industries—philanthropists and grassroots organizers have a unique opportunity to join forces and shift the paradigm. In today’s hostile political climate, funders and organizers must defy fear-mongering, reject conformity, and shift strategies—and they must do so together. 

This is the moment to be bold and to expand infrastructure and sustainable systems for justice. We can’t afford to wait and see just how bad things get, or to hold onto philanthropic resources until the next presidency. Real change demands more than one- or two-year commitments. We need major, sustained, decades-long, trust-first investments in the people who have the experience, courage, and vision to challenge the status quo.

Indigenous Resilience Must Be Bolstered 

Indigenous communities are no strangers to long-term struggle. From the American Indian Movement and Landback efforts like the Klamath Dam removals to the recently successful Free Leonard Peltier campaign, Indigenous leaders have consistently organized with minimal resources against the most powerful and violent systems in the world. Indigenous peoples’ continued commitment to justice, rooted in multigenerational resistance, is a testament to the power of sustained movement work.

Meanwhile, the resources Indigenous organizers can access pale in comparison to well-funded efforts like Project 2025. This initiative to dismantle federal agencies and consolidate power among the ultra-wealthy is the result of decades of unwavering commitment from the far right. It is bankrolled by billionaires from just six families. 

With Trump’s reelection, the far right has gained significant momentum and is rapidly advancing its radical vision built and supported by billionaires. From page one, Project 2025 makes clear that the conservative movement has been organizing against governmental power since the 1970s, with its predecessor, the “Mandate for Leadership,” released in 1981. Utilizing this framework, the far-right movement had a goal of establishing a conservative administration in 2025 that would enact policies to fulfill the mandate’s “conservative promise.” With Trump’s re-election, they are making tremendous headway toward actualizing their vision.    

The Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations have demonstrated the effectiveness of well-resourced, long-term organizing. Philanthropic organizations that are instead committed to justice must apply similar dedication and boldness. 

Without a comparable match to the well-oiled machine the right has built, we risk further entrenching authoritarianism and systemic injustice. We’re already seeing rapid moves toward this, only two months into the second Trump administration. But with 30+ year investments, progressive movements can make real and lasting moves toward justice. 

Trust-Based Grantmaking Practices Need to Be Standard

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, many foundations pledged to adopt social justice frameworks and increase their giving. Yet when faced with the existential threat of authoritarian governance, those same foundations withdrew funding from civic engagement initiatives altogether. 

Many large private foundations are following the Trump administration’s lead and abandoning their partners by watering down their narrative strategies or even eliminating their DEI programming. This kind of cowardly reaction is the opposite of what should be happening. Foundations are some of the best positioned organizations to leverage change that would otherwise be impossible without their support. 

Foundations too often bend to the winds of change, becoming tight-fisted in times of political uncertainty. But these are the very moments when it’s critical to release resources to those who can use them in the most effective and creative ways to resist and build something different. This is when funders should make meaningful investments in people who can and will weather all storms. 

Further, foundations must move away from the transactional, risk-averse model that requires grantees to justify their existence at every turn. Trust-based grantmaking, which provides flexible, multi-year general operating support, allows movements to adapt and thrive. Funders should consider the long-term vision of grantees and support their strategies without micromanaging the path they choose to get there. 

This partnership can manifest in many ways. One way is by providing multi-year general operating grants with no reporting requirements, like the Radical Imagination Family Foundation’s six-year commitment to NDN Collective’s general operating expenses. Another way is by releasing large investments to community trusts who can lead hands-on initiatives, as the Bush Foundation did in 2020 when it established a $100 million partnership with NDN Collective and Nexus Community Partners to close the racial wealth gap.

Each organization received $50 million to launch five-year initiatives that address the systemic wealth disparities among Black and Indigenous individuals across Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. In addition, the Bush Foundation increased their regular grantmaking programs by $50 million.  

These “acts of power sharing,” as the Bush Foundation describes them, can be as simple as sharing a grantee newsletter. Or it can be increasing current commitments to have a bigger impact, as the MacArthur Foundation and a few other supporters of NDN Collective have done in recent months. 

Resourced Movements Yield Real Change 

Philanthropy’s reluctance to invest deeply in grassroots organizations often stems from risk-assessment models that fail to grasp the realities of systemic oppression. Wealth-holders, many of whom are disconnected from marginalized communities, frequently lack the lived experience to judge what is or isn’t a risk.

During the 2024 election cycle, many movement organizations experienced a funding cliff that affected their ability to proactively engage with communities and develop political education strategies. This denial of funding requests left organizers without financial support to provide critical safety and security measures for staff and community members against politically motivated attacks like doxxing attempts. 

Foundations are too often focused on investing in reactionary initiatives that lack a real community-based lens and approach, which only amplifies the “white saviorism” trope so often displayed in social justice spaces. Instead of perpetuating these hierarchical dynamics, funders should trust those closest to the work to determine how resources are best used.

The fight to free Peltier is a striking example of the power of an adequately resourced grassroots movement. Peltier’s release this year was a testament to the persistence and resilience of Indigenous organizers and their nearly five decades of unwavering advocacy. During Peltier’s most critical time of need, grassroots organizers, movement and nonprofit leaders, policymakers, and community members stepped up and came together, determined to change the conditions of one individual who had the U.S. government stacked against him. 

We are aware that our movements will remain under political attack, facing more intensity with the current regime. However, we also know that together we have the power to create the conditions needed to set new precedents. Imagine what could happen if that same multigenerational, coordinated energy is applied toward the goal of our collective liberation from an authoritarian state. 

Breaking Free From Performative Philanthropy

Providing long-term grants is an important starting point; true support requires actively engaging with grantees. Meaningful relationships are built through regular conversations, site visits, and opportunities for collaboration. Funders must also be good guests in the space of grantees, being present and respectful to listen, learn, and seek to understand. Indigenous organizing relies on engaging in meaningful ceremony, where the offerings of wisdom and consensus are received by a collective to envision a better path forward. 

NDN Collective is dedicated to building the collective power of Indigenous people while dramatically increasing philanthropic investments into Indigenous-led organizations and initiatives. In determining how to distribute funds, NDN Foundation uses specific tactics to help us fully understand our relatives and their concerns, while informing our approach as an accessible community resource.

Our staff members regularly attend city council, tribal council, and school board meetings; go door-to-door to gather data; host town halls, direct action, and safety-related trainings; and gather frontline narratives. This informs our wealth rematriation strategy, which has moved $107 million since NDN Collective’s founding in 2018. 

Organizational staff such as program officers can play key roles translating grantee stories to the board, advocating for grantee needs, and leveraging additional funding in a foundation. Now more than ever, we need program staff and leaders to advocate for their grantees, appeal to their boards, and most of all, to be reliable.

In a time of increasing authoritarianism and social fragmentation, philanthropy must rise to the occasion. Foundations must ask themselves: What would it look like to relinquish power and control over wealth that was built through the exploitation of Black and Brown people? How can we use our resources to support movements that are already working toward collective liberation—and currently managing to do so with only table scraps? 

The path forward requires financial support as well as a willingness to stand in solidarity. True commitment means embracing uncertainty, taking risks, and staying the course even when victory seems distant. 

The far-right’s dedication to sweeping change has shown the effectiveness of long-term, large-scale investment. It’s time for philanthropy to match that commitment in service of justice. The future of our communities depends on it. 

If we want to sustain life on Earth in the face of this crisis, we’re told to do everything from buying electric vehicles and taking shorter showers to avoiding plastic straws and shopping with reusable bags. The elites promote the idea that “technology will save us” with solar panels on every home, mirrors in space to reflect the sun away from Earth, and cloud seeding to make it rain during a drought. So-called tech “solutions” offer an attractive and compelling narrative, but these false promises crumble under scrutiny.

Movement Generation (MG) offers a different understanding of the climate crisis and how we should respond. In our analysis, the climate crisis is better understood as part of a larger ecological crisis, which can be described as a crisis of disconnection: We are disconnected from the land, and we are disconnected from each other.

The ecological crisis predates climate change. It did not begin with the burning of fossil fuels. It began with the trans-Saharan/transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the taking of Indigenous lands through colonialism and imperialism. The magnitude of these events and the impact they had on humanity and our ecosystems are incomprehensible.

In the span of about 1,250 years, from 650 CE to 1900 CE, more than 50 million people of African descent were taken from their homes and forced into enslavement. More than 50 million Indigenous people in the so-called Americas were killed, and more than 1 billion acres of their land were stolen. Trillions of dollars were generated and circulated almost exclusively among people of Arab and European descent.

The forced labor was used to heavily exploit and extract natural resources all over the world. Entire landscapes and ecosystems were destroyed to create colonies that grew into countries. The tremendous amount of money that was created during the period of enslavement fueled the industrial revolution. Since the burning of fossil fuels would not have been possible without slavery and genocide, then the response to this crisis requires Black liberation and ecology. A global redistribution of power and wealth through reparations and Indigenous sovereignty will move land away from the few who see it as an object to exploit and transfer it to the many who long to care for it but have been violently denied the right to do so.

In 1970, Nathan Hare, Ph.D., the first coordinator of a Black Studies program in U.S. history, published “Black Ecology,” a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Black Studies and Research. “The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance to the ultimate liberation of black people,” Hare wrote. “Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been so blatantly omitted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each other.”

One year later, Marvin Gaye released his iconic album What’s Going On, with songs that played to the theme of Black liberation and ecology, including “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” “What’s Going On,” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” In 1977, Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya to empower African women and their communities to plant trees and think more ecologically. With just a handful of examples, we can see what our ancestors have long known: Black liberation and ecology go together like soil and water. 

So what does that mean for us today? I think about Black liberation as the process of obtaining safety, sovereignty, and self-determination for people of African descent. It is inherently revolutionary and the antithesis to the myth of white supremacy. Black liberation seeks to create a world where people of African descent can reach their full potential. It seeks to restore people of African descent to their traditional greatness—part of which includes being the original stewards of the Earth, the people who have an 80,000-year-old relationship with the Earth.

The evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens—the currently agreed upon ancestor of modern humans—occurred about 150,000 years ago on the continent of Africa, likely in central Africa. Our species lived exclusively there for the next 80,000 years, before the great migration out of Africa began. Therefore, for the first 80,000 years of our existence, all humans on Earth were exclusively people of African descent.

In that time, our ancestors created the building blocks of life as we know it today. They mastered the use of fire, created complex tools, developed languages, created art, engaged in trade and resource sharing, and advanced cognitive abilities like planning and problem solving. An instrumental part of their progress was ecology, the study of home. It was an 80,000-year study of animal behavior, human growth and development, plant medicine, seafaring, cartography, astronomy, and the relationship between earth, water, air, fire, and spirit.

MG understands ecology as the study of home/earth. (Eco comes from the Greek word oikos, which simply means “home,” while -logy is a word rooted in Latin meaning “the study of.”) Home can be as big as the planet or as small as a drop of water. It all depends on the perspective of the student. Ecology invites us to study the relationships that make up home, not just the container that is home. Through relationships of home, we can explore concepts like interdependence, reciprocity, dynamic balance, growth through conflict, zero waste, and regeneration. Ecology is a modern word for an ancient practice, and I believe it is vital to the survival of our species.

One of the most important and enduring teachings from our ancestors is the idea that humans are not separate from nature. We are all connected. What you do to the land, you do to the people, and what you do to the people, you do to the land. This overarching message has been a foundational belief of humanity from our earliest days on the African continent up to the present moment.

However, in the last few hundred years of our story, the dangerous myth of white supremacy has sought to eradicate this belief. This myth makes a delusive claim that white people are innately superior to other races (especially the Black race), animals, nature, and life itself. 

Human activities that would be considered atrocious to our ancestors are now celebrated as proof of white superiority: the construction of mega dams that disrupt entire ecosystems, the discovery and burning of fossil fuels that create climate disruption, the development of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that deplete soil and pollute groundwater, and the over extraction of rare earth minerals to power the information economy. All of this is made possible by the myth of white supremacy and its evil economic offspring, the extractive economy (more broadly referred to as capitalism).

If we are going to create a sustainable future with life-affirming, regenerative economies, then we must fight for global reparations—not only cash payments but also an opportunity to repair our relationships with the land and with one another. We must earnestly study our planet and develop responses to the crisis that are rooted in regeneration, care, and cooperation with the purpose of creating ecological and social well-being. Traveling the path of Black liberation and ecology will increase our chance to survive as a species in the face of catastrophic changes to our ecosystem that have just begun.

It seems as though every month there is news of extreme weather patterns that are often deadly and directly linked to climate change. In February 2025, 14 people died when rivers in Kentucky and the Ohio Valley flooded. One month earlier, multiple deadly fires broke out across Southern California, destroying thousands of homes and killing 24 people. 

Could New York and Vermont’s plans to fine fossil fuel companies work to curb the untenable costs of climate catastrophe?

Blair Horner, executive director of the New York Public Interest Group, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the idea of a climate superfund and how it can be replicated nationwide.

She’s set up benches and toys outside for Chago and his friends to play with, strung lights over the trailer the way she used to over her front door, and hung up a smiling sun ornament that looks like the one they lost in the flooding that devastated parts of southeastern San Diego on Jan. 22, 2024. 

But lately Chago has been asking Calix a question that breaks her heart, one that she doesn’t know the answer to: Will we ever live in an apartment again?

“I basically told him, ‘We’re not going to be able to move soon,’” Calix said, sitting outside her trailer on a recent evening. “How do I explain the current housing market to an 8-year-old?”

Calix and Chago are among approximately 5,000 San Diego–area residents impacted by the historic downpour last January that led to dramatic flooding in parts of the city and county, with particularly severe damage in Southcrest and Shelltown. The mother and son were among hundreds of people who suffered severe property damage and displacement. Five people died.

While some flood survivors have been able to return home, many others are still struggling to recover, rebuild their homes, or find new places to live. Some survivors, particularly renters like Calix, have been forced to restart life elsewhere, with little hope of returning to their old communities.

Extreme flooding events, even in regions typically associated with dry weather like Southern California, are becoming more common as the climate warms. Climate change, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels, is changing weather patterns, leading to heavier and more dangerous downpours that can overwhelm infrastructure designed for more predictable times. 

But Calix and others impacted by the disaster insist there is another force that exacerbated the flooding, one that also led to what many see as a disjointed and inadequate disaster response: decades of government neglect and indifference toward San Diego’s lower-income neighborhoods.

These neighborhoods, located primarily in southeastern San Diego where much of the flooding happened, are among the most economically stressed and environmentally burdened areas in the region. They were also historically redlined—a racist, government-sponsored practice that made it difficult for people in those neighborhoods to get financial services such as mortgages and insurance, and concentrated low-income and people of color in flood-prone areas.

Residents say the legacy of discrimination continues to this day through lack of city investment in flood-control infrastructure and inadequate disaster planning and support for those affected. The result is even greater hardship and precarity for people and communities already on the edge. The situation is also a microcosm of the inequitable distribution of risks from climate change, and an example of the challenges communities and governments must grapple with as floods and other weather-related disasters become more frequent.

“What happened on that day was a planning disaster,” says Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego, a community organization whose offices in Barrio Logan were damaged in the flood. “That climate event happened throughout the county, but where was it felt, it was felt in the places where the city had failed to modernize and update its infrastructure.” 

Alliance San Diego is among approximately 700 people and organizations now suing the city, alleging it failed to maintain stormwater infrastructure, and instead prioritized investments in wealthier communities. They point to a 2020 city report that said segments of Chollas Creek, which flooded during the storm, had not been maintained and had the potential to cause property damage. The lawsuit also notes the city’s admission of a severe lack of funding to maintain stormwater infrastructure. Last year, the city estimated it needed about $9 billion in infrastructure upgrades.  

Nicole Darling, director of communications for the city, said it does not comment on pending litigation. But she said the city dispatched more than 300 staff members to clean out storm drains and inlets before the rainstorm, including critical drains in the Chollas Creek area. One segment, close to Beta Street in Southcrest, which suffered severe damage, was scheduled for upcoming debris removal at the time the storm happened, she said in an email. 

Darling emphasized that the storm was historic and its impact unpredictable. “This was an unprecedented storm,” she said. “It was the fourth wettest day in history. We’ve never seen this level of flooding before.”

Guerrero and others participating in the lawsuit said they want the city to compensate survivors for their losses and do more to prevent the Chollas Creek stormwater channel from flooding. Some community organizers and flood survivors are demanding other changes as well. 

Clariza Marin, chief financial officer for the Harvey Family Foundation, a community organization that has been on the front lines of helping those affected, said the response on the ground has been chaotic. She said local authorities need to work in collaboration with residents to create a disaster preparedness plan that reflects what community members need, so they can be better prepared for future disasters.

She and other residents interviewed said they also want the city and county to provide more support to help the many survivors, both homeowners and former renters, who either didn’t receive aid or didn’t get enough to help them rebuild their lives. This would include assisting people like Calix who were displaced from the floods but didn’t benefit from county and city financial aid to help them find housing. “All of our resiliency planning should be community driven,” Marin says. “It shouldn’t be about scrambling to tell (residents) what I can do for you, what you’re going to have to accept.”

Darling pointed to various efforts by the city to support flood survivors, including money for temporary lodging and help for small businesses. She said city officials have been attending public meetings and listening to community feedback since the disaster. She added that the city has also been distributing pamphlets to residents living in floodplain areas about how to prepare for potential flooding in the future.  

Neglected Communities

Calix, who is part African American, liked the multicultural community in the area around Beta Street in Southcrest where she and Chago settled in 2020. The sounds and smells were familiar. She felt comfortable. She liked the cost of rent even more—$1,500 for two bedrooms, the same as she’d paid for a one-bedroom apartment in the northern, more expensive part of the city.

About 80 years ago, the federal government categorized large swaths of southeastern San Diego, such as Southcrest, as “hazardous,” declaring that the properties there were “high risk” for defaulting on loans largely because of the people who lived there: laborers, immigrants, and people of color.

Although redlining has since been outlawed, its impact continues to this day, with people in historically redlined communities experiencing higher rates of poverty and ill health than those in other non-redlined areas. Southcrest, Shelltown, and other neighborhoods that suffered flood damage, including Logan Heights and Barrio Logan, have disproportionately higher rates of residents living in poverty compared to other parts of the city. These residents are also exposed to other negative factors that can impact their health, such as pollution from diesel fumes, hazardous waste sites, and lead from housing, according to California’s Environmental Protection Agency.   

It’s these types of economically and environmentally stressed locations that climate scientists say are most vulnerable to flooding, and where populations have the hardest time recovering from natural disasters. People of color and those living in mobile homes, in particular, are disproportionately exposed to flooding, research shows. And these same populations as well as low-income people in general, have the most difficulty accessing federal flood disaster assistance.

“We know that risks of climate change are absolutely higher in communities of concern or communities that are historically marginalized,” says Darbi Berry, director of climate and environmental programs at the University of San Diego’s Nonprofit Institute and director of the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative.

But southeastern San Diego is also a haven for people priced out from more affluent areas of the city. Some neighborhoods are full of paid-off homes where families have lived for generations. Low-wage workers and immigrants are also drawn here, looking for an affordable place to rent in a city where the cost of housing seems to rise by the day. 

A Shocking Loss

Calix’s son, Chago, turned 8 the day the flood destroyed their rental home. The day started out normal enough. Calix dropped her son off at school in Point Loma, resisting Chago’s pleas to let him stay home for his birthday. It was drizzling, but she thought nothing of it. She promised to deliver some treats for him and his classmates later in the day and drove to a nearby party supply store.

But during her drive, normality ended. It started raining intensely. At an intersection, Calix noticed a car stuck in what looked like floodwater. By the time she got to the party supply store, she’d passed numerous other flooded streets and stranded cars. The store was closed and the parking lot flooded. Her mind leapt to the rental apartment she and Chago shared in Southcrest, 10 miles south. “Was it OK?” she wondered. “Were my neighbors OK?”

It wasn’t until five hours later, after the floodwaters receded, that Calix was able to return to Southcrest and find out. She encountered devastation: streets and homes caked in black sludge, cars piled on top of each other, dead animals, shellshocked neighbors—some of whom had narrowly escaped drowning. Her apartment looked like the inside of a muddy blender. Her and Chago’s furniture, clothes, and other possessions were destroyed, including her father’s ashes and recently opened Christmas presents.

“To see all that devastation at once, it was very desperate,” says Calix, who spent the next several days trying to salvage what she could: a couple of bikes, a pet snake. “There was probably more stuff I could have saved off the walls, things up in cabinets, but I had to just walk away. I couldn’t do it anymore. And neither could my kid.”

Renters in Peril 

Some of the people who suffer the most in the wake of flooding and other natural disasters are renters—a population that accounts for one-third of U.S. households. Renters tend to have less wealth than homeowners, are less likely to have insurance to recoup lost belongings or the costs associated with displacement, and also receive less help from the government after disasters. To add insult to injury, research shows that rents for the lowest-income households rise significantly after floods. 

In other words, the people with the fewest financial resources to weather losses from a natural disaster get the least help to recover, and then end up paying even more for housing if they’re lucky enough to find another place to live. In California, and in San Diego especially—where more than one in three households already don’t make enough to meet their basic needs, and where the average rent is more than $3,000 a month—losses and displacement from a flood can result in a compounding cycle of long-term financial pain and housing insecurity. 

That’s the predicament Calix found herself in after the flooding. Even though she received $5,000 in emergency assistance from FEMA, that wasn’t enough to secure another apartment rental that she could afford on her salary as a massage therapist, she said. She was also in debt from having to replace clothes, toys and everyday items she lost in the flood, as well as extra gas and food while living in the hotels. 

“It’s overwhelming … ” Calix says. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

The county and city of San Diego, with support from other local cities and community organizations as well as the federal government, have tried to mitigate the challenges facing displaced flood survivors. The county allocated $33.7 million to recovery efforts, including to help provide food, emergency lodging, fund home and infrastructure repairs, and help residents secure federal disaster aid.

Some of this funding went to a program that provided temporary accommodation for people in hotels after the flooding, and housed more than 2,200 people, or nearly 900 households, at its peak. That program ended in June. With about $7 million in support from the county and city, the San Diego Housing Commission then provided up to $15,000 in assistance to people still in emergency lodging near the end of the program to help them pay for rent, security deposits, and other expenses to relocate. 

But there have been problems. Numerous participants in the temporary lodging program have complained they were housed in unsafe or unsanitary hotels and evicted or threatened with eviction because of payment delays from the contractor hired to run the program. Many people who needed accommodation didn’t even get the help because they didn’t know about the program, had trouble accessing it, or were afraid to seek help because of their immigration status, says Clariza Marin, CFO of the Harvey Family Foundation. Others left before they were ready because of conflicting information from FEMA workers that led them to believe staying in the hotels would jeopardize their federal aid money, Marin and Calix said.

The housing commission also limited who could apply for the financial assistance to those still in the program on May 23—a date by which many had left. That meant just 313 families initially received aid. The commission recently expanded eligibility to another 194 families who had applied but left the hotels earlier, offering them up to $5,500. But that doesn’t cover all of the approximately 900 families that were in the program at its peak. 

Calix is one of the flood survivors and former renters who, so far, has not qualified for financial help from the housing commission. She decided to leave the program after three months because at the last hotel she stayed at, she felt unsafe. She was also hearing about other people getting evicted and got nervous that she and Chago would be next. She never applied for aid because she assumed she wouldn’t qualify. Now she’s angry that she, and many of her neighbors, have been left out. 

“We’re all in a hole, and we’re trying to get out and they just keep, you know, letting us fall deeper,” she says. “To be told you get no help and other people do, it is very frustrating.”

Low-Income Homeowners Suffer Too

The disaster has been devastating for homeowners too. Many are low income and elderly and didn’t have any or enough flood insurance. Several of those who received money from FEMA said it wasn’t enough to cover the cost of the damage. According to Marin, some residents have been forced to take out loans, pay for repairs using credit cards, or live in flood-damaged moldy homes. Others have given up, abandoning or selling their residences to out-of-town buyers, she said.

Juan Chavez, a retired truck driver, has been trying to help his mother-in-law, 79, hold on to the Beta Street home she lived in for 30 years before the flood forced her to move in with him and his wife. She uses a wheelchair and has dementia. Although the home had some flood insurance, the payout barely covered the cost of basic cleanup, he said. Chavez estimates he and his wife, a secretary, will have to cobble together $100,000 of their own money to make the home livable again. 

Across the street, Harold Roberts, 74, is still trying to get his home fixed after it was flooded with several feet of water. A caregiver for the elderly, he said he couldn’t afford the $6,000 a year he would have needed for flood insurance on his home, and the FEMA money he received only partially covered the damage. He lost his car and truck in the flood and spent six months at a motel in Chula Vista paid for by the county. Now he’s among dozens of his neighbors receiving assistance from the Harvey Family Foundation to restore their homes.

“A lot of families, for a situation that they didn’t cause, they’re forced to go into debt in order to save what little they do have,” says Armon Harvey, the foundation’s CEO. “They lost cars, they lost everything, and now they have to dig into their own pockets, into their savings, just to save their homes.”

Flood recovery is expensive. The average annual cost of flooding in the U.S. is more than $32 billion and rising. According to a recent study featured in the Fifth National Climate Assessment, California lost an average of $1.7 billion annually to floods as of 2020. That’s expected to rise to almost $2 billion by 2050. Yet federal disaster assistance typically doesn’t provide enough support to the people who need it the most, research shows. 

A Last Resort

After several weeks in the hotel program, Calix learned that her grandfather was selling an old trailer. He offered to give it to her, if she paid for repairs and moving it. Calix saw it as her ticket out of the hotel program, and a chance at some kind of stability for herself and her son. She racked up more debts on her credit cards to pay for new tires, towing, and a parking spot at a local RV park. 

Calix now pays about $1,600 a month for her spot at the RV park. She and Chago have to move to a different park every six months because stays are time limited. She said she’s grateful to have a place to live, but it feels temporary. She’s still in debt because of the disaster, and her credit score has suffered. If she had received $15,000 from the Housing Commission like some of the other survivors, she could have paid off her debt and stabilized her financial situation enough to get an apartment, she said. 

“It would have made a huge difference,” she says. “We would be a lot further along. I’m basically falling behind and my stability is hanging on by a thread, to be honest, and that’s the truth of it. We really needed that help, and we’re not the only ones.” 

The Harvey Family Foundation has been trying to stem the exodus of low-income renters and homeowners from the flood-struck areas. Over the past year, they’ve received about $700,000 in city and county funds and raised another $500,000 in philanthropic support to help repair homes in Southcrest, Shelltown, and neighboring communities.

So far they’ve completed 73 home repairs with 14 more in the pipeline. These include rentals, such as those owned by Tony Tricarico, 77, who before the flood rented 11 small apartments on his Beta Street property for between $1,200 and $1,400 a month. 

The flood destroyed Tricarico’s home and all the rental units on the property. He had no flood insurance and didn’t qualify for FEMA aid. He was ready to give up and sell, he said. But the Harvey Family Foundation offered to help him restore the units if he didn’t raise the rents and offered them back to the displaced families. He agreed. So far, three units are fixed and rented, another three will be completed soon. At least one of the families is living in a trailer in a nearby alleyway waiting to return, he said. 

“I wanted to help” the renters, Tricarico says. “I’ve known them 20 years, I’ve watched their children grow up.” 

Much more funding is needed to help with repairs, Marin said. Even now she’s receiving calls from distressed homeowners who have run out of insurance or FEMA money, or are newly discovering mold or other problems in their homes caused by the floods, she said. 

Investments in infrastructure to prevent future flooding and make San Diego’s most vulnerable communities more resilient to the effects of climate change are vital, Berry with UC San Diego said. Infrastructure projects should include green, nature-based solutions that remove concrete and create more spaces such as parks where excess water can be absorbed into the soil, she added. It’s also important that officials take care to avoid “green gentrification” that drives up housing costs and displaces low-income residents, she said.

A state initiative called the Transformative Climate Communities program is working to address this challenge by funding community-led development and infrastructure projects designed to simultaneously improve climate resiliency and bring economic benefits to California’s most disadvantaged communities. These include investments in affordable housing, bike lanes and walking paths, public transportation, and community gardens. 

Fresno is one community that has successfully used this funding through its Transform Fresno initiative, Berry said. More recently, the San Diego Foundation and Environmental Health Coalition also received the funds to develop climate- and community-resilience projects in San Diego’s central historic barrios.

The dilemma is that more investment is needed and San Diego taxpayers are reluctant to fund infrastructure projects, Berry said. Measure E, which would have raised the city’s sales tax by 1 percent and generated up to $400 million in additional general-fund revenue, including for infrastructure, was narrowly defeated in November.

She said she’s hopeful that the passage of state Proposition 4, a $10 billion bond to help California pay for efforts to address the impacts of climate change, including flood control and sea-level-rise protections, will further improve climate resiliency in San Diego and elsewhere. But it won’t be enough, she said. 

“We can’t keep waiting for disasters (in order) to respond,” she said. “We need to be proactive and not reactive, because we’re well aware that the reactive systems that we have are not sufficient … If we aren’t building resilience, it’s not going to get easier to respond” when disasters happen.

Back at the RV park in north San Diego, Calix is trying to keep herself and Chago focused on the positive. But she, like many other flood survivors, is worried about the next disaster. Worried that the city still hasn’t fixed the problems with its infrastructure. Worried that the local government has no plan in place to better help future disaster victims.

But, for her son, she takes a deep breath and tries to set those worries aside.

“At least we have a place to live,” she tells Chago. “At least we’re not living in a car or sleeping on friend’s couches,” like some of the other people they know.  

At least they have each other. At least they survived. 

Reporter Lauren DeLaunay Miller contributed to this story. This story is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative. This story originally appeared in California Health Report.

Penniman, who is the author of the acclaimed book Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, is one of 12 abolitionists featured in the new book Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible, written by YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar. Kolhatkar’s conversation with the food justice activist, featured on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali, focuses on restoring people’s deep connections to land and growing our own food. 

Penniman asks the question: What if we decarcerated our people and our food simultaneously, relying on the life-giving possibilities of land stewardship while rejecting the death-making institutions of policing and imprisonment?

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection.

Eketi arrived at The Green House on Feb. 17, two weeks late for her residency. Harmattan was wearing off, and everywhere was becoming hot again. It was the year 2100, and Eketi was returning to Lagos after a short, unsuccessful career as an environmental journalist in Uyo. She had not intended to be late. In fact, she had never imagined she would arrive late at anything she spent the last three years dreaming and praying and worrying about. But when the acceptance message popped on her smart pad, she had found it difficult to muster enough enthusiasm to pack her bags and leave her failures in Uyo behind. Said failures had wrapped themselves around her neck and simply refused to let go. They took her sleep, tightened her chest, and manifested themselves as multiple voices in her head telling her things she could no longer refute, because she was no longer certain they were lies.

Her career had not been going as planned, but she didn’t think she would be fired. She had it planned out in her head: Put up with her micromanaging editor for two years, lead the reporting on a big story or two, get enough experience and credibility to eventually apply for a long-form reporting grant. But her story on Big Oil divestment had gone south. Her competence called into question; words were exchanged. Heavy words, words that still caused acute pain even in recollection. After she was given her sack letter, a day before the acceptance message popped on her smart pad, her editor had given her the password to access Soji, his AI unemployment therapist. “A lot of our former staff have found it useful,” he had said, patting her shoulder. Shame swelled in Eketi’s chest afresh. She shook her head, willing herself to move on. 

Eketi took in the green duplex she would be calling home for the next three and half months, a hideout for all six residents of the Green Nigeria Youths Fellowship. Flowers grew on top the short fence and crawling plants were all over the building like a robe. An electric keke glided past as she swiped her card on the gate’s sensor. It took her three attempts to do it right. Her hands were shaking and her back ached terribly. She had entered the wrong train twice on her way here. She grew up in this city and had practically spent most of her adolescence here, but it still managed to elude her every time. She felt stupid. But why should she? Lagos was constantly changing—the government was always changing something. Closing off a street, uprooting buildings, erecting mini dams, hydrokinetic plants, artificial carbon trees … it was new every time. If it weren’t, “getting lost” would not be listed as a trendy activity on Lagos Vox. 

She stepped into the grass-carpeted compound, a battered box made of recycled car tires in each hand. Tucked in a discreet corner of the compound almost out of her eyes’ view were compost bins, categorized waste baskets, and a biodigester system powered by human waste. She stood still for a while in the eerily quiet compound, a sharp contrast from the stories her great-grandmother used to tell her about a Lagos that was noisy, congested, and a huge threat to mental well-being. Every time she told those stories, Eketi wondered what it must have been like to live in that bustling city rife with tribal tensions and famous for being a land of opportunities. Lagos was no longer that place. After going underwater around the year 2050, people took their energies and opportunities elsewhere. Now, it was a slow city mildly abuzz with 10 million people, quiet enough to host a residency. 

Eketi entered the house without finesse—one box had scraped her knee, and her palm was sore from trying to hold up the other one. The living room was a tidy but startling neon green. Minimally furnished with simple white sofas and a center table carved in the shape of the Nigerian flag, the room boasted a few real plants. 

“Welcome to The Green House, Eketi Edo,” the smart house system spoke. “Take the stairs to your left, and you’ll find your room on your right.”

“Great.” Eketi shrugged. There was no human to receive her, and she was glad she would not be seen in her current hideous state. She climbed the stairs and found the room with her name across the door. 

A quick swipe in one attempt and this time, there was no green. Just white. A lot of white. A small bed. A desk. A closet. A mini fridge. A bathroom. The plan was to put away her things, take a bath, rummage through her boxes for something to snack on, but she collapsed on the bed and fell into a deep sleep. She woke hours later to cackling laughter and several voices talking over themselves. Someone was knocking playfully and supplementing the effort by saying “ko-ko-ko.”

Eketi opened the door to a small group with measuring eyes. Her fellow residents. She recognized them from their headshots on the Fellowship’s website. She opened wider to let them in.

“If it isn’t the late resident!” Tracing gruff voice to face, she saw it was Chimezuo. Ecocide lawyer.

“The digital house assistant said you had arrived,” a gentler voice said. “Are you one of those ‘arrive late in style people’?” The voice belonged to Bukky. Eco-anxiety researcher who always overshared on social media. She was wearing a shirt that said “Stop Deep Sea Mining.” 

Eketi managed a tired smile. She suddenly felt shy.

“But why are you late, sef?” Chimezuo again.

“Let her breathe, abeg,” a bespectacled person spoke from behind Bukky. Boma. Climate justice campaigner and carbon credits analyst.

“And who is stopping her from breathing?” Chimezuo said almost immediately.

“Sorry we were not here to welcome you. We went for an afrosoul concert.” It was Bukky again.

Eketi started to worry immediately that she did not fit into the group, that she did not look as well put-together as they did. That as the days went by, they would find her wanting, and she would be ousted as a fraud. She watched the trio continue to talk all over themselves, feeling an intense wave of gratitude they gave her no chance to speak. “If you keep quiet, nobody will know you’re stupid,” her mother used to say every time she failed the random Bible quiz in church. She was keeping quiet now. 

Another girl, Ajaratou—circular economy specialist—was peering into her closet, peeping into her bathroom. “Your room is better than mine,” she said, mostly to herself. Someone else was standing at the door, in but mostly out. Thick, short locs dangled across his face and the buttons on his white linen shirt were undone, an inner black tee exposed. He had a bag of plantain chips clasped in both hands. He gave Eketi a reluctant smile. She smiled back. He nodded and retreated quietly. Esosa. Documentary filmmaker.

Life at The Green House was routine. Eating was a collective activity; the cook was always overeager and the food too much. The morning always started with Bukky talking about how committed she was to exercise, something a lot of people couldn’t do because “if it were easy, everyone would do it.” There was a group session every morning after breakfast to discuss progress on personal projects. After, the group spent the day indoors or outdoors working on their projects individually. Socializing was left for nighttime and weekends.

Today, breakfast was moi moi and akamu, and it was Eketi’s turn to discuss her project. This past week, she had listened to everyone talk about their projects with certainty and a kind of pride she knew she’d never be able to muster for her own work. She was apprehensive. The discussion was like a bloodbath. They’d let her go last so she could listen to everyone talk about their work and be enthused about the joint publication they’d have to produce at the end of the residency. The publication would be a statement of their collective vision for a sustainable Nigeria. But Eketi was still not enthused. About the publication, maybe, but the group discussion, no. Yesterday, Boma had talked about his project involving the degrowth movement and the dismantling of the prevailing capitalist economic model, and Chimezuo had called it a “a little too idealistic.” 

“So was your work at one time,” Boma returned.

“To be fair, capitalism has delivered climate action,” Ajaratou put in. “Nigeria went green because the rich wouldn’t have thrived any other way.” 

“I’m not sure you even understand what your work is about,” Boma said. 

Eketi had spent a significant chunk of the night rehearsing, and she found it laughable. This project got her into the fellowship. A jury had read and believed it was residency-worthy. Why was she beginning to think otherwise? Her former boss used to call her stories “silly, little ideas.” He would call a senior journalist and say, “Come and hear the story Eketi wants us to cover o.” And everyone would gather, and her editor would insist she shared the idea “for constructive feedback.” Foolishly, she would share, and the feedback would destroy so violently she would run to the toilet to vomit spit like a pregnant woman.

There was spit in her mouth now. They were all seated around a table, the smell of breakfast still in the air. Chimezuo looked like he couldn’t wait to get back to his room. Bukky was giggling with Boma, and Ajaratou was writing something on a sticky note. Esosa looked like he was not in the room. His eyes were shifty and distant, and his fingers trembled slightly. 

She swallowed the pool of spit in her mouth and told them about her intention to document the reintroduction of Indigenous knowledge and ways of living into Nigeria’s modern realities.

“On the train on my way here, I overheard an old man remark about how civilized we are now. But isn’t it interesting that our celebrated modernity is about reclaiming the things we once thought primitive? You know, taking once-rejected traditional wisdom and innovating with it.”

Nobody said anything. She swallowed again.

“You see, we’ve been creating the new by reconnecting with the old. Progress has not been a distinct divide. It’s been a circle.” She was gesticulating now, some nervousness beginning to creep in. “Think about the many things we can begin to reimagine simply by learning more about the past.” She told them about the photos she had taken of modern houses with flat roofs, how they mimicked the ways the Yorubas used to build their houses. And the reintroduction of thatch barriers and the obi of the Igbos. “Even the prominence of protected areas—seas, forests—can be traced back to the precolonial ways of having sacred forests and rivers, and fishing and hunting and planting practices that allowed for the regeneration of biodiversity.”

“Hmm,” Bukky said.

“So, what’s the overall intention?” Boma asked. “Getting everyone to focus on the past for the sake of the future?”

“Or another rant about colonialism?” Chimezuo jumped in. He laughed and looked around as if to confirm if others were enjoying his joke as much as he clearly was. “You guys na, it’s the 22nd century!”

“She didn’t mention colonialism,” Ajaratou quipped. “I like the idea sha.”

“So, how will you go about this ‘reconnection’?” Boma does the quote with his fingers.

“I think the more important question is how this changes anything really,” Bukky said.

Eketi began to feel like she was in a Rapid Fire Questions episode on TV. They had begun to talk over themselves again. Esosa remained quiet. She held his eyes for a while, and whatever she saw in there made her feel deeply pitied.

“Can we just stick to the discussion format?” Eketi asked, wringing her fingers together.

She quickly told them what she had done so far, what she aimed to do this week, and how she would like to approach it for their joint publication. Their responses were a few noncommittal grunts and an “alright” here and there. Everyone left as soon as she was done. She remained seated, with the returned voice of her mother telling her to have stayed quiet. 

Eketi was avoiding everyone, so she came down after dinner was over. She hurried to the kitchen to make some eggs she would eat with a steaming cup of Milo. She found Esosa there, eating cookies and energetically stirring something in a wok. His body stiffened when he saw her, but he said nothing to her. She went about mixing her eggs. 

The omelette was a little too burnt and most of the spices had concentrated on one side, but she pretended to eat it with relish. Esosa was done with whatever he was making in the wok. It looked like some kind of Korean stir-fry. He transferred it to a bowl with a lid, made some fresh orange juice, and started to fry some yams. 

“Hungry much?” Eketi said, a feeble attempt at conversation. 

He shrugged and tucked a stray loc behind his ear. 

She mentally kicked herself for bothering. His yams were almost ready, and she was on her second cup of Milo. The silence had grown awkward between them. She was washing the dishes she used when he finally spoke. 

“I like your project,” he said, turning to her.

Eketi released a breath she did not know she had been holding. “Thank you.”

He nodded. He placed his food in a woven basket and covered it with a cloth. 

“Taking that to your room?” They were not supposed to eat in the rooms.

He raised one thick brow. “Going to report me?”

She shook her head. He walked away. 

Ajaratou came into the kitchen then. She sneered after him. “That one,” she said pointing with her lips, “that one is a troubled soul.” 

“How?” 

“You did not hear it from me. Better leave him alone.”

“I’m not holding him.” Eketi was feeling defensive, and she hated it. 

“Indeed.”

Eketi spent the remainder of the night wondering why Ajaratou said Esosa was a troubled soul and why, without any context, she was inclined to agree, what with him always appearing perpetually fatigued. On occasion, Esosa was calm only to become so fidgety like he wanted to jump out of his skin the very next minute. His nonchalance at morning meetings also felt rehearsed, his performance hanging on by a thread.

His room was right next to hers, so eavesdropping became another routine for Eketi. Every night, she would press her ear against the wall to learn more about him. Most times, there was talking. A lot of talking he didn’t seem quite capable of in person. Sometimes, she heard “fuck!”, hiccups, gasping, crying? It sounded like crying. During the day, she would watch him and try to make sense of whatever she thought happened at night. Eketi began to worry that she had become too invested in someone else’s life. She brought this up with her e-therapist, who suggested that it might be because she didn’t have the courage to face her own life.

Today, there was a group trip to the Lekki Conservation Centre. They were on a solar-powered train weaving its way leisurely through the city. Eketi was seated next to Esosa, who was busy taking photos. His body was hanging out the train, and it was different to see him so immersed, so involved with something. 

She peered out the window to try catching the sights that had him so engaged. The train was currently at Yaba, a busy market area that still managed to be a booming tech hub. Whatever was left of the Lagos spirit resided mostly in Yaba, with its colorful shops, noisy traders, and vibrant young population. There was a signpost announcing an altruistic vacation to Delta State that involved mangrove planting in the creeks. Someone had written on a wall just beside the governor’s e-poster that they fixed solar panels. A man was getting into a fight with another man for using his keke to charge his own. 

Eketi texted her friend about the keke fight, which didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Why is it that I never ever see any serious fights in this Lagos?

Esosa was done taking pictures and had resumed his quiet self on his seat. There was a loud “Hallelujah somebody!” on the train.  A short, stout woman began preaching about Jesus coming soon. “Brethren, tomorrow may be too late,” she shouted at the top of her voice.

When her sermon was over, she asked for donations to support the minister of God. When she retook her seat, a middle-aged man began to walk around, advertising his decomposable pads and diapers made from banana stems.

“Sure you don’t want pads?” Esosa asked, turning to her. He was all charm, a lopsided smile on his face.

Shocked that he was starting a conversation voluntarily, she blubbered a bit. “No. I use discs.”

“My sister uses discs too.” He was nodding. He looked out the window again. “Do you know this place?” 

The train was gliding by the Third Mainland Bridge.

“Yes. Makoko. Home of asoebi.”

He shook his head. “It used to be a fishing community. You know, canoes. Stilt houses. Clinics on water. Stuff like that.”

“Did my undergraduate thesis on Makoko, and I never came across that information.”

He shrugged. “Why do you think that is?”

“Cos you made it up?” Eketi said carefully.

He laughed. It was a titillating sound, and she was hearing it for the first time. “For God’s sake, Eketi!” 

She laughed too. He said her name perfectly, as someone who was from her village would. “A little odd you’re the only one with this information, no?”

He laughed again. “My great-grandparents used to live there,” he said when he had recovered from his laughter.

“Oh.”

“I think it’s easier to control what people know and what they care about with the kind of technologies we have now.” 

“True.”

“States are partnering with millionaires to keep everyone obedient and functional.”

“You sure you’re not a conspiracy theorist?”

He smiled. “See? I can’t even convince someone who cares about history.”

Eketi felt chastised. “But—”

“What if I told you Bayelsa went through a genocide fueled by climate inaction?”

Eketi said nothing. They sat in silence for a while before he spoke again. 

“There is a lot of stuff we don’t know, but maybe it’s good we don’t know. Because if we know,” he cleared his throat, “can we forgive it? Can we fix it? Can we look beyond it?”

“I guess not.”

He shrugged. 

The Lekki Conservation Centre was a 78-hectare nature reserve. Established in 1990, it was a biodiversity hotspot home to the rich flora and fauna of the Lekki peninsula. It also housed an urban agroecology farm where domestic animal rearing had been seamlessly integrated with mixed cropping agriculture and the preservation of wild animal species. The Centre was proof that humans could thrive alongside nature without separation, a binary way of thinking that dominated environmental discourse in the 21st century. 

The agroecology farm was impressive. They were shown some native endangered seeds from a time when the world was obsessed with genetic modification, and lab-grown seeds thrived at the expense of native seeds. The group also saw a demonstration of farmers using the black ant as a biological pesticide, an idea borrowed from Indigenous farming practices in precolonial Africa.

“This farm is our past meeting the future,” the head farmer said proudly. 

“See?” Esosa said, tapping her shoulder from behind. “You should believe more in your ideas.”

Warmth flooded her cheeks. The next day, Eketi had to talk about her project, and she felt more confident. She started by talking about the agroecology farm and how it leaned into her ideas. “So, you see,” she said looking around the table, forcing herself to meet everyone’s eyes, “the idea is not so far-fetched when you actually open your mind to it.”

It was the third month of the residency, and Esosa did not show up to the morning meetings four times in a row. Eketi was worried—she had been pressing her ears to the wall at every chance—but the rest of the cohort thought he was acting up.

“But do you think he’s inside and not coming out of his room?” Bukky asked with a glance at the stairs. “I think he’s out.”

“He’s in,” Boma added. “The assistant didn’t say otherwise.”

“But what did he say was wrong with him?” Bukky asked, turning to her.

All eyes were on Eketi. She shrunk. “We are not that close.”

“Told you he was trouble,” Ajaratou murmured in a singsong voice. 

“He’s a strange one, I admit,” Bukky said. “But I envy him a bit. Eats a lot but doesn’t get fat. My dream metabolism!”

“As in! If I could do that, there’s nothing I won’t eat in this world,” Ajaratou said. “Nobody will be able to separate me and food.”

“I don’t think anyone can separate you and food right now,” Boma put in. 

Chimezuo laughed. “There’s a circular economy in her stomach.”

“Get out!” Ajaratou was laughing too. 

They moved on to other topics, passing a tray of baba dudu around them. 

“We should let the organizers know we think something is wrong with him,” Eketi said, interrupting. 

“What if,” Ajaratou asked, “he hacked the assistant and is out having fun, and you ruin it for him by snitching?” 

“He’s not out having a fun time.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“I thought you didn’t know him so well,” Boma said.

Eketi shrunk even further.

“But hacking? Isn’t that far-fetched?” It was Chimezuo. 

“He used to be a badass emojineer and tech bro,” Bukky said. “We went to the same school.”

Emojineers were linguistic virtuosos and masters of digital expression in mainstream emoji communication. This new information made Eketi feel like she didn’t know him at all. Yes, he said a few nice things, and she liked him a tiny little bit, but how did she imagine eavesdropping could reveal a person fully? 

That night, the rest of the cohort went for a live theater rendition of the EndSARS protest, but she stayed behind and glued herself to the wall against her better judgement. She was waiting for any sound of life. She decided to do what no one had tried: knocking on his door. 

She knocked a few times and for a few minutes. She said her name and said she was just checking in. She was returning to her room when she heard the door open.

Esosa’s room was dimly lit and in utter disarray. In the semi-darkness, she could see empty bags of chips, a stack of pizza cartons, and half-finished tubs of ice cream. His mini fridge was open and the smell of alcohol hung in the air.

“Esosa?”

Eketi found him in the bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl, emptying his stomach. He finished, rinsed his mouth in the sink and collapsed gently on the floor. She sat beside him. His skin was damp with sweat, and he smelled like he hadn’t showered in days.

“Esosa—”

He shook his head and lurched towards the toilet. He vomited some more and returned to the floor. He looked frail, breakable. His eyes were the most bloodshot eyes Eketi had ever seen.

“I have an eating disorder,” he said, his voice hoarse from misuse. After a long stretch of silence, he added, “Bulimia.”

Eketi nodded. 

“Don’t tell the others.”

“I won’t.”

“Increase lights,” she said to the assistant. Bright lights came on and he winced, his eyes struggling to adjust.

In the brighter room, Eketi sighted some laxative pills and a big bottle of agbo, traditional Yoruba medicine used for a variety of ailments, including stomach troubles.

She fetched him water in a glass.

“Don’t go,” he said when she neared the door. 

“I’m only going to bring a broom.”

“You don’t have to.”

She ignored him and returned with the broom. He watched her tidy the room in silence, sniffing and heaving intermittently. With the room tidy, she rummaged through his wardrobe for some clean clothes. He had only a few. She hung them in the bathroom.

“Go and shower. I’ll wait out here,” she said, helping him to his feet.

He began to cry but went into the bathroom. While he was showering, Eketi made his bed and had a quick trip to her room for some candles. She lit them and their smell began to waft around the room. 

Esosa emerged in clean clothes. Shadows of the candle flame danced around his skin. He was gaunt, his eyes were hollow, but he remained beautiful. 

She patted the bed, signaling for him to come lie in it. 

He climbed in and pulled the duvet over his chest. “Will you sleep with me?” he asked gently before his eyes widened in alarm. “Not, not with me. Not, not in that sense.” He sat up. “I’m sorry. I meant—”

She giggled. “It’s okay na.” 

He exhaled loudly. He did not return to his lying position. “Thank you, really.” 

She nodded. They sat together in comfortable silence. 

“You should seek help,” she said after a sigh.

He cringed. “If I go to a specialist, it is one more thing that’s wrong with me.”

She reached for his hand. “But if you go, it becomes one less thing that’s wrong with you.”

He sighed. “When it started, I told myself I had it under control. I told myself it wouldn’t get this bad, that it was just my love for cooking.” He laughed dryly at himself.

“You could die.” 

“I know.” He sighed again. “In the kitchen, I am in control. I can make things come out the exact way I want. Outside it, I can’t.”

“Is this about your personal project?” she ventured.

He winced. “A little bit. I’m making a film about my family.”

She waited for him to continue, but he did not. 

“Their life in Makoko?”

“Yes.” He reached for a tissue by his bedside and blew his nose. “My father was a very sad person. I always felt like he didn’t love me, and I didn’t know why until he died, and I found this journal about his life as a climate refugee. And somehow, the things he wrote about did not exist anywhere; it was as if he had made it all up, as if he had imagined some suffering to justify how bad a parent he was.” He blew his nose again. “But he didn’t imagine it. I did some research and my father’s story is true. And now …” he buried his face in his palms, “now, I feel I have a responsibility to get this story out. I quit my job and became a filmmaker just for this story.”

She waited a beat. “I don’t have all the answers, Esosa, but I know you can deliver this story.” 

“Perhaps. But it makes me struggle, it makes me …” He droned off. 

“Struggle is normal. I’m struggling too.”

“You’re not eating yourself to death, at least.”

She smirked. “But I’m self-sabotaging. I have anxiety attacks for breakfast. My whole life feels like running a race I already lost.”

“I don’t think you know how brilliant you are,” he said, turning to her. 

She bit her lip. “I believe everyone who compliments me is lying to me.” She shook her head, as if shrugging off the thought. “I just feel like I’m not meant to be brilliant, that I stumbled on it somewhere in my childhood, and it’s not mine to keep.”

Esosa squeezed her fingers gently. 

“You know, my mom used to call me ode, oponu, all those names for the mentally retarded. In primary school, my teachers would act like they couldn’t see my hand whenever I attempted to answer a question because I was always getting the answers wrong. I just don’t know how to not doubt myself. And sometimes,” she wiped a stray tear—was she crying? “I think I set myself up to fail so I can appease that voice in my head that’s calling me a failure. Like, ‘See? I failed. Can I go free now?’”

“Eketi —”

“I was fired from my last job. I don’t think I deserved it, but I don’t think I was a good journalist either. I’m seeking help already, so don’t worry about me.” 

He held her shoulders and hugged her real tight. She burst into tears, and hugging, they cried together. It was loud and ugly and intense.

After, they laid in bed, Esosa being the little spoon.

“I’ll get better, Eketi. I promise.”

“I’ll get better too,” she responded. “I’ll do yoga.” 

He chuckled. “Real yoga or American yoga?” 

She laughed. “Ode.”

He began to snore softly in a few minutes. She stayed awake, eyes wide open in the dark, contemplating her struggles and her many attempts to act like they did not exist. Not dealing with them meant they’d had ample time to worsen and calcify. She felt ready to try addressing them again. She made mental notes to finally log into Soji and update her profile on Job Finder. She also had to have that dreaded conversation with her mother.

The next day, she woke up feeling centered, like something had been fixed inside her while she slept. Esosa was not in the room, but he had left a note on the bedside stool. It was a quote by the 21st-century Nigerian writer, Eloghosa Osunde. Silence is a dangerous thing to give yourself to, especially if you were born to speak. 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection.

Special thanks to this year’s judges, Annalee Newitz (@annaleen.bsky.social) and Omar El Akkad (@omarelakkad). 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection.

1. Naty

It’s 6 a.m. and the heat is rising quicker than the sun. Today is going to be another hot, smoldering day, as it has been for the past six months—the only difference, the humidity. If I must be honest, I liked it better when the air was dry. We are blessed to be one of the families living with the new architecture. For centuries, Creole houses have been designed to have trade winds flow through them from east to west. 

With the rising heat and longer droughts, many families have migrated to constructions with rounder walls, like our West African siblings—made to avoid angles and the accumulation of heat. Still, with the change of the season, the level of moisture in the air is suffocating. Even inside our home, the ambient wetness hugs the skin and refuses to let go. I wish I were 3 years old, running around in my underwear all day. Back then, Mama would place soursop leaves and guinea mint in a tin bucket all day in the sun. In the evening, she would bathe me with the water. I would feel refreshed and sleep so soundly. At 17, that attire is no longer an option, and a daily herbal bath would require way more water than we should spend. At least this present discomfort is a sign that the rains are coming.

Mama is already clanking on pots, filling up a bowl with yam, cassava, and stewed meat. There is a flask of rum in her basket, some fruits, and, of course, gourds filled with fresh filtered water. By the large calabash and sweet scent hanging in the air, I know that she has made use of the freshest hours before sunrise to fire up the griddle and prepare coconut kassav—those sweet, goodness-filled pancakes made of cassava flour our Kalina ancestors have passed down to us.

I give Mama a kiss and, like every morning, I pour water from our charcoal fountain into the moka pot—just enough. I pack the ground coffee in and I heat up the stove to distill Ma Nee’s morning brew. We are all going to the plateau today. It is time to lead our cattle to another spot, where—we hope—they will be able to graze on something that is not dry for a couple of days and have sufficient shade to escape the sharp bite of the sun. Mama thinks it would do Ma Nee some good to visit the family’s plot. As a child, NeeNee (as they called her) would visit this place in the deep countryside of Saint Ann’s. She would run and play with her siblings in the savanna, at the foot of the mango and the guinep trees, under the watchful eyes of her own grandmother, who had been born right there and had played there as a girl herself. My grandmother has so many stories about this place from the time before the yearly droughts—stories from her childhood, from the generations before her but also legends of our island. Who knows? Going there might spark memories and keep her with us a bit longer.

I pop a few slices of breadfruit cake in the oven and call Ma Nee to the kitchen. Mama is glad her mother still answers to her name and walks without a stick but I can tell she keeps a tight leash on her hopes.

“Precious little girl,” she says with a gentle smile. “Why you shout me name like dis? We a fi go home?”

“Naty callin’ you for breakfast, Ma,” Mama replies.

“Naty? She me daughter Maryse. Me know me own pickney,” Ma Nee says, with a side eye.

“I Maryse, Ma. This me daughter, Naty.” Mama does not skip a beat and leaves no room for further questions. “Come get your breakfast, Ma. Naty done make that good coffee you like, from Gran Fon and the breadfruit cake is warmin’ up.”

“Yes… .” Joy spreads all over Ma Nee’s face. “You remembered. Get de coffee from de place…”—Mama joins Ma Nee and they finish the sentence together— “…where they did not grow bananas.” Ma Nee laughs and it turns on a light in Mama’s eyes.

The truth is our island stopped the production of coffee in those areas decades before I was born. The French authorities had allowed the spraying of chlordecone on banana crops but never fully dealt with the leftover residue. Even though they claimed it was safe to grow fruit trees on top of polluted soil, the industry suffered from the bad publicity and only a few independent producers on our wing of the butterfly-shaped island still persist.

It’s almost 7 a.m. Papa is in the driver’s seat and Ma Nee is sitting next to him. Mama and I have hopped in the back of our family’s old pickup. Each of us has grabbed our large bakwa before leaving. When we get there, the sun will already be fully at work and we will need the extra protection. These hats were once reserved for fishermen—no larger than shoulder-width and with a cone-like top to dissipate heat. They are now a necessity during the hotter months and are made quite large to protect the head and provide shade to the upper body.

I love the short trip to Fon Limèl. Once we leave the public road, we plunge onto a tuff road that pretends to be neat for a while but quickly turns bumpy and is only an introduction to the next one—a dirt one—that is made of hills and valleys. Mama holds on to her hat and her basket. I too hold on to my bakwa and keep a hand on the railing.

We pass the spot where Ma Nee’s grandmother was born. The house is no longer standing, but we always acknowledge it and lower our heads in a respectful nod. We drive on and pass through a majestic green arch formed by two giant mango trees that sit on both sides of the dirt road. It is said that Ma Nee’s grandfather, Papa Charles, once left his garden in Fon Limèl after sunset—a great taboo—but these trees are home to duppies that are known for being playful. The spirits started humming at him, louder and louder, but he knew you are not supposed to acknowledge them or things may get worse. Papa Charles put a little speed in his steps and did not look back.

We park near the small pond where Mama’s people have been fetching water for their animals since no one here can remember. Over the years, they have made it deeper and shaded it with trees to slow down evaporation.

We all go to the one kapok tree—a majestic tree that itself is a piece of history. Mama digs a small hole between its huge roots. She hands the flask of rum to Ma Nee, who takes a swig and pours the rest in the hole. Papa places a square of banana leaf at the bottom of the hole, then Mama pours the yam, cassava, and stewed meat she had packed earlier. She fills the hole back in and hands me a small gourd of water. I take a swig and pour the rest on our gift to the ancestors.

The soil is cracked and our cows look battered. Papa fixes his bakwa and goes to tend to them. Mama and I find shade under a very old and large guinep tree and sit with Ma Nee, who brushes the dry earth with the heel of her foot, eyes brimming with stories. She and Mama press their backs on the trunk and I sit facing Ma Nee.

2. Ma Nee

“Me done fell here from this tree once,” I tell my daughter and the nice woman who looks like her. “Me done come here every Saturday with me Mommy and me sisters. Me brother older than we so he don’t want to come. He stay home doing big boy business. But I here, on we family land with Tòtò, Sy, Mommy, and me grandmother, Ma Nò.”

I see the curiosity in their faces. They want to hear the story of how I fell, but I am tired and the heat is oppressive. Guadeloupe has always been hot—we are in the Caribbean, after all—but I do remember days when people just left a metal barrel by their gardens and it was enough water to sustain production for an entire family. Six months without rain was a phenomenon that was unheard of.

As a child, I used to enjoy the dry season. I did not truly know what the cracks in the soil meant, but I enjoyed leaping over them. They made me feel like the world was about to open beneath my feet and I would be able to explore the depths of the Earth. Now these cracks have become rifts and, indeed, you could dive deep into their darkness. They have become traps where cattle—and uncareful children—can lose a leg.

And to think that we were once called the Isle of Beautiful Waters… . In a way, we have taken a path that has led us away from this name. In a way only… . The waters are still beautiful. The issue is that some of them are polluted.

“France did we dirty with dat chlordecone.”

“Yes, Ma,” the woman says. She has a sadness to her. Perhaps I can change that.

“Me done tell you already how we island came to be?”

My daughter looks not quite like my daughter, but I recognize these eyes. They are round and have an appetite for the world.

“De goddess Atabey was bathing in de Caribbean Sea. Beautiful she was with her golden bracelets, her queenly earrings, and her wonderfully carved golden half-moon hanging between her breasts. Her husband, Sukaimo, had offered her a necklace made of precious pearls and a butterfly she did wear with pride. One day, she done learn of his indiscretions. You see, Sukaimo was known for having a soft spot in his heart for beautiful women. Atabey was so smitten by grief and anger. She did snatch de necklace from her own neck and threw de pearls across de Caribbean Sea. Dem became de islands and de butterfly became Guadeloupe.”

“And why is it called …”

I do not recognize this child. Is Maryse old enough to have a daughter this age?

“Precious little girl, do you know Maryse?”

3. Maryse

“And why is it called the Isle of Beautiful Waters?” Naty asks.

My mother looks confused.

“Precious little girl, do you know Maryse?” Ma asks.

“Yes, Ma.” She turns to look at me. “She’s my daughter.”

“She beautiful. She look like you when you was her age.”

“I no look beautiful now, Mommy?” I laugh.

“Yes, baby!” She takes my hand in her wrinkled ones and for a moment, stares at me with a smile until I can tell that this reality has dissolved and she has moved to a different one. She lets go of my hand.

“Naty, dahling. Perhaps, you can refresh Ma Nee’s memory,” I say to my daughter. Then I pretend I am listening to this story I have heard countless times and hope none of them can guess that, inside, I am screaming. I want to hold on to my mother but I truly do not know how long I will be able to keep her at home.

4. Naty

“Legend tells us of an Arawak princess who lived on the island Waitukubuli—Dominica today. Her true name has been lost to the millennia, but she called herself Anuk. She was forbidden to bathe alone in the rivers. At the time, the gods roamed the Earth and the blue serpent god, Iniki, younger brother to Quetzalcoatl, had taken the habit of leaving Abya Yala, the continent, which was too crowded by other gods. So he went to the islands and bathed in their waters. He loved Waitukubuli above all.

“Anuk’s father did not want her to fall prey to the blue serpent god. He was known to devour young, beautiful flesh. But the princess had a mind of her own, and in her father’s short absence, she went to the river and bathed alone in a plunge basin.

“Alas, within minutes, the water started gurgling, and a giant blue snake slithered up from the depths. He was magnificent—scales blue as the sea, eyes and underbelly yellow. He had feathers on the back of his head, the colors of the rainbow. The princess was not afraid. She let the snake coil around her legs and around her belly. Together, they danced in the water for hours. When she came back to her village that same night, her belly was round and full. This made her father angry and he banished her to the butterfly island, which was dry like the desert.

“Anuk was sad and alone, but not for long. Instead of a child, she laid a multitude of eggs. When they hatched, they became the fierce Kalina people. Their father, the blue serpent god Iniki, called upon the waters and created cascades, rivers, and ponds of all sizes. The land became lush and the Kalina people lived in abundance on the butterfly island they now called Caloucaera, the Isle of Beautiful Waters.”

5. Maryse

My daughter has a hunger for the stories. She knows them all and is always eager to hear them once more. At her age, I was very different. My excitement was reserved for other things. I must say it feels good to see her take after my own mother and keep the tradition.

All our phones ding at the same time. That is the sound of an official alert. I look and, indeed, there is news.

“Naty, go tell your father we must change our plans. The hurricane that was coming to Antigua is headed further south—straight for us.”

We were only expecting bad weather, but it will be a storm. We are used to them now, but we have work to do. I turn to my mother.

“Ma, now I understand why the weather so humid and hot today. A hurricane comin’. A big one.”

“Ah … It go be like Hugo in 1989?”

“Ma, you know they changed. You was little pickney in 1989.”

“It was serious business!” she emphasizes.

“Oh … I know, Ma. Me seen the archives. Today, they all worse. Only the smallest ones is like Hugo.”

“Ah …” My mother opens her mouth in astonishment.

“But don’t worry, Ma. It’s early. We still have some time to snack on the kassav, and we can head home to prepare.”

6. Naty

It is 5:30 p.m. and night is already claiming the rays of the sun. Mama, Papa, and I have joined the neighbors to bar windows and put tape on any exposed glass. Those who live in more fragile housing secure space for themselves and their families with other members of the community. Our communal water cisterns have been protected from harsh wind and any debris that may contaminate them.

Mama and I have made sure our dry food reserves are where we need them to be. Now, my favorite part begins. We prepare the candles and some snacks so we can tell each other stories during the worst of the storm to keep everyone calm.

“Ma Nee, will you tell me again the story of the Africans coming to Guadeloupe?”

I step into my grandmother’s room and she is not there.

“Mama, is Ma Nee with the neighbors?”

“No. She is home! What do you mean?”

7. Ma Nee

I dislike being outside when the sun is already setting, but I know it’s not proper of me to abuse these people’s kindness. I have to go home.

There should be a June plum tree here. And this road should be dirt, not asphalt. I might be lost. With some luck, Papa Charles will be coming from his garden soon. He’ll help me. Let me have a seat.

It’s too dark now, where is Papa Charles?

“Papa Charles?” If I call him out loud, maybe he will come. I think he cannot see me in the pitch black.

“Papa Charles! Me want go home. Tell Mommy, me want go home!” I start to cry.

“Duppies fi get me on de road. Me scared.” 

8. Maryse

We have looked in the kitchen garden. We have scoured the backyards of our closest neighbors, and there is no sign of my mother. Darkness is fully here and with the storm coming, they are going to cut electricity everywhere. We need to find her. I must not let Naty see my distress, but I am terrified of what could happen.

“Naty, baby.” I steady my voice as much as I can. “Give me a torchlight. I go see Aunt Tòtò’s old house. You go with your Papa and see around the baker’s. She always lookin’ for sweet things.”

Why did I refuse to put a tracker on her? Hurricanes make landfall at night. We only have about 90 minutes before the first winds.

9. Ma Nee

“Me sorry, Mommy. Me sorry.”

“You’re OK, Ma Nee. You’re OK.”

“Papa Charles angry wit’ me?”

“Nobody’s angry, Ma Nee. You’re good.”

“We go home now?”

“Yes, Ma Nee. I’m taking you home. Your daughter waitin’ fi you.”

10. Naty

It’s 8 p.m. Ma Nee was out for at least two hours and most of it in darkness. Both she and Mama look quite shaken. Papa does his best to lighten the mood with jokes and rubbed shoulders. But the anxiety that just visited us is only turning away to leave space for the hurricane, which is no comfort.

“Naty, baby. Tell us a story.” Mama asks.

“There was a time when the Kalina gods would spend their leisure time observing and visiting Caloucaera. It was such a quiet island with beautiful waters and a powerful but peaceful people.

“One day, boats were spotted from afar. They were large constructions of wood that somehow did not sink into the sea. They seemed to be pushed by clouds of cloth and slid as oil toward the island. The Kalina people did not fully understand what was happening, but were hospitable. They were horrified when the spirits of the sea coming off the boats, the Palanakiłi, returned their welcome with attacks on their families. The Kalina chased them all away, but they had underestimated the Palanakiłi’s greed. They came back with more boats, more weapons, and something special in the bellies of their ships.

“The war being waged on the beach was parallel by another one in the heavens. The Kalina god Hurakan gathered his winds and attacked the fleets that had not yet landed. When he was about to unleash the worst of his fury, he was interrupted by Yemọja, goddess of the sea and mother to those made cargo.

“She pleaded with Hurakan for the lives of her children. But in order to save them, she had to save the Palanakiłi as well. This is how the ugliest of trades started on our beautiful island and in the Americas.

For centuries after that, it is said that Yemọja and Hurakan conspired and finally managed to get rid of this evil. The legends say that it required them to sacrifice a lot of their powers. That is why they have trusted us with the responsibility to make sure that this scourge never comes back.”

The winds outside are rising and I look up, in the candlelight, to see Ma Nee falling asleep.

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection.

Special thanks to this year’s judges, Annalee Newitz (@annaleen.bsky.social) and Omar El Akkad (@omarelakkad). 

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection.

“Emeka, you forgot your respirator.”

I reached for the holster at my waistband and felt nothing. Not again! 

“No, I didn’t.”

“So what am I holding right now, young man?”

I pictured Mum with the face-hugging contraption raised to eye level, a frown wrinkling her brow. 

“Did you go into my room?” I was sure my sigh rang clearly through the tiny mic of my earpiece. 

“That’s not the point. How are you going to get home without it?”

“The air-quality counter’s green.” I rechecked the small, flat disk dangling from my neck to be sure. Definitely green. “You worry too much.”

She didn’t, but I couldn’t turn around. Not if I planned on making it to the other side of Shepherd’s Bush on time. I just had to make sure to return to West Brompton before the night dust set in.

The expected reprimand for my back talk came, and I listened quietly, my arms pushing metal oars into murky water. The slush of the blades slicing through liquid was already loud enough to draw peeks from windows. Especially at that time of year when the water level receded enough for my oars to occasionally collide with roofs of long-abandoned cars. I wouldn’t have minded on most days, but prying eyes weren’t needed for this trip.

I arrived at my destination just as Mum’s voice cut out from my earpiece.

“Was that your mum?”

My head snapped in the direction of the speaker. Adriana perched on the first-floor window ledge of a semidetached brick house, her rubber-booted feet dangling above a moored tandem kayak. My lips turned up. They always did when I saw her. 

“Are you psychic now?” My canoe bumped her hull, my fumbled actions failing to match my unflustered tone.

She chuckled and dropped into my wobbling vessel, tying back her thick, dark hair with a scrunchie that circled her wrist. “Your scowl gave it away.” Grabbing my second set of oars, she helped me steady the canoe. 

“You know how she is. Always trying to baby me.” It was impossible not to make a face.

“That’s because you keep doing things like forgetting your respirator.” She pointed at my telling holster with a headshake. “Here, have mine.”

I frowned as I caught the device that came flying my way. “What about you?”

Reaching into the cargo hatch of her kayak, she pulled out a spare from her duffel bag, shaking it at me before shoving it back in. “You forget I know you well. Anyway, mine or yours?” 

She hauled the rest of her equipment into my canoe when I pointed out the sack I’d managed to pilfer from reserves. There was no way our combined load would fit in hers. We wasted no time covering our stash with a tarp before starting to row north, even though people mostly ignored each other when their boats crossed paths in these narrow West London water streets. 

“I can never get over how stunning the skyline looks lit up like this.” Adriana spoke quietly a few minutes later, her strong hands lifting and lowering my second set of oars as we went along.

I looked up, following her gaze. The setting sun cloaked everything around us in a wash of deep red and orange, creating a striking contrast with the backdrop of green foliage covering the flat-roofed houses we went past. Only a few pitched roofs had metal planting decks built over them, because people realized the resources needed to keep those types of vertical farms up during windstorms weren’t worth the effort. 

Dad had learned the hard way when the platform he’d installed nine years ago crashed into our last house. I still don’t think he’s been able to get rid of the guilt he felt about the loss of my childhood home, a place we’d managed to stay in long after half of the neighborhood was forced out. Dad’s clever tanking of our upper floors to stop damp and mold seeping through from the lower floor couldn’t compete with the gaping hole in the roof. 

“It’s still not as sexy as Venice was before it disappeared,” I joked, crinkling my nose at the discolored water we pushed through. The sulphur-tinged smell wafting toward us made my point.  

The foul odor hadn’t lifted ever since the Thames Barrier broke 15 years ago, flooding London’s densely populated banks for a few miles either side of the city’s epicenter. As I’d only been in diapers back then, it helped that I couldn’t remember what the air smelled like before The Break happened. But occasional jaunts to the drier shores, where the city’s sewers weren’t completely engulfed by the river, made sure I knew the difference. 

Mum always went on about how the government’s decisions to delay the Barrier’s fortification had been down to mismanaged funding. Money channelled toward defending us from external dangers that never materialized. And when the deferred crisis at our doorstep bubbled over, causing the inevitable to happen, the same government was quick to pack up and move the capital’s political house from a waterlogged Westminster to the less affected grounds of Wembley. 

The few thousand residents able to join in the exodus had been the two-home-owning caliber of well-off people, and the fortunate homeowners who had airtight environmental disaster clauses written into their insurance policies. Some others had found lodgings with sympathetic family members living in towns and cities far away enough from the river to only watch on their tellies as the drama unfolded.  

But the rest didn’t have that luxury. They stayed where their lives had once made sense, watching anxiously every day as water levels rose around them with every downpour of torrential rain. 

Helpless as the city they knew and loved became one with the river. 

The truth is, when you have nowhere to run, you don’t die out. You simply adapt.

Adriana scoffed at my Venice comparison, drawing me back to the present. “You’re just going off photos. This view is plenty sexy to me.”

She glanced over her shoulder at me and winked, and for a second, I wondered if she was actually referring to me. No, not wondered. Hoped. 

Catching myself before I full-on stared at her, I huffed. “First of all, I don’t think the gondolas they had were trying to navigate submerged cars and drifting furniture. There’s absolutely nothing sexy about that.”

The contradiction of our situation was that, with no more active cars clogging London’s streets, the air quality within the expanded river line was much cleaner than in places on the outskirts. The main atmospheric pollutant we battled was sporadic carbon hazes the night winds blew in from those areas. Dust thick and stifling enough for the air counter disks around our necks to be necessary.

Adriana shrugged. “Well, my abuela went to Venice for her honeymoon, and she swears London was just as romantic, if you had the right person to share the city with.”

“How is she holding up?” I asked now that Adriana had brought up her grandmother.

Her slumped shoulders said a lot more than words.

“I should have started earlier. I don’t know if she’ll hold out.”

“You’ve done the best you can. I’m still amazed you found a way to pay for those rhizomes.”

“It was worth it. For her.”

I nodded, my eyes dropping to the covered supplies between us. At first, I hadn’t understood the magnitude of what Adriana intended to do when she’d pulled alongside my boat one Sunday morning as I waited for Mum and Dad to say their exceptionally long goodbyes to the crush of worshippers inside the upper room of Saint Ambrose Church. The way they carried on, you would think we weren’t going to see everyone again in just a week. 

“Can you keep a secret?” 

She had smiled as I’d looked to my left and right, then behind me for good measure. Adriana Diaz was talking to me, Emeka Emezue. Nearly four years after her family started attending Mass there, she was acknowledging I existed past the nods we shared during the service’s peace offering. 

A small part of me wished I’d been the one to pluck up the courage to say something to her, but it was finally happening. That was all that mattered. 

She was clearly her family’s designated rower for the day, sent out before Mass ended to bring their boat close to the church’s converted window exits before everyone else came out. Her mother, brother, and grandmother were probably still being sociable inside. I wondered if, like me, she didn’t mind not being stuck in there with all those people. 

“Depends on what it is.” I crossed my arms casually, as if I wouldn’t carry a murder to my grave if that was what she wanted to confess.

I watched as she struggled to resist an eye roll and failed. “I’m only asking because I know you work at Kew.”

My eyes narrowed. I wondered what her angle was. My job at Kew Gardens had never been something anyone showed interest in. At least not anyone below the age of 30. Those who remembered the days before our new normal and were eager to tell me how glorious the place had been. 

Hugging the river, it was no surprise the sprawling grounds of the botanic gardens hadn’t been spared during The Break. On my first day as a volunteer there, we were told that, at first, the horticulturists and grounds workers had done their best to secure the area. But with far too many specimens to rehome at short notice, they eventually took what they could and left the rest to be salvaged by a handful of volunteers who lived locally. 

In more recent years, Kew’s outreach program had spread slightly farther, allowing people like me to sign up. Teens who cared about what our agricultural science teachers showed in our online classes and wanted some practical knowledge to help land jobs in the vertical farms dotted across the city. Kids with few friends and with parents eager to get them out of the house.

“Can you get your hands on something for me?” Adriana asked when I didn’t respond to her statement. 

My squint solidified into a frown. Of course, that was the only reason she was talking to me. It was no secret that some exotic seeds and shoots found their way out of the undamaged storerooms left at Kew for the right price. I just never thought anyone would imagine I would be able to help broker such a deal. 

“Why are you so keen on growing this?” I’d asked when she showed me a photo of what looked like long, fat bananas on her phone. “You know it’s going to be near impossible for plantains to mature here without constant warm weather and care.”

I knew quite a lot about plantains because of Mum. She reminisced about them all the time, swearing no self-respecting Nigerian family could do without them once upon a time, even in the confines of London. Ripe, unripe. Fried, boiled, roasted, mashed. The variety of ways they could be consumed were endless. Before The Break, Mum swore she could find them easily in African shops. She even claimed supermarket chains began stocking them when they realized there was a large enough market to see them fly off shelves, if you threw in people from the Caribbean, South Asia, and South America. 

Now, most fresh foods we were able to buy were locally grown to save on resources and reduce the importation carbon footprint. Potatoes, peas, leeks, squashes. The types of crops accustomed to the city’s natural climate. We still had some items brought in from outside London, but after a strong governmental push for communities to be locally resourceful, the cost of getting these luxuries put most people off. 

“We’re pretty much matching the summer temperatures for Florida back in the early 2000s,” Adriana insisted with confidence, shutting off the image on her phone. “And I’ve read they were able to grow plantains there.”

She had a good point, although I still couldn’t see how she expected them to survive. Seasonal temperatures started to level out about a decade ago, but the heat in London had risen so quickly before that merciful moment, we were already several degrees above what anyone would have imagined when the Paris Agreement was struck at the turn of the century. The converse was that the temperatures also dipped drastically during the winter months, bringing a chill that only began to ease in early June. 

Definitely not a plantain-growth-friendly climate. 

“It’s for my abuela,” Adriana finally admitted after I explained this to her. Her body tensed as she looked toward the church. “There’s not a lot she talks about so clearly and constantly these days. She goes on about how much she loved fried plátanos from her childhood in Puerto Rico. I didn’t even realize she liked them so much before she began to lose her …”

She looked away. I let the moment pass. 

“Anyway, it’s a craving she can’t seem to shake. It broke my heart when she joked that at least she’ll get to taste plantains in heaven. If I can do this for her, she won’t have to wait that long.”

I was going to protest some more, try to make her see how difficult it would be, but loud chatter and movement near the church’s window signaled people had started to emerge. 

“What’s in it for me?” I didn’t want to look too eager to say yes. 

She frowned as if she hadn’t considered I wouldn’t just do this out of goodwill. “A quarter of my stash?” 

The fact that this came out as a question confirmed my suspicions. 

“Eh, that payment is only dependent on whether you yield any crop. If it isn’t already clear, I’m not confident your plan’s going to work.”

“Look, it’s going to take all the money I’ve saved up to pay for what I need. I doubt I’ll have anything left over for you.” Her reply came with a desperate glance at the window. 

I only had a moment to consider her offer. The thing was, if this worked, I would also be able to surprise Mum with something she had craved for years. It wasn’t quite as noble an act as Adriana going through all this trouble to give her ailing grandmother something to cherish, but it would make my mother happy. 

I realized what I had to do.

“OK, I’m in.”

“Really?”

“On one condition.”

Her face clouded over again as she waited for my demand.

“If I’m going to benefit from this transaction, I have to make sure the plants actually reach maturity. You can’t possibly manage this all by yourself. Watering, manuring, weeding, frost protection. There’ll be plenty to do.”

And it certainly wouldn’t hurt that it would give me an excuse to spend time with her. 

“So you want to help me?”

At my nod, her hand shot out quickly, taking mine and shaking it.

“Done.”

Her family came out at that moment, so I was never sure if she agreed to my condition just to close the deal, or if she actually wanted my help. Either way, we were locked in.  

The purchase was much easier than I imagined. I made a subtle inquiry the next time I was at Kew. A guy called Paul spoke to his mate, Mo, who asked his supervisor, Lee, if there were any plantain rhizomes going. I was probably holding my breath as much as Adriana for the five days we waited for a response. Not wanting to scare her off, I never asked how she was able to afford the extortionate amount of credits I’d been told to transfer. 

When Paul finally handed me something wrapped in damp cloth in the loos after work one day, it was a miracle I didn’t fist-bump him. I snuck a peek at the weird-looking cuttings and crossed my fingers we weren’t being swindled.  

About a month later, Adriana showed me the small leaves shooting out of an earth-filled box she’d hidden in her canoe. Now this was no longer just an idea she’d been holding on to; we’d started to leave Mass even earlier than usual to strategize. Her face glowed with so much excitement, I wondered how she was able to keep our plans a secret from her family. 

“Aren’t they stunning? I can’t believe they didn’t die right away. I was sure I’d overwatered them or hadn’t let them sit in enough sunlight.”

“Don’t get too excited, this is only the beginning.” I’d tried managing her expectations, but it was pointless. Seeing how happy those tiny sprouts made her, I was proper hooked. There was no way I was going to let this fail. 

The next challenge we had was identifying a space tall enough to hold the stems when they were fully grown. A suitable internal space at least 4 meters high with windows to let in enough light, but not so much that the plants could easily be spotted by passersby. And one with sufficient floor strength to carry the weight of the soil needed. The problem was, most spaces that ticked all those boxes were located on ground floors. 

We found the perfect ballroom a few weeks into our search, on the upper level of a hotel that didn’t have a massive red cross on its front wall. Although we chose to live within the river line at our own risk, the government felt ethically obliged to send structural engineers and surveyors around every now and then to check for weakening foundations. Council taxes were still paid by homeowners, and what better way was there to rationalize this than building safety inspections? Nothing in London had been built to survive years of submersion in water. Not even with the respite of extremely dry summer months. 

The hotel was close enough to the water’s edge to have been abandoned by its owners. Most multistory buildings with lifts couldn’t function properly with flooded plant rooms at basement level. Once we were sure all floors were unguarded, I’d helped Adriana dig up earth from parks nearby. I also occasionally nicked a bag or two of manure when my supervisor sent me on deliveries to vertical farms. It wasn’t uncommon for items to fall into the water every so often.  

As it turned out, Adriana had everything else worked out. It was warm enough that we didn’t need much extra heat in summer, but when she showed up with a stash of solar panels, some UV lamps, and a toolbox to make sure her investment was secure during the cooler months, my admiration for her went up more than a notch. 

“We’ll install the panels on the roof so we can keep the lamps on all year round if we want. They should produce enough electricity to also power some portable heaters.”

“Have you done this before?” I eyed the panels as we hauled them up the stairs. Not that I didn’t trust her confidence, but it was hard to fully buy into it when we were only 16.

She shrugged. “Perks of Mum being an electrician. She installed the panels we have at home. I helped her last year when she had to change a few, and I’ve read up a lot on the rest.” 

“That’s impressive. Sometimes, it almost feels like you don’t need me,” I joked with a short laugh. 

“Nah, mate, I’m glad I have your help.” She stopped walking and smiled at me. “It would have been really lonely doing all this by myself.”

The sincerity in that smile had kept me going for days. It became clear not long after we started working together that Adriana had no friends. At least no one she mentioned to me. I could see how she had very little time for any when she spent most days helping with her grandmother’s care after school and on the weekends.

Maybe working at Kew wasn’t the only reason she’d approached me. Maybe she’d recognized a fellow loner in me back then. Maybe she’d seen I needed her company as much as she needed mine. 

Now, four months after she initially came up to me outside the church, I couldn’t remember what my days had been filled with before that point.  

“Something’s wrong,” Adriana said as we pulled up near the hotel. 

I tilted my head to see past her, spotting a boat by the building’s entrance. An engine hummed on this one, and it was wide enough to fit five people.

“Could it be an inspection?” I asked, despite knowing she wouldn’t have an answer.

“Whatever it is, we can’t go in until they leave.” She stated the obvious.

“But we can’t lurk here, they’ll wonder why we’re watching them.”

We weren’t doing anything illegal by being there, but if an official decided to get nosy, poked around, and asked about the manure I’d taken, or if they discovered we were occupying a building we didn’t own or realized how we’d got our hands on the rhizomes in the first place, it would be a different story.

As if on cue, one of the women on the boat turned our way. 

Adriana panicked at the exact second I did. Our oars clashed as we drove them into the water at the same time, and the canoe wobbled.

“Whoa! Brace against that wall,” I called out, pointing to the building we were beside.

We’d managed to attract the attention of everyone on the boat. There was no time to waste once we were steady. 

“This way,” I directed Adriana, keeping my head down and rowing swiftly into a side street. “We just have to wait them out.” 

Adriana frowned. “I have to get back within the hour. They need my help at home.”

“It shouldn’t be long. It’s quite late in the day for inspectors to be out anyway.”

I was right. We heard the boat’s motor drawing closer as they left the hotel. And then even closer when they began to turn into the street we were hiding in.

“Crap!” I shrieked, looking around for an escape route. There was a double-casement window behind Adriana wide enough for us to row into. The building already had a cross on its wall, so the crew wouldn’t be checking it. “In here. Hurry!”

I let out a sneeze the moment we pushed our way into the waterlogged living room. Something hung heavy in the air, and it wasn’t the unmissable stench of damp and decay. It took another second for me to realize what it was, but not before I watched in horror as Adriana’s oar banged against a floating tabletop.

A plume of small black particles rose all around us. Thick layers of toxic carbon dust that had lain undisturbed for goodness knows how long in the abandoned house. I felt the disk around my neck vibrate before the room filled with teeny beeps as our air counters did what they were designed to do to protect us. I looked at Adriana, and the flashing red light at her chest matched mine. 

Even as my eyes began to water, I knew I couldn’t do what a lifetime of training and logic begged me to do. All I could think of was shutting off the sound before the inspection crew decided to come to our rescue. Between a fit of coughs, I tugged at the chain at my neck, reaching forward to yank Adriana’s off too. I was full-on gasping by the time I dunked the disks into the water. The irony was, the beeping had cut out, but the sound of my wheezing was now louder than those had been. 

Something cold and metallic covered my nose and mouth, giving my lungs a chance to suck in sweet, clean air. I looked down at the hand holding the respirator to my face, and turned to find Adriana had already sensibly put her spare on first. We rasped into our devices, waiting to see if we’d been fast enough to stop the sounds reaching the crew, each passing second feeling like a lifetime.   

By the time the hum of the boat’s engine began to fade, I was no longer gulping for air. And when the only sound that reached our ears was that of our breath, I didn’t stop to think before I pulled Adriana against my chest. We sat there for a moment longer, our racing heartbeats failing to match the room’s serenity. 

I had always imagined how it would feel to hug her for the first time. Relief was not one of the emotions I thought would be coursing through my veins. Especially with the added realization that Adriana’s arms had found their way around my shoulders. On any other day, a heartfelt declaration would have been the only way to seal this moment. 

“That was … the respirator … I don’t know if I …” The words tumbled out of me, making more sense in my head than out. “Thank you for doing that.”

Adriana leaned back, the fear in her eyes still clear. “No, thank you for shutting the disks off. We’d be in bigger trouble if you hadn’t done that.”

“I think the fact that you saved my lungs deserves more credit than what I did.” I somehow found it in me to chuckle.

“Technically, you wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t asked for your help.”

“Still, thank you.” I reached for her again and didn’t let go for a little longer. Adriana didn’t pull away, only sighing heavily when I finally sat back. 

We said no more, keeping the respirators on as we carefully made our way out of the house. The street was empty, as expected, so we turned the corner and headed to our original destination. 

When we arrived outside the hotel, a fresh red marking on the wall greeted us. 

“No! It can’t be!” The despair in Adriana’s voice was almost as stifling as the dust cloud.

“Hang on. Let’s see what it says.” I pulled out my phone and scanned a black dot by the cross. 

“Limited structural damage detected in basement-level walls,” I read the summary on my screen. 

“Foundations unaffected; however, structural integrity of the building fabric is likely to deteriorate further within 12 months.” 

My sigh of relief echoed Adriana’s. At least it didn’t say a month, or even two. There was still time for the plantains to reach maturity.

Adriana’s head snapped my way, her eyes widening. “Do you think they … .” She couldn’t get the rest out.

We moored the canoe and sprinted up to the ballroom. 

“Thank god!” Adriana cried out when we stumbled in to find our investment intact.

“But we’re screwed anyway,” I said, walking up to touch one of the broad green leaves. “This building’s now on their radar.”

“I think it may be a good thing.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “What part of this could possibly be good?”

“Think about all the houses they inspect on your street. Once they mark them as structurally unsound, they don’t bother with them again for a while, do they?”

“We’re still risking collapse on ourselves if we stick to this.”

“And when last did you hear of a marked building collapsing?”

I frowned. She wasn’t wrong. 

“If my projection is right based on the temperatures we’ve been maintaining, we have about six more months to go before we can hope for fruits to show up.” Adriana didn’t look deterred. In fact, there was a new light in her eyes. “All we need is one bunch to make all this worth it. We can still make it happen.”

“You deserve a medal for all this, you know.” I couldn’t help smiling this time. “I would have given up ages ago. Maybe all the way back in that week when we were waiting to hear if the rhizomes were available. And definitely that time the plants started to wilt because you thought we’d overwatered them. But somehow, you just keep going.” 

I thought my compliment would turn her lips up, but she only shrugged.

“Is it silly that I keep praying this has to work, because what if there are no plantains in heaven?” 

Adriana choked back a sob.

My hand reached for hers. Adriana looked down at it. 

“Your abuela will hold on for the ones right here.”

Her answer came after a long pause. “Promise?” When her eyes met mine again, they glistened.

We both knew my answer held no meaning, yet I nodded, squeezing her hand gently.

“I promise.”

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate-fiction contest produced by Grist Magazine. Imagine 2200 asked writers to imagine the next 180 years of equitable climate progress, and the winning stories feature intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Read all 12 stories in the collection.

Special thanks to this year’s judges, Annalee Newitz (@annaleen.bsky.social) and Omar El Akkad (@omarelakkad). 

Kolhatkar has been reporting from the front lines of this major disaster, considered one of the deadliest wildfires in California history. She personally knows more than two dozen families who lost their homes in the fires. Her children’s former school has also burned down. There are National Guard soldiers deployed less than two blocks from her North Pasadena home, barring entry into Altadena. Community members have organized donation centers to help the thousands of people who have suddenly become homeless. 

Daisy Trejo, a Mexican American resident of North Pasadena, lost her multigenerational family home that also served as the office for her small business. Paul Livingstone, a musician, community activist, and life-long resident of Altadena also lost his home and recording studio, though he also helped save his neighbor’s home. Trejo and Livingstone spoke with Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about evacuating their community and losing their homes.

After driving for hours, the group arrived at salt lakes in the desert, “like glistening white pans you can see from a distance.” 

Spindly green shoots of wild salicornia emerged from the water, flourishing despite “salt literally built up in crystals on the surface of the soil,” she said. “These plants are remarkable.”

Salicornia—also known as samphire, sea beans, sea asparagus, glasswort, and pickleweed—is a halophyte, a group of salt-loving species that blossom in conditions that would be fatal to other plants. Recently, scientific interest in salicornia has spiked, thanks to concern over increasing soil salinity—the result of rising seas, prolonged drought, and human activities like deforestation and seawater irrigation. 

Saudi Arabia is hardly alone in its salty dilemma. By some estimates, more than half of the globe’s arable land could become too salty to farm by the year 2050. A recent study from NASA predicts that saltwater will taint 77 percent of the coastal aquifers—groundwater systems that deliver freshwater inland—by 2100. These conditions will be a death sentence for many conventional crops, which aren’t bred to handle high levels of salinity.

What will farmers grow in the salty fields of the future? Melino thinks it might be salicornia.  

Cultures around the world have utilized salicornia for centuries to produce glass and soap, while countries from France to Turkey to Korea have long regarded the plant as a culinary delicacy. Salicornia proliferates in coastal deltas, mangrove swamps, and salt marshes, growing in small, short bushes. Recognizable by its bright green and knobby stalks—which boast a satisfying crunch ideal for stir-fries, salads, or even pickles—salicornia is high in fiber; its seeds can be used to produce an oil that’s rich in protein and fatty acids.

That’s why Melino, now a lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia, is working to transform the plant—which grows wild around the world—into a domesticated crop. 

While it took our ancestors thousands of years to domesticate wheat and corn, “We don’t have that kind of time,” said Melino. To speed up the process, she and her international research team have gathered the hardiest specimens they could find from all over the world and are now breeding them in nurseries in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. 

Domesticating salicornia would be a huge step forward in getting the plant into the hands of farmers who are struggling to adapt to rising seas and salty soils, said Yanik Nyberg, founder and CEO of Seawater Solutions, a Scottish organization that restores degraded coastland around the world and helps communities adopt climate-friendly farming practices. 

In Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, where 18 million people depend on rice production for their livelihoods and saltwater intrusion is predicted to soon cause up to $3 billion in crop losses a year, Seawater Solutions is teaching farmers to grow salicornia and develop a market for the crop. 

Nha Be Nhut, a farm outside Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, once grew lemongrass, watermelon, and squash using pumped groundwater, a method that can hasten saltwater intrusion. Today, its owners are running trials growing salicornia, irrigating the plants with brackish water from nearby canals, and selling it to high-end restaurants in the city, where chefs incorporate it into dishes like salicornia-marinated gazpacho and salicornia pakora.

In eastern Ghana, the organization is working with villagers in the low-lying Volta Delta to restore mangrove forests that have been cut down or overfished, and sow salicornia in the adjacent lagoons. For now, the plant will be used as fish food in aquaculture projects, said Nyberg.

These projects are largely in trial stages, with profit and scalability still a question mark. But a challenge, according to Nyberg, is sourcing reliable seeds. 

“Right now, we’re selecting plants from the wild, ones that perform well, and we dish those out,” Nyberg said. “Usually, only about 50 percent survive; it’s definitely quantity over quality.” 

“These are pretty wild plants, so germination is erratic,” said Arjen de Vos, whose Netherlands-based organization, the Salt Doctors, develops climate-resilient agricultural systems in salt-affected parts of the world. “Getting their hands on good seeds is difficult for farmers.” 

There are other obstacles standing in the way of the broad adoption of salicornia as a food crop, de Vos said. For one thing, little research has been done on pests or diseases that might affect the plants. Another larger issue is developing a market for the crop. “If there’s no market for it, no farmer will grow it.”

Efforts are underway to introduce consumers to salicornia. In the United Arab Emirates, the nonprofits World Wildlife Foundation and International Center for Biosaline Agriculture brought together the country’s top chefs to familiarize them with the food and ways to use it in their menus. Salicornia startups have popped up in Portugal and Poland, and in Ireland, a popular Dublin restaurant features the salty vegetable on the menu. 

For now, de Vos said most farmers are taking stopgap steps to adapt to increasing salinity, such as installing drainage systems and breeding conventional vegetables to be more salt-tolerant. 

But he worries even those strategies may not be sustainable in the long term. 

“Rainy seasons are becoming shorter. People are tapping deeper and deeper, where the groundwater is saltier. The world is running out of fresh water,” he said. “We may not be there yet, but salicornia will be very needed.”

Melino, who’s not involved in de Vos’ or Nyberg’s projects, said there’s something of a “consortium” of people around the world working to make salicornia a viable crop for a warmer, saltier future. “It’s a little bit of a competitive space,” she said, with some scientists, like her, working on domestication and others working on “promoting a culinary relationship” with the plant: “The two can and should happen alongside each other.”

The scientist is hopeful that as research continues, salicornia’s trajectory will look something like quinoa’s, another salt-tolerant crop. The Andean grain prized by Indigenous cultures was neglected for centuries before being “rediscovered” in the last half of the 20th century and heavily promoted by the United Nations. In 1980, eight countries grew quinoa; today that number is close to 100. By 2034, the grain you couldn’t find on grocery store shelves a decade ago, is projected to hit $2.78 billion in global sales. 

With enough investment and interest, Melino believes salicornia might one day be as popular—and that saltwater, instead of being a foe to the world’s food supply, might be its friend.

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with The Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University), and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

The market is one component of the group’s food sovereignty work, which also includes cultivating mushrooms and caring for a bison herd. Siċaŋġu Co is also working on housing, education, and programs that support physical and spiritual wellness. But food came first. “We started with food because it’s so universal. Not just as a need but as a grounding cultural and family force,” says Michael Prate, who spearheaded the program in its initial stages. “It’s where people come together to build relationships.”

The food inequities that Siċaŋġu Co is working to address can be traced back to the eradication of bison herds by white settlers during the 1800s. For many Lakota, bison are akin to family and play an integral part in both their physical and spiritual lives. Millions of bison used to roam these plains, but when colonizers pushed West, they slaughtered the animals en masse, both to make room for the cattle herds they brought with them and to disrupt the Lakota way of life and force them onto reservations.

Mushrooms for Health and Sustenance

At the market, Siċaŋġu Co member Frederick Fast Horse shows off the mushrooms that he has foraged and raised to passersby. According to an important story passed down in Lakota history, the Lakota were once cave dwellers, and mushrooms were key to their survival, Fast Horse tells Sentient. These critical fungi are more than just calories though, as Fast Horse believes mushrooms are part of what helped Lakota stay so healthy for centuries, until the effects of colonization, which shifted the Nation’s diet to a heavy reliance on dairy and processed meats. “Every single mushroom actually coincides and targets a specific organ inside of your body,” he tells me.

In addition to being a skilled mycologist and forager, Fast Horse is also the chef at the nonprofit’s school, where he is reintroducing culturally significant ingredients to the students. Fast Horse makes breakfast and lunch for around 70 students and staff each day. The typical fare is pretty simple, he says: dishes made of just a handful of ingredients, plus a broth and spices.

In collaboration with school leadership, Fast Horse is developing dietary guidelines that reflect more traditional foods and agricultural practices. This way of eating amounts to “living off of the land.” It means eating “all the foods that are already around us, everything that you grow and very simplistic methods of preparing food and eating it,” says Fast Horse.

The diet they’re launching at the school isn’t just culturally important, it’s also better for the students’ health, according to Fast Horse who is very critical of the modern, industrialized food system. When discussing the FDA, he says “They don’t care about your health. They’re only caring about mass production.”

A diet that leans more on mushrooms and plants also happens to be more climate-friendly than the typical U.S. diet, in which beef is consumed four times more than the global average. In the big picture of global greenhouse gas emissions, somewhere between 12 and 20 percent of all emissions comes from meat and dairy farms. While the goal of Siċaŋġu Co isn’t explicitly to eat less meat, it does aim to boost access to traditional foods. This includes both low-emissions plants and mushrooms that are locally harvested and bison raised on a very small scale, treated as “kin,” in a way that looks nothing like a factory farm.

Native-Owned Bison Are Family

Rosebud Reservation is home to the largest Native-owned bison herd, with over a thousand animals roaming 28,000 acres. Bison are ruminants, like cattle, which means they too belch methane, but bison offer a variety of ecosystem benefits thanks to the way they live on the land.

While herds of cattle also graze nearby, the differences are stark. Cattle are destructive to everything, says Siċaŋġu Nation member Karen Moore. Moore, who manages the food sovereignty initiative and lives on the reservation, describes how grazing cows tend to concentrate together, sometimes feasting on a single type of plant until it’s depleted. Bison are more likely to cover more ground when they graze, eating a variety of plants, which has a gentler impact on the ecosystem.

Last year, two animals from the Nation’s herd were donated to the school. With that meat, Fast Horse says he has been able to replace 75 percent of the red meat the school would have otherwise procured.

Getting the students to eat more culturally significant foods is not without its challenges, however. If one popular student decides they don’t like a particular dish, then all the other kids follow suit, says Fast Horse. He avoids the problem by trying to make foods more palatable. For example, by grinding mushrooms into small pieces. “They get the flavor, but they don’t see the actual mushroom,” he says.

Another Siċaŋġu Co member, Mayce Low Dog, teaches community cooking classes that instruct participants how to use traditional ingredients in their dishes.

The work is paying off. “It seems like more people are into trying weirder foods, not necessarily like your tomatoes and cucumbers,” says Moore. “It’s been really, really exciting to see.” Her coworkers raved about her stinging nettle pesto, made from plants she foraged.

Harvesting local plants is also a critical part of the group’s work. The Nation has “been in crisis for hundreds of years,” says Moore, but harvesting their own food is part of “getting back to being self-reliant.”

On a brisk morning during my visit, Moore and Low Dog invite me to join them to harvest local plants that they’ll dry and turn into herbal teas, both for the farmers market and a community-supported agriculture program that subsidizes food shares for some residents. The teas are a way residents can reconnect with traditional foods even if they’re not skilled foragers themselves.

Gravel crunches under the tires as we pull off of the main road and slowly roll along the banks of a pond. Along the way, Moore and Low Dog keep their eyes peeled for useful plants for tea. For both Moore and Low Dog, foraging is a newer skill. As we walk, they consult each other about different plants, making sure they’re selecting the correct ones and that everything is ready for harvest. It’s a skill they’re intentionally learning from each other and their elders.

Moore reaches down to gather some Ceyeka, or wild mint, for the teas. She’s sure to leave behind about half of the plant to ensure the plant continues to grow on the banks so there’s more when they come back again on a later day.

Forging Connection and Community

Victoria Contreras was introduced to the food sovereignty initiative as a high school volunteer. Now, two years later, Contreras, who manages the Siċaŋġu Harvest Market, has learned to be more intentional about incorporating Indigenous ingredients in her meals, she tells Sentient. “I’m actively looking for something that I can swap out, or a recipe that I can try,” she says, fondly recalling a stinging nettle ice cream one of her coworkers made.

In addition to expanding community knowledge of traditional ingredients, the Harvest Market and other programs have also brought community residents together. The market helps create new friendships and revive old connections, says Sharon LaPointe who helps her daughter, Sadie, with her stand selling flavored lemonades, homemade pickles, and bread. It’s a sentiment shared by many of the vendors there that Wednesday.

Michael Prate, who helped get the group off the ground, remembers some Nation members weren’t so sure of the group in the early days. “I think people have a skepticism that things are gonna go away,” he says, “because that’s the trend,” as many programs that pop up on the reservation tend to be temporary. There are challenges, including growing crops under the harsh weather conditions in South Dakota, conditions that will become even more severe in a changing climate.

The many shifting challenges facing the Siċaŋġu Nation is why food sovereignty is so critical. “They’re here to teach us how to be food sovereign because someday food is gonna get too expensive for our people,” says Brandi Charging Eagle. “The prices of food are going up, but our wages aren’t,” adds Charging Eagle, who is part of the Siċaŋġu nonprofit, but also follows its mission in her own home, where she is teaching her children how to grow their own food.

The Siċaŋġu Nation’s nonprofit will have to stay nimble in order to survive. “There’s always going to be something else that the community is going to be weathering and adapting to,” Prate says. “That’s just reality.”

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with The Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient, and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University), and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

When scientists came up with a new climate-friendly food plan in 2019 and published their findings in the medical journal The Lancet, I read with interest. The guidelines called for more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, which seemed doable to me. The authors even allowed for meat and dairy consumption, albeit in small quantities. Both are major drivers of the climate crisis: The United Nations estimates that meat and dairy produce more than 11 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and some experts put the figure at up to 19.6 percent.

But I’ve long wondered whether the widely respected food plan could work for most Americans. In my hometown of Baltimore, a quarter of all people live in food deserts, a figure some researchers say is an underestimate.

Nationally, grocery stores have shuttered left and right in recent years. Increasingly, many Americans are relying on a very particular kind of shop for food: dollar stores, which are the fastest-growing retailers in the U.S. In Baltimore, there are dozens.

Those factors dictate how sustainable—and nourishing—individual diets can be.

“Our food choices are largely shaped by the food environment around us, including which foods are available, affordable, convenient, and desirable,” said Raychel Santo, a Baltimore-based senior food and climate research associate at the nonprofit World Resources Institute. “Everyone deserves the opportunity to enjoy healthy, sustainable meals that nourish both people and the planet.”

Can dollar stores provide Americans with that opportunity? I decided to find out. For one week, I attempted to follow the Lancet planetary health diet while grocery shopping at them exclusively. The experience left me feeling dejected—and bloated.

The Dollar Store

Other people have created extensive spreadsheets and meal plans for their forays into the planetary health diet. I’ve never been a planner. To guide my grocery shopping, I merely typed the basic tenets of the food plan into my phone’s notes app: 34 percent of daily calories from starches like rice and wheat; 23 percent from legumes; 18 percent from fats; 8 percent from fruits and vegetables; the remaining 10 percent from dairy, meat, and sugar. I planned to head to the store after my first meeting but got busy until mid-afternoon.

When I reached Dollar Tree, I quickly filled a cart with beans, tortillas, pre-cooked brown rice, oatmeal, peanut butter and other staples. I was in desperate need of vegetables, but the options were highly limited. I sighed as I placed some canned ones in my cart.

In the checkout aisle, I saw a can of Pringles chips. Having skipped breakfast, I was starving, so I impulsively added them to my haul and ate them on the drive home.

Hours later, I realized I’d made a mistake. The diet encourages limiting consumption of both starchy vegetables and saturated oils, which are both surprisingly emissions intensive to produce, and I’d gone over my daily allotment of the latter. I resolved to be more careful.

I was in desperate need of vegetables but the options were highly limited.”

For a proper lunch, I heated some brown rice and whipped up black beans from a can, which were more expensive than the ones I buy from my usual grocery store. As luck would have it, my can opener broke, so I was forced to hack open a can of corn with a knife. I ate my austere lunch with little pleasure.

For dinner, I had leftovers with half a slice of tinny-tasting cheese. I desperately wanted to add some fresh produce to my meal, but the Dollar General had none.

When I sat down to analyze my day’s meals, I realized I was way behind on my fruit and vegetable intake, since the Lancet authors classify corn as a starch. I quickly stir-fried some tinned green beans with salt and pepper. They were awful.

Breaking the Rules

I woke up the next morning and realized something would have to change. I’d prepared my first day’s food with only ingredients from Dollar General, but since the Lancet study doesn’t address spices, I decided using seasonings from my cabinet would be OK.

This helped, but new problems arose. I’d planned to eat liberal scoops of peanut butter each morning since the diet calls for a high intake of legumes, but the brand I’d purchased had added sugar, which is discouraged in the climate diet (since it’s surprisingly land, water and carbon intensive to produce and linked to health issues like diabetes), so I had to instead rely on salted peanuts.

The tortillas I’d purchased also had a surprising amount of added sugar, as did the mandarin orange fruit cups and tins of pineapple I’d bought in a desperate attempt to integrate fruit into my diet. For the next couple of days, I stuck to brown rice and corn to meet my starch intake, and rinsed the fruit off thoroughly before eating it.

Experts say eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables is beneficial for gut health, but I quickly realized that wouldn’t be an option, since the Dollar Store doesn’t offer much variety when it comes to plants.

In Search of Produce

When I began my experiment, I resolved not to eat out for the week. I figured it would betray the spirit of the project to go to restaurants, as much as it pained me to refuse a friend’s invitation to grab pizza.

But on night three, I caved. At a work event, I munched on a handful of cherry tomatoes and carrot sticks—climate-diet-friendly foods, sure, but ones that surely didn’t come from a dollar store.

Those bites of crudités left me fiending for more fresh food. Dollar General has since last year been adding produce to more of their stores, so the following morning, I called around to find one.

Soon, I found a location that offered fruits and vegetables a 15-minute drive away. I was excited by the prospect of a salad, but I felt ridiculous. That week, I’d already driven to my closest Dollar Tree, and now I was going to have to drive even more. Using an online carbon calculator, I learned that my round-trip drive could generate up to 5 lbs. of planet-warming carbon dioxide, meaning it could be more emissions heavy than a 3 oz. steak.

I started to spiral. I’m no believer in emphasizing the personal carbon footprint, and yet I’d taken on this project! But I pushed these thoughts aside as I drove.

Slim Pickings

The Dollar Tree produce pickings were slim: browning bananas, bags of potatoes and onions, and some uninspiring pre-made salads. The cherry tomatoes were starting to mold; the mushrooms were covered in soft, dark spots. The iceberg lettuce looked OK, but the more nutritious romaine was wilting—and twice as expensive. The plastic-wrapped bell peppers were in the best shape, so I felt I had to grab some even though they’re my least favorite vegetable.

I reluctantly placed a sad-looking selection of produce into my cart, then went in search of other groceries. This time, I was equipped with a more extensive list.

But many of my desired items were nowhere to be found. There were no lentils, no whole grains other than rice, and no loaves of bread, tortillas, or yogurt that didn’t have added sugar. I had also hoped to find some climate-diet-friendly frozen meals, but save for the bags of fries, every single option contained meat, cheese, or both.

I went home and cooked some black beans for the second time that week, adding peppers, tomatoes, and a whole onion. I ate my stew over brown rice with a whole head of romaine lettuce. It would have to do.

Off the Rails

The following day, I had oatmeal with bananas and strawberries for breakfast and more rice, beans, and salad for lunch. But that evening, things went off the rails. It was the weekend and I had family in town, so I decided to break the rules to show them my favorite local oyster bar.

When we placed our order, I thought all bets were off for my meal plan. But as it turned out, I didn’t fare so badly. The oysters were allowed, and even the half a burger I had fell within my red meat allotment. I ate some much-needed brussels sprouts, beets, and nuts. And since the diet didn’t mention drinks, I suppose even my martini—fine, two martinis—was all right.

But nothing I ate that night could have come from the Dollar Store. In fact, my dinner cost more than all my other meals that week combined. While eating some dollar-store popcorn later that night—a whole grain, so diet friendly—I perused the menus of the cheaper local restaurants I frequent. They invariably offered meat, cheese, and sugar-heavy fare.

In the final days of my experiment, I tried to use up all of my Dollar Store purchases, but some of my produce spoiled quickly. I’d unintentionally contributed to an issue the Lancet authors highlighted: Food waste is a major contributor to climate-warming emissions, and the authors say it should be cut by half.

But dollar stores alone aren’t the problem, so they can’t be the only locus of the solution. ”

On my final food-plan day, I noticed a purple head of local radicchio in my crisper drawer, which I’d bought at the health food store the previous week. I was fresh out of Dollar Store vegetables and didn’t want it to spoil, plus I was sick of beans and rice, so I cheated and ate the whole thing with lemon juice and olive oil.

Targeted policy to expand food access, experts have pointed out, will be necessary for the Lancet climate food plan to become effective. Amid research showing that many people lack access to nutritious meals, advocates are pushing for Dollar Stores to stock fresher, more desirable healthy foods. That could help improve people’s overall well-being, and it could also improve the health of the planet.

But dollar stores alone aren’t the problem, so they can’t be the only locus of the solution. The broader food system must change to ensure people can eat sustainably.

“Increasing access to a variety of plant-based foods [and] the presence of these options at stores and other food providers is the first step,” said Santo. “Other factors—including the cost, quality, convenience of preparation, variety, and cultural relevance—are also key to shaping a food environment that enables healthy and sustainable food choices.”

In the meantime, I’ll no longer take my ability to access and afford a variety of food for granted. That goes for fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains—but now that I’m off the climate diet, I might also eat another can of Pringles.

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with The Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient, and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University), and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

Helping communities eat more plants has many benefits—health and food justice among them—but it’s also good for the climate. Food production accounts for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. According to Brent Kim, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, the largest source of these food-related emissions comes from the farm itself, not food miles. “What we eat and how it was produced matter more for the climate than how far it travels.” Eating a plant-based diet, even for just one day a week, can have a greater positive impact on greenhouse gas emissions than eating local food every day, Kim says.

While the largest source of food-related emissions stems from meat from methane-belching ruminant animals, namely beef and lamb, successful grassroots initiatives, like community gardens and farmers markets, play an important role too when they help shift what people eat. Local programs encourage sustainable and healthy food choices, but also offer a path for addressing challenges important to each community. Elizabeth Bowman, former executive director at Food Access LA, sees these local efforts as part of a broader vision for sustainable food that includes but also goes beyond greenhouse gas emissions.  

“To me, sustainability is very holistic, bottom up, top down, and allows people to have access to healthy foods without barriers,” Bowman says. Transparency and food sovereignty are two very important goals in the work. And, Bowman adds, making food choices from the “soil up”—starting with healthy soil but also thinking about whether farm workers have good working conditions.  

Bowman’s work with Avenue 33, a small hillside farm in the Lincoln Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, illustrates this approach. Avenue 33 partners with Los Angeles Leadership Academy (LALA) to operate LALA Farm, which offers opportunities to zero in on different aspects of food systems. Classes held on the farm include hands-on topics like composting and its climate impacts to science students learning about photosynthesis. Lessons also include the history of agriculture, the farm labor movement, and how farming practices of some Indigenous populations compare to contemporary farming.

Both Avenue 33 and LALA farms provide fresh produce to farmers markets that are EBT authorized (an electronic system that enables people to use government assistance dollars for food purchases) as well as a free weekly food distribution at a nearby school. Food grown on the LALA farm, like tomatoes and peppers, are added weekly to the high school’s salad bar, sometimes alongside a nutrition lesson. 

California supplies nearly half of the fruits and vegetables eaten in the United States. Yet a significant portion of the population, around 8.8 million Californians, face food insecurity. The issue is not only economic—though affordability is a key factor—but also one of access, rooted in land-use policies. These policies have contributed to a disparity in food access, with larger supermarkets concentrated in wealthier neighborhoods. This is known as “supermarket redlining” and forces people to rely on convenience stores or fast-food outlets as their main source of food. A 2008 study found that individuals without access to supermarkets were 25 to 46 percent less likely to maintain a healthy diet.

Farmers markets, supported by federal, state, and private food assistance programs, are helping to bridge the gap by offering a direct distribution model. While there are systemic abuses that stem from a system of “food apartheid,” these programs are at least an effort to get more produce at competitive prices in markets close to food insecure communities, at prices lower than those in chain grocery stores. 

A 2021 study highlighted the role farmers markets can play in reducing food insecurity, noting that by 2019, around 50 percent of farmers markets accepted some form of federal food assistance. Access alone does not address all of the challenges associated with dietary change, programs like California’s Market Match, where EBT value is doubled, can help improve the affordability of fresh, local food. The Florin market has become one of the top 10 EBT markets in the country, with around $300,000 in EBT and Market Match funds spent in 2023. 

“Neighborhoods that lack access to fresh produce have an abundance of fast food and heavily processed foods,” Bowman writes, yet “communities are responsive when fresh produce is simply made available and especially when incentivized with programs like Market Match.”

“I think that when people have access to fresh produce, they will buy it,” Bowman told Sentient in an email. There are many reasons they might make a change in what they eat. “In general fresh produce is less expensive than meat products, so there is evident economic value there,” writes Bowman. 

Earlier this year, budget cuts in California threatened the program’s success when California Governor Gavin Newsom proposed a $37.8 billion cut to the state budget. The threat was averted after advocacy groups, including Alchemist CDC, were able to persuade Newsom to preserve the program’s full $35 million budget. 

There are other challenges however, says Kim Bowman, who worked on food security for decades in Southern California. “Accessing healthy food in Los Angeles can be really challenging. While grassroots initiatives are making strides, there is a lack of infrastructure to support these efforts comprehensively.” 

Bowman stresses the need for policies that not only help younger generations enter agriculture by making land acquisition easier, but also support farmers adopting regenerative practices. Subsidies for such practices could help reduce reliance on synthetic chemicals and build a more sustainable agricultural sector. However, these efforts must be paired with broader systemic changes. This can mean subsidies for farmers like Bowman mentions, or in other cases could be changing livestock productivity.

“Ultimately there’s no one silver-bullet recipe for a sustainable food system—and we benefit from a diversity of different scales, including local, regional, and, sometimes, national or international,” according Johns Hopkins’s Brent Kim. “The important thing is approaching what we grow, how we grow it, and what we eat with an eye toward kindness, conservation and equity.”

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with The Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient, and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University), and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

Maria and her husband both work in restaurants in the sparsely populated Rogue Valley. Already hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had left them both with fewer hours at work, the family has struggled to rebound. 

The Almeda wildfires, which were supercharged by hot, dry weather caused by climate change, left thousands of homes in southern Oregon destroyed. In rural cities like Talent and Medford, farmworker families in particular faced a brutal choice: Stay and work through the haze of smoke that was growing thicker as the fires got closer, or lose out on their daily wages, which had already been cut because of the pandemic. 

“We need to work three times as much,” Maria says, reflecting on her financial situation of late. “The cost of everything—rent, food—is so much higher.”

To offset the inflated cost of living since the wildfires, Maria has relied on a weekly farmers market run by a local nonprofit called Rogue Food Unites, where she can receive staples like eggs, vegetables, and fruits for free. The organization was founded after the Almeda fires and initially worked with local businesses to provide hot meals and food boxes to survivors of the disaster. Since then, it has evolved to provide long-term support for families who are still facing food insecurity as recovery stretches on. 

By purchasing local produce, Rogue Food Unites is not only feeding families but also supporting the small, independently owned farms that are working hard to rebound after the pandemic and wildfires. The produce and eggs they provide happen to be low-carbon foods, which can help solve the community’s food insecurity as well as reduce its climate impacts. The group has also started working with local growers to make emergency dried food kits for residents to prepare for the next climate disaster. 

It’s an ironic twist that the climate crisis is fueled in part by the food system in the U.S.—namely the land use and emissions from concentrated livestock operations—and so many of the climate effects are felt first and worst by farmworkers and their communities. That’s why Rogue Food Unites redistributes local produce to residents at no cost—and no questions asked about need, income, or immigration status. 

A significant portion of Rogue Food Unites’ clients are undocumented families, and many are farmworkers who work seasonal jobs. “The intention is to welcome all families,” says Jesus Rios, the client liaison manager at Rogue Food Unites. “It’s open to anybody.” 

Connecting Food and Home and Climate

The Almeda fires destroyed some 2,400 homes, of which three-quarters were in mobile home parks. The region was already facing an affordable housing crisis; in Medford, more than half of all renters paid more than one-third of their income on housing. 

Many families Rios works with were living in mobile homes, which they owned outright before the fires. “That’s a lot more affordable than paying for an apartment or residential home,” he says. Now, people’s budgets are becoming tighter with higher rents for the available apartments or houses post-disaster. “Usually, toward the end of the month at the market, we hear families saying, ‘We’re really grateful for this food because we don’t have any more money left for groceries.’” 

Maria says she has noticed the lines getting longer at the market in the past couple years, as more and more families rely on the market to make ends meet. Maria says it’s been harder for young people who normally haven’t needed to access aid like this: “I talked to a young lady [in line] who said that even with two jobs, she couldn’t afford her studio apartment.” 

Maria and her family were able to catch a break in at least one way: During the worst of their financial woes, her two teenage children, who are U.S. citizens, were able to apply for benefits through the Supplementary Nutrition Access Program, commonly referred to as SNAP. The federal program provides monthly funds to purchase groceries to more than 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.   

Receiving SNAP benefits made it easier for Maria to stretch her and her spouse’s paychecks to cover other household necessities like toilet paper and soap—and to start putting away savings to fix up their house. Additionally, in Oregon, local farmers markets often offer a matching program for SNAP users, called Double Up Food Bucks, through which every dollar in SNAP funds counts as $2 at a farmers market. 

But across the state, many undocumented or noncitizen households may not have the ability to access those benefits, particularly among farmworker communities who were displaced by the wildfires. 

Farmworkers in southern Oregon consistently say that the cost of housing is their biggest issue, says Reyna Lopez, the director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), a statewide farmworkers union. “Within our membership, at least a quarter of folks say they have gone to a food bank over the last year,” she says. 

The average farmworker’s take-home pay in the state is below $25,000 a year, according to state data. “It’s pretty devastating that the same population that ensures America is being fed, that a big chunk of them are food insecure,” Lopez says. “And it’s no secret that a majority of that workforce is from Mexico or Latin America.” 

Across the United States, at least 1.2 million low-income immigrants are shut out of this essential food aid program due to immigration status. That isn’t just limited to undocumented residents; legal permanent residents aren’t eligible until they’ve established residency for five years. As many as 5 million people may live in mixed eligibility households—meaning that some family members are citizens, and others aren’t, according to the Migration Policy Institute.  

“Immigration status is connected to everything,” Lopez says. “There’s so many doors that are shut for you, like SNAP benefits, health care services, social security benefits—even if you have worked there your entire life.”

Opening Up Food Access

In 2023, PCUN and a coalition of food justice and immigration justice organizations backed a bill in the Oregon legislature called “Food for All Oregonians.” The bill would set aside state funding for a SNAP-like program for Oregonians who can’t access federal benefits due to their immigration status. “The basic premise is that if you’re human, you deserve food,” says Susannah Morgan, the president of the Oregon Food Bank, which is one of the largest organizations involved in the coalition. 

Though the bill didn’t pass in the 2023 session, advocates plan to reintroduce it in the 2025 session, which begins in January. 

“Not providing food assistance to folks working in the food industry is cruel and unusual,” she says. “The impetus for this [advocacy] was realizing that pandemic-level resources, like the $1,200 checks and extra SNAP benefits or extra unemployment benefits we were getting—that wasn’t available to our neighbors who didn’t have full citizenship.” 

More than 60,000 people in Oregon could benefit from the expanded benefits, at a cost of $120 million every two years, Morgan says. As proposed, the program would allow people to use the same applications for state or federal food assistance; applicants who are citizens would qualify for federal benefits, while those who are undocumented would qualify for the state-subsidized benefits instead. 

“If we’re able to ease the eligibility requirements and streamline the application process, many more families are going to be able to access these essential nutritional supports,” Lopez says. 

A More Just Future

In 2022, the coalition successfully pushed the legislature to pass a bill that expands overtime benefits to farmworkers. And after the Almeda fires, PCUN pushed for stronger heat and smoke rules, protecting outdoor workers from unsafe conditions during climate disasters. In 2022, the state adopted the strongest protections in the country, mandating that employers provide access to shade, cold water, and rest breaks during extreme conditions. This is all the more important in a changing climate. 

“Having higher wages and making sure that people are able to live a better quality of life is really important when it comes to food justice,” Lopez says. “Financial insecurity leads people to rely on less nutritional food—or maybe people just go without eating, because the fear of deportation can prevent undocumented workers from seeking help.” 

SNAP benefits and other food aid programs have never gone far enough in the first place, Morgan says. “SNAP benefits run out between the second and third week of every month.” 

Across Oregon and southwest Washington, more than 1 million people—about one in four residents—rely on the Oregon Food Bank’s services at least once a year. “We are the very last line of defense against hunger,” Morgan says. “When large numbers of people are coming to us, that tells me the federal safety net is very hole-y.”

Now, with the re-election of Donald Trump as president, observers fear that the new administration may target these already inadequate safety nets, slashing what conservatives see as wasteful government spending. The plans, outlined in a conservative manifesto called Project 2025, are frustrating but not surprising, says Morgan. “Immigrants and refugees—our neighbors, coworkers, friends—experience some of the highest rates of hunger in our state. It’s unacceptable that federal policies continue to exclude our communities.” 

There’s virtually no chance that the Trump administration, which campaigned heavily on the idea of “mass deportations,” would extend those benefits to undocumented workers. 

“We are not trying to take advantage [of benefits programs],” Maria, the undocumented restaurant worker from the Rogue Valley says. “But life is hard. The government should think about that—our children suffer the consequences of hunger the most. If there is money available, people shouldn’t go hungry.” 

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with the Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University) and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

“No more lunch tickets,” he said to a woman standing in the hallway. 

When Walz held up the signed bill in the crowded school cafeteria, the room erupted into applause as children hugged the former coach’s neck. “As a former teacher, I know that providing free breakfast and lunch for our students is one of the best investments we can make to lower costs, support Minnesota’s working families, and care for our young learners and the future of our state,” Walz said in a press release on the legislation. “This bill puts us one step closer to making Minnesota the best state for kids to grow up, and I am grateful to all of the legislators and advocates for making it happen.”

The law reimbursed public school districts, charter schools, and non-public schools for meals purchased through the National School Lunch and the School Breakfast Programs. The state-funded Free School Meals for Kids program also provides reimbursement for meals served to students who do not qualify for free or reduced-price meals so all students receive the meals at no cost. The program is estimated to cost the state about $400 million over a two-year budget period.

“Based on the latest data from the Department of Education, lunch participation was up about 19 percent and breakfast participation was up 41 percent,” says Sophia Lenarz-Coy, executive director of the Food Group, which is focused on increasing access to healthy, locally grown food in Minnesota. “We can see that students are just better prepared. They’re better able to learn and focus.”

Minnesota could be setting the framework for adoption on the federal level. In 2023, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who also represents Minnesota, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Jahana Hayes introduced the Universal School Meals Program Act. The law would provide students with free breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a snack each day, without needing to prove eligibility.

It would also raise reimbursement rates, the amount of money the federal government provides to states for lunches, afterschool snacks, and breakfasts served to children participating in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast programs. The bill would also increase the national average payment for free lunch from $4.01 to $4.63 and include additional payments to schools using locally sourced food.

“Minnesota has a long history of good coalition work around food,” says Lenarz-Coy. “When we look at what got us to universal school meals in Minnesota, [the health sector] was involved, food producers were involved, public health was involved, education advocates were involved, and anti-hunger advocates were involved. It really was a coalition.”

It is going to require that level of coalition-building to bring Minnesota’s approach to universal school meals to the national level. But now, with a Republican president-elect and a Republican majority in the Senate and the House, Project 2025 is a real possibility.

With its implementation comes the removal of many protections provided to school children across the country, including calling for an end to the community eligibility program (CEP), which, beginning in the 2014-2015 school year, allowed high-needs schools to begin providing free lunch to all their students and receiving reimbursement based on the percentage of students eligible for those meals. Schools are designated as high needs if a significant percentage of its student population qualifies for free or reduced-price meals.

The Food Group notes Project 2025 and similar proposals do not acknowledge the connection between nutrition and learning or the need of many students who are above the CEP free or reduced-price eligibility threshold but are still unable to afford school meals. Since Barack Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act into law in 2010, which aided the creation of the CEP, children in the U.S. have eaten 23 percent more fruit and 16 percent more vegetables at school, and breakfast participation has increased by nearly 25 percent.

While feeding all children in schools is an expensive endeavor, Lenarz-Coy says it’s an essential element of education that shouldn’t be overlooked. In July, Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) compiled studies showing the value of free school meals for all children, including improved physical and emotional health among students, increased attendance rates, improved test scores among marginalized student groups, and reduced discipline infractions.

“[In Minnesota], we’ve made sure to continue talking to school nutrition associations about how we can keep improving the quality of the lunch along with getting lunch to everybody,” says Lenarz-Coy. “It’s not an easy lift, so the key is to have champions. [You need] several stars to align. Having a champion in the governor’s office was really important to getting a policy this big over the line.”

Hunger Is a Health Problem

Healthy meals for the nation’s children is not a new concept.

In 1946, the National School Lunch Act began giving free school lunches to low-income students. The Child Nutrition Act of 1966 then condensed control of the school lunch program from several government agencies to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), established the School Breakfast Program, and authorized the Special Milk Program, which provides milk free of charge or at a reduced cost to children in schools who do not participate in other child nutrition programs.

The USDA piloted the Child Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) in 1968 to provide food and resources for local sponsors who want to combine a feeding program with a summer activity program. In response to reports of hungry children, the Black Panther Party began running free breakfast programs out of churches and community centers, eventually expanding to 36 cities across the United States by 1971.

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, supplying school meals became an even more urgent priority. In 2020, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which gave the USDA authority to issue nationwide waivers making meals free for all students in participating school districts. More than 5 million children were served during the summer of 2020, nearly double the number of children who received meals through the program in each of the five previous summers. The move led to a record drop in food insecurity among families with children, from nearly 12 million in 2020 to 9 million in 2021.

“It was a huge success,” says Crystal FitzSimons, interim president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), an organization that aims to improve the nutrition, health, and well-being of people facing food insecurity in the United States. “Schools loved it, parents loved it, kids loved it.”

Though the program ended on June 30, 2022, when Congress failed to extend the waiver, at least eight states, including California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico, have now passed legislation to provide free school meals to students.

Other bills such as the School Meals Expansion Act, the No Hungry Kids in School Act, and the Expanding Access to School Meals Act would expand free meals to students, an idea the majority of people in the U.S. support. A poll by FRAC found that 63 percent of voters nationwide support legislation that would provide free meals to students.

Free Food Without Shame

Despite this widespread support, Project 2025 suggests narrowing the scope of the USDA, which it refers to as a “major welfare agency” and removing references to “equity” and “climate smart” in the USDA’s mission statement. Besides the devastating overall effects of this move, conflating free meal programs with welfare discourages students from participating in free meal programs.

This framing continues the stigmatizing of free school meals as “welfare” that began during the “right to lunch” movement in the 1960s. In a 2023 interview on the Integrated Schools podcast, Jennifer Gaddis, Ph.D., an associate professor of civil society and community studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, said that before the pandemic, 30 million children participated in the school lunch program on a daily basis. However, about 20 million more had access to the program but chose not to participate, partially because of the stigma.

“I think shame [was a reason people didn’t participate],” Gaddis said. “And just the stigma of this being like a government handout versus something that you expect to be part of the school day.”

Universal school lunch eliminates the visibility of who is receiving assistance. Consequently, more students are likely to participate in the lunch program. When students feel comfortable participating, they are more likely to consume healthy nutritious meals, which can positively affect their health and academic performance. Eliminating the negative connotation associated with school lunch also fosters a more inclusive learning environment and a decrease in disciplinary actions, while also alleviating stress on families that may already be resource-strapped.

“Families are struggling with increased food costs and housing costs,” FitzSimons says. “[Universal school meals] reduce the household food budget and make it easier for families to make ends meet. It’s much easier when [parents] don’t have to worry about making sure their kids have lunch, and it helps ensure that students have access to the nutrition they need so that they don’t show up in class hungry or get hungry in the afternoon.”

When the School Doors Close

As the push for free healthy school meals increases, so does the discussion about how the U.S. can reduce child hunger once the last school bell rings. Since the Families First Coronavirus Response Act expired, the number of children living in hunger has increased. Today, 14 million children are facing hunger in the United States.

Some schools currently supplement school-day breakfast and lunch with weekend meals for students with an identified need, while other families are reliant on care food programs offered through local organizations. “If there is a weekend program, like at a rec center, a YMCA, or a Boys and Girls Club, they can serve meals through the child and adult care food program,” FitzSimons says. “They don’t reach as many kids, obviously, as school meals.”

But this isn’t a new problem, though there are old solutions: In 1995, a school nurse, who has remained unnamed, in Little Rock, Arkansas, observed that many of the students she treated for illness or fatigue were hungry because they did not have enough to eat at home. So she created a backpack meal program, where she partnered with a local food bank to provide bags with food for students to take home over the weekend.

Over time, programs such as Feeding America’s BackPack Program, Blessings in a Backpack, and Operation Backpack have cropped up in schools and districts all across the country. More than 800,000 children across the U.S. benefit from food backpack programs on any given weekend. 

The BackPack Program works with food banks and schools to provide healthy, easy-to-prepare food for weekends and school breaks. The program feeds more than 450,000 children each week by sending backpacks of groceries home with students. A study of the program in Urbana, Illinois, found that meals provided to families beyond the school day increased food security. Thirteen percent of families surveyed moved from “low food insecure” to “food secure” between October and December, and schools reported improved academic performance, school attendance, literacy and math test scores, and interest in school.

If we want to bring universal school meals to all children, regardless of income, it’s going to take a combination of imagination, tolerance for criticism, and a shift in how we consider this issue. “On test days, schools feed all kids well. Every day is a good day to do well in school,” she says. “We’re really trying to make the case that in the same way we cover books and other things about school, we should make sure all kids going to public schools are fed.”

“The situation in the mountains, where our community lives, is even worse,” she says. More floods as well as long periods of drought have made the perennial water sources in the upper mountains run dry.

Thousands of kilometers from Gurung’s community in the mountains, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP29, was just held in Baku, Azerbaijan. At this annual global convening, professionals, stakeholders, and politicians spent weeks deliberating situations like that of the Tamang and the nearly 500 million Indigenous people around the world. 

Gurung attended COP29 as program officer for the Center for Indigenous Peoples’ Research and Development, based in Kathmandu, Nepal. And her demands were clear: “We want $5 trillion—not as a loan, but as a grant,” she says. 

This target aims to address the urgent needs of developing countries for transitioning to clean energy and adapting to climate change. But COP29 ended on Nov. 24 with a pledge from developed nations to contribute just $300 billion annually to support adaptation. It has not been decided whether this will take the form of a grant or a loan.

Gurung was certainly disappointed. The Inuit Circumpolar Council described the outcome as “unacceptable.” And climate envoy Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, the chief negotiator for Panama, called it a “spit in the face.” 

Despite Indigenous peoples’ crucial and outsized role in climate action, their demands for financial support have again gone unheeded.

COP’s History of Exclusion

Indigenous peoples have always been shortchanged by the agreements that have come out of COP negotiations. 

In 2021, at COP26 in Glasgow, a pledge of $1.7 billion was made to support land rights and forest tenure for Indigenous peoples and local communities. And while countries are on track to meet that goal, only about 2.1 percent of this funding reached Indigenous communities directly.

Much of the funding that comes out of these global agreements is funneled through institutional banks including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These entities have been criticized for their approach to climate finance, particularly in relation to Indigenous peoples. By providing a significant portion of the climate finance in the form of loans rather than grants, for example, they increase the debt burden on those communities. 

Also, the process to access these funds is often complex and bureaucratic, making it difficult for Indigenous communities to benefit directly. Funds are often channeled through national governments or large organizations, which may not prioritize or effectively address the specific needs of Indigenous communities. There even have been instances where projects funded by these institutions have led to human rights abuses and displacement.

So besides a bigger “fair share,” of climate funding for Indigenous communities, Gurung wants direct access to these grants “without an international finance institution in between, like the World Bank or the IMF.” She emphasizes that Indigenous peoples are rightly afraid that those international institutions could demand economic reforms or policy changes that may not align with the priorities or needs of those communities.

“It’s important that Indigenous peoples obtain direct access and control without bureaucratic delays and mandates about how the funds are allocated and spent,” Gurung says. 

Investing in Indigenous Women and Youth

While there is much discussion about Indigenous communities, Indigenous voices aren’t heard enough at COP gatherings, Gurung says: “A lot of negotiations are not open for us.”

Many Indigenous representatives and civil society observers criticized the exclusion and lack of transparency in the negotiation process. Indigenous leaders publicly expressed their frustration with the process’s inadequate consultation of Indigenous communities. For instance, Alessandra Korap Munduruku, an Indigenous rights campaigner from Brazil, criticized the carbon-credit mechanisms being discussed, highlighting how they often lead to land grabs and displacement of Indigenous communities.

Indigenous delegates also reported limited access to negotiation rooms and decision-making processes to the Institute of Development Studies. This exclusion was highlighted by various human rights groups and Indigenous organizations, who noted that their voices were not adequately represented in the final agreements. 

As a kind of protest against this exclusion, Gurung organized a side event about Indigenous women. Along with two colleagues, she shared her experience and how climate change affects Tamang women more than men. She also highlighted the resilience and the knowledge of Indigenous women in her community and Indigenous communities more broadly: “We have more knowledge about natural medicines, about seed banks, food storage, and agricultural practices. We know the surroundings, the environment, and to work as leaders.”

Gurung argues that Indigenous female knowledge is not only richer than that of non-natives, but also superior to that of Indigenous men. She says that for men in her community, it’s more acceptable to find a job in the city, so “men are often migrating from the community.” 

Therefore, in order to make the most meaningful investments in climate solutions, the focus should be on women and youth. “For they need to gain the knowledge and they need to take leadership in the future,” Gurung says. 

The Challenge of the Maasai

The climate realities faced by the Tamang are not unlike those of the Maasai in East Africa. Pastoralist Isaac Nemuta says the effects of climate change have held him and his peers in an iron grip for decades. 

The Maasai are known as a people who hold on to their traditional way of herding—having persisted through centuries of persecution by British colonial rule and Christian missionaries—but they are now being forced to change. In the past 30 years, periods of drought have become more frequent and intense, with rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfalls. 

“In recent years, the situation has worsened,” he says. The past five consecutive rainy seasons all brought way too little water, leading to severe drought conditions. Since the end of 2020, hardly a drop of rain has fallen, which has led to the death of more than 2.5 million cattle.

With millions of pastoralists in East Africa adrift, Nemuta teamed up with colleagues to start an NGO called Climate Smart Pastoralists Limited. They help pastoralists adapt to the new climate conditions and mitigate the impacts of drought through sustainable practices such as rotational grazing, water conservation techniques, and grassland restoration. 

The NGO also engages in community education and capacity building. Their school for pastoralists, launched in 2007, serves not only Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania, but all pastoral peoples. “Even Turkana from the far north of the country attend our school,” Nemuta says.

Most of the funding for Climate Smart Pastoralists Limited comes from small and medium NGOs like Heifer International and German Agro Action (Welt Hunger Hilfe). They also receive funding through the Savory Institute and the Africa Wildlife Foundation.

Nemuta says he has tried to gain access to international climate finance money, like that coming from COP, but without results. The different funding streams for climate adaptation, mitigation, and even the loss and damage funds discussed at COP29 are simply out of reach. The application process for the climate funds that are collected on a global scale is inscrutable for small, Indigenous communities like his.

Making COP Money Accessible

Many Indigenous peoples face significant challenges in accessing the large amounts of money that come out of global conferences like the one in Baku.

The application procedures for UN funds can be highly complex and bureaucratic. Indigenous communities often lack the technical expertise and resources needed to navigate these processes effectively, according to a report from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 

Applications and related documents are often in languages that Indigenous peoples may not be fluent in, making it difficult for them to understand and complete the necessary paperwork. And like Nemuta’s Maasai community, many Indigenous communities are not aware of the available funding opportunities or do not have access to the necessary information to apply. 

But solutions to overcome these barriers exist. The UN itself, through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (which organizes COP29), describes an alternative approach for Indigenous peoples to access climate funding without the bureaucratic hurdles typically associated with UN climate money. The mechanisms are built by and for Indigenous people and local communities, and they can operate in different sociocultural regions and contexts.

These Indigenous Led Funds (ILFs) provide a mechanism for resources to reach Indigenous communities directly, bypassing complex bureaucratic processes, with culturally appropriate grantmaking. They use approaches that align with Indigenous knowledge, priorities, and worldviews.

Some ILFs work internationally across several countries, while others focus on national or community-based initiatives, allowing for flexible and context-specific support. 

At the end of the day, all different forms of ILFs strengthen Indigenous peoples’ ability to make decisions about resource allocation and project implementation. And they act as intermediaries between Indigenous communities and external resources, facilitating partnerships and knowledge exchange. In short: ILFs streamline climate solutions. 

Gurung is clear that for climate solutions to get traction, climate funding needs to be available through an easy and accessible process without too much delay. In short, she says, “It needs to be Indigenous friendly.”

As Donald Trump gets ready to take office, Dr. Robert Bullard, who is from Elba, is calling on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to take compensatory action before the Biden administration’s term ends.

Bullard, often called the “father of environmental justice,” is the author of 18 books on environmental racism, sustainability, and climate change. He is also the founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice and distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. He spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about justice for Shiloh.

Sophomore Sophia Bugarim remembers taking the survey. To the first question—“Do you experience any of these climate emotions?”—Bugarim answered “fear.” The next question narrowed down the four core emotions into more specifics. This time Bugarim selected “worry.” 

“I feel worried that one day I’ll be in a situation where I have to leave my house, and I’ll come back and have no idea what it will look like,” says Bugarim, who recalled her survey answers on an October day when school had been canceled due to the possibility of storm water surge and high winds. While Miami was not in Hurricane Milton’s path, Bugarim wonders how soon the city will be in the path of another storm. “These storms are getting worse. There was a hurricane last week in Tallahassee. Next week gets me worried. It’s very unpredictable.”

Sebastian Navarro, who manned the table as sustainability ambassador during his senior year, thinks students at Maritime and Science Technical Academy probably learn about climate change more than others in the district due to the school’s focus on maritime sciences. He says students visit the reefs just offshore from the beachside school. But that classwork is focused on cognitive learning, not discussion about feelings. 

On the climate emotions survey, when given options for what worries them most about climate change, about one-third of students said sea level rise. Another third said biodiversity loss and coral bleaching. 

Sarah Newman, executive director of the Climate Mental Health Network, says climate change adds another layer of mental health risk for youth and can deepen existing inequities. In 2021, Newman founded the Network to provide solutions beyond traditional therapy, which can be cost-prohibitive and faces ongoing provider shortages. 

She sees the climate emotions wheel as a supplement to mental health therapy and believes schools are a key place to address mental health amid a changing climate. This is a stark contrast with the conservative Project 2025, which aims to erase climate change from public education and the federal government entirely. Newman sees the importance in grassroots solutions to support individuals and communities impacted by the changing climate, regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. 

“Having climate anxiety is a normal response to the climate crisis, so if you respond to what is a societal issue with an individual approach, you’re isolating someone’s experience to a clinical setting,” she says. “Because it’s a collective experience, the process of navigating our climate emotions, managing them, and healing needs to be done in community with others.” 

A New Tool

Multiple reports suggest there is plenty of room for improvement to deepen climate content across subjects and add more social and emotional learning in public schools in the United States. On the National Center for Science Education’s 2020 report card, Florida received a D for its lack of climate change content in state science standards. The center graded 20 states at no higher than a C+, while 21 states, which all use the Next Generation Science Standards, received a B+.

Then in 2022, the North American Association for Environmental Education found only 37% of states included climate change in one subject in addition to science (usually social studies), and only 10% of climate change content addressed the socio-emotional learning dimensions of the crisis.

A 2023 report led by the American Psychological Association and others concurs that more school-based and health-system solutions are needed. Newman sees the climate emotions wheel as a tool that educators everywhere can begin using now. It’s a bottom-up approach that can skirt the obstacles being thrown up in institutions and governments at all levels.

Finnish environmental theologian Panu Pihkala, who popularized the idea that “climate emotions” is a more useful term than “climate anxiety,” consulted with the Climate Mental Health Network to create the climate emotions wheel. It is now available in 30 languages, including Spanish, Kiswahili, and Bengali, and used in a variety of settings.

“Everything about the school day is a learning experience. It’s not just the curriculum being directed by the teacher,” said Michele Drucker, who heads the Miami-Dade County Council Parent Teacher Association environmental committee.

Drucker also ran a sustainability ambassador program in local high schools, which Navarro completed during his lunch hours. Navarro invited students to enter a drawing for completing climate actions such as bringing a reusable water bottle, using share tables for uneaten food at lunch, and eliminating single-use plastics. This is also where Navarro shared the climate emotions wheel, which he says received a lot of engagement and seemed to bump up participation in the weeks that followed.

Navarro says the wheel helped generate hallway conversations about climate, too, as peers asked each other: “Which emoji are you?”

Climate Emotions in the Classroom

In other schools, teachers are adding the climate emotions wheel to their coursework.  

“One of the biggest problems with climate education is not a lack of knowledge,” says Kimberly Williams, a science teacher at Smithtown High School West on Long Island in New York. She began integrating emotional support into her climate change units a few years ago. She says her classes would start the year “discouraged and apathetic,” and that “it’s easy for the students to feel ‘there’s nothing I can do, so I should do nothing.’”

Williams tasked her students with using the paint tool on a tablet to shade portions in a circle representing the degree to which they were feeling a climate emotion. A guide then helped them describe their emotions and evaluate their own strengths and possible contributions to climate solutions.

Williams concedes that most science teachers do not include this kind of social and emotional learning into their lessons: “They don’t see the two as interwoven, and I don’t see the two as something you can separate.”

Williams says in her district, most teachers only “dance around the subject” in an effort to avoid the politics of climate change. To her, that indicates that teachers aren’t connecting it to students’ lives. “They’re showing a graph,” not saying, “‘Why do you think that is?’ or ‘What we can do about it?’”

In nearby New York City, 52% of teachers in a survey said they teach about climate change, but most only dedicate a few hours per year. A recent state bill, which died at the end of the 2024 legislative session, would have mandated that all grades and subject matters include climate.

This bill would have addressed mental health, as well, said Elissa Teles Muñoz, the K–12 programming manager for the Climate Mental Health Network, at a recent Climate Week NYC panel. 

“When there is climate education … it does need to include safeguards for youth mental health,” said Muñoz, who helped write the bill with the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s not responsible to drop a bomb on a child’s brain.”

Growing Support From the Grassroots

The climate emotions wheel relies on grassroots leaders—teachers, parents, or others—to find ways to implement it, which may limit its reach and impact.

Some teachers may not feel supported to include the exercise. Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies K–12 climate education, considered teacher surveys alongside local politics. She found that teachers from states where school or government leaders oppose climate education felt more anxious. For example, the 7% of teachers in Clayton’s sample who were from Florida reported significantly higher levels of climate anxiety.

But Clayton found that when teachers perceived parental support for climate education, they were more likely to talk to students about climate emotions. 

In Miami-Dade public schools, Drucker is bolstered by how the PTA can bypass some state or district politics with grassroots action at schools. She advocated for years for systems-level climate action, though Florida schools lack state support for fully embracing climate action. And that obstacle is only getting worse: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill this spring that strikes the phrase “climate change” from state law entirely.

Newman also believes there’s power in hyperlocal action. One of the climate emotions wheel’s strengths may be that it empowers students. 

For Williams’ part, she includes the climate emotions exercise to help students move toward action. At the end of her courses, she asks students to complete the survey again and asks what they would modify from their earlier responses. One student updated the colors in the wheel and said she felt a little more empowered to take her own actions once she wrote them down.

Navarro says he is still working through climate emotions, but he feels encouraged by peer support in the environmental clubs at his school. “You have the opportunity to advocate for different causes,” he says. Recently, students acted on their concerns by advocating for and landing the district electric buses. Navarro says it feels good to know that “you’re actually making a difference.”

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 $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel, 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. did not make it into the most recent funding bill, 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 a recent op-ed 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 stood on the Haywood Road bridge 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. Human Rights Watch has reported 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 four water engineers 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 water-crisis response efforts here in Western North Carolina (along with other community-led efforts being coordinated by the Rural Organizing and Resilience and Holler Harm Reduction 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. 

In storm-ravaged North Carolina, there is an added complication of climate disaster in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, with thousands left homeless, grieving lost loved ones, and dealing with devastated infrastructure, a ruined economy, and shuttered businesses. 

Erica England, strategic partnerships coordinator at Organized Power in Numbers, is leading GOTV efforts in North Carolina and spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about the top concerns for voters in this swing state.

“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 record-breaking storm 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 whose costs exceeded $1 billion 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.” 

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 discover new drugs, identify new galaxies, and catalog species recovery.

“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.”         

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 isn’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 Cooperative Observer Program, 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 weather stations at the nation’s airports—account for about 80% of the precipitation numbers that federal scientists use to compile what’s known as the U.S. Climate Normals—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 “biblical devastation.”

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 Sept. 25 to Sept. 27: 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 atlas that categorizes the likelihood of extreme storm events, state weather officials determined 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.”

“I understand why young people are really angry and really hurting,” Fonda said. “What I want to say to them is: ‘Do not sit this election out, no matter how angry you are. Do not vote for a third party, no matter how angry you are. Because that will elect somebody who will deny you any voice in the future of the United States. … If you really care about Gaza, vote to have a voice, so you can do something about it. And then, be ready to turn out into the streets, in the millions, and fight for it.’”

Fonda’s remarks came in a wide-ranging interview organized by the global media collaborative Covering Climate Now and conducted by The Guardian, CBS News, and Rolling Stone magazine.

Making major social change requires massive, nonviolent street protests as well as shrewd electoral organizing, Fonda argued. Drawing on more than 50 years of activism, from her anti–Vietnam War and anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s to later agitating for economic democracy, women’s rights, and, today, for climate action, Fonda said that: “History shows us that … you need millions of people in the streets, but you [also] need people in the halls of power with ears and a heart to hear the protests, to hear the demands.”

During the Great Depression, she said, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with helping the masses of unemployed. But FDR said the public had to “make him do it” or he could not overcome resistance from the status quo. “There is a chance for us to make them do it if it’s Kamala Harris and Tim Walz [in the White House],” she said. “There is no chance if Trump and Vance win this election.”

Scientists have repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by half by the next decade, Fonda noted, so a President Harris would have to be pushed “to stop drilling and fracking and mining. No new development of fossil fuels.” Trump, on the other hand, has promised to “‘drill, baby, drill.’ For once, let’s believe him. The choice is very clear: Do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”

Fonda launched the Jane Fonda Climate political action committee three years ago to elect “climate champions” at all levels of government: national, state, and local. “The PAC focuses down ballot—on mayors, state legislators, county councils,” she said. “It’s incredible how much effect people in these positions can have on climate issues.”

Forty-two of the 60 candidates the PAC endorsed in 2022 won their races. In 2024, the PAC is providing money, voter outreach, and publicity to more than 100 candidates in key battleground states and in California, Fonda’s home state. California is “the fifth-biggest economy in the world, and an oil-producing state,” she explained, “so what happens here has an impact far broader than California.”

Fonda is also, for the first time in her life, “very involved” in this year’s presidential campaign, “because of the climate emergency.” She plans to visit each battleground state, she said: “And when I’m there, we give our schedule to the Harris campaign. Then they fold in Harris campaign [get-out-the-vote events], volunteer recruitment, things like that … and then I do them for our PAC candidates” as well.

Her PAC has a strict rule: It endorses only candidates who do not accept money from the fossil fuel industry. The industry’s “stranglehold over our government” explains a crucial disconnect, Fonda said. Polls show that most Americans want climate action, yet their elected officials often don’t deliver it. In California, she said, “We’ve had so many moderate Democrats that blocked the climate solutions we need because they take money from the fossil fuel industry. … It’s very hard to stand up to the people that are supporting your candidacy.”

Fonda also faulted the mainstream news media for not doing a better job of informing the public about the climate emergency and the abundance of solutions. Watching the Harris–Trump debate, she thought that “Kamala did very well.” But she “was very disturbed that the No. 1 crisis facing humanity right now took an hour and a half to come up and was not really addressed,” she added. “People don’t understand what we are facing! The news media has to be more vigilant about tying extreme weather events to climate change. It’s starting to happen, but not enough.”

Given her years of anti-nuclear activism—including producing and starring in a hit Hollywood movie, The China Syndrome, released days before the Three Mile Island reactor accident in 1979—it’s perhaps no surprise that Fonda rejects the increasingly fashionable idea that nuclear power is a climate solution.

“Every time I speak [in public], someone asks me if these small modular reactors are a solution,” she said. “So I’ve spent time researching it, and there’s one unavoidable problem: No nuclear reactor of any kind—the traditional or the smaller or the modular, none of them—has been built in less than 10 to 20 years. We don’t have that kind of time. We have to deal with the climate crisis by the 2030s. So just on the timeline, nuclear is not a solution.” By contrast, she said: “Solar takes about four years to develop, and pretty soon it’s going to be 30% of the electricity in the world.”

The reason that solar—and wind and geothermal—energy are not prioritized over fossil fuels and nuclear, she argued, is that “big companies don’t make as much money on it.” Noting that air pollution from fossil fuels kills 9 million people a year globally, she added: “We’re being poisoned to death because of petrochemicals and the fossil fuel industry. And we [taxpayers] pay for it! We pay $20 billion a year [in government subsidies] to the fossil fuel industry, and we’re dying. … We need that industry out of our lives, off of our planet—but they run the world.”

The two-time Academy Award winner’s decades as one of the world’s biggest movie stars has given her an appreciation of the power of celebrity, and she applauds Taylor Swift for exercising that power with her endorsement of the Harris–Walz ticket.

“I think she’s awesome, amazing, and very smart,” Fonda said of Swift. “I’m very grateful and excited that she did it, and … I think it’s going to have a big impact.”

“My metaphor for myself, and other celebrities, is a repeater,” Fonda added. “When you look at a big, tall mountain, and you see these antennas on the top, those are repeaters. They pick up the signals from the valley that are weak and distribute them so that they have a larger audience. … When I’m doing the work I’m doing, I’m picking up the signals from the people who live in Wilmington and the Central Valley and Kern County and are really suffering, and the animals that can’t speak, and trying to lift them up and send [their stories] out to a broader audience. We’re repeaters. It’s a very valid thing to do.”

Climate activism is also “so much fun,” she said, and it does wonders for her mental health.

“I don’t get depressed anymore,” she said. “You know, Greta Thunberg said something really great: ‘Everybody goes looking for hope. Hope is where there’s action, so look for action and hope will come.’” Hope, Fonda added, is “very different than optimism. Optimism is ‘Everything’s gonna be fine,’ but you don’t do anything to make sure that that’s true. Hope is ‘I’m hopeful, and I’m gonna work like hell to make it true.’”

This article by The Guardian is published here as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

Each year, those who live near the Atlantic Ocean, particularly those near the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, brace themselves for the return of hurricane season. As the water temperatures increase and mix with warm, humid air, tropical thunderstorms form and gather speed. Once a storm’s winds reach 74 miles per hour, the storm is officially classed as a hurricane—and people on land begin paying much closer attention. Between June and the end of November, the looming threat of high-speed winds, heavy rainfall, and coastal flooding hangs in the air; those who live closest to the water make emergency plans, keep an eye on their vulnerable neighbors, coordinate mutual aid efforts, and hold onto hope that, this year, they’ll be safe.

If a hurricane does make landfall, many in the area of impact will have the option to drive, fly, or run away from the danger and ensure their families are warm, dry, and far from danger. Some will choose to stay behind in spite of the risks, but thousands of others will be left with no choice at all. Prisons and jails are often the last places to be evacuated when natural disasters hit. While people on the outside are given ample warning, the incarcerated are at the mercy of prison staff, government officials, and state politicians.

On Sept. 26, 2024, Hurricane Helene smashed into northwestern Florida and quickly made its way toward Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. When it made landfall, its winds whipped the air at 140 miles per hour, causing massive flooding and destruction across all four states. Authorities were well aware Helene was on its way, with each state declaring a state of emergency ahead of the storm. “There will be no place for you to go if things get bad,” officials with Cedar Key Fire Rescue on Florida’s Gulf Coast warned. “This is going to be a life-threatening surge. It is nothing to take lightly.”

Yet, even as the hurricane barrelled down, people incarcerated in prisons and jails in multiple states were not allowed to evacuate. Instead, they were moved to higher floors or, as was the case in Florida, to “hardened dorms built to withstand high winds.” In other cases, they were simply locked in their regular dorms. 

Less than two weeks later, Hurricane Milton hit Florida again, knocking out power for millions, throwing up 38 tornadoes, and causing widespread flooding. The lead-up to the storm was grim, and photos of fleeing residents stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic only added to the alarm. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor went on television to tell Floridians, “If you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you are going to die.”

For the second time, though, thousands of the state’s incarcerated people—including more than 21,000 located in mandatory evacuation areas—were left with no option but to ride out the storm behind bars. The Florida Department of Corrections stated it had “successfully relocated” 5,950 people ahead of the storm—out of 28,000 who lay in the hurricane’s path. As Jordan Martinez, an organizer with watchdog Fight Toxic Prisons, told Democracy Now, the number of evacuees only made up a small percentage of the individuals in harm’s way and some of the evacuations barely qualified as such.

The majority of those evacuated came from work camps, halfway houses, and work release centers, and in many instances they were “evacuated” to theoretically stronger facilities nearby. For example, women at Lowell Work Camp, a section of the Lowell Correctional Institution in Marion County, Florida, were evacuated just a few dozen yards away … to another part of the same prison complex.

“The fact that they are unable to evacuate people in mandatory evacuation zones goes to show the complete lack of prioritization of the lives of incarcerated people during hurricanes,” Martinez said. “If we are prioritizing the safety of our communities, those communities must include the incarcerated people inside that are themselves organizing on the inside to fight for better conditions, and quite often being forced during hurricanes to prepare to protect their communities via forced slave labor with sandbags or in cleanup in the aftermath.”

As Martinez noted, the trouble does not end once the wind stops blowing, either. Hurricane damage can disrupt incarcerated peoples’ access to light, clean water, food, and medical supplies, leaving them cold, hungry, thirsty, or sick for days or weeks at a time. Power outages can cut them off from communicating with their loved ones and the rest of the world, which also hamstrings their ability to report unsanitary or dangerous conditions inside their facilities. It also leaves them unable to check in on their own communities, or to find out whether their own families are safe.

When Helene slammed into western North Carolina, prisoners in multiple facilities outside Asheville told The Intercept about losing access to running water—and having to relieve themselves in plastic bags. As one woman’s husband told her, “We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.”

Elsewhere, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a nationwide collective of incarcerated individuals who provide support and legal resources to other prisoners, were able to share a report from inside a maximum security prison in Florida as Milton tore through the state: “Power’s out in here, and the COs are hiding in their offices while we’re left in the dark. We’re shouting for meds and updates, but no one’s listening. Just trying to hold on and hope this storm doesn’t swallow us whole…”

Another message illustrated the inhumane conditions inside as the storm raged, mirroring the hellish conditions stirred up by Helene: “Toilets backing up, feces running over. We’ve been told we’ll have to lay in it. No movement allowed.”

While incarcerated people can be denied the most basic level of hygiene inside their dorms, they are also often the first to be drafted to clean up after a climate disaster. As The Appeal reported, both Florida and South Carolina have called on incarcerated workers to clear roads and haul debris after Helene and Milton. During a press conference, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis cheerfully framed this forced labor as “utilizing” the state’s “resources.” “They do prison labor anyways,” he said. “The good thing about that is you can use that on private property, not just on public.” He also noted the cleanup “would cost us way more money if you had to do that through some of these private contractors.”

Unsurprisingly, Florida and South Carolina are two of seven states in which incarcerated workers are paid nothing for nearly all prison jobs.

As the climate crisis worsens, incarcerated people and those who love them will continue to worry that every new weather emergency may mean a death sentence unless real, concrete action is taken and laws are put into place to ensure state and local county officials are prepared in advance to evacuate everyone who may be under threat, regardless of their address or legal status.

Amid this ever-growing threat, incarcerated people, their loved ones, and organizers are on the front lines, advocating for themselves and their co-prisoners. “We urge the public to understand our plight as people in jails and prisons,” a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak told Democracy Now. “We suffer during natural disasters and lock our dark cells, not knowing if we will survive or not.”

Publications such as The Appeal, The Marshall Project, and The Intercept are also closely following the impact of the climate crisis on prisoners and amplifying the stories of incarcerated individuals who have been subjected to dire conditions or left behind during catastrophes. Every letter, every social media post, and every phone call counts. The louder the public outcry about this cruel practice becomes, the less likely officials will give a repeat performance the next time a deadly storm starts brewing.

“This is not just a logistical failure, it’s a profound moral failing,” the member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak emphasized. “While entire towns are evacuated and communities band together to seek safety, we remain locked within these walls, treated as less than human. It is heartbreaking to think that while the world preps for survival during a pending natural disaster such as Hurricane Milton, we are still treated as if we don’t matter, as if our lives can be tossed aside in the name of protocol. We must end this normalized routine. We beg the public to pay attention and have a heart of compassion.”

Among the hardest hit areas is Asheville, North Carolina, where the water system has been devastated, hundreds of thousands remain without power or internet access, and a thriving arts district has been severely flooded. To make matters worse, Donald Trump and his billionaire backer Elon Musk have fueled wild conspiracy theories, in part based on their continued demonization of immigrants.

Lauren Steiner, an organizer, activist, and independent journalist based in Asheville, spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about Helene’s impact, the government’s response, and how the local community is engaged in mutual aid efforts.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has a plan to accelerate climate change by cutting the size and scope of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Weather Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, falsely claiming these agencies themselves are “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” It calls for the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change so the U.S. wouldn’t need to track, report, or reduce emissions. 

An August 2024 study determined that if all of the document’s climate-related recommendations were implemented, the U.S. would spew an additional 2.7 billion tons of climate-heating emissions into the atmosphere by 2030. Antonia Juhasz, energy, climate, and environmental justice author, analyst, and investigative journalist spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about what a progressive vision of climate justice could look like, as part of YES! Media’s ongoing Progress 2025 initiative.

And while an overabundance of water is a major threat to the Netherlands, the even greater threat for the country is actually a lack of it. “The concept of droughts in the Netherlands is new to most people,” explains Frank van Gaalen, a researcher with the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL). “It doesn’t match the image of the Netherlands as a country that lies, for a large part, beneath sea level, is surrounded by sea, and contains rivers, lakes, canals, and ditches.”

When van Gaalen published a report that pointed out the danger of droughts this year, people—even locally—reacted with “amazement and disbelief.”

Having too little water and having too much share a common cause: climate change. “We know that climate change is already happening and will continue. The way we are dealing with water in the Netherlands will have to take all these threats into consideration together,” van Gaalen says. 

So while leaders work to combat both floods and droughts, they also have to consider the fact that the land itself is sinking—a process called subsidence. And some researchers are pointing out that the measures the government has been implementing against floods are insufficient and overly reliant on technological solutions, such as dikes. 

“If we keep on increasing our coastal protection only with grey structures—for example, a concrete dike—subsidence behind the dike will continue and sea level will rise,” says Marte Stoorvogel, a researcher at Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). “At some point you’re creating some kind of situation where when it goes wrong, it will go really badly wrong.” 

For the last 20 years or so, various Dutch initiatives have tried to tackle the problem. For example, the Amsterdam district of IJburg is known for its floating houses that move with the rise and fall of a lake called IJmeer. Since the severe river floods of 1993 and 1995, the government introduced a new approach, a project called Ruimte voor de Rivier (Room for the River), which tries to give back swaths of land to previously regulated rivers, letting them meander, and even overflow as necessary. Dunes are also getting more attention, not just as beautiful nature preserves, but also as dynamic, biodiverse areas that can offer an additional buffer against the effects of climate change.

The sustainable solutions that Stoorvogel and her team are working on envision a transition zone that incorporates both water and land. The work also includes making sure people in the Netherlands don’t only see the sea as a threat. 

“Instead of keeping the boundary between sea and land very sharp, we need to start incorporating the sea more into our landscape,” she says. 

A More Spiritual Solution

For Stoorvogel, inspiration to solve this issue came from an unlikely source: a powerful but little-known goddess called Nehalennia. While the goddess was worshiped in the Netherlands in pre-Christian times, Stoorvogel is now hoping to introduce her to more of the modern Dutch population as a way to “reconnect with the water in a spiritual way and see also the beauty in it.”

Nehalennia—goddess of the sea, as well as fertility and rebirth—plays an important role in Dutch neopaganism today. According to Hanneke Minkjan, an independent researcher who wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Dutch neopaganism, Nehalennia was declared the most important female deity in the Netherlands during the 2006 Goddess Conference, despite the fact that not much was known about her. 

“People immediately embraced the scarce evidence because they had something tangible, something that was really there,” explains Peter Versteeg, a cultural anthropologist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who specializes in neopaganism and religion. “She was a goddess of seafarers and travelers, and her altar was found in the sea. I can imagine that this has been very inspiring to a lot of Dutch neopagans.”

Even though the majority of the population in the Netherlands identifies as non-religious, Stoorvogel set out to create an altar to Nehalennia. She teamed up with the Berlin-based art studio Nonhuman Nonsense, which describes itself as “a research-driven design and art studio creating near-future fabulations and experiments somewhere between utopia and dystopia.” The multimedia altar comprises natural components, such as wood and mud, as well as an AI-generated triptych of the goddess and a space that allows visitors to listen to the sounds of the sea through a shell.

The project, called “Mud and Flood: The Return of Nehalennia” won the Bio, Art and Design (BAD) Award in 2022 from a consortium of various scientific and cultural institutions in the province, demonstrating that the goddess can garner interest from scientific, artistic, and environmental communities as well.

Stoorvogel hopes that becoming aware of Nehalennia’s importance to this country—as well as her function as a medium between the sea and humans—could help change the stance of people trying to keep water out at all costs. “The water doesn’t always have to be a threat,” she says. “Instead of letting water into our landscape and seeing it as a gigantic loss, [we can see] the beauty of it.”

A return to nature is an overarching theme in neopaganism, which is “firmly associated with nature spirituality, the worship of nature, the energy of nature, the energy of the elements,” explains Versteeg. “This is another form of inspiration, and that’s when people turn to nature and try to become aware of it.” 

That awareness can be an essential tool for combating climate change. 

From Landscape to Seascape

At a time when the lack of water in the Netherlands is becoming an even bigger threat than an overabundance, it becomes crucial to consider what the sea, lakes, and rivers truly mean to a country so long defined by them. “With climate change bringing more, longer, and more extreme dry and hot periods, we have to find a new balance between discharging of excess water and conserving water for dry periods,” van Gaalen says.

While attempts to fight drought are less known than the struggle against the water, they do exist. For example, the Ijsselmeer—a reservoir that provides fresh drinking water to Amsterdam and its surroundings—has fluctuating water levels. This makes it possible to store more water in the wet winter months that can then be used during the drier summer months. 

The Dutch government has also implemented measures for spatial planning they call water en bodem-sturend, or “water and soil guiding,” which involves, among other things, opting for circular agriculture and no longer building apartments or houses in areas prone to flooding.

Implementing so many systemic changes would require a paradigm shift. “The most important aspect in these considerations is adapting our activities and land use to the possibilities and restrictions of our water, soil, and natural systems,” explains van Gaalen, “including accepting that not all activities are possible on all locations.” 

But maybe solutions can be found in a more spiritual approach alongside a purely technological one. 

“Nehalennia and her history and characteristics are a way of showing people that we don’t have to fight against the water,” Stoorvogel says. “It’s about trying to open up to the idea that it’s part of our landscape.”

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, What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures (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 Substack 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.” 

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 climate comedy, 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.

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.” 

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 Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. Her book explains how “dispossession of Palestinians in the hands of the Zionist settler state occurs, centrally, in the ecological realm.”  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 not inherently harmful; 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 an invasive species. 

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 2021 article, 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.” 

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 The Land in Our Bones, 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.

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 Western Oregon Tribal Fairness Act; this bipartisan legislation sought to put tribal lands 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 contribute 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—the Cow Creek Umpqua say 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 Western Oregon Indian Termination Act, 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 “encouraging move toward progress” 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 recalled this year. “The trees were gone. It was just black, and it was just the most depressing sight I’d ever seen.” 

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.” 

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—on tribal access and forest resource quality. Lake’s research underscores that building trust and sharing knowledge through collaboration 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.” 

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 invested $30 million 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 placed the National Bison Range in trust 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 stewardship deals with tribes in the Midwest and Western states—and conservation easements—like the one Oakland used to place a parcel of land 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 restrict the tribes’ autonomy 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, securing loans and initiating a $32 million fundraising effort to pay them off. 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.” 

Indigenous peoples are considered among the most affected 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. 

“There’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.” 

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 Next City. 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. 

In a new story for YES! as part of our ongoing Progress 2025 initiative, award-winning journalist Peter Yeung, who traveled to Los Cedros, explains how the region remains protected against extractive industries thanks to its constitutional rights. Yeung, who covers climate, global health, migration, human rights, and cities through a solutions-oriented lens spoke with YES! Senior Editor Sonali Kolhatkar on YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali about his report.

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 4,800-hectare (11,860-acre) reserve of cloud forest in the northwest Ecuadorian Andes, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas.

This tropical haven—home to a wealth of wildlife, 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 More Than Human Rights Project, 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 sixth mass extinction 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 Bitty Roy, 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 Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. 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 rivers, watersheds, mountains, and even the entirety of Mother Earth, whereas others have focused on species like seals in the North Sea, sea turtles in Panama, or a specific animal, such as Tommy the chimpanzee, who was living in a cage in New York. In one particularly creative case this year, campaigners succeeded in getting music streaming platforms to allow nature to be credited for sounds used in songs.

In Ecuador, the groundwork was set in 2008 when, thanks to lobbying from Indigenous groups, the country adopted a new constitution 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 Rainforest Information Center, 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 mass deforestation 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 140 scientific papers 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.” 

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 verdict 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.

“There 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 report 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 case claiming pollution violated the rights of the Machángara River, which runs through Ecuador’s capital, Quito. In March, Peru recognized 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 referenced the Los Cedros precedent in court filings.

“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 environmentalist 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 recognized 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 remains undrinkable.

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 isn’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, We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People (titled We Will Not Be Saved in global editions) out on September 17, 2024.

Within hours, Kaliko learned this wasn’t a normal fire, and that her dad’s house was gone. The Lāhainā fire consumed the town, killing 102 people and destroying more than 2,000 buildings, the flames fanned by a potent combination of climate change and colonialism.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the deadliest wildfire in modern United States history, one that changed Hawaiʻi forever and made Kaliko more determined to defend her community.

This summer she was part of a group of plaintiffs who forced the state of Hawaiʻi to agree to decarbonize its transportation system, which is responsible for half of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. (We are only using her first name because she is a minor and filed the lawsuit without her surname.)

Now 14, she has spent the past year going to protests and testifying at water commission meetings to defend Indigenous water rights. She sees her advocacy as part of her kuleana, a Hawaiian word that connotes both a privilege and a responsibility, to her community in West Maui where her Native Hawaiian family has lived for 19 generations.

“I’m from this place, it’s my main kuleana to take care of it like my kupuna have in the past,” she said, referring to her ancestors. 

Across the country and globe, young people are filing lawsuits to try to hold governments and companies accountable for their role in promoting climate change. At the center of many are Indigenous youth like Kaliko who feel an enormous urgency and responsibility to step up and protect their land and cultural resources from this latest colonial onslaught on their way of life. 

In May, eight Alaska residents age 11 to 22—half of whom are Alaska Native—sued the state to block a liquefied natural gas pipeline project that’s expected to triple the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. In June, Indigenous youth and environmental groups in New Mexico won a key initial victory in a lawsuit challenging the oil and gas industry. 

In July, the Montana Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Held v. Montana, a lawsuit brought by Montana youth challenging the state’s law that forbids agencies from considering climate change in their environmental reviews. The plaintiffs include Native American youth who say worsening wildfires and warmer days are making it harder to continue their cultural traditions. 

It’s not just the United States. In 2022, Indigenous youth in Australia won a major victory against a destructive coal project. A few years earlier, Indigenous youth in Colombia joined a broader youth lawsuit that affirmed the rights of the Amazon Rainforest to protection and conservation. 

The cases are part of a major upswing in climate change litigation globally over the last decade, including a rise in climate cases brought by Indigenous peoples in countries ranging from Argentina to New Zealand. 

Korey G. Silverman-Roati, a fellow at the Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, said there’s growing recognition that not only are Indigenous people uniquely susceptible to climate impacts but their unique human rights protections can lend extra power to climate cases. 

The lawsuit Kaliko helped bring wasn’t centered on Indigenous legal rights, but most of the plaintiffs were Native youth like her, and they collectively secured one of the most successful outcomes in the history of U.S. climate litigation. “That might be a signal to future folks interested in bringing climate litigation that these might be especially persuasive plaintiffs,” Silverman-Roati said.

To Katy Stewart, who works at the Aspen Center’s Center for Native American Youth, the willingness of Indigenous youth like Kaliko to take the lead in these cases makes sense. Her organization recently surveyed more than 1,000 Indigenous youth and conducted focus groups to learn what they care about. When it came to climate change, emotions ran hot. 

“What we are seeing and hearing a lot was anger, frustration, and a want to do something,” she said. “It was hopeful to me that there wasn’t sort of a ‘giving up and this is over for us.’ More of ‘We need to do something because we’re the ones seeing this right now.’”

For teenagers like Kaliko, litigation offers an opportunity to force change in a political and economic system that has long resisted calls to climate action. It also feels like a necessary step to protect her home. 

“It’s really important to me that other kids don’t have to go through what I’ve experienced, and that’s what drives me to do this stuff,” Kaliko said. “But it’s really just like the thought of ‘If I don’t do it, then who will?’”

When Johnny Juarez from Albuquerque thinks of climate change, he thinks of New Mexico’s oil fields, vast and expansive and dominant in the state’s economy. Juarez is 22, and in the time he’s been alive, the state’s oil production has ramped up 10 times.

The drilling has expanded even though there’s scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels is causing incredible damage to the Earth. It’s ramped up despite harmful air pollution affecting neighboring communities and regardless of the deadly risks to workers, such as in the case of Randy Yellowman, a 47-year-old Native American man killed in an explosion in 2019.

Talking about the harms of the oil and gas industry is hard in New Mexico, though, because it’s such an entrenched economic driver. Yellowman had been on the job 17 years when he was killed. Juarez, an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Laguna, knows Native families whose parents and grandparents worked in the oil fields and see it as a viable career for themselves and their children. 

“What a just transition looks like to us is centering those families that are going to be most impacted and making sure that they get the support they need,” Juarez said. Juarez has talked a lot about the “just transition” in his job as a community organizer, the concept of moving away from fossil fuels to rely instead on green energy and doing so in a way that respects the rights of marginalized peoples. 

He thinks it’s an essential step, and that’s one of the reasons he’s one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit in New Mexico that contends the state is violating its constitution by failing to control pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry. 

To Juarez, suing to stop the fossil fuel industry feels like a necessary continuation of his family’s legacy of standing up against environmental racism. Long before he was born, his great-grandfather sued the Jackpile Mine, a gigantic open-pit uranium mine, for violating their property rights. The family lost their suit, and decades after the mine closed, Indigenous families continue to deal with the environmental fallout of the mine.

Juarez’s family left the reservation because of the uranium pollution, and Juarez grew up in Albuquerque, where he was raised by his grandfather, a former sheepherder and graduate of a federal Indian boarding school. Still, they returned to the reservation to celebrate feast days, and Juarez’s childhood is peppered with memories of fishing with his grandfather and watching cultural dances. 

“As Pueblo people, we’re really fortunate that, despite very violent attempts, we were never removed from our ancestral homelands and reside exactly where the colonizers found us,” he said. Environmental justice feels like another birthright. 

“This was actually a fight that I was really born into,” Juarez said. “The fossil fuel industry and fossil fuel extraction and fracking and oil and gas exploration is really just the next chapter in colonial extractivism in New Mexico.”

That’s exactly how Beze Gray of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Canada feels. In 2019, they joined a group of seven young people, three of whom are Indigenous, who sued the government of Ontario for weakening its climate goals. Gray grew up in the shadow of dozens of chemical plants and oil refineries and saw firsthand how pollution hurt their community. Now, compounding that harm are climate-change-fueled shorter winters that are making it tougher to continue Indigenous ways of living. 

“We used to have a month to do sugar bushing, and now it’s spread out into days,” Gray said of their traditional practice of collecting maple water and boiling it into sugar. “This feeling of loss and grief of experiencing life with climate change—it impacts so many of our traditional ways.” 

Even though Juarez’s lawsuit passed its first legal hurdle, it’s far from clear whether it’ll be successful. Gray’s case, too, has faced setbacks and is awaiting a ruling on appeal. Many climate lawsuits don’t go anywhere—a court decides that the people suing don’t have standing, or the law doesn’t say what the plaintiffs think it does, or a judge decides that their concerns are valid but they sued the wrong defendants the wrong way. 

Those disappointments have taught plaintiffs to be persistent. Our Children’s Trust is an Oregon-based nonprofit that has spearheaded many of the youth-led lawsuits in the U.S., including the cases in Montana and Hawaiʻi. When their attorney Andrew Well talks about their Alaska case, he clarifies that their current litigation is called Sagoonick v. State of Alaska II. A previous lawsuit, Sagoonick v. State of Alaska, with the same named plaintiff, failed after a judge ruled that the youth couldn’t sue the state for its systemic actions but could challenge particular state agency decisions. So that’s what they’re doing this time, challenging the state’s support of a proposed 800-mile liquefied natural gas pipeline stretching from north to south. 

Summer Sagoonick, an Iñupiat Alaskan from Unalakleet, was just 15 when the first lawsuit was filed. Over the past 10 years, climate change in Alaska has accelerated, with the state warming twice as fast as the rest of the country. Permafrost is thawing, salmon are disappearing from the Yukon River, and crabs are missing from the Bering Sea. By the time this next case resolves, the Alaska that she grew up with may not exist.

Globally, Indigenous peoples are often the first to experience the effects of climate change because of their dependence on land and water. In the U.S., modern-day reservations are more susceptible than Indigenous traditional homelands to drought and wildfires, extreme weather events expected to worsen as the Earth warms. 

Stewart from the Center for Native American Youth said not only are Indigenous youth watching their climate change firsthand, but they’re also experiencing climate loss on top of existing trauma. Youth like Juarez are just a generation or two away from government boarding schools that ripped Indigenous children away from their homes in an attempt to assimilate them. Now, many are in the process of trying to reclaim the cultures and languages that were stolen from generations before but are confronting the reality that a warmer Earth could prevent many traditions from persisting. 

Becoming plaintiffs in climate lawsuits is a way of combating that grief and turning it into something productive.

“If you can take this despair and anger and frustration and be able to put it somewhere, that does wonders for your own self-esteem and your own belief in the future and your own hope for the future,” Stewart said. “The starting point of believing that you matter is being listened to. And I think we’re seeing young people stepping into that role and having hope that things can get better.” 

Holding onto that hope isn’t easy. The day Lāhainā burned, Kaliko was shocked, but thinks it may have been easier for her to stomach the loss because it wasn’t the first time she had lost a home.

She was just 8 years old back in 2018 when a tropical storm hit Maui. No such storm had ever made landfall on the island before, but her mom had a bad feeling about this one, and so she told Kaliko to pack up some of her things and they left. 

Theirs were the only family in the valley they knew of that evacuated, and when they came back, theirs was the only house that had been completely destroyed by flooding. Gone were the paintings in Kaliko’s bedroom, including the pretty one of the cardinal above her bed. Gone were her dresses, including her favorite pink-and-green one with a lei on it.

In that way, the grief of the Lāhainā wildfire felt familiar. But this time, her whole life was upended. Suddenly, school was completely online. Then she and her classmates were moved to a temporary campus. She couldn’t go to the beaches where she used to swim after the state blocked off the burn area. She didn’t see her friends as often because they were moving around a lot and missing a lot of classes. 

Kaliko felt grateful that she had her mom’s house, that she hadn’t been in Lāhainā the day of the fire, and that she hadn’t lost loved ones the same way that other kids did. But she also felt scared. 

“This is just going to keep happening,” she thought. The realization is motivating her to join the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation’s youth council created by her lawsuit’s settlement so that she can hold the state accountable to its decarbonization promises. 

More recently, in a lot of ways, life has gone back to normal. This summer, she attended her eighth-grade banquet, graduated from middle school, and competed in the state championships with her outrigger canoe paddling team. 

Still, she feels acutely aware that everything can change overnight. And she doesn’t want what happened to her to happen to anyone else. 

Twenty-one years from now—the deadline for the state of Hawaiʻi to decarbonize its transportation system—Kaliko hopes to still be living at home, doing what she can to make a difference. 

“I want to mainly be advocating for my community,” she said. “I don’t think I can imagine myself doing anything else.”