References
In addition to select sources shared in the book, you will find a full list of references for each essay below.
Sources by Essay
Select Sources
Atkin, Emily. HEATED (newsletter).
Benyus, Janine M. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: Harper Collins, 2009.
Berry, Wendell. The Hidden Wound. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010.
brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.
Bullard, Robert, and Beverly Wright. The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books, 1993.
Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Chenoweth, Erica. “The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance.” Filmed November 4, 2013, at TEDxBoulder, Boulder, CO. Video, 12:33.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000.
“A Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal: Principles and Values.” No date.
Foote, Eunice. “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.” American Journal of Science and Arts 22 (1856): 382–83.
Goodell, Jeff. The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World. New York: Little, Brown, 2017.
Green America and Kiss the Ground. “Climate Victory Gardens.” No date.
Hayhoe, Katharine. “The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Fight Climate Change: Talk About It.” Filmed November 30, 2018, at TED Women, Palm Springs, CA. Video, 17:04.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” Edited by Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. Special report, 2019.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Klein, Naomi. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt, 2014.
Leiserowitz, Anthony, et al. Climate Change in the American Mind. New Haven: Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 2019.
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951.
Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re In Without Going Crazy. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012.
Mitchell, Sherri. Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2018.
Moms Clean Air Force. “Breath of Life: Bible Study Curriculum.” No date.
Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, and Avi Lewis. “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” Illustrated by Molly Crabapple. Presented by Naomi Klein and The Intercept, April 17, 2019. Video, 7:35.
Oreskes, Naomi, and Eric M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Penniman, Leah. Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2018.
Project Drawdown. The Drawdown Review: Climate Solutions for a New Decade. Edited by Katharine Wilkinson. San Francisco: Project Drawdown, 2020.
Ray, Janisse. The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2012.
Robinson, Mary. Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018.
Robinson, Mary, and Maeve Higgins. Mothers of Invention (podcast). Produced by Doc Society.
Schwartz, Judith D. Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2019.
Sellers, Sam. “Gender and Climate Change in the United States: A Reading of Existing Research.” Women’s Environment and Development Organization and Sierra Club, 2020.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818.
Simard, Suzanne. “How Trees Talk to Each Other.” Filmed June 29, 2016, at TEDSummit, Banff, Canada. Video, 18:11.
Smith, Bren. Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. “Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing.” 1996.
Stokes, Leah Cardamore. Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Sturgeon, Amanda. Creating Biophilic Buildings. Seattle: International Living Future Institute, 2017.
Thunberg, Greta. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference. New York: Penguin Books, 2019.
Toensmeier, Eric. The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2016.
U.S. Congress. Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal, H.R. 109, 116th Cong., § 1 (2019).
United States Global Change Research Program. “Fourth National Climate Assessment.” 2017 and 2018.
Warren, Elizabeth. “Climate Plans.”
Westervelt, Amy. Drilled (podcast). Produced by Critical Frequency.
Williams, Terry Tempest. Erosion: Essays of Undoing. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Full Sources
Begin: Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
She was the first woman in climate science, but history overlooked her until just a few years ago.
Raymond P. Sorenson, “Eunice Foote’s Pioneering Research on CO2 and Climate Warming,” Search and Discovery, no. 70092 (2011).
“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature…”
Eunice Foote, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” American Journal of Science and Arts 22 (1856): 382–83.
…it was read aloud by Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, rather than by Foote herself…
Leila McNeill, “This Suffrage-Supporting Scientist Defined the Greenhouse Effect But Didn’t Get the Credit, Because Sexism,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 5, 2016.
That was three years before Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own more detailed work on heat-trapping gases…
Ed Hawkins, “John Tyndall: Founder of Climate Science?” Climate Lab Book, April 26, 2018.
Her name appears on the list of signatories to the 1848 Seneca Falls “Declaration of Sentiments”…
“Signatures to the ‘Declaration of Sentiments,’” Woman’s Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, NY, 1848; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Frederick Douglass: ‘A Women’s Rights Man,’” Atlantic, September 30, 2011.
John Tyndall opposed women’s suffrage.
Roland Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer and Public Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
…women and girls face greater risk of displacement or death from extreme weather disasters.
Mary Halton, “Climate Change ‘Impacts Women More Than Men,’” BBC, March 8, 2018; Julie-Anne Richards and Simon Bradshaw, “Uprooted by Climate Change: Responding to the Growing Risk of Displacement” (report, Oxfam, 2017); International Union for Conservation of Nature, “Disaster and Gender Statistics,” accessed April 1, 2020; Eric Neumayer and Thomas Plümper, “The Gendered Nature of Natural Disasters: The Impact of Catastrophic Events on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy, 1981–2002,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97, no. 3 (2007): 551–66.
Early marriage and sex work…have been tied to droughts and floods.
Gethin Chamberlain, “Why Climate Change Is Creating a New Generation of Child Brides,” Guardian, November 26, 2017; Otto Simonsson, “‘I Did It Only for the Money’: Climate Displacement Pushes Girls into Prostitution,” Reuters, October 17, 2018.
There is growing proof of the link between climate change and gender-based violence…
Itzá Castañeda Camey et al., Gender-Based Violence and Environment Linkages: The Violence of Inequality, ed. Jamie Wen (Gland, Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature, 2020).
All around the world, women and girls are making enormous contributions to climate action…
Mothers of Invention, “Mothers,” accessed April 1, 2020; Véronique Hyland, Naomi Rougeau, and Julie Vadnal, “27 Women Leading the Charge to Protect Our Environment,” Elle, June 6, 2019; 500 Women Scientists, “500 Women Scientists,” accessed April 1, 2020; African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, “New Interventions for a Changing World: Celebrating African Women Scientists on the Frontlines of Climate Change,” accessed April 1, 2020; Women’s Earth & Climate Action Network, International, “Women Speak: Stories, Case Studies and Solutions from the Frontlines of Climate Change,” accessed April 1, 2020; Man-Made Disaster, “30 Women & Non-Binary Artists Explore Patriarchy & the Planet,” accessed April 1, 2020; Apolitical, “Climate 100: The World’s Most Influential People in Climate Policy,” accessed April 1, 2020; Carly Nairn, “13 Female ‘Cli-Fi’ Writers Who Are Inspiring a Better Future,” Sierra Club, March 8, 2018; Sara Schonhardt, “Where Women Lead on Climate Change,” Christian Science Monitor, May 1, 2018; Kate Wheeling and Ted Scheinman, “The Women on the Front Lines of Climate Change,” Pacific Standard, March 20, 2017.
We see joyful following where wise leadership appears, joining instead of duplicating, giving one another credit, sharing resources, passing the mic, and celebrating one another’s successes. It is shine theory in practice.
“Shine Theory” is a term coined by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman. Refer to shinetheory.com for more information.
Women remain underrepresented…in executive leadership of environmental organizations, United Nations climate negotiations, and media coverage of the crisis, and in the legal systems that create and uphold change.
Green 2.0, “Executive Summary,” in “Report Card,” 2019; United Nations Climate Change, “Women Still Underrepresented in Decision-Making on Climate Issues Under the UN,” November 27, 2019; “Gender Composition” (report by the secretariat, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: Conference of the Parties, Twenty-fifth session, December 2–13, 2019, Santiago); Ted MacDonald, “How Broadcast TV Networks Covered Climate Change in 2019,” Media Matters for America, February 27, 2020; Sara Atske, A.W. Geiger, and Alissa Scheller, “The Share of Women in Legislatures Around the World Is Growing, but They Are Still Underrepresented,” Pew Research Center, March 18, 2019; Tracey E. George and Albert H. Yoon, “The Gavel Gap” (report, American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, 2016).
Girls and women leading on climate receive insufficient financial backing and too little credit.
Christen Dobson and Steven Lawrence, “Executive Summary: Our Voices, Our Environment: The State of Funding for Women’s Environmental Action” (report, Global Greengrants Fund and Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds, 2018); Miriam Gay-Antakia and Diana Liverman, “Climate for Women in Climate Science: Women Scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 9 (2018): 2060–2065.
Research shows that women have an edge over men when it comes to the planet: caring about the environment and climate change and acting on that care…
Matthew Ballew et al., “Gender Differences in Public Understanding of Climate Change,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, November 20, 2018; Aaron M. McCright, “The Effects of Gender on Climate Change Knowledge and Concern in the American Public,” Population and Environment 32 (2010): 66–87; Aaron R. Brough et al., “Is Eco-Friendly Unmanly? The Green-Feminine Stereotype and Its Effect on Sustainable Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research 43, no. 4 (2016): 567–82; Aaron R. Brough and James E.B. Wilkie, “Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly,” Scientific American, December 26, 2017; Aaron M. McCright and Chenyang Xiao, “Gender and Environmental Concern: Insights from Recent Work and for Future Research,” Society and Natural Resources 27, no. 10 (2014): 1109–13.
…aversion to taking on outsized risk or imposing it on others (something White men are particularly inclined to do).
Christina Palmer, “Risk Perception: Another Look at the ‘White Male’ Effect,” Health, Risk & Society 5, no. 1 (2003): 71–83; Melissa L. Finucane et al., “Gender, Race, and Perceived Risk: The ‘White Male’ Effect,” Health, Risk & Society 2, no. 2 (2000): 159–72; Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 4 (2011): 1163–72.
Female legislators more strongly support environmental laws—and stricter laws at that.
Lena Ramstetter and Fabian Habersack, “Do Women Make a Difference? Analysing Environmental Attitudes and Actions of Members of the European Parliament,” Environmental Politics 29, no. 6 (2020): 1063–1084; Per G. Fredriksson and Le Wang, “Sex and Environmental Policy in the U.S. House of Representatives,” Economics Letters 113, no. 3 (2011): 228–30.
When parliaments have greater representation of women, they are more likely to ratify environmental treaties.
Kari Norgaard and Richard York, “Gender Equality and State Environmentalism,” Gender and Society 19, no. 4 (2005): 506–22.
When women participate equally with men, climate policy interventions are more effective.
Nathan J. Cook, Tara Grillos, and Krister P. Andersson, “Gender Quotas Increase the Equality and Effectiveness of Climate Policy Interventions,” Nature Climate Change 9 (2019): 330–34.
…higher political and social status for women correlates with lower carbon emissions and greater creation of protected land areas.
Zhike Lv and Chao Deng, “Does Women’s Political Empowerment Matter for Improving the Environment? A Heterogeneous Dynamic Panel Analysis,” Sustainable Development 27, no. 4 (2019): 603–612; Laura A. McKinney and Gregory M. Fulkerson, “Gender Equality and Climate Justice: A Cross-National Analysis,” Social Justice Research 28 (2015): 293–317; Christina Ergas and Richard York, “Women’s Status and Carbon Dioxide Emissions: A Quantitative Cross-National Analysis,” Social Science Research 41, no. 4 (2012): 965–976; Colleen Nugent and John M. Shandra, “State Environmental Protection Efforts, Women’s Status, and World Polity: A Cross-National Analysis,” Organization & Environment 22, no. 2 (2009): 208–229.
…as Adrienne Rich writes, “reconstitute the world.”
Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources,” in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 60.
“What we pay attention to grows”…
adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017).
Section 1: Root
Calling In · Xiye Bastida
Between 2011 and 2013, my town experienced two years of the worst drought in Mexico in seventy years.
David Ortega-Gaucin and Israel Velasco, “Socioeconomic and Environmental Aspects of Drought in Mexico,” Aqua-LAC 5, no. 2 (2013): 78–90.
Then in 2015 we were hit by heavy rainfall that resulted in flooding…
Juan Gabriel González, “Afectan inundaciones a mil viviendas y cientos de hectáreas de cultivo en Edomex,” MVS Noticias, September 21, 2015.
Reciprocity · Janine Benyus
…plants were cooperators as well as competitors, facilitating one another in beneficial ways.
Frederic E. Clements, Plant Succession: An Analysis of the Development of Vegetation (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1916).
…a plant-helping-plant process later dubbed facilitation.
Joseph H. Connell and Ralph O. Slayter, “Mechanisms of Succession in Natural Communities and Their Role in Community Stability and Organization,” American Naturalist 111, no. 982 (1977): 1119–44.
…he saw communities so tightly interwoven, he called them organismic.
Frederic E. Clements, “Experimental Ecology in the Public Service,” Ecology 16, no. 3 (1935): 342–63.
What Clements called communities was simply happenstance…
Henry A. Gleason, “The Individualistic Concept of the Plant Association,” American Midland Naturalist 21, no. 1 (1939): 92–110
Gleason’s work was virtually forgotten until 1947, when a small group of researchers resurrected his individualist views…
Stanley A. Cain, “Characteristics of Natural Areas and Factors in Their Development,” Ecological Monographs 17, no. 2 (1947): 185–200; Frank E. Egler, “Arid Southeast Oahu Vegetation, Hawaii,” Ecological Monographs 17, no. 4 (1947): 383–435; Herbert L. Mason, “Evolution of Certain Floristic Associations in Western North America,” Ecological Monographs 17, no. 2 (1947): 201–10.
His book…reviews more than a thousand studies…
Ragan M. Callaway, Positive Interactions and Interdependence in Plant Communities (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
A single six-foot-wide yareta, or cushion plant, can be thousands of years old…
Christian Körner, Alpine Plant Life: Functional Plant Ecology of High Mountain Ecosystems (Springer, 2011), 289; B. J. Butterfield et al., “Alpine Cushion Plants Inhibit the Loss of Phylogenetic Diversity in Severe Environments,” Ecology Letters 16, no. 4 (2013): 478–86.
In a brilliant study, she exposed growing seedlings to two types of carbon dioxide…
Suzanne W. Simard et al., “Net Transfer of Carbon Between Ectomycorrhizal Tree Species in the Field,” Nature 388 (1997): 579–82.
…fungi branch out from the roots of one tree to connect dozens of trees and shrubs and herbs…
Simard et al., “Net Transfer of Carbon.”
This “wood-wide web” is an underground Internet…
Robin Sen, “Budgeting for the Wood-Wide Web,” New Phytologist 145, no. 2 (2000): 161–63; Suzanne Simard, “How Trees Talk to Each Other,” TEDSummit (June 2016, Banff, Canada), MPEG-4, 18:11.
…80 percent of all land plants have roots that grow in association with mycorrhizae fungi…
Pierre-Marc Delaux et al., “Evolution of the Plant-Microbe Symbiotic ‘Toolkit,’” Trends in Plant Science 18, no. 6 (2013): 298–304.
Plowing…and the year-on-year addition of artificial nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers…
Jan Jansa, Andres Wiemken, and Emmanuel Frossard, “The Effects of Agricultural Practices on Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi,” Geological Society, London, Special Publications 266 (2006): 89–115.
When communities of vegetation breathe in carbon dioxide, turn it into sugars, and feed it to microbial networks, they can sequester carbon deep in soils for centuries.
Santosh Kumar Mehar and S. Sundaramoorthy, “Carbon Sequestration and the Significance of Soil Fungi in the Process,” in Fungi and their Role in Sustainable Development: Current Perspectives, ed. Praveen Gehlot and Joginder Singh (Singapore: Springer, 2018), 467–82.
…the 50 to 70 percent of soil carbon that has been lost to the atmosphere…
R. Lal, “World Cropland Soils as a Source or Sink for Atmospheric Carbon,” Advances in Agronomy 71 (2001): 145–91.
Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth · Sherri Mitchell—Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset
…“the Great Powers, tired of self-development, were endeavoring to extend their possessions and civilization all over the world”…
“The Malaria Expedition to West Africa,” Science 11, no. 262 (1900): 36–37.
“The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism”…
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 1.
…Indigenous oral traditions have corrected inaccurate or misleading accounts of major events in U.S. history…
George Nicholas, “When Scientists ‘Discover’ What Indigenous People Have Known for Centuries,” Smithsonian, February 21, 2018.
“The faculty of imagination is not strongly developed among them”…
Arthur S. Thompson, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present, Savage and Civilized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1859).
…scientists from eleven institutions published the first draft of their Open Tree of Life Project…
Elizabeth Pennisi, “First Comprehensive Tree of Life Shows How Related You Are to Millions of Species,” Science, September 21, 2015; Cody E. Hinchliff et al., “Synthesis of Phylogeny and Taxonomy into a Comprehensive Tree of Life,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 41 (2015): 12764–69.
Though Indigenous peoples comprise only about 5 percent of the global population, our lands hold approximately 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity…
Claudia Sobrevila, The Role of Indigenous Peoples in Biodiversity Conservation: The Natural but Often Forgotten Partners (Washington: World Bank, 2008), xii.
…an estimated 40 to 50 percent of the remaining protected places in the world.
Stephen T. Garnett et al., “A Spatial Overview of the Global Importance of Indigenous Lands for Conservation,” Nature Sustainability 1 (2018): 369–74; Stephan and Thora Amend, eds., National Parks Without People? The South American Experience (Caracas: International Union for Conservation of Nature, 1992).
We also create the least greenhouse gases and have the largest carbon stores on the planet within our territories.
Sobrevila, Role of Indigenous Peoples.
“The entire span of human life exists within each one of us”…
Sherri Mitchell, Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2018), 11.
“Every [natural] soundscape…generates its own unique signature”…
Bernie Krause, “The Voice of the Natural World,” TEDGlobal 2013 (June 2013, Edinburgh, Scotland), MPEG-4, 14:36.
“Nature will speak to us with its mighty breath of wind”…
Gary David, “Hopi Prophecy and the End of the Fourth World—Part 1,” Ancient Origins, November 2, 2014.
“Upon suffering beyond suffering, the Red Nation shall rise again”…
Crazy Horse, 1877, as told to Sitting Bull and passed down through the oral tradition of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples and quoted in Mitchell, Sacred Instructions, 225.
“If the new people learned to trust the ways of the circle”…
Anishinaabe prophecy of the seven fires, passed down through oral tradition in the late nineteenth century, as quoted in Mitchell, Sacred Instructions, 224.
“Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift”…
Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945).
…“Some day the Earth will weep, she will beg for her life”…
James Wilson, The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America (New York: Grove Press, 1998), iv.
…Passamaquoddy Nation delegates Deacon Sockabasin and Joseph Stanislaus, stood before the Maine Legislature asking…
Siobhan Senier, ed., Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Indigenous Writing from New England (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
“Be still, they say. Watch and listen”…
Linda Hogan, Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
A Handful of Dust · Kate Marvel
As climate scientist Alex Hall puts it, the trees are co-conspiring with the sky…
Alex Hall, “Why and How Climate Science Must Change” (Turco Lecture, American Geophyiscal Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, December 12, 2019).
The forests are dying, attacked on all sides by relentless demand for fossil fuels, beef, money.
Wannes Hubau et al., “Asynchronous Carbon Sink Saturation in African and Amazonian Tropical Forests,” Nature 579 (2020): 80–87.
…the plants of the Amazon do not need to open the pores on their leaves quite so much to take in the gases they need.
Gabriel J. Kooperman et al., “Forest Response to Rising CO2 Drives Zonally Asymmetric Rainfall Change over Tropical Land,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 434–42.
These shrunken pores expel less water into the atmosphere.
Kooperman et al., “Forest Response to Rising CO2.”
…“Weather backward.”
Sarah Snell Bryant diary, 1816 remarks, original at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Indian Ocean monsoon…is delayed by months.
Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, “The Eruption of Tambora in 1815 and ‘the Year Without a Summer,’” in Volcanoes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Major Eruptions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 148.
…the torrential rains drown croplands and the people who work them, leaving pools of stagnant, filthy water.
de Boer and Sanders, “Eruption of Tambora.
Cholera spreads as far as Moscow.
de Boer and Sanders, “Eruption of Tambora.”
Harvests fail in northern Europe…
Lucy Veale and Georgina H. Endfield, “Situating 1816, the ‘Year Without Summer,’ in the UK,” Geographical Journal 182, no. 4 (2016): 318–30.
Switzerland…is racked by violence as desperate, starving mobs converge on the cities.
William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman, The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 263–67.
In a villa on Lake Geneva, a group of bored English tourists challenge one another to write ghost stories.
de Boer and Sanders, “Eruption of Tambora,” 152; Mary W. Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831).
The culprit…is to be found on Sumbawa…
de Boer and Sanders, “Eruption of Tambora,” 152.
In April of 1815, Mount Tambora erupted…
Heinrich Zollinger, Vulkanes Tambora auf der Insel Sumbawa und Schilderung der Erupzion Desselben im Jahr 1815 (Winterthur, Switzerland: Joh Wurster, 1855), 20.
…five explosions since Tambora powerful enough to spray gas and dust far up into the stratosphere.
James Hansen et al., “A Pinatubo Climate Modeling Investigation,” in The Mount Pinatubo Eruption: Effects on the Atmosphere and Climate, NATO ASI Series, Series I: Global Environmental Change, vol. 42, ed. G. Fiocco, D. Fua, and G. Visconti (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 1996), 233–72.
…Pinatubo cooled the planet by an entire degree…
Christopher G. Newhall and Raymundo S. Punongbayan, eds., Fire and Mud: Eruptions and Lahars of Mount Pinatubo, Philippines (Hong Kong: United States Geological Survey, 1996).
Wobbles in the Earth’s orbit precipitate ice ages and deglaciations.
J. D. Hays, John Imbrie, and N. J. Shackleton, “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science 194, no. 4270 (1976): 1121–32.
There were once forests in the Sahara…
Lorraine Boissoneault, “What Really Turned the Sahara Desert from a Green Oasis into a Wasteland?” Smithsonian, March 24, 2017.
It is dry because the planet wobbled slightly in its orbit…
Boissoneault, “What Really Turned the Sahara.”
Saharan dust is carried across the Atlantic…landing gently on the forests of the Amazon.
Ellen Gray, “NASA Satellite Reveals How Much Saharan Dust Feeds Amazon’s Plants,” NASA.com, February 22, 2015 (last updated August 7, 2017).
What Is Emergent Strategy? · adrienne maree brown
“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise”…
Nick Obolensky, Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty (Burlington, VT: Gower, 2014).
“Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals”…
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993).
…“create conditions conducive to life.”
Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002).
On Fire · Naomi Klein
…since…1988, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen by well over 40 percent…
Climate Watch, “Global Historical Emissions,” accessed March 14, 2020; U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Climate Change Indicators: Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” accessed March 14, 2020.
The planet has warmed by about 1 degree Celsius since we began burning coal…
Myles Allen et al., “Framing and Context,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 51.
…average temperatures are on track to rise by as much as four times that amount before the century is up…
United Nations Environment Programme, Emissions Gap Report 2019 (Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme, 2019), 27.
…the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, humans didn’t exist.
Brian Palmer, “When’s the Last Time Our CO2 Levels Were This High?” Pacific Standard, May 19, 2015.
For the first global youth strike…there were nearly 2,100 strikes in 125 countries, with 1.6 million young people participating.
Naomi Klein, “‘We Have a Once-in-Century Chance’: Naomi Klein on How We Can Fight the Climate Crisis,” Guardian, September 14, 2019.
“I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones”…
Greta Thunberg, “The Disarming Case to Act Right Now on Climate Change,” TEDxStockholm (November 2018, Stockholm), MPEG-4, 11:04.
“Greta Thunberg may have been the spark, but we’re the wildfire.”
UK Student Climate Network, “A Manifesto for Tackling the Climate Change Crisis,” Guardian, March 15, 2019.
…Wales and Scotland both declared a state of climate emergency, and the British parliament…quickly followed suit.
Amy Gunia, “The U.K. Has Officially Declared a Climate ‘Emergency,’” Time, May 2, 2019.
…we are on a path to warming the world by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
Fiona Harvey, “Past Four Years Hottest on Record, Data Shows,” Guardian, November 29, 2018;
Jeff Tollefson, “How Hot Will Earth Get by 2100?” Nature, April 22, 2020.
…to keep the warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius would require…cutting global emissions approximately in half by 2030 and getting to net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.
Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 12.
…“rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C Approved by Governments,” (press release), October 8, 2018.
…“We have a right to good jobs and a livable future”…
Ryan Grim and Briahna Gray, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Joins Environmental Activists in Protest at Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Office,” The Intercept, November 13, 2018.
…documented the human and ecological costs of corporate globalization…
Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000).
“Once you have done your homework”…
Greta Thunberg, “You’re Acting Like Spoiled Irresponsible Children,” European Economic and Social Committee (February 21, 2019, Brussels) MPEG-4, 10:04.
Section 2: Advocate
Litigating in a Time of Crisis · Abigail Dillen
…in the United States…a steady decline in equality and happiness…
Jean M. Twenge, “The Sad State of Happiness in the United States and the Role of Digital Media,” in World Happiness Report 2019, ed. John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey D. Sachs (New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network, 2019), 86–95.
…support for climate action correlates with the perception of climate risk, as well as egalitarian values.
Matthew T. Ballew et al., “Climate Change Activism Among Latino and White Americans,” Frontiers in Communication 3, no. 58 (2019): 1–15.
White people, and especially White men, perceive the risk least.
Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change 21, no. 4 (2011): 1163–72; Melissa L. Finucane et al., “Gender, Race, and Perceived Risk: The ‘White Male’ Effect,” Health, Risk & Society 2, no. 2 (2000): 159–72; Christina Palmer, “Risk Perception: Another Look at the ‘White Male’ Effect,” Health, Risk & Society 5, no. 1 (2003): 71–83.
…“The 1970s absolutely must be the years when America pays its debt”…
Frank Gannon, “RN In ’70—Launching the Decade of the Environment,” Richard Nixon Foundation, January 1, 2010.
At the height of the coal rush, there were more than 160 proposed coal plants…
Steve James, “RPT-FEATURE-US Coal-Fired Power Plant Plans Up in Smoke?” Reuters, March 5, 2007.
Beyond Coal · Mary Anne Hitt
Located a few miles away from the predominantly African American community of Mansfield, Louisiana, Dolet Hills had received a D grade from the NAACP…
U.S. Census Bureau, “American FactFinder,” accessed February 19, 2020; Adrian Wilson et al., Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People, ed. Monique W. Morris (Baltimore: NAACP, 2016), 64–84.
…SWEPCO would retire the plant two decades earlier, in 2026.
Robert Walton, “SWEPCO Settles with Sierra Club to Plan 650 MW Coal Plant Retirement by 2026,” Utility Dive, January 9, 2020.
SWEPCO…generates more than 80 percent of its power from coal, compared with the national average of 25 percent.
S&P Global Market Intelligence (2018), distributed by S&P Global Market Intelligence; U.S. Energy Information Administration, “What Is U.S. Electricity Generation by Energy Source?” last updated February 27, 2020.
…American Electric Power, which ranks second in the nation for coal consumption.
M. J. Bradley & Associates, “Company Generation Trends (2008–2017),” accessed March 12, 2020.
…Dolet Hills…was a notorious polluter—the worst in Louisiana’s power sector…
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Air Markets Program Data,” (December 11, 2019).
…it had been dodging market rules and conducting a sneaky utility practice of forcing its expensive coal power onto the grid…
Joe Daniel, “Backdoor Subsidies for Coal in the Southwest Power Pool: Are Utilities in SPP
Forcing Captive Customers to Subsidize Uneconomic Coal and Simultaneously Distorting the Market?” (report, Sierra Club, Oakland, CA, 2017).
As I write this, we’re at 315 plants down, 215 to go.
Sierra Club, “We’re Moving Beyond Coal,” accessed March 12, 2020.
…less than a quarter of our electricity from coal in the United States—down from half of our power a decade ago…
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Short-Term Energy Outlook,” February 2020, 3; William Watson et al., “U.S. Coal Supply and Demand: 2010 Year in Review” (report, U.S. Energy Information Administration, Washington, DC, 2010), 9.
…saving more than eight thousand lives every year and preventing more than 130,000 asthma attacks annually.
Calculated using data from Conrad Schneider and Jonathan Banks, “The Toll from Coal: An Updated Assessment of Death and Disease from America’s Dirtiest Energy Source,” ed. Marika Tatsutani (report, Clean Air Task Force, Boston, 2010).
…PacifiCorp’s coal plants were indeed more expensive than wind or solar power and were costing its customers hundreds of millions of dollars more than clean energy.
Robert Walton, “PacifiCorp, Sierra Club Head to Court over Confidential Coal Fleet Study,” Utility Dive, August 16, 2018; Energy Strategies, “PacifiCorp Coal Unit Valuation Study: A Unit-by-Unit Cost Analysis of PacifiCorp’s Coal-Fired Generation Fleet” (report, Sierra Club, Salt Lake City, 2018), 4.
…PacifiCorp finally relented and released its numbers, followed by an energy plan…
Iulia Gheorghiu, “PacifiCorp Shows 60% of Its Coal Units are Uneconomic,” Utility Dive, December 5, 2018; Cassandra Profita, “PacifiCorp Plan to Move Away from Coal Exposes Deep Divide Among Western States,” Oregon Public Broadcasting, October 14, 2019.
In 2018 NIPSCO completed an energy plan that…would save its customers more than $4 billion…
Gavin Bade, “Even in Indiana, New Renewables Are Cheaper Than Existing Coal Plants,” Utility Dive, October 25, 2018; “Leaving Things Better: Your Energy, Your Future,” Northern Indiana Public Service Company, accessed March 12, 2020; Northern Indiana Public Service Company, 2018 Integrated Resource Plan (Merrillville, IN: Northern Indiana Public Service Company, 2018), 4–7.
NIPSCO has solicited bids for solar equal to the power generated by its coal plants…
Iulia Gheorghiu, “NIPSCO to Replace Coal with 2.3 GW of Solar, Storage in Latest RFP,” Utility Dive, October 9, 2019.
A decade ago, there were two coal plants operating in downtown Chicago…making local residents sick…
Julie Wernau, “Fisk, Crawford Coal Plants Had Long History, as Did Battle to Close Them,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 2012.
…Thomas Edison and Queen Mary had signed the guest book at the Fisk plant.
Wernau, “Fisk, Crawford Coal Plants.”
Fisk and Crawford were plants number ninety-nine and one hundred to announce retirement in the United States.
Stefanie Spear, “Sierra Club Marks Milestone as 100th Coal Plant Set to Retire,” EcoWatch, February 29, 2012.
…“something people can modify and share because its design is publicly accessible.”
Opensource.com, “What Is Open Source?” accessed February 20, 2020.
…the Jemez Principles provide a framework for thinking about our advocacy in a different way.
Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, “Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing,” December 1996.
…two aging coal plants…making people sick in this predominantly African American community.
Michigan Public Service Commission and DTE Electric Company, 2017 DTE Electric Integrated Resource Plan (Detroit: DTE Electric Company, 2017), 66; U.S. Census Bureau, “QuickFacts: River Rouge City, Michigan,” accessed March 12, 2020.
…the utility announced it would close the two coal plants, which had been major contributors to the area’s sky-high rates of asthma.
Alisha Winters, “Fighting for the Right to Breathe in Detroit and Beyond,” Sierra Club, 2015.
Already more than three million Americans work in the clean-energy industry, outnumbering fossil fuel workers three to one.
E2, “Clean Jobs America,” March 2019.
…it’s essential for the developed nations of the world to phase out coal by 2030 to keep global temperatures below critical thresholds.
Gaurav Ganti, “Coal Phase-out—Global and Regional Perspective,” Climate Analytics, accessed February 20, 2020.
U.S. domestic gas consumption splits roughly into thirds…
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Natural Gas Explained: Use of Natural Gas,” last updated December 18, 2019.
…10 percent of U.S. gas that is exported.
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “U.S. Natural Gas Production Grew Again in 2019, Increasing by 10%,” March 10, 2020.
…gas has been linked to higher rates of asthma when used for cooking and heating.
Deborah Jarvis et al., “Association of Respiratory Symptoms and Lung Function in Young Adults with Use of Domestic Gas Appliances,” Lancet 347, no. 8999 (1996): 426–31; Weiwei Lin, Bert Brunekreef, and Ulrike Gehring, “Meta-analysis of the Effects of Indoor Nitrogen Dioxide and Gas Cooking on Asthma and Wheeze in Children,” International Journal of Epidemiology 42, no. 6 (2013): 1724–37.
…a time when the warming of our planet was a low priority for most Americans.
Nadja Popovich, “Climate Change Rises as a Public Priority. But It’s More Partisan Than Ever,” New York Times, February 20, 2020.
Collards Are Just as Good as Kale · Heather McTeer Toney
…their operations yielded polluted land and water.
U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Mississippi, “Leading Edge Aviation Services Sentenced for Unlawful Handling of Hazardous Waste at Greenville, Mississippi, Facility” (press release), November 4, 2014.
“Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen”…
Hebrews 11:1–3, American Standard Version.
“For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, even so faith apart from works is dead.”
James 2:26, American Standard Version.
Over the course of my eight years as mayor, Greenville also experienced two historic flood events.
Miles Grant, “Climate Crisis Fueling Mississippi River’s Historic Floods,” Grist, May 12, 2011.
Heavier wintertime precipitation is yet another outcome of rising global temperatures.
Ruixia Guo et al., “Human Influence on Winter Precipitation Trends (1921–2015) over North America and Eurasia Revealed by Dynamical Adjustment,” Geophysical Research Letters 46, no. 6 (2019): 3426–34.
Behavioral and mental health challenges have also been directly linked to a worsening climate.
Susanta Kumar Padhy et al., “Mental Health Effects of Climate Change,” Indian Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine 19, no. 1 (2015): 3–7.
Studies even connect climate change to violent crime.
Solomon M. Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel, “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,” Science 341, no. 6151 (2013).
…evidence of hot weather being linked to increased shootings…
Giffords Law Center, “Shootings Spike in Summer Months,” accessed February 19, 2020.
…the Zika virus, a disease made worse by climate change…
Greg Mercer, “The Link Between Zika and Climate Change,” Atlantic, February 24, 2016.
Our community of more than 1.2 million moms and dads…
Moms Clean Air Force, “Our Mission,” accessed February 19, 2020.
…Black women—particularly southern Black women—are no strangers to environmental activism.
Thomas Macias, “Environmental Risk Perception Among Race and Ethnic Groups in the United States,” Ethnicities 16, no. 1 (2015).
…57 percent of Black Americans are concerned or alarmed about climate change, compared to 49 percent of White folks.
Matthew Ballew et al., “Which Racial/Rthnic Groups Care Most about Climate Change?” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, April 16, 2020.
…Dr. McClain convened community meetings so that people were part of the solution.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Savannah Capacity Building Pilot Project,” accessed February 19, 2020.
The Politics of Policy · Maggie Thomas
…Detroit’s 48217 neighborhood—called by its zip code, the most polluted in Michigan…
Steve Neavling, “Struggling to Breathe in 48217, Michigan’s Most Toxic ZIP Code,” Detroit Metro Times, January 8, 2020.
…Black families are more likely than White families to live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of air pollution—even when they have the same or more income.
Liam Downey and Brian Hawkins, “Race, Income, and Environmental Inequality in the United States,” Sociological Perspectives 51, no. 4 (2008): 759–81; Lesley Fleischman and Marcus Franklin, “Fumes Across the Fence-Line: The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil & Gas Facilities on African American Communities,” ed. Katherine Taylor and Sarah Uhl (report, NAACP and Clean Air Task Force, 2017).
…Governor Inslee’s “Community Climate Justice” plan…
Jay Inslee for Governor, “Community Climate Justice: Governor Inslee’s Plan for Environmental & Economic Justice in an Inclusive Clean Energy Economy,” accessed March 16, 2020.
…Senator Warren’s plan for “Fighting for Justice as We Combat the Climate Crisis”…
Warren Democrats, “Fighting for Climate Justice as We Combat the Climate Crisis,” accessed March 16, 2020.
…his “100% Clean Energy for America” plan…
Jay Inslee for Governor, “100% Clean Energy for America: Governor Jay Inslee’s plan for 100% Clean Electricity, Vehicles and Buildings,” accessed March 16, 2020.
After Senator Warren released her plan for “A New Farm Economy,” more than sixty Black farmers, advocates, and academics sent a letter to the campaign…
Warren Democrats, “A New Farm Economy,” accessed March 16, 2020; Annie Linskey, “Black Farmers Say Warren’s Plan Wouldn’t Solve Their Biggest Problem,” Washington Post, August 31, 2019.
…Black farmers have lost 80 percent of their farmland over the last century, amounting to around thirty million acres and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost wealth.
Abril Castro and Zoe Willingham, “Progressive Governance Can Turn the Tide for Black Farmers,” Center for American Progress, April 3, 2019; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930. Census of Agriculture. The Negro Farmer in the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1930), 22; Lizzie Presser, “Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It,” ProPublica, July 15, 2019.
The update to the plan—“Addressing Discrimination and Ensuring Equity for Farmers of Color”…
Warren Democrats, “Addressing Discrimination and Ensuring Equity for Farmers of Color,” accessed March 16, 2020.
Nearly 40 percent of Americans live in coastal counties…
Office for Coastal Management, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, “Economics and Demographics,” accessed March 16, 2020.
…“He’s got it exactly right, we need a Blue New Deal.”
Rebecca Beitsch, “Enthusiasm Builds for ‘Blue New Deal’ After Climate Town Hall,” The Hill, September 8, 2019.
The Blue New Deal became one of Senator Warren’s most popular plans.
Warren Democrats, “We Need a Blue New Deal for Our Oceans,” accessed March 16, 2020.
In the entire 2016 election cycle, climate change and environmental issues got only five minutes and twenty-seven seconds of discussion on the presidential debate stage.
Emma Foehringer Merchant, “The 2016 Presidential Debates All but Ignored Climate Change,” Grist, October 19, 2016.
…climate has become a voting priority, regularly ranking among the most important issues for Democratic voters.
Brady Dennis, “In State After State, Climate Change Emerges as a Key Issue for Democratic Voters,” Washington Post, February 24, 2020.
For many young voters…voting for a presidential candidate with the strongest climate plan is paramount.
Derrick Feldmann et al., “Influencing Young America to Act 2019,” (report, Cause and Social Influence, 2019).
A Green New Deal for All of Us · Rhiana Gunn-Wright
The GND’s five big goals are laid out in “House Resolution 109”…
Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal, H. R. 109, 116th Cong. (2019), § 1.
…global emissions have to be roughly halved by 2030 to have a chance of keeping warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 12; Our Children’s Trust, Government Climate and Energy Actions, Plans, and Policies Must Be Based on a Maximum Target of 350 ppm Atmospheric CO2 and 1°C by 2100 to Protect Young People and Future Generations(Eugene, OR: Our Children’s Trust, 2019).
The climate crisis is entangled with other crises…
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 18.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
CareerBuilder, “Living Paycheck to Paycheck Is a Way of Life for Majority of U.S. Workers, According to New CareerBuilder Survey” (press release), August 24, 2017.
…about 40 percent of Americans could not afford an unexpected $400 expense…
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2018 (Washington, DC: Federal Reserve System, 2019), 21.
…25 percent of Americans skipped necessary medical care because they couldn’t afford it.
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Report on the Economic Well-Being.
Over the last forty years, the top 1 percent…have captured “more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s”…
Klein, This Changes Everything, 18.
…deregulation and other neoliberal economic policies allowed elites to accrue nearly all of the economic gains since 1980.
Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States” (working paper 22945, NBER Working Paper Series, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 2016), 34–35.
…declines in union membership alone accounting for as much as one-third of the growth in income inequality for men and one-fifth for women since 1972.
Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, “Unions, Norms, and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality,” American Sociological Review 76, no. 4 (2011): 513–37.
…the 2008 housing crisis…wiped out generational wealth, leaving many communities of color no better off than they were prior to the civil rights movement.
Sarah Burd-Sharps and Rebecca Rasch, Impact of the US Housing Crisis on the Racial Wealth Gap Across Generations (Brooklyn: Social Science Research Council, 2015); Urban Institute, “Nine Charts About Wealth Inequality in America (Updated),” last updated October 24, 2017.
…ten thousand of these bills were nearly exact copies of model legislation, most of which was produced and lobbied for by special-interest groups and think tanks funded by elites.
Rob O’Dell and Nick Penzenstadler, Copy, Paste, Legislate: You Elected Them to Write New Laws. They’re Letting Corporations Do It Instead, ed. Chris Davis et al. (Center for Public Integrity, 2019).
To justify an economic mobilization, a crisis must be serious enough…to demand an all-out “total war effort” from both the public and private sectors.
Ralph J. Watkins, “IV. Economic Mobilization,” American Political Science Review 43, no. 3 (1949): 555–63.
98 percent of the government-backed home loans provided as part of the New Deal and the World War II GI Bill went to White Americans.
Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (Oxford University Press, 1975), 221.
Some New Deal employment programs, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, prohibited women and made it exceedingly challenging for Black people to participate.
Eric Gorham, “The Ambiguous Practices of the Civilian Conservation Corps,” Social History 17, no. 2 (1992): 229–49; Michael Shane Hoak, “The Men in Green: African Americans and the Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942” (master’s thesis, College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia).
To transition to 100 percent renewable electricity…the United States will need roughly 78 million rooftop solar arrays, 485,000 wind turbines, and 49,000 solar power plants…
Mark Z. Jacobson et al., “Low-Cost Solution to the Grid Reliability Problem with 100% Penetration of Intermittent Wind, Water, and Solar for All Purposes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 49 (2015): 15060–65.
To fully transition the U.S. electricity system to renewables, about 57 percent of all suitable residential rooftops need to have solar installations.
Jacobson et al., “Low-Cost Solution to the Grid Reliability Problem.”
But in 2020 an average-sized residential solar system will cost between $11,400 and $14,900 after tax credits…
Sara Matasci, “How Much Do Solar Panels Cost in the U.S. in 2020?” energysage.com, January 30, 2020.
…the average cost for a year of childcare ranges from $5,500 to $25,000.
Economic Policy Institute, “Child Care Costs in the United States,” accessed March 3, 2020.
Section 3: Reframe
How to Talk About Climate Change · Katharine Hayhoe
Seventy-three percent of people in the United States agree the planet is warming…
Anthony Leiserowitz et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind” (report, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, April 2020), 4.
…62 percent of Americans recognize that the main reason for this warming is human activity…
Leiserowitz et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind,” 4.
…burning fossil fuels (that’s about three-quarters of the problem) and deforestation and agriculture (that’s most of the other quarter).
Ottmar Edenhofer et al., eds., Climate Change 2014 Mitigation of Climate Change: Working Group III Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 9.
Seventy-three percent of us also believe climate change will affect future generations, but only 42 percent think it will affect us in our lifetimes.
Leiserowitz et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind,” 4.
The decade that just closed was the warmest on record…
Steve Cole and Peter Jacobs, “NASA, NOAA Analyses Reveal 2019 Second Warmest Year on Record,” last modified January 15, 2020.
…climate change is already leading to more frequent heavy-rain events and record-breaking heat waves, increasing the area burned by wildfires, and supersizing our storms and hurricanes.
Katharine Hayhoe et al., “Our Changing Climate,” in Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, vol. 2, ed. D. R. Reidmiller et al. (Washington, DC: U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2018), 88–95; John T. Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams, “Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire Across Western US Forests,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 42 (2016): 11770–75.
…almost 40 percent of the rain that fell during Hurricane Harvey…was the direct result of human-induced warming.
Mark D. Risser and Michael F. Wehner, “Attributable Human‐Induced Changes in the Likelihood and Magnitude of the Observed Extreme Precipitation During Hurricane Harvey,” Geophysical Research Letters 44, no. 24 (2017): 12457–64.
The area burned by wildfires across the western United States has more than doubled since the 1980s as a result of a warmer world.
Abatzoglou and A. Park Williams, “Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change.”
“Bomb cyclones” in the Midwest and atmospheric rivers along the West Coast are intensifying as the climate changes…
Timothy Gardner, “Climate Change’s Fingerprints Are on U.S. Midwest Floods: Scientists,” Reuters, March 21, 2019; J. P. Kossin et al., “Extreme Storms,” in Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, vol. 1, ed. D. J. Wuebbles (Washington, DC: U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2017), 265–67.
…Miami Beach is trying to stave off the impacts of a rising sea level by raising its streets, even though experts say what’s planned is still not enough.
Alex Harris, “Raising Flood-Prone Roads Has Angered Miami Beach Residents. Experts Say They Need to Go Higher,” Miami Herald, January 22, 2020.
Since the 1960s…climate change has widened the economic gap between the richest and poorest countries in the world by as much as 25 percent.
Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Marshall Burke, “Global Warming Has Increased Global Economic Inequality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 20 (2019): 9808–13.
…women and kids, the very people who are disproportionately affected by climate change and the increasing risk of weather-related disasters around the world.
C. Nellemann, R. Verma, and L. Hislop, eds. “Women at the Frontline of Climate Change: Gender Risks and Hopes,” (report, United Nations Environment Programme, 2011).
We’ve known since the 1850s that digging up and then burning coal—and, later, oil and gas—produces heat-trapping gases that are wrapping an extra blanket around the planet.
Eunice Foote, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” American Journal of Science and Arts 22, no. 31 (1856): 382–83; John Tyndall, “On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption, and Conduction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 151 (1861): 1–36; Arvid Högbom, “On the Probability of Secular Changes in the Level of Atmospheric CO2,” Swedish Chemical Journal 6, no. 171 (1894): 169–76.
Together with colleagues from Norway and Australia, I’ve even taken the few dozen studies that suggest this isn’t the case and recalculated their work from scratch.
Rasmus E. Benestad et al., “Learning from Mistakes in Climate Research,” Theoretical and Applied Climatology 126 (2016): 699–703.
These include the women and children Adsum supports in Halifax; farmers struggling to raise their crops in East Africa; Bangladeshis losing their land to sea-level rise and erosion; and Arctic peoples whose traditions are threatened and whose homes are being displaced by rising seas and thawing permafrost.
Sheri Lecker, “Letter from Adsum for Women and Children: Storm Response Was Good but Needs to Be More Inclusive,” Nova Scotia Advocate, September 12, 2019; Wesley Langat, “Kenya’s Food Crisis: ‘With This Kind of Farming, I Only Make a Loss,’” Climate Home News, July 26, 2017; Gardiner Harris, “Borrowed Time on Disappearing Land,” New York Times, March 28, 2014; Elizabeth Ferris, “A Complex Constellation: Displacement, Climate Change and Arctic Peoples” (report, Brookings Institution, 2013).
The eighty-five lowest-emitting countries in the world…will bear 40 percent of the economic losses and 80 percent of the resulting deaths from human-induced climate change.
DARA and Climate Vulnerable Forum, Climate Vulnerability Monitor: A Guide to the Cold Calculus of a Hot Planet, 2nd ed. (Geneva: DARA International, 2012), 19.
In Texas, climate change is amplifying our natural cycle of wet and dry, making our droughts stronger and longer at the same time it supercharges hurricanes and extreme rain.
Kevin Kloesel et al., “Southern Great Plains,” in Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States: Fourth National Climate Assessment, vol. 2, ed. D. R. Reidmiller et al. (Washington, DC: U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2018), 989.
And transitioning to clean energy brings new tech and opportunities as well, including around 35,000 jobs in Texas already.
American Wind Energy Association, “Wind Energy in Texas,” last modified January, 2020; Solar Energy Industries Association, “State Solar Spotlight: Texas,” December 11, 2019.
Truth Be Told · Emily Atkin
…a prospective Texas Senate candidate who said global warming was God’s punishment for women who got abortions.
Emily Atkin, “Top Texas Republican Thinks Abortion Caused Global Warming,” ThinkProgress, November 6, 2013.
“The most recent report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed…”
Atkin, “Top Texas Republican.”
Over the next two years, I fact-checked dozens of instances of climate misinformation…
Emily Atkin, “2014’s Most Skewed, Misleading, and Wrong Pieces of Climate and Environment Coverage,” ThinkProgress, December 22, 2014; Emily Atkin, “Watch Obama’s Top Science Advisor Repeatedly Shut Down Climate Deniers at House Climate Hearing,” ThinkProgress, September 18, 2014.
I explained myriad terrifying scientific studies…
Emily Atkin, “The Pacific Ocean Is Turning Sour Much Faster Than Expected, Study Shows,” ThinkProgress, March 28, 2014; Emily Atkin, “How Climate Change Is Making America’s Favorite Crop More Vulnerable,” ThinkProgress, May 5, 2014; Emily Atkin, “Why This New Study on Arctic Permafrost Is So Scary,” ThinkProgress, April 8, 2015.
I reported from the front lines of environmental injustices…
Emily Atkin, “Low-Income, Black, and Latino Americans Face Highest Risk of Chemical Spills,” ThinkProgress, May 2, 2014; Emily Atkin, “Tar Sands Pollution Forces Native Community to Confront the Loss of Its Oldest Tradition,” ThinkProgress, July 8, 2014; Emily Atkin, “How Houston’s Biggest Polluters Are Buying Texas’ Elections at the Expense of Its Residents,” ThinkProgress, October 29, 2014.
It was in 2014, after writing about a World Meteorological Organization report…
Emily Atkin, “U.N. Scientists See Largest CO2 Increase in 30 Years: ‘We Are Running Out of Time,’” ThinkProgress, September 9, 2014.
“We must reverse this trend,” the WMO’s secretary-general said…
World Meteorological Organization, “Record Greenhouse Gas Levels Impact Atmosphere and Oceans” (press release no. 1002), September 9, 2014.
…state government agencies were removing scientific information about it from their websites.
Emily Atkin, “North Carolina Environmental Agency Removes Climate Change Links from Website,” ThinkProgress, March 12, 2014.
…global warming couldn’t be bad, because Mars was warming too.
Emily Atkin, “Kentucky Senator: Climate Change Is Fake Because ‘We All Agree’ Mars Is Warming Too,” ThinkProgress, July 9, 2014.
…I covered Ted Cruz’s promises to be antiestablishment; women’s-health activists throwing condoms at Carly Fiorina; and a Republican college student confronting Marco Rubio about climate change.
Emily Atkin, “Ted Cruz Promises to Create the Most Right-Wing Supreme Court in History,” ThinkProgress, January 31, 2016; Emily Atkin, “Carly Fiorina Ambushed by Planned Parenthood Supporters at Tailgating Party,” ThinkProgress, September 26, 2015; Emily Atkin, “Marco Rubio Questioned by Republican College Student on Climate and Energy Policy,” ThinkProgress, September 29, 2015.
…sea level rise was threatening one of the nation’s most important air force bases, near Norfolk, Virginia.
Emily Atkin (@emorwee), “Tillerson: ‘I don’t see [climate] as an imminent nat security threat, but perhaps others do’ Others . . . like this Air Force commander?” Twitter, January 11, 2017, 2:18 p.m.
…an article calling Scott Pruitt…a “hypocritical liar.”
Emily Atkin, “Scott Pruitt Is the Hypocritical Liar That Trump Deserves,” New Republic, May 19, 2017.
…companies that were advertising on The Michael Knowles Show, which is hosted by a climate denier who called Greta Thunberg “mentally ill.”
Emily Atkin, “The Advertisers Funding Greta Thunberg’s Autism Troll,” HEATED, September 25, 2019.
…Vistaprint announced it would not be advertising “on any upcoming episodes of the Michael Knowles podcast, now or in the future.”
Emily Atkin, “The Ocean Report You Didn’t See,” HEATED, September 26, 2019.
…an investigation into how Twitter’s upcoming ad policy would benefit fossil fuel companies while harming climate advocacy groups.
Emily Atkin, “UPDATE: Twitter Backtracks on Banning Climate Ads,” HEATED, November 18, 2019.
…a national conversation about Twitter’s ad policy and climate change…ultimately culminated in Twitter changing its ad policy.
Atkin, “UPDATE: Twitter Backtracks.”
…the legendary Village Voice journalist Jack Newfield, said it best…
Wayne Barrett, “Jack Newfield, 1938–2004,” Village Voice, December 21, 2004.
Harnessing Cultural Power · Favianna Rodriguez
…what Greta Thunberg calls “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”
Greta Thunberg, “How Dare You” (September 23, 2019, United Nations Climate Change Summit, New York), MPEG-4, 4:34.
…the I-880 highway, which carries the highest volume of truck traffic in the San Francisco Bay Area as it slices through communities of color…
Environmental Defense Fund, “Air Pollution and Health in East Oakland,” accessed March 12, 2020.
Those communities were protected, while we ingested toxic diesel fumes that cut our life spans.
Environmental Defense Fund, “A Tale of Two Freeways,” accessed March 12, 2020.
A recent look at episodic TV shows found that in 2019 only three dealt with climate change…
Geoff Dembicki, “Climate Change Is Everywhere. Just Not on TV,” Vice, July 15, 2019
Stories are like individual stars.
Jeff Chang, Liz Manne, and Erin Potts, “A Conversation About Cultural Strategy,” Medium, June 15, 2018.
…polling shows people of color are more alarmed or concerned than their White counterparts. That includes 69 percent of Latinx Americans, the most of any racial group.
Matthew Ballew et al., “Which Racial/Ethnic Groups Care Most about Climate Change?” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, April 16, 2020
…a coalition of artists and climate groups organized a massive live-painting intervention…
David Solnit and Julie Searle, “San Francisco Climate Strike Street Murals Take Over Wall Street West,” Common Dreams, September 28, 2019.
…a powerful illustrated video about what the future could look like if we have a Green New Deal in the United States.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Avi Lewis, “A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” directed by Kim Boekbinder and Jim Batt, The Intercept, 2019, MPEG-4, 7:35.
The Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe got it right when he said…
Jerome Brooks, “Chinua Achebe, the Art of Fiction No. 139,” Paris Review, no. 133 (1994).
Becoming a Climate Citizen · Kate Knuth
As scientists in the 1980s started to document signs of the impending climate crisis, politics took a turn away from the collective (and against regulation), while culture deepened into consumerism.
Naomi Klein, “Climate Change Is the Fight of Our Lives—Yet We Can Hardly Bear to Look at It,” Guardian, April 23, 2014
The preferences of economic elites far outweigh the preferences of average Americans when it comes to policy outcomes in government.
Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81.
Deaths from despair have risen, particularly among white, working-class Americans, who are dying earlier from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol abuse.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2017): 397–476.
…30 percent of people born in the 1980s believe it is “essential” to live in a democracy, versus 72 percent of people born in the 1930s.
Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, “The Signs of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 1 (2017): 5–16.
…10 million environmentalists who were registered to vote in the 2016 presidential election but didn’t show up to the polls.
Joe Romm, “A ‘jaw-dropping’ 15 million super-environmentalists don’t vote in the midterms,” ThinkProgress, September 4, 2018.
Wakanda Doesn’t Have Suburbs · Kendra Pierre-Louis
“I was stunned,” she wrote…
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015), 6.
…among hunter-gatherer societies, those with better storytellers are more cooperative.
Daniel Smith et al., “Cooperation and the Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Storytelling,” Nature Communications 8, no. 1853 (2017).
“We humans have to go to space if we are going to continue to have a thriving civilization”…
“Jeff Bezos and Caroline Kennedy on Apollo 11 and the Future of Space Travel,” CBS News, July 16, 2019.
…suburb dwellers have greater greenhouse gas emissions than their urban counterparts.
Christopher Jones and Daniel Kammen, “Spatial Distribution of U.S. Household Carbon Footprints Reveals Suburbanization Undermines Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Population Density,” Environmental Science and Technology 48, no. 2 (2013): 895–902.
…couples in Sweden…where at least one partner has a commute forty-five minutes or longer are 40 percent more likely to divorce.
Erika Sandow, “Til Work Do Us Part: The Social Fallacy of Long-Distance Commuting,” Urban Studies 51, no. 3 (2014): 526–43.
Suburban residents are less likely to get physical exercise than their urban counterparts.
Reid Ewing et al., “Relationship Between Urban Sprawl and Physical Activity, Obesity, and Morbidity,” American Journal of Health Promotion 18, no. 1 (2003): 47–57.
Section 4: Reshape
Heaven or High Water · Sarah Miller
The sea level in Miami has risen ten inches since 1900.
Kevin Loria, “Cities Around the US Are Flooding at High Tide and on Sunny Days at Record Rates—Here’s What It’s Like,” Business Insider, June 12, 2018.
In the 2000 years prior, it did not really change.
Ocean Portal Team, “Sea Level Rise,” Smithsonian, April, 2018.
…sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between fourteen and thirty-four inches above 1992 levels by 2060.
Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Sea Level Rise Work Group, “Unified Sea Level Rise Projection: Southeast Florida” (report, Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Steering Committee, October 2015), 4
By 2100, it could be six feet…
Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact Sea Level Rise Work Group, “Unified Sea Level Rise Projection.”
…if you don’t think about the fact that it’s filled with thousands of pounds of post-hot Pilates ceviche poops, Biscayne Bay is breathtaking.
Jessica Lipscomb, “Horrible Biscayne Bay Pollution Worsened by 800-Gallon Sewage Leak,” Miami New Times, November 27, 2018.
…the Dutch have spent billions of dollars on climate resilience and Florida has spent millions.
Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, “Impact Zone—The Netherlands,” accessed April 15, 2020; Alex Harris, “Adapting to Climate Change Is Going to Cost Florida a Lot. Who’s Going to Pay for It?” Miami Herald, July 10, 2019; Laura Oliver, “Countries Around the World Are Looking to the Netherlands to Help Them Deal with Flooding and Water Crisis. Here’s Why,” Global Commission on Adaptation, October 15, 2019.
The Dutch strategy is holistic…whereas in Miami they have just installed some pumps and raised some roads and buildings…
Andres Viglucci, “He Kept the Netherlands Dry. Now He Aims to Defend Miami and the World from Rising Seas,” Miami Herald, February 10, 2017.
…by 2030, there will be about 45 days of sunny day flooding per year in Miami.
Erika Spanger-Siegfried, Melanie Fitzpatrick, and Kristina Dahl, “Encroaching Tides: How Sea Level Rise and Tidal Flooding Threaten U.S. East and Gulf Coast Communities over the Next 30 Years” (Cambridge M.A.: Union of Concerned Scientists, 2014), 33.
By 2045, there will be about 240…
Spanger-Siegfried, Fitzpatrick, and Dahl, “Encroaching Tides.”
…a legal battle between homeowners and the county government in St. Johns County…
St. Johns County v. Robert & Linnie Jordan, 63 So. 3d 835 (2011).
…every scrap of attention or money lower-income areas receive, they must beg for.
Natalie Delgadillo, “The Realities of Sea-Level Rise in Miami’s Low-Income Communities,” CityLab, October 23, 2016.
A Tale of Three Cities · Jainey K. Bavishi
One resident had posted that day…
Laura Nizzo Marcelin, “Slept in. Water is still in front of door. 10:00 am Davenport Court. Does anyone know if its safe to get out yet? Have to get to work eventually,” Facebook, December 21, 2018.
…around 80 percent of the city was flooded and more than one thousand people lost their lives statewide.
Allison Plyer, “Facts for Features: Katrina Impact,” Data Center, last modified August 26, 2016; Carl Bialik, “We Still Don’t Know How Many People Died Because of Katrina,” FiveThirtyEight, August 26, 2015.
…neighborhoods were inundated, submerged under more than ten feet of water.
Allison Plyer, “Facts for Features: Katrina Impact,” Data Center, last modified August 26, 2016.
The storm displaced more than one million people…
Plyer, “Facts for Features.”
…up to 600,000 households were still displaced a month later.
Plyer, “Facts for Features.
The population of New Orleans fell by more than half, from more than 480,000 right before Katrina to about 230,000 in 2006.
Plyer, “Facts for Features.
In 2018 there were 92,245 fewer African Americans living in New Orleans than before Katrina, compared with 8,631 fewer Whites.
Data Center, “Who Lives in New Orleans and Metro Parishes Now?” last modified October 10, 2019.
…1,900 square miles of coastal land have disappeared since 1932, and without action another 1,806 square miles will be gone by 2060…
Resilient New Orleans: Strategic Actions to Shape Our Future City (New Orleans: City of New Orleans, 2015), 37.
…the “Great Katrina Footprint Debate”…
Richard Campanella, “The Great Katrina Footprint Debate 10 Years Later,” Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA), May 29, 2015.
…strengthening a 130-mile levee system, at a cost of more than $14 billion.
Resilient New Orleans.
…the levee system would likely be inadequate in protecting New Orleans and its suburbs from storm surge by as early as 2023.
Thomas Frank, “After a $14-Billion Upgrade, New Orleans’ Levees Are Sinking,” Scientific American, April 11, 2019.
Hawaii relies on imports for up to 90 percent of its food…
City and County of Honolulu Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency, Ola: O‘ahu Resilience Strategy (Honolulu: City and County of Honolulu, 2018), 48–50.
…could take a full week before a disaster-relief operation could be initiated…
Malia Mattoch McManus, “Hawaii Braces for Hurricane Iselle, with Julio Right Behind,” Reuters, August 6, 2014.
Waikiki generates 42 percent of Hawaii’s tourism revenue, bringing in $2 billion each year.
Waikīkī Beach Special Improvement District Association, “Background,” accessed February 16, 2020; Nori Tarui, Marcus Peng, and Dolan Eversole, “Economic Impact Analysis of the Potential Erosion of Waikīkī Beach: A 2016 Update” (report, University of Hawai’i Sea Grant College Program, 2018), 1.
The beach has had erosion problems since the late 1800s…
Sophie Cocke, “Saving Waikiki Beach—at Least for Now,” Honolulu Civil Beat, March 9, 2015.
Though more than eighty structures…have been erected over time, erosion continues to claim one foot of beach every year.
Sophie Cocke, “Saving Waikiki Beach.”
…12 percent of visitors surveyed in 2008 said they would not come back because of the small, overcrowded beaches.
Waikīkī Beach Special Improvement District Association, “Background.”
And sea level could rise three feet by midcentury.
Tetra Tech, Inc., and State of Hawaiʻi Department of Land and Natural Resources, Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands, “Hawaiʻi Sea Level Rise Vulnerability and Adaptation Report” (Honolulu: Hawaiʻi Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation Commission, 2017), xi.
In 2015 the Honolulu City Council passed legislation requiring businesses along Waikiki to help pay for long-term beach management.
Waikīkī Beach Special Improvement District Association, “About Us,” accessed March 10, 2020.
In 2019 the resulting funds, combined with an investment from the state, helped to implement a large sandbag groin…
Timothy Hurley, “Kuhio Beach Restoration Project in Waikiki Is Done,” Star Advertiser (Honolulu, HI), November 30, 2019.
New York City has 520 miles of coastline…and 400,000 residents live in its floodplain.
New York City Special Initiative on Rebuilding and Resiliency, “Preface,” in A Stronger, More Resilient New York (New York: City of New York, 2013); New York City Department of City Planning, “Flood Risk in NYC,” November 2016, 1.
In 2012 Hurricane Sandy took the lives of forty-four New Yorkers, caused $19 billion in damage, and flooded nearly ninety thousand buildings.
Joseph Goldstein, “Death of Rockaways Man Is Linked to Hurricane Sandy,” New York Times, June 24, 2013; New York City Special Initiative on Rebuilding and Resiliency, “Preface.”
The Lower East Side…median income of $40,000 and one of the highest concentrations of public housing in the country…
Good Old Lower East Side, Hester Street Collaborative, and Urban Justice Center Community Development Project, “Getting LES Ready: Learning from Hurricane Sandy to Create a Community-Based Disaster Plan for the Future” (report, Lower East Side Long Term Recovery Group, 2014), 5.
Ninety-four percent of residents lost power…
Good Old Lower East Side, Hester Street Collaborative, and Urban Justice Center Community Development Project, “Getting LES Ready,” 2.
More than half of the neighborhood’s residents reported getting assistance…
Good Old Lower East Side, Hester Street Collaborative, and Urban Justice Center Community Development Project, “Getting LES Ready,” 19.
…the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design competition…
Rebuild by Design, “The Big U,” accessed March 10, 2020.
At the heart of this project is East River Park…
New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, “John V. Lindsay East River Park,” accessed March 10, 2020
The elevated park will also connect to a series of floodwalls and floodgates…
New York City East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, “Scope,” accessed March 10, 2020
When complete, it will protect approximately 110,000 New Yorkers…
New York City East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, “Index Page,” accessed March 10, 2020.
The project aims beyond building physical resilience to climate impacts, to include the social resilience of communities.
Rebuild by Design, “What Is Rebuild by Design?” accessed March 10, 2020.
Buildings Designed for Life · Amanda Sturgeon
More than 90 percent of our time is now spent indoors…
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “The Inside Story: A Guide to Indoor Air Quality,” accessed March 6, 2020.
In the United States, 40 percent of energy goes to buildings…most of that is from fossil fuels.
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “How Much Energy Is Consumed in U.S. Residential and Commercial Buildings?” last updated May 14, 2019; International Energy Agency, Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction 2019 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2019).
Building in this way can significantly reduce energy consumption and emissions…
Kevin John Lomas and Yingchun Ji, “Resilience of Naturally Ventilated Buildings to Climate Change: Advanced Natural Ventilation and Hospital Wards,” Energy and Buildings 41, no. 6 (2009): 629–53.
…biophilic design—philia meaning “love,” bio meaning “life.”
E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Harvard University Press, 1984).
…our intuitive craving for comfort, safety, and security.
Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (Wiley, 1996).
Biophilic design is…starting to revolutionize our hospitals and schools…
Rodney H. Matsuoka, “Student Performance and High School Landscapes: Examining the Links,” Landscape and Urban Planning 97, no. 4 (2010): 273–82; Dongying Li and William C. Sullivan, “Impact of Views to School Landscapes on Recovery from Mental Stress and Fatigue,” Landscape and Urban Planning 148 (2016): 149–58; R. S. Ulrich, “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery,” Science 224, no. 4647 (1984): 420–21.
…transformations of space precipitate transformations of creativity, healing, and learning too.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, “Urban Nature for Human Health and Well-being: A Research Summary for Communicating the Health Benefits of Urban Trees and Green Space,” 2018; Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan, “The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature,” Psychological Science 19, no. 12 (2008): 1207–12.
…one hour in nature has been shown to improve our memory and attention by 20 percent.
Berman, Jonides, and Kaplan, “Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature.”
…very high efficiency and passive solar can maintain comfortable indoor temperatures with outdoor temperatures as low as 45 degrees Fahrenheit.
Julia Africa et al., “Biophilic Design and Climate Change: Performance Parameters for Health,” Frontiers in Built Environment 5, no. 28 (2019).
The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system now references biophilic design, and it is included in the WELL Building Standard and…the Living Building Challenge.
U.S. Green Building Council, “Designing with Nature, Biophilic Design for the Indoor Environment,” accessed March 6, 2020; International Well Building Institute, “Biophilia I—Qualitative,” accessed March 6, 2020; International Living Future Institute, “Biophilic Design Initiative,” accessed March 6, 2020.
Catalytic Capital · Régine Clément
“The plain truth is that capitalism needs to evolve if humanity is going to survive.”
Rose Marcario, “Enough Is Enough: Join the Climate Strikes and Demand Action,” LinkedIn, September 12, 2019.
In August 2019, leaders of thirty-three certified B Corporations…put their names on a full-page ad in The New York Times…
B The Change, “Dear Business Roundtable CEOs: Let’s Get to Work,” Medium, August 25, 2019.
The Roundtable had just made an announcement…
David Gelles and David Yaffe-Bellany, “Shareholder Value Is No Longer Everything, Top CEOs Say,” New York Times, August 19, 2019.
Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg critiques capitalism as an inherently destructive system…
Rose Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951).
…transforming our global energy system will require annual investment of roughly $2.4 trillion through 2035…
Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 22.
Single-family offices…manage an estimated $5.9 trillion of assets globally.
Reuters Staff, “Burgeoning Family Offices Manage $5.9 Trillion: Campden” Reuters, July 16, 2019.
…the world’s richest 1 percent have carbon footprints that are 175 times higher than the poorest 10 percent.
AFP, “World’s Richest 10% Produce Half of Global Carbon Emissions, Says Oxfam,” Guardian, December 2, 2015.
The failure of the market economy to price so-called externalities…should lead us to question the limitations of how we measure financial performance…
Jérôme Tagger, “Inside Out Economics: Are Externalities the Main Event?” Preventable Surprises, February 6, 2020.
…conventional investors, such as BlackRock, waking up and joining the climate marketplace.
Pippa Stevens, “Here’s How the World’s Largest Money Manager Is Overhauling Its Strategy Because of Climate Change,” CNBC, January 14, 2020; Katie Fehrenbacher, “Why ‘Climate Tech’ Is the New Cleantech,” GreenBiz, February 5, 2020.
Mending the Landscape · Kate Orff
It was also a local harbinger of global change…
Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Petrochemical America (Aperture, 2012).
…our neighborhood pond…dried up for two years straight, filling up with bird and fish carcasses and alarming local residents.
TaNoah Morgan, “Life Chokes as Lake Dries; Resident Seeks Money to Buy Water to Help Basin’s Fish and Fowl; Algae Absorbing Oxygen,” Baltimore Sun, July 30, 1999.
…sprawling development, which discouraged community life, contributed to a social crisis…
Aimee Picchi, “The New Face of Suburbia: Economic Woes and Early Death,” CBS News, March 29, 2017; Gina Kolata and Sabrina Tavernise, “It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy,” New York Times, November 26, 2019.
…the salt marshes of Jamaica Bay were being used as New York City’s trash heap.
Kate Orff, “Cosmopolitan Ecologies,” in Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park, ed. Alexander Brash, Jamie Hand, and Kate Orff (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011); Frederick R. Black, Jamaica Bay: A History, Gateway National Recreation Area New York, New Jersey, ed. James L. Brown (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1981)
Federal, state, and local action converged (at times, prompted by lawsuits) in response to this landscape emergency.
Jamaica Bay Ecowatchers, “Timeline,” accessed March 10, 2020.
These are all critical factors precipitating the sixth mass extinction…
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014).
…Living Breakwaters, rocky protective structures, seeded with oysters, to reduce wave action along the eroding shore of Staten Island.
New York State Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, “Living Breakwaters: Tottenville,” accessed March 10, 2020.
…the climate crisis demands massive transitions in energy, land, industry, transport, buildings, and cities…
Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018).
Research has shown that many people want to and feel proud to leave their land in buyout programs…
Liz Koslov, “The Case for Retreat,” Public Culture 28, no. 2 (2016): 359–87
…the NFIP is already over $20 billion in debt.
Diane P. Horn and Baird Webel, “Introduction to the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)” (report, Congressional Research Program, updated December 23, 2019).
Section 5: Persist
We Are Sunrise · Varshini Prakash
… it takes just 3.5 percent of a population getting active…for a campaign to win.
Michelle Nicholasen, “Nonviolent Resistance Proves Potent Weapon,” Harvard Gazette, February 4, 2019; Erica Chenoweth, “The Success of Nonviolent Civil Resistance,” TEDxBoulder (November 4, 2013, Boulder, Colorado), MPEG-4, 12:33.
At the current U.S. population, 3.5 percent would be about 11.5 million people…
Kaiser Family Foundation, “Population Distribution by Age” (2018).
…more than seven in ten Americans understand that climate change is happening, nearly six in ten are either “alarmed” or “concerned” about it, and a majority want government and corporations to do more to address the problem.
Anthony Leiserowitz et al., “Climate Change in the American Mind” (report, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, April 2020), 4; Matthew Goldberg et al., “For the First Time, the Alarmed Are Now the Largest of Global Warming’s Six Americas,” Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, January 16, 2020; Anthony Leiserowitz et al., “Politics and Global Warming” (report, Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, April 2019), 10.
…Andrew Wheeler, a coal lobbyist, was put at the helm of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Li Zhou, “The Senate Just Confirmed a Former Coal Lobbyist to Lead the EPA,” Vox, February 28, 2019.
In New York in 2019…passage of one of the most ambitious climate policies in the country.
David Roberts, “New York Just Passed the Most Ambitious Climate Target in the Country,” Vox, July 22, 2019.
…one hundred fossil fuel producers are the source of more than 70 percent of emissions since 1988.
Paul Griffin, “The Carbon Majors Database: CDP Carbon Majors Report 2017” (report, CDP, July 2017), 8; Tess Riley, “Just 100 Companies Responsible for 71% of Global Emissions, Study Says,” Guardian, July 10, 2017.
…support from 86 percent of Democrats, 64 percent of independents, 55 percent of rural voters, and 40 percent of white evangelical Christians.
NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist Poll, “National Tables July 15th through July 17th, 2019” (question: “Do you think a Green New Deal to address climate change by investing government money in green jobs and energy efficient infrastructure is a good idea or a bad idea?”), July 2019, 20.
For young people…it’s 77 percent.
NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Marist Poll, “National Tables.”
At the Intersections · Jacqui Patterson
…Harbour View, which was polluted by a cement plant, and the surrounding area had an array of health problems due to exposure to particulate pollution.
“Pollution: A Terrifying Picture,” Kingston (Jamaica) Gleaner, April 30, 1990.
The water supply in Harbour View was contaminated by industrial waste.
“Pollution: A Terrifying Picture.”
…the second-highest murder rate in the world…
Amber Pariona, “Murder Rate by Country,” WorldAtlas, January 9, 2020.
…Jamaica is the Caribbean island most vulnerable to future climate change and is also highly vulnerable economically.
Roxann Stennett-Brown, Tannecia S. Stephenson, and Michael A. Taylor, “Caribbean Climate Change Vulnerability: Lessons from an Aggregate Index Approach,” PLoS ONE 14, no. 7 (2019): e0219250.
…the role of race in the high incidence of infant mortality in African American women.
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, “Infant Mortality and African Americans,” last modified November 8, 2019.
Where you live is a powerful indicator of health and well-being…
Amy Roeder, “Zip Code Better Predictor of Health Than Genetic Code,” Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, August 4, 2014; Laura Dwyer-Lindgren et al., “Inequalities in Life Expectancy Among US Counties, 1980 to 2014: Temporal Trends and Key Drivers,” JAMA Internal Medicine 177, no. 7 (2017): 1003–11; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “Life Expectancy: Could Where You Live Influence How Long You Live?” accessed March 30, 2020.
…the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund triggered such oppressive austerity measures…
Jason Oringer and Carol Welch, “Structural Adjustment Programs,” Institute for Policy Studies, April 1, 1998.
…in South Africa pharmaceutical corporations were suing the government for legislating to reduce drug prices.
Pat Sidley, “Drug Companies Sue South African Government over Generics,” BMJ 322, no. 7284 (2001): 447.
…Black people…being shot on the Danziger Bridge.
Campbell Robertson, “New Orleans Police Officers Plead Guilty in Shooting of Civilians,” New York Times, April 20, 2016.
The most polluting coal plants are disproportionately located in communities where residents are predominantly low income or people of color.
Adrian Wilson et al., “Coal Blooded: Putting Profits Before People” (Baltimore: NAACP, 2012).
…sea-level rise, which is displacing…Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana.
Jacob Batte, “Gulf Will Devour Terrebonne, Lafourche by 2100, Study Says,” Houma (LA) Today, March 31, 2016.
…three coal-fired power plants, all of which received an F grade…
Wilson et al.,“Coal Blooded.”
This pollution is tied to…violence.
Jesse D. Berman et al., “Acute Air Pollution Exposure and the Risk of Violent Behavior in the United States,” Epidemiology 30, no. 6 (2019): 799–806.
…the record-breaking heat wave of 1995, which killed 739 of my neighbors?
Mike Thomas, “An Oral History: Heat Wave,” Chicago Magazine, June 29, 2015.
Dear Fossil Fuel Executives · Cameron Russell
Fashion’s carbon footprint is big and growing, responsible for 8 to 10 percent of global emissions.
Quantis, “Measuring Fashion: Environmental Impact of the Global Apparel and Footwear Industries Study” (report, Quantis, 2018); “How Much Do Our Wardrobes Cost to the Environment?” World Bank, September 23, 2019
Three-fifths of all clothes end up in a landfill or incinerator within years of being produced.
Nathalie Remy, Eveline Speelman, and Steven Swartz, “Style That’s Sustainable: A New Fast-Fashion Formula,” McKinsey & Company, October 2016.
…textile production is on track to use at least a quarter of the world’s carbon budget by 2050.
Ian Banks, ed., A New Textiles Economy: Redesigning Fashion’s Future (Cowes, UK: Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2017), 39.
…a Bangladeshi garment factory in Rana Plaza had collapsed, killing at least 1,134 people and injuring more than 2,500 others.
“The Rana Plaza Accident and Its Aftermath,” International Labor Organization, accessed March 11, 2020.
That factory produced clothing for brands including Benetton, the Children’s Place, Joe Fresh, Mango, Primark, and Walmart…
“Rana Plaza Factory Collapse Compensation—Interactive Guide,” Guardian, March 17, 2014; “Rana Plaza,” Clean Clothes Campaign, accessed March 11, 2020.
The five-year commitments made by major North American and European retailers to improve worker safety expired.
Elizabeth Paton, “After Factory Disaster, Bangladesh Made Big Safety Strides. Are the Bad Days Coming Back?” New York Times, March 1, 202
“All will return to how it was when Rana Plaza happened.”
Dana Thomas, “Why Won’t We Learn from the Survivors of the Rana Plaza Disaster?” New York Times, April 24, 2018.
…Amazon, which had surpassed Walmart as the biggest clothing retailer in the United States, was selling garments from dozens of the blacklisted, unsafe Bangladeshi factories.
Coresight Research, “Amazon Apparel: Annual US Survey Reveals Amazon Has Overtaken Walmart as America’s Most-Shopped Retailer for Apparel” Coresight Research, March 4, 2019; Justin Scheck, Jon Emont, and Alexandra Berzon, “Amazon Sells Clothes from Factories Other Retailers Blacklist,” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 2019.
In 2019, when fifty thousand Bangladeshi garment workers went on strike demanding higher wages, the fashion press didn’t give the workers so much as a blog post of coverage.
Minh-Ha T. Pham, “Stories the Fashion Media Won’t Tell,” Nation, January 18, 2019.
…mere years left to avoid a climate change that most humans will be unable to adapt to.
Myles Allen et al., “Summary for Policymakers,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018).
…the most public efforts to make fashion sustainable address only natural-resource impacts…
Vanessa Friedman, “Fashion’s Latest Trend: Eco Bragging Rights,” New York Times, October 10, 2019.
…the vast majority of women who power the fashion industry, making up 80 percent of its workforce, are women of color and most don’t make a living wage.
Harpreet Kaur, “Low Wages, Unsafe Conditions and Harassment: Fashion Must Do More to Protect Female Workers,” Guardian, March 8, 2016; Minh-Ha T. Pham, “How to Fix the Fashion Industry’s Racism,” New Republic, April 18, 2019; Anne Elizabeth Moore, Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking (Portland, OR: Microcosm, 2016).
In the United States alone, direct and indirect subsidies exceed annual spending by the Pentagon…
Tim Dickinson, “Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending,” Rolling Stone, May 8, 2019.
…Black Americans are 75 percent more likely than Whites to live in “fence-line” communities…
Lesley Fleischman and Marcus Franklin, “Fumes Across the Fence-Line: The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil & Gas Facilities on African American Communities” (report, NAACP and Clean Air Task Force, 2017), 6.
This proximity and exposure increase the risk of cancer, lung conditions, and other illnesses.
Fleischman and Franklin, “Fumes Across the Fence-Line.”
…the bunkers of billionaires…
Aria Bendix, “45 Unreal Photos of ‘Billionaire Bunkers’ That Could Shelter the Superrich During an Apocalypse,” Business Insider, June 10, 2019.
In the wake of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, organizing by garment workers and their allies led to the New Deal labor protections…
Kirstin Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage (New York: Anchor Books, 2010).
…thredUP…is building a logistics backbone to carry upward of $50 billion in retail value.
Evan Clark, “Digital Forum: ThredUp Goes for Big-Time Growth,” WWD, September 26, 2019.
“I want to ship fewer collections,” she told Vogue…
Emily Farra, “Tracy Reese Unveils a New Sustainable, ‘Responsibly Designed’ Collection That’s Based in Detroit,” Vogue, June 24, 2019.
…in 2020, solar and onshore wind costs will consistently fall below fossil fuels.
International Renewable Energy Agency, “Global Energy Transformation: A Roadmap to 2050,” 2019 ed. (report, International Renewable Energy Agency, 2019).
Native American and Alaskan Native tribes have the highest rates of homes without electricity in the United States.
Eduardo Garcia, “One Thing That’s Getting Done: Solar Power for Navajo Homes,” New York Times, February 5, 2020.
…PUSH Buffalo is helping low-income communities access solar power and weatherize their homes and is developing energy-efficient affordable housing.
“PUSH Buffalo,” accessed February 7, 2020.
Since the Paris Agreement, banks around the world (JPMorgan Chase is the worst offender) have invested $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels…
Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Indigenous Environmental Network, Sierra Club, Oil Change International, and Honor the Earth, Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card 2019 (San Francisco: Rainforest Action Network, 2019), 3.
The production of garments doubled from 2000 to 2014, and the average consumer bought 60 percent more—but kept each piece for half as long.
Remy, Speelman, and Swartz, “Style That’s Sustainable.”
Sacred Resistance · Tara Houska—Zhaabowekwe
Enbridge…pipeline that would carry more than 700,000 barrels of bitumen sludge per day through my people’s territory…
“NEB Recommends Approval of Enbridge’s Line 3 Replacement with 89 Conditions,” Oil Sands Magazine, April 25, 2019; Enbridge, “Enbridge and Spectra Energy Combine to Create North America’s Premier Energy Infrastructure Company,” accessed March 10, 2020.
…Indigenous peoples hold 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity…
Claudia Sobrevila, The Role of Indigenous Peoples in Biodiversity Conservation: The Natural but Often Forgotten Partners (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008).
Public Service for Public Health · Gina McCarthy
There are one hundred regulations in limbo, and counting…
Nadja Popovich, Livia Albeck-Ripka, and Kendra Pierre-Louis, “The Trump Administration Is Reversing 100 Environmental Rules. Here’s the Full List,” New York Times, July 15, 2020.
We reduced air pollution in the United States by 70 percent while GDP tripled.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Progress Cleaning the Air and Improving People’s Health,” accessed March 10, 2020.
…climate change is not an equal-opportunity killer.
Nick Watts et al., “The 2019 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Ensuring That the Health of a Child Born Today Is Not Defined by a Changing Climate,” Lancet 394, no. 10211 (2019): 1836–78; Jos Lelieveld et al., “Loss of Life Expectancy from Air Pollution Compared to Other Risk Factors: A Worldwide Perspective,” Cardiovascular Research 116, no. 11 (2020): 1910–1917.
Four million kids worldwide develop asthma each year…living near a major roadway.
Pattanun Achakulwisut et al., “Global, National, and Urban Burdens of Paediatric Asthma Incidence Attributable to Ambient NO2 Pollution: Estimates from Global Datasets,” Lancet Planetary Health 3, no. 4 (2019): 166–78.
Women leaders are more ambitious in their efforts to address climate change than are their male counterparts.
Astghik Mavisakalyan and Yashar Tarverdi, “Gender and Climate Change: Do Female Parliamentarians Make Difference?” European Journal of Political Economy 56 (2019): 151–64.
Section 6: Feel
Under the Weather · Ash Sanders
…a North Atlantic right whale…3 of only 409 left…
H. M. Pettis, R. M. Pace III, and P. K. Hamilton, “North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium 2019 Annual Report Card” (report, North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, 2020), 4.
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago…a series of volcanic eruptions…turning the world into a hothouse in a geologic blink of an eye.
Dana Nuccitelli, “Burning Coal May Have Caused Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction,” Guardian, March 12, 2018.
…the vast majority of life on Earth went extinct.
David M. Raup, “Size of the Permo-Triassic Bottleneck and Its Evolutionary Implications,” Science 206, no. 4415 (1979): 217–18; Zhong-Qiang Chen and Michael J. Benton, “The Timing and Pattern of Biotic Recovery Following the End-Permian Mass Extinction,” Nature Geoscience 5 (2012): 375–83.
…the largest insect extinction in history.
Conrad C. Labandeira, “The Fossil Record of Insect Extinction: New Approaches and Future Directions,” American Entomologist 51, no. 1 (2005): 14–29.
It took the Earth between 8 and 9 million years to fully recover.
Chen and Benton, “The Timing and Pattern of Biotic Recovery.”
…we are seeing a trajectory toward Permian levels of carbon in the atmosphere.
Nuccitelli, “Burning Coal May Have Caused.”
…200 million Americans will suffer from mental illness as a result of natural disasters, droughts, heat waves, and economic downturn.
Kevin J. Coyle and Lise Van Susteren, “The Psychological Effects of Global Warming” (report, National Wildlife Federation Climate Education Program, February 2012), v
In the wake of Hurricane Maria…children developed PTSD at twice the rate of the general population.
Zara Greenbaum, “Puerto Rico, Two Years After Maria,” Monitor on Psychology 50, no. 8 (2018): 28.
…after Hurricane Katrina, the suicide rate in New Orleans nearly tripled, and the number of instances of depression and PTSD grew…
Susan Saulny, “A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide,” New York Times, June 21, 2006.
…acknowledging the reality of climate change and its consequences can trigger …ecoanxiety.
Susan Clayton Whitmore-Williams et al., Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance, ed. Ashlee Cunsolo et al. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2017), 4.
In 2008, in the midst of a severe drought in Australia, a seventeen-year-old boy refused to drink water…
Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo, “Water, Water, Everywhere, nor Any Drop to Drink: Climate Change Delusion,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 42, no. 4 (2008): 350.
…more than seventy thousand farmer suicides, which experts say were connected to rising temperatures in the region.
National Crime Records Bureau Ministry of Home Affairs, Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India 2018 (Mahipalpur, India: National Crime Records Bureau, 2018), 203; Michael Safi, “Suicides of Nearly 60,000 Indian Farmers Linked to Climate Change, Study Claims,” Guardian, July 31, 2017; Tamma A. Carleton, “Crop-Damaging Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in India,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 33 (2017): 8746–51.
More than ten thousand farmers killed themselves in India in 2018 alone.
National Crime Records Bureau Ministry of Home Affairs, Accidental Deaths & Suicides.
Greta Thunberg…a severe depression during which she stopped eating and drinking.
Olivia Petter, “Greta Thunberg Was Depressed and Refusing to Eat Years Before Climate Strike, Father Reveals,” Independent, December 30, 2019
…David Buckel, a human rights lawyer who in 2018 lit himself on fire in Prospect Park…
Annie Correal, “What Drove a Man to Set Himself on Fire in Brooklyn?” New York Times, May 28, 2018.
…the purpose of the discipline is to define “‘sanity’ as if the whole world mattered.”
Theodore Roszak, “Definition of Ecopsychology,” Ecopsychology Newsletter 1, no. 8 (1994).
…doctors who diagnosed the Australian boy with climate psychosis, were careful to note the boy’s other symptoms…
Wolf and Salo, “Water, Water, Everywhere.”
…more than 16 percent of the valley floor exposed.
Glenn Albrecht, “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change,” Australian Psychiatry 15, no. 1 (2007): S95–98.
…“solastalgia,” a portmanteau of the Latin solus, which means “abandonment and loneliness,” and “nostalgia.”
Glenn Albrecht, “‘Solastalgia’: A New Concept in Health and Identity,” PAN: Philosophy Activism Nature 3 (2005): 41–55.
People living in the hardest-hit mining areas reported…greater emotional and physical effects than the control group.
Nick Higginbotham, “Validation of an Environmental Distress Scale,” EcoHealth 3 (2006): 245–54.
…Alan AtKisson calls this predicament “Cassandra’s Dilemma”…
Alan AtKisson, Believing Cassandra: How to Be an Optimist in a Pessimist’s World (London: Routledge, 2011).
Mothering in an Age of Extinction · Amy Westervelt
…sea turtles, because of the sand getting too hot…
Jacques-Olivier Laloë et al., “Effects of Rising Temperature on the Viability of an Important Sea Turtle Rookery,” Nature Climate Change 4 (2014): 513–18
…most birds, forced to shift their habitats and migratory patterns…
Cagan H. Sekercioglu et al., “Climate Change, Elevational Range Shifts, and Bird Extinctions,” Conservation Biology 22, no. 1 (2007): 140–50; Kyle G. Horton et al., “Phenology of Nocturnal Avian Migration Has Shifted at the Continental Scale,” Nature Climate Change 10 (2019): 63–68; Christine Howard et al., “Flight Range, Fuel Load and the Impact of Climate Change on the Journeys of Migrant Birds,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285, no. 1873 (2018)
…coral, bleached and drab…
Terry P. Hughes et al., “Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Mass Bleaching of Corals in the Anthropocene,” Science 359, no. 6371 (2018): 80–83.
What feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins calls “othermothering”…
Patricia Hill Collins, “The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships,” SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4, no. 2 (1987): 3–10.
Anthropologists like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy have seen this approach across multiple communities…
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Collins writes in Black Feminist Thought…
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000).
…then–Exxon CEO Lee Raymond said in a speech he gave to the American Petroleum Institute’s annual gathering in 1996…
Lee R. Raymond, remarks at the Exxon Corporation Annual Meeting, American Petroleum Institute (November 11, 1996, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Washington, DC), MPEG-4, 24:17; J. F. Black, “The Greenhouse Effect”(memo to F. G. Turpin, Exxon Research and Engineering, June 6, 1978), 9.
“Everyone agrees that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and that such concentrations in the atmosphere are rising”…
Raymond, remarks at the Exxon Corporation Annual Meeting.
…the manufacturing of plastic itself, in facilities that belch carbon dioxide.
Lisa Anne Hamilton and Steven Feit, “Executive Summary,” in Plastic & Climate: The Hidden Costs of a Plastic Planet, ed. Amanda Kistler and Carroll Muffett (Washington, DC: Center for International Environmental Law, 2019), 1–5.
Loving a Vanishing World · Emily N. Johnston
A single one of the several ocean garbage patches contains nearly two trillion pieces of plastic.
L. Lebreton et al., “Evidence That the Great Pacific Garbage Patch Is Rapidly Accumulating Plastic,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 4666 (2018).
There are microplastics in sea salt worldwide.
Mary Kosuth, Sherri A. Mason, and Elizabeth V. Wattenberg, “Anthropogenic Contamination of Tap Water, Beer, and Sea Salt,” PLoS One 13, no. 4 (2018): e0194970; Jessica Glenza, “Sea Salt Around the World Is Contaminated by Plastic, Studies Show,” Guardian, February 8, 2017.
Fish populations are collapsing.
Jared Ferrie, “A Perfect Storm: Climate Change and Overfishing,” New Humanitarian, September 19, 2016; Azua Luo, “Ocean Fish Stocks on ‘Verge of Collapse,’ Says IRIN Report,” New Security Beat (blog), February 28, 2017.
Whales and dolphins are suffering profoundly from the din of the sonar…
E. C. M. Parsons, “Impacts of Navy Sonar on Whales and Dolphins: Now Beyond a Smoking Gun?” Marine Science 4, no. 295 (2017); NRDC, “Does Military Sonar Kill Marine Wildlife?” Scientific American, June 10, 2009.
Seawater is acidifying so fast in the Salish Sea that oysters are struggling to build shells.
Judith Lavoie, “The Race for Adaptation in an Increasingly Acidic Salish Sea,” Narwhal, March 12, 2018; Katie Campbell, “Acidifying Water Takes Toll on Northwest Shellfish,” directed by Katie Campbell (NOAA), MPEG-4, 6:27
…phytoplankton levels have fallen rapidly since 1950—and phytoplankton…produces about half of the world’s oxygen.
Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis, and Boris Worm, “Global Phytoplankton Decline over the Past Century,” Nature 466 (2010): 591–96; Lauren Morello and ClimateWire, “Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950,” Scientific American, July 29, 2010; Christopher B. Field et al., “Primary Production of the Biosphere: Integrating Terrestrial and Oceanic Components,” Science 281, no. 5374 (1998): 237–40.
…where jellyfish thrive and other life plummets.
Lucas Brotz et al., “Increasing Jellyfish Populations: Trends in Large Marine Ecosystems,” Developments in Hydrobiology 220 (2012): 3–20.
Its colors will change.
Stephanie Dutkiewicz et al., “Ocean Colour Signature of Climate Change,” Nature Communications 10, no. 578 (2019); Sarah Gibbens, “Climate Change Will Shift the Oceans’ Colors,” National Geographic, February 4, 2019.
…the end-Permian, in which most of life on Earth was wiped out.
Douglas H. Erwin, “The Permo-Triassic Extinction,” Nature 367 (1994); Hillel J. Hoffman, “The Permian Extinction—When Life Nearly Came to an End,” National Geographic, accessed February 19, 2020.
That extinction was triggered by greenhouse gases from the Siberian Traps, which led to temperature rise and climate destabilization.
Uwe Brand et al., “The End‐Permian Mass Extinction: A Rapid Volcanic CO2 and CH4‐Climatic Catastrophe,” Chemical Geology 322–23 (2012): 121–44.
…temperatures and greenhouse gas concentrations that were rising orders of magnitude more slowly than we’re causing them to rise now.
Richard E. Zeebe, Andy Ridgwell, and James C. Zachos, “Anthropogenic Carbon Release Rate Unprecedented During the Past 66 Million Years,” Nature Geoscience 9 (2016): 325–29; Katrin Meissner and Kaitlin Alexander, “Mass Extinctions and Climate Change: Why the Speed of Rising Greenhouse Gases Matters,” Conversation, March 23, 2016; Isobel Whitcomb, “Has the Earth Ever Been This Hot Before?” Live Science, July 13, 2019.
…Seattle’s public port announced it would be welcoming the Polar Pioneer rig to Elliott Bay…
John Ryan, “Shell Arctic Drilling Fleet OK’d to Use ‘Green’ West Seattle Port,” KUOW, January 14, 2015.
…the journal Nature outlined the energy projects we could not engage in…
Christophe McGlade and Paul Ekins, “The Geographical Distribution of Fossil Fuels Unused When Limiting Global Warming to 2°C,” Nature 517 (2015): 187–90.
…a company source told The Guardian…
Arthur Neslen, “Shell Has Frozen Its Arctic Oil Drilling—but It’s Still Hungry for Fossil Fuels,” Guardian, September 28, 2015.
…“where energy projects go to die.”
Marissa Luck, “Oil Refinery Faces Host of Hurdles Before Coming to Longview,” Daily News (Longview, WA), May 29, 2015.
…seventy-three remaining Southern Resident orcas…
Center for Whale Research, “Southern Resident Killer Whale Population,” July 1, 2019.
The Adaptive Mind · Susanne C. Moser
…according to a first-of-its-kind survey of adaptation professionals…four out of five respondents say they feel burned out.
This research is ongoing and not yet published. For additional information, contact the author.
Gallup found that burnout costs American society dearly every year.
B. Wigert and S. Agrawal, “Employee Burnout, Part 1: The 5 Main Causes,” Gallup, July 12, 2018).
…for more than a decade, psychologists and psychiatrists have been raising the alarm about the coming wave of psychological distress due to the climate crisis.
American Psychological Association Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change, Psychology and Global Climate Change: Addressing a Multi-faceted Phenomenon and Set of Challenges (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2009); Susan Clayton, Christie Manning, and Caroline Hodge, “Beyond Storms & Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change” (report, American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica, 2014); Susan Clayton et al., “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance” (report, American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica, March 2017); Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville R. Ellis, “Ecological Grief as a Mental Health Response to Climate Change–Related Loss,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 275–81; Katie Hayes et al., “Climate Change and Mental Health: Risks, Impacts and Priority Actions,” International Journal of Mental Health Systems 12, no. 28 (2018).
…increases in violence and suicidality due to extreme heat.
Marshall Burke et al., “Higher Temperatures Increase Suicide Rates in the United States and Mexico,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 723–29; Janna Trombley, Stephanie Chalupka, and Laura Anderko, “Climate Change and Mental Health,” American Journal of Nursing 117, no. 4 (2017): 44–52.
Some have proposed classifying the entirety of climate change as a “trauma.”
Benjamin White, “States of Emergency: Trauma and Climate Change,” Ecopsychology 7, no. 4 (2015): 192–97; Alan Bellamy, “Trauma, Fragmentation and Narrative: Sandor Ferenczi’s Relevance for Psychoanalytical Perspectives on Our Response to Climate Change and Environmental Destruction,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 16, no. 2 (2019): 100–108; Zhiwa Woodbury, “Climate Trauma: Toward a New Taxonomy of Trauma,” Ecopsychology 11, no. 1 (2019): 1–8; Eric Garza, “Awakening to the Traumacene,” Medium, May 29, 2019.
…emerging recognition of the emotional labor done by those expected to be unemotional and objective—namely climate scientists.
Nadine Andrews, “Psychosocial Factors Influencing the Experience of Sustainability Professionals,” Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal 8, no. 4 (2017): 445–69; Susan Clayton, “Mental Health Risk and Resilience Among Climate Scientists,” Nature Climate Change 8 (2018): 260–61; Lesley Head and Theresa Harada, “Keeping the Heart a Long Way from the Brain: The Emotional Labour of Climate Scientists,” Emotion, Space and Society 24 (2017): 34–41.
…the burnout common among advocates and activists, as well as the emotional burden laid on youth.
John Fraser et al., “Sustaining the Conservationist,” Ecopsychology 5, no. 2 (2013): 70–79; Péter Molnár and Zoltan Vass, “Pessimistic Futures Generation for Pessimistic Future Generations? The Youth Has the Future but the Older Has the Authority,” Futures 45 (2013): S55–6; Joanna Petrasek MacDonald et al., “A Necessary Voice: Climate Change and Lived Experiences of Youth in Rigolet, Nunatsiavut, Canada,” Global Environmental Change 23, no. 1 (2013): 360–71; Karen O’Brien, Elin Selboe, and Bronwyn M. Hayward, “Exploring Youth Activism on Climate Change: Dutiful, Disruptive, and Dangerous Dissent,” Ecology and Society 23, no. 3 (2018): 42; Blanche Verlie, “Bearing Worlds: Learning to Live-with Climate Change,” Environmental Education and Research 25, no. 5 (2019): 751–66; Rosaura Orengo-Aguayo et al., “Disaster Exposure and Mental Health Among Puerto Rican Youths After Hurricane Maria,” JAMA Network Open 2, no. 4 (2019): e192619; Maria Ojala, “Hope and Climate Change: The Importance of Hope for Environmental Engagement Among Young People,” Environmental Education Research 18, no. 5 (2012): 625–42.
With the exception of first responders such as emergency workers and firefighters, the psychological strain on the broader category of climate professionals has not been adequately recognized.
Nina Agrawal, “Must Reads: Firefighter Suicides Reflect Toll of Longer Fire Seasons and Increased Stress,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2019; Daniel Gilford et al., “The Emotional Toll of Climate Change on Science Professionals,” Eos 100 (2019).
Psychological self-care is not a luxury.
Olga Phoenix, “Self-Care Wheel: Voted #1 Self-Care Tool for Trauma Professionals!” accessed March 6, 2020.
…a balanced, resilient mind is a kinder and more compassionate, alert, productive, and effective mind.
Laura van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk, Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler, 2009); Stephen Kaplan, “Meditation, Restoration, and the Management of Mental Fatigue,” Environment and Behavior 33, no. 4 (2001): 480–506; G. L. Bradley, J. P. Reser, and A. I. Glendon, “Distress and Coping Response to Climate Change,” in Stress and Anxiety: Applications to Social and Environmental Threats, Psychological Well-being, Occupational Challenges, and Developmental Psychology Climate Change, ed. K. Kaniasty et al. (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2014), 33–42; Richard E. Adams, Joseph A. Boscarino, and Charles R. Figley, “Compassion Fatigue and Psychological Distress Among Social Workers: A Validation Study,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 76, no. 1 (2006): 103–8; J. David Creswell, “Mindfulness Interventions,” Annual Review of Psychology 68 (2017): 491–516; James S. Gordon, “Mind-Body Skills Groups for Medical Students: Reducing Stress, Enhancing Commitment, and Promoting Patient-Centered Care,” BMC Medical Education 14, no.198 (2014).
Cultivate grounded hope.
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012); Kate Davies, Intrinsic Hope: Living Courageously in Troubled Times (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2018); Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016); Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Susanne Moser, “Hope in the Face of Climate Change: A Bridge Without Railing,” Conference on Communication and Environment (June 12, 2015, Boulder, Colorado), MPEG-4, 46:21.
…there are now efforts under way to grow a cadre of climate-conscious psychologists.
In the United Kingdom, psychologists have founded the Climate Psychology Alliance, a referral list of climate-aware psychologists; in Australia, Psychology for a Safe Climate provides a starting place to find psychological support resources; and in the United States, a growing number of psychologists are coming together under the umbrellas of the Climate Psychology Alliance North America and the Climate Psychiatry Alliance.
In such a world of accelerating change, the well-being of our hearts and souls must be reestablished to their rightful place as relevant and essential.
Carol L. Berzonsky and Susanne C. Moser, “Becoming Homo sapiens sapiens: Mapping the Psycho-cultural Transformation in the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 20 (2017): 15–23.
Section 7: Nourish
Solutions Underfoot · Jane Zelikova
…winnow ants were moving northward and up in elevation…abandoning the plants that rely on them for seed dispersal.
Tamara J. Zelikova, Robert R. Dunn, and Nathan J. Sanders, “Variation in Seed Dispersal Along an Elevational Gradient in Great Smoky Mountains National Park,” Acta Oecologica 34, no. 2 (2008): 155–62.
…“in nature, nothing exists alone.”
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).
…ecological relationship between ants and the plants they disperse…
J. H. Ness, D. F. Morin, and I. Giladi, “Uncommon Specialization in a Mutualism Between a Temperate Herbaceous Plant Guild and an Ant: Are Aphaenogaster Ants Keystone Mutualists?” Oikos 118, no. 12 (2009): 1793–804.
Over the last twelve thousand years, we have lost about 133 billion metric tons of carbon from this soil…
Jonathan Sanderman, Tomislav Hengl, and Gregory J. Fiske, “Soil Carbon Debt of 12,000 Years of Human Land Use,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 36 (2017): 9575–80.
The main driver of this loss—the plow—revolutionized farming…
R. Lal, D. C. Recoski, and J. D. Hanson, “Evolution of the Plow over 10,000 Years and the Rationale for No-Till Farming,” Soil & Tillage Research 93, no. 1 (2007): 1–12.
…more than a third of the planet’s land to grow food for 7.8 billion people worldwide.
Food and Agriculture Organization, “Agricultural Land (% of Land Area),” World Bank.
Our production of food and fiber spans about fifty million square kilometers…
Kees Klein Goldewijk et al., “The HYDE 3.1 Spatially Explicit Database of Human-Induced Global Land-Use Change over the Past 12,000 Years,” Global Ecology and Biogeography 20, no. 1 (2011): 73–86.
The United Kingdom may be a few decades away from losing all its soil fertility, and other parts of the world…are in a similar predicament.
Jill L. Edmondson et al., “Urban Cultivation in Allotments Maintains Soil Qualities Adversely Affected by Conventional Agriculture,” Journal of Applied Ecology 51, no. 4 (2014): 880–89; Martina Sartoria et al., “A Linkage Between the Biophysical and the Economic: Assessing the Global Market Impacts of Soil Erosion,” Land Use Policy 86 (2019): 299–312; Cheikh Mbow et al., “Food Security,” in Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems, ed. P. R. Shukla et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2019).
A tablespoon of soil contains billions of microbes.
“The Earth Microbiome Project Is a Systematic Attempt to Characterize Global Microbial Taxonomic and Functional Diversity for the Benefit of the Planet and Humankind,” Earth Microbiome Project, accessed March 12, 2020; Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo et al., “A Global Atlas of the Dominant Bacteria Found in Soil,” Science 359, no. 6373 (2018): 320–25.
There may be a trillion species of microbes on Earth—99.999 percent still undiscovered.
Kenneth J. Locey and Jay T. Lennon, “Scaling Laws Predict Global Microbial Diversity,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 25 (2016): 5970–75.
…microbes collectively hold more carbon than all animals combined.
Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 25 (2018): 6506–11.
Billions of tons of carbon sit underground, three times more than in the atmosphere.
R. Lal, “Soil Carbon Sequestration Impacts on Global Climate Change and Food Security,” Science 304, no. 5677 (2004): 1623–27.
…Antoni van Leeuwenhoek first saw tiny organisms, or “wee beasties,” as he called them, in a drop of pond water in the 1670s.
David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).
…this unseen majority drives an invisible engine that hums under our feet—in our yards, in parks, on our farms and ranches…
Marcel G. A. van der Heijden, Richard D. Bardgett, and Nico M. van Straalen, “The Unseen Majority: Soil Microbes as Drivers of Plant Diversity and Productivity in Terrestrial Ecosystems,” Ecology Letters 11, no. 3 (2008): 296–310; Grant L. Thompson and Jenny Kao-Kniffin, “Urban Grassland Management Implications for Soil C and N Dynamics: A Microbial Perspective,” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7, no. 315 (2019); Kelly S. Ramirez et al., “Biogeographic Patterns in Below-Ground Diversity in New York City’s Central Park Are Similar to Those Observed Globally,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281, no. 1795 (2014); Marcel G. A. van der Heijden and Cameron Wagg, “Soil Microbial Diversity and Agro-ecosystem Functioning,” Plant and Soil 363 (2013): 1–5.
They transform organic matter from plants and animals into soil organic carbon (SOC)…
S. Trumbore, “Age of Soil Organic Matter and Soil Respiration: Radiocarbon Constraints on Belowground C Dynamics,” Ecological Applications 10, no. 2 (2000): 399–411.
…photosynthetic organisms drive the single most important chemical transformation of carbon on our planet.
Holli Riebeek, “The Carbon Cycle,” NASA Earth Observatory, June 16, 2011.
Scientists have only recently uncovered how important soil pores are for carbon storage.
A. N. Kravchenko et al., “Microbial Spatial Footprint as a Driver of Soil Carbon Stabilization,” Nature Communications 10, no. 3121 (2019).
…the bulk of stored carbon is actually dead microbes, known as microbial necromass.
Chao Liang et al., “Quantitative Assessment of Microbial Necromass Contribution to Soil Organic Matter,” Global Change Biology 25, no. 11 (2019): 3578–90.
It took over two hundred years of research and debate for scientists to generally agree about the importance of diversity…
Markus Lange et al., “Plant Diversity Increases Soil Microbial Activity and Soil Carbon Storage,” Nature Communications 6, no. 6707 (2015).
…could draw down about 10 percent of the carbon dioxide we emit every year!
Bronson W. Griscom et al., “Natural Climate Solutions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 44 (2017): 11645–50.
…the climate movement has been largely affluent and White.
“Report Card,” Green 2.0, accessed March 4, 2020.
Plants, fungi, and lichens were drawing carbon dioxide out of the air as early as 700 million years ago.
Daniel S. Heckman et al., “Molecular Evidence for the Early Colonization of Land by Fungi and Plants,” Science 293, no. 5532 (2001): 1129–33.
Solutions at Sea · Emily Stengel
Wildfires are scorching farmland from Australia to California.
Heesu Lee and Phoebe Sedgman, “Here’s How Wildfires Will Impact What Australians Eat and Wear,” Bloomberg, January 11, 2020; Joan Cusick, “California Farmers Face a Long Road to Recovery After Wildfires,” Civil Eats, October 8, 2019.
Floods are wreaking havoc on America’s breadbasket.
Sarah Almukhtar et al., “The Great Flood of 2019: A Complete Picture of a Slow-Motion Disaster,” New York Times, September 11, 2019.
…agriculture using 90 percent of the world’s freshwater resources…
Food and Agriculture Organization, “Annual Freshwater Withdrawals, Agriculture (% of Total Freshwater Withdrawal),” World Bank.
A New Yorker profile described him as living in an Airstream and drinking water from a whiskey bottle.
Dana Goodyear, “A New Leaf,” New Yorker, October 26, 2015.
Oysters filter up to fifty gallons of water per day, removing nitrogen…a major factor in aquatic dead zones.
Roger I. E. Newell, “Ecological Changes in Chesapeake Bay: Are They the Result of Overharvesting the American Oyster, Crassostrea virginica,” in Understanding the Estuary: Advances in Chesapeake Bay Research (Baltimore: Chesapeake Research Consortium Publication, 1988): 536–46; M. Lisa Kellogg et al., “Denitrification and Nutrient Assimilation on a Restored Oyster Reef,” Marine Ecology Progressive Series 480 (2013): 1–19.
…supplementing livestock feed with a small amount of seaweed can reduce methane output by more than half in cattle.
Breanna M. Roque et al., “Inclusion of Asparagopsis armata in Lactating Dairy Cows’ Diet Reduces Enteric Methane Emission by Over 50 Percent,” Journal of Clean Production 234 (2019): 132–38.
…farming regenerative species in less than 5 percent of U.S. waters could produce protein equivalent to three trillion cheeseburgers, create more than fifty million new jobs, and absorb ten million tons of nitrogen and 135 million tons of carbon per year…
Rasmus Bjerregaard et al., Seaweed Aquaculture for Food Security, Income Generation and Environmental Health in Tropical Developing Countries (white paper, World Bank, 2016), 2–3.
Today we’re farming in just 0.004 percent of all coastal oceans.
Carlos M. Duarte et al., “Can Seaweed Farming Play a Role in Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation?,” Frontiers in Marine Science 4, no. 100 (2017).
Black Gold · Leah Penniman
…246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States.
“A History of Slavery in the United States,” National Geographic, accessed March 9, 2020.
Worms of the Nile River Valley are thought to have been a significant contributor to the extraordinary fertility of Egyptian soils.
Jerry Minnich, The Earthworm Book: How to Raise and Use Earthworms for Your Farm and Garden, 4th ed. (Rodale, 1977).
…high concentrations of calcium and phosphorus, as well as 200 to 300 percent more organic carbon than soils typical to the region.
Dawit Solomon et al., “Indigenous African Soil Enrichment as a Climate‐Smart Sustainable Agriculture Alternative,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14, no. 2 (2016): 71–76.
…soil fertility was not an inherent quality but something that is nurtured over generations…
Emmanuel Krieke, Environmental Infrastructure in African History: Examining the Myth of Natural Resource Management in Namibia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
…George Washington Carver was a pioneer in regenerative farming…
Mark D. Hersey, My Work Is That of Conservation: An Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
“deficiency in nitrogen can be met almost wholly by the proper rotation of crops”…
George W. Carver, “The Need of Scientific Agriculture in the South,” The American Monthly Review of Reviews 25, no. 1 (1902): 320–322.
…“unkindness to anything means an injustice done to that thing”…
George W. Carver, “Being Kind To the Soil,” The Negro Farmer (January 31, 1914).
It took only a few decades of intense tillage to drive around 50 percent of the original organic matter from the soil into the sky as carbon dioxide.
Eldor A. Paul et al., eds., Soil Organic Matter in Temperate Agroecosystems: Long Term Experiments in North America (CRC Press, 1996).
The agricultural productivity of the Great Plains decreased 64 percent after just twenty-eight years of tillage by Europeans.
Paul et al., eds., Soil Organic Matter in Temperate Agroecosystems.
Each year we lose around 25 million acres of cropland to soil erosion worldwide.
David Pimentel and Michael Burgess, “Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production,” Agriculture 3, no. 3 (2013): 443–63.
The loss is ten to forty times faster than the rate of soil formation…
Pimentel and Burgess, “Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production.”
Soil degradation alone may decrease food production by 30 percent over the next fifty years.
Pimentel and Burgess, “Soil Erosion Threatens Food Production.”
…leaving at least eighty-five dead and nearly nineteen thousand structures damaged or destroyed…
Cal Fire, “Top 20 Most Destructive California Wildfires,” 2019.
…sinkholes like the one in Chester County, Pennsylvania, connected to the Mariner East gas pipeline
CBS3 Staff, “Residents Nervous After Another Sinkhole Near Mariner East Pipeline Opens Up in Delaware County,” CBS Philly, November 18, 2019; Jon Hurdle, “To Help Deal with Chester County Sinkhole, Sunoco Removes Product from 44 Miles of Pipeline,” StateImpact, January 25, 2019.
“The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land”…
Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010).
In the United States today, nearly 85 percent of the people who work the land are Hispanic or Latinx…
Trish Hernandez and Susan Gabbard, “Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2015–2016: A Demographic and Employment Profile of United States Farmworkers” (Research Report No 13, JBS International, January 2018).
Pesticide exposure, wage theft, uncompensated overtime, child labor, lack of collective bargaining, and sexual abuse are all-too-common experiences of farmworkers today.
Kamala Kelkar, “When Labor Laws Left Farm Workers Behind—and Vulnerable to Abuse,” PBS, September 18, 2016.
Record heat waves…have caused injury and death among Latinx farmworkers.
Nano Riley, “Farmworkers Are on the Frontlines of Climate Change. Can New Laws Protect Them?” Civil Eats, February 27, 2019.
Several Alaskan Native communities struggle to hunt and fish in their traditional ways…
Tracy Fernandez Rysavy and André Floyd, “People of Color Are on the Front Lines of the Climate Crisis,” Green America, accessed March 9, 2020.
…sub-Saharan Africa is among the regions projected to experience the harshest impacts of climate change.
Melody Zhang, “True Climate Justice Is Impossible Without Racial and Economic Justice,” Sojourners, July 29, 2019.
“If you’re not affected by climate change today, that itself is a privilege”…
Natasha Pinon, “How to Make Sure Racial Justice Is Part of Climate Activism,” Mashable, October 28, 2019.
Agriculture…along with forestry, deforestation, and other land use…contributes roughly 24 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Gensuo Jia et al., “Land-Climate Interactions,” in Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes in Terrestrial Ecosystems, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2019), 133.
…the most substantive solutions to global warming, per Project Drawdown’s analysis.
Project Drawdown, The Drawdown Review: Climate Solutions for a New Decade, ed. Katharine Wilkinson (San Francisco: Project Drawdown, 2020).
…silvopasture…integrates nut and fruit trees, forage, and grasses to feed grazing livestock.
Marc D. Abrams and Gregory J. Nowacki, “Native Americans as Active and Passive Promoters of Mast and Fruit Trees in the Eastern USA,” Holocene 18, no. 7 (2008): 1123–37.
…regenerative agriculture…involves minimal soil disturbance, organic production, compost application, the use of cover crops, and crop rotation.
Hersey, My Work Is That of Conservation.
…the prominent role of the cotton industry in the enslavement of African Americans…
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Why Was Cotton ‘King’?” PBS, accessed March 9, 2020.
…silvopasture can absorb more than two metric tons of carbon per acre every year…
Eric Toensmeier, The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2016), 390; Ranjith P. Udawatta and Shibu Jose, “Carbon Sequestration Potential of Agroforestry Practices in Temperate North America,” in Carbon Sequestration Potential of Agroforestry Systems, ed. B. Mohan Kumar and P. K. Ramachandran Nair (Amsterdam: Springer, 2011), 17–42.
Emissions released by grazing animals can be completely offset by the carbon sequestered in well-managed pasture.
Paige L. Stanley, “Impacts of Soil Carbon Sequestration on Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Midwestern USA Beef Finishing Systems,” Agricultural Systems 162 (2018): 249–58.
…Black farmers who have been historically dispossessed of land…
Vann R. Newkirk II, “The Great Land Robbery,” Atlantic, September 29, 2019.
…agroforestry…which may be the most climate-healthy type of farming possible.
Toensmeier, Carbon Farming Solution, 100.
…for every 1 percent increase in soil organic matter, we sequester roughly 8.5 metric tons of atmospheric carbon per acre.
Toensmeier, Carbon Farming Solution, 22.
…potentially put 300 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide back in the soil…
Jonathan Sanderman, Tomislav Hengl, and Gregory J. Fiske, “Soil Carbon Debt of 12,000 Years of Human Land Use,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 36 (2017): 9575–80.
…shifting our agricultural practices could comprise 15 percent of the puzzle, according to Project Drawdown.
Project Drawdown, Drawdown Review.
After mice were treated with Mycobacterium vaccae, a friendly soil bacteria, their brains produced more…serotonin.
Pagan Kennedy, “How to Get High on Soil,” Atlantic, January 31, 2012.
Water Is a Verb · Judith D. Schwartz
…the amount of water in the “aerial river” above the Amazon rainforest exceeds the water flowing in the Amazon River itself.
Antonio Donato Nobre, “The Future Climate of Amazonia: Scientific Assessment Report” (Articulación Regional Amazónica, 2014), 13.
“Up there is another ocean.”
Rachel Carson, Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson, ed. Linda Lear (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 177.
Every 1 percent increase in soil organic matter…represents an additional twenty thousand gallons of water per acre held in the ground.
Lara Bryant, “Organic Matter Can Improve Your Soil’s Water Holding Capacity,” NRDC (blog), May 27, 2015.
…between 80 and 90 percent, from transpiration.
Douglas Sheil, “How Plants Water Our Planet: Advances and Imperatives,” Trends in Plant Science 19, no. 4 (2014): 209–11; Scott Jasechko et al., “Terrestrial Water Fluxes Dominated by Transpiration,” Nature 496 (2013): 347–50.
On a sunny day…our tree will transpire more than twenty-six gallons of water.
Jan Pokorny, “Evapotranspiration,” in Encyclopedia of Ecology, 2nd ed., ed. Brian D. Fath (Elsevier B.V., 2019), 299.
Nobre often refers to trees as “geysers.”
Nobre, “Future Climate of Amazonia,” 13.
…the transpiration action of one tree on a sunny day represents three times the cooling capacity of an air-conditioning system in a five-star hotel room.
Pokorny, “Evapotranspiration.”
“Every plant is a solar-powered factory producing the organic material on which all life depends”…
Peter Andrews, Back from the Brink: How Australia’s Landscape Can Be Saved (Sydney: ABC Books Australia, 2014), Kindle.
“Most life on land depends on water from rain, but much of the rain on land may also depend on life.”
Sheil, “How Plants Water Our Planet.”
…“condensation nuclei”: the flecks of particulate matter around which moisture coalesces, mainly ice crystals, salts, pollen, and scented compounds produced by plants.
“Aerosols and Clouds (Indirect Effects),” NASA Earth Observatory, November 2, 2010.
He calls these “scents of the forest” or…“pixie dust.”
Nobre, “Future Climate of Amazonia,” 14-15.
Section 8: Rise
A Letter to Adults · Alexandria Villaseñor
…we have to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about half this decade to avoid irreversible, catastrophic effects of climate change.
Joeri Rogelj et al., “Mitigation Pathways Compatible with 1.5°C in the Context of Sustainable Development,” in Global Warming of 1.5°C, ed. Valérie Masson-Delmotte et al. (Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018), 95.
Globally, an estimated nine million people die every year from air pollution.
Nick Watts et al., “The 2019 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change: Ensuring That the Health of a Child Born Today Is Not Defined by a Changing Climate,” Lancet 394, no. 10211 (2019): 1836–78; Jos Lelieveld et al., “Loss of Life Expectancy from Air Pollution Compared to Other Risk Factors: A Worldwide Perspective,” Cardiovascular Research (2020).
Over two hundred square miles burned, and about fourteen thousand homes were destroyed.
Priya Krishnakumar and Jon Schleuss, “More Than 18,000 Buildings Burned in Northern California. Here’s What That Looks Like from Above,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2018.
The air…reached over 350 on the Air Quality Index, a level deemed hazardous…
Zoë Schlanger, “In Parts of California, Breathing Is Like Smoking Half a Pack of Cigarettes a Day,” Quartz, November 9, 2018.
In October 2019, fifteen children from across Canada sued their government for supporting the fossil fuel industry…
Phil McKenna, “15 Canadian Kids Sue Their Government for Failing to Address Climate Change,” Inside Climate News, October 25, 2019.
Already people’s food supplies are at risk because of…pest invasions.
Madeleine Stone, “A Plague of Locusts Has Descended on East Africa. Climate Change May Be to Blame,” National Geographic, February 14, 2020.
Extinction rates are tens to hundreds of times higher than they have been in the past ten million years, and the climate crisis will likely make them worse.
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, “Summary for Policymakers,” in The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, ed. S. Díaz et al. (Bonn: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, 2019), 24; Cristian Román-Palacios and John J. Wiens, “Recent Responses to Climate Change Reveal the Drivers of Species Extinction and Survival,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 8 (2020): 4211–17.
In the winter of 2018–19, the western monarch butterfly population dropped below thirty thousand—a drop of 86 percent in a single year.
Emma M. Pelton et al., “Western Monarch Population Plummets: Status, Probable Causes, and Recommended Conservation Actions,” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 7, no. 258 (2019).
An Offering from the Bayou · Colette Pichon Battle
By the end of the next century, it’s predicted that 200 million people will be displaced due to climate change…
Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees: An Emergent Security Issue,” 13th Meeting of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE) Economic Forum, May 25, 2005.
South Louisiana is losing land at one of the fastest rates on the planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert, “Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast,” New Yorker, March 25, 2019.
After Hurricane Katrina, universities and high schools around the United States took in students…
Associated Press, “Katrina Forces Tulane to Cancel Fall Semester,” NBC News, September 3, 2005; Education World, “Arms Open Wide for Katrina’s Kids,” September, 2005.
A Field Guide for Transformation · Leah Cardamore Stokes
Over the last century, these companies resisted innovation.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Schools We Need: And Why We Don’t Have Them (Anchor Books, 1999); Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Thomas Edison, for example, hoped to move away from coal toward wind and solar energy.
Leah Cardamore Stokes, Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Fossil fuel corporations and electric utilities also organized to deny climate science.
David Anderson, Matt Kasper, and David Pomerantz, Utilities Knew: Documenting Electric Utilities’ Early Knowledge and Ongoing Deception on Climate Change from 1968–2017 (report, Energy and Policy Institute, 2017); Naomi Oreskes and Eric M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury Press, 2010).
From the 1980s to the present, they have funded organizations that denied the scientific consensus on climate change, spending billions on the effort.
Anderson, Kasper, and Pomerantz, “Utilities Knew”; Oreskes and Conway, Merchants of Doubt; Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications (1977–2014),” Environmental Research Letters 12, no. 8 (2017); Emily Holden, “How the Oil Industry Has Spent Billions to Control the Climate Change Conversation,” Guardian, January 8, 2020.
And these efforts were wildly successful…
Justin Farrell, “Corporate Funding and Ideological Polarization About Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 1 (2016): 92–97.
In 2018 only 36 percent of the U.S. electricity supply came from clean-energy sources… Between 2009 and 2018, annual growth in renewable energy was a mere 0.7 percentage points.
BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, 2019 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook (New York: BloombergNEF, 2019).
…natural gas expansion has outpaced renewables in recent years.
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “More Than 60% of Electric Generating Capacity Installed in 2018 Was Fueled by Natural Gas,” March 11, 2019.
…nuclear plants…currently supply more than half of our clean power.
U.S. Energy Information Administration, “What Is U.S. Electricity Generation by Energy Source?” last updated February 27, 2020.
The U.S. military…is the institution that consumes the most fossil fuels in the world.
Union of Concerned Scientists, “The US Military and Oil,” June 1, 2014.
In recent years, the U.S. military has emitted more greenhouse gases than Denmark.
Niall McCarthy, “Report: The U.S. Military Emits More CO2 Than Many Industrialized Nations,” Forbes, June 13, 2019.
On average, each American emits around fifteen metric tons of carbon pollution each year.
Henry Bewicke, “Chart of the Day: These Countries Have the Largest Carbon Footprints,” World Economic Forum, January 2, 2019.
…the United States as a whole emits around six billion metric tons every year.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Recent Trends in U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks (MMT CO2 Eq.),” table ES-2 in Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, 1990–2018 (Washington, DC: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2020)
“Changing the system, not perfecting our own lives, is the point”…
Bill McKibben, “Embarrassing Photos of Me, Thanks to My Right-Wing Stalkers,” New York Times, August 5, 2016.
…during the coronavirus pandemic…emissions barely budged—falling an estimated 8 percent…
International Energy Agency, Global Energy Review 2020 (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2020).
…methane…creates massive amounts of radioactive waste when it is dug up from the earth.
Justin Nobel, “America’s Radioactive Secret,” Rolling Stone, January 21, 2020.
“The number one thing we can do is the exact thing that we’re not doing: talk about it.”
Katharine Hayhoe, “The Most Important Thing You Can Do to Fight Climate Change: Talk About It,” TEDWomen (November 2018, Palm Springs, California), MPEG-4, 17:04.
“It is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane, and more than half.”
Wendell Berry, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2013), 82.
“People who are organized can change policy”…
Susan Ormiston, “Jane Fonda Talks Protest, Arrest—and Why She Wants Another Night in Jail,” CBC News, December 18, 2019.
Like the Monarch · Sarah Stillman
…in 2016 “sudden-onset” disasters pushed three times as many people from their homes as conflict or violence…
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Disasters and Climate Change,” accessed March 16, 2020; Solomon M. Hsiang, Marshall Burke, and Edward Miguel, “Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Human Conflict,” Science 341, no. 6151 (2013).
…over the next thirty years, 143 million people will be displaced within three of the most vulnerable regions alone: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.
John Podesta, The Climate Crisis, Migration, and Refugees, Brookings Institution, July 25, 2019.
Since 2008 some 25 million people have been displaced globally…by catastrophic weather events each year.
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “Disasters and Climate Change.”
The UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention first defined…five particular grounds: “race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2010), 3.
Protection for asylum seekers hinges, in U.S. immigration court, on arbitrary factors like the jurisdiction…
Jaya Ramji-Nogales et al., Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication and Proposals for Reform, ed. Andrew Ian Schoenholtz, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Philip G. Schrag (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
The storm damaged more than 100,000 housing units in New Orleans and pushed at least 800,000 people out of their residences.
Allison Plyer, “Facts for Features: Katrina Impact,” Data Center, August 26, 2016.
In New Orleans, Black families of low socioeconomic status bore the brunt of long-term dislocation.
Laura Bliss, “10 Years Later, There’s So Much We Don’t Know About Where Katrina Survivors Ended Up,” CityLab, August 25, 2015.
…the Institute for Women’s Policy Research interviewed 184 Black women who’d lived in four of the city’s largest public housing complexes.
Samantha Michaels, “Low-Income, Black Women Largely Ignored in Katrina Recovery,” Grist, August 28, 2015.
A decade after the storm, nearly four in five White residents of New Orleans said their state had “mostly recovered,” while three in five Black residents reported it hadn’t…
Michael Henderson, Belinda Davis, and Michael Climek, Views of Recovery Ten Years After Katrina and Rita: A Survey of Residents of the City of New Orleans and Residents Throughout Louisiana (report, Louisiana State University, 2015), 5.
In 2018 Kerala endured the flood of a century, followed a year later by a monsoon…displacing some 200,000 people.
Matthew Cappucci and Colin Daileda, “Kerala Floods Turn Deadly as India Suffers Relentless Monsoonal Deluge,” Washington Post, August 9, 2019.
“The monsoon calendar has changed and its intensity too”…
Jeemon Jacob, “Why Global Warming Has Left Kerala Vulnerable,” India Today, October 25, 2019.
The vast majority have come from Central America’s “Northern Triangle”…where inhabitants of the region’s “dry corridor” endure increasingly erratic weather patterns…
“Erratic Weather Patterns in the Central American Dry Corridor Leave 1.4 M People in Urgent Need,” ReliefWeb, April 25, 2019.
Gang violence and corruption lead the list of reasons that families leave Honduras and El Salvador to seek asylum.
Amelia Cheatham, “Central America’s Turbulent Northern Triangle,” Council on Foreign Relations, last updated October 1, 2019.
In the western highlands of Guatemala, climate change is now considered a major catalyst for migration.
Jonathan Blitzer, “How Climate Change Is Fuelling in the U.S. Border Crisis,” New Yorker, April 3, 2019.
…nearly 50 percent of Guatemalan kids under the age of five are considered chronically malnourished, with rates exceeding 70 percent in many rural areas.
World Food Programme, “Guatemala Country Programme (2015–2019),” accessed March 16, 2020.
Last year, more than 1 percent of Guatemala’s entire population attempted to reach the United States.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol Nationwide Apprehensions by Citizenship and Sector (FY2007–FY 2019), January 30, 2020.
…immigration authorities began a campaign to round up, arrest, detain, and deport hundreds of undocumented Haitian storm survivors…
Manuel Madrid, “Bahamian Government Resumes Deportation of Storm-Ravaged Immigrants,” Miami New Times, October 3, 2019.
…“protects us from the scariness of things with no names.”
Toni Morrison, “Nobel Lecture” (December 7, 1993, Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy, Stockholm), MPEG-4, 33:18.
…over the past twenty years, the butterflies have lost more than 165 million acres of habitat.
“Species on the Move,” Inside Climate News, accessed March 5, 2020.
But in recent years, sightings have grown rarer.
Lynda V. Mapes, “Chasing a Memory,” Seattle Times, October 3, 2019.
So they’re shifting their travels, in search of food and ease.
Lynda V. Mapes, “Feds Seek Expanded Habitat Protection as Salmon, Orcas Battle Climate Change, Habitat Degradation,” Seattle Times, September 18, 2019.
The whales of J Pod then traveled alongside Tahlequah and her dead calf for weeks.
CBC Radio, “Orcas Now Taking Turns Floating Dead Calf in Apparent Mourning Ritual,” CBC Radio, July 31, 2018.
…the pod turns to the eldest female whales to lead their foraging efforts, a particularly vital skill when food is scarce.
Stuart Nattrass et al., “Postreproductive Killer Whale Grandmothers Improve the Survival of Their Grandoffspring,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 52 (2019): 26669–73.
The whole pod arrives at strategies together, turning to their culture and history for clues, and picks up the slack for one another, sharing food.
Lisa Stiffler, “Understanding Orca Culture,” Smithsonian Magazine, August, 2011; Jason Bittel, “Grandmother Orcas Help Their Grand-Whales Survive,” Washington Post, December 9, 2019; Virginia Morell, “How Orcas Work Together to Whip Up a Meal,” National Geographic, July, 2015.
Signal employees threatened the men with deportation.
David v. Signal International, 735 F. Supp. 2d 440 (E.D. La. 2010).
…a judge let the case move forward.
Scott Flaherty, “Most Allegations Survive in Signal Human Trafficking Suit,” Law360, August 13, 2014.
Community Is Our Best Chance · Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez
The official death toll is now 2,975.
Milken Institute School of Public Health and University of Puerto Rico Graduate School of Public Health, Ascertainment of the Estimated Excess Mortality from Hurricane María in Puerto Rico (project report, George Washington University, 2018), iii.
ONWARD · Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
as documented in data-driven analysis of climate solutions and temperature trajectories…
Project Drawdown, The Drawdown Review: Climate Solutions for a New Decade, ed. Katharine Wilkinson (San Francisco: Project Drawdown, 2020).
…we already have most of the solutions we need…
Project Drawdown, Drawdown Review.
“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.”
Adrienne Rich, Sources (Woodside, CA: Heyeck Press, 1983).
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