“I believe it’s helpful to have depictions of the world we want,” says Tory Stephens, climate fiction creative manager at Grist. “We’re trying to show that another world is possible.”

Stephens leads an annual writing contest called “Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors.” Now in its fourth year, the contest seeks to prompt reflection and action on climate change. Stephens says the goal of the initiative is, in part, “advocating and helping people realize their visions and dreams through writing.” 

The exercise is designed to be beneficial for both the writers and the readers. Climate fiction is a collective endeavor. We ������’t imagine a better world alone, nor can we build one. 

Stephens says fiction helps get us out of the mental ruts we often find ourselves in amid the humdrum of our daily grind and the overwhelm of the climate crisis. Climate fiction can prompt rich discussions through enlightening questions like “What does hope look like?” or “What does a decolonized future look like?” And while journalism can ask these questions, fiction actually builds out these worlds to show them in all their glorious detail.

The news today doesn’t always zoom out far enough to show the extractive nature of our current reality and all those it harms. Most news stories show a mainstream perspective that too often centers a white, straight, male view of the world. It misses entirely the lived experience of far too many people and communities. 

Stephens points out that the very real knowledge held by folks who have been pushed to the margins isn’t being depicted in news stories. And it’s certainly not showing up on the front page of mainstream western media outlets. And the efforts to change those norms are too often framed as fringe or frivolous or unrealistic. 

But who gets to choose what’s realistic? Isn’t reality what we collectively make it? Is the status quo something we really want to bring into the future?

In the same way that historical fiction can give us a new understanding of past events and shift our perspective, climate fiction can do the same for possible futures. 

The writers of the stories in Grist’s fiction collections are in the business of radical reimagining. “We’re trying to show a world of abundance, where the characters are the folks that have been marginalized,” Stephens says. “Those folks are depicted in hero terms, owning the world, and bringing forth a world that others want to live by.”

Grist’s writing competition calls for people who are on the front lines all over the world to share their vision of the world from where they sit (and stand and rise up). 

“That’s not going to look the same if you ask someone from India, or even another part of India, right? There’s just so many different perspectives on what a clean, green, and just world looks like,” Stephens says. He believes exposure to novel and vastly different ideas of beautiful, rich worlds has serious value. “And right now, there’s not enough of that, in my opinion, going on.”

Stephens says he wants to be clear that he thinks dystopian stories also serve a great purpose to society. “They show the world that we ��Dz�’t want to live in, and I think that’s something we need,” he says, “but we feel like there’s not enough hopeful stories out there.”

“There’s a narrative arc that needs to change in the United States,” Stephens says. We need to move from an understanding of “‘we ������’t get out of this crisis’ to ‘we can get out of this crisis.’”

That’s where hopeful climate fiction comes in. Grist has received more than 3,000 entries to its writing competition in its first three years. And for the 2025 edition of Imagine 2200.

Why the year 2200? It may seem oddly specific, and also too far ahead to be able to grasp. But that’s exactly why Grist chose that year—to help us break free of the limits of our collective imagination. We need to overcome the myopic perspectives that Western society is so mired in. Stephens points to the fact that U.S. politicians ������’t pass a budget for six months. Long-term planning has to go beyond four-year terms and five-year plans. 

As a counterweight, Grist aimed to shift away from Western timelines altogether. In deciding on a timeline, editors looked to Indigenous frameworks for being good stewards of the Earth, not just for our own sake, or for individual outcomes, but for seven or eight generations of future ancestors. 

“I think there’s deep wisdom in looking internally for future societies and planning that far ahead,” Stephens says. “You can dream big, and no one can tell you that’s not going to be achieved by that time, because we all just ��Dz�’t know.”

These stories, then, are like lenses to broaden our horizons. They are meant to tease our imaginations and prompt us all to dream bigger and more boldly. 

Stephens compares dreams to seeds—each one with the potential to grow into something real. ������Ƶ justice. Cleaner technologies. The centering of frontline communities. “The thing I like about these stories—and the reason I advocate for climate storytelling and climate fiction—is I think we need a million more flowers to bloom, or stories to bloom.” 

Stephens readily admits there are already some climate outcomes baked into whatever narrative we write from here; they are an inevitable part of the reality that we’re going to be living in. “But it doesn’t have to end in the apocalypse,” Stephens says. “It can end with us having a better life.”

Explore stories from this year’s contest below:

������Ƶ Than a Marble

Propelled by a discerning non-verbal child, a craft gets elevated to an act of devotion.

By Rae Mariz

Rewilding a Grieving Heart

A father copes with the loss of his daughter by giving back to nature, as she had wanted.

By Andrew Kenneson

Rooted in the Diaspora

Evolving technology and place-based knowledge help a family connect with joy while far from home and one another.

By Sanjana Sekhar

The Water Came Early

Grappling with the fantasy and memory of flooding on California’s last remaining almond farm.

By Zoe Young

For the Good of the Hive

A bee caretaker learns just how much humans can gain from tuning in to nature’s cues.

By Jamie Liu

She lay cradled between the moss and her mama, watching the branches cut the sky in precise patterns. Her poor ma Suzume had fallen asleep after chasing the child around the farm, trying to keep Lærke’s tongue out of the beehive. The city’s colorful turbine balloons hovered high in the atmosphere, silently harvesting wind—and look there, the giggle of a single cumulonimbus in an otherwise blue sky. 

Little Lærke’s developing mind observed the canopy overhead, babbling her wordless song above the comforting thunder of her mother’s snores. Then the word took shape on her lips and flew. Wing. Out into the world.

Auntie Cade looked up from the sacred text her needle had been working, the folds of fabric bunched in her lap. She’d been humming the ballad as she stitched those lessons of the living land, quietly harmonizing with the baby’s joyful yoller, but fell silent when she heard the word. The child’s first! 

She followed Lærke’s gaze up to the sky, expecting to identify which dot in the kaleidoscope of community kites had caught the child’s attention, then eased herself down beside the babe to see from her perspective. Which of those turbine balloons or spinning kites and whipping dragontails in the skies had teased the first word from the baby’s lips …? 

Maybe that one? One of the neighbor’s blimp turbine designs had dual blades that flashed like hummingbird wings—not the most efficient design, but since when has creativity been overly concerned with efficiency? It was certainly eye-catching.

Instead, as Auntie Cade nestled back close to the baby, cheek-to-cheek, Lærke showed her auntie a butterfly wing swirling dust motes ignited by the sunlight.

“That’s right, wing,” Auntie Cade affirmed, and pulled The Field Guide blanket up over the three of them. They snuggled in under the weight of wisdoms passed from auntie to auntie—woven, crafted, compiled—while Lærke and her auntie watched the butterfly dance in the golden pollen.

We always say a child’s first word is a gift.

And look at that.

…

You’re … hm. You’re not watching the butterfly. Look …

The blue of the butterfly wing is not a pigment, the color is formed by a delicate structure that refracts light itself, much like the blue of the sky. No real surprise that the beauty of chaos has been represented in the motion of—

You seem distracted. What are you looking for? Me? You’re wondering who this person is, telling you to look here and there. You want to know who’s telling the story? Fine.

I am a storyteller. The storyteller. This story’s teller.

There’s no use scanning the edges of the scene trying to find me. I’m not perched on a boulder beside these three as they’re experiencing this intimate, poignant moment on this lovely day. You think I’m up in a tree looking down on the scene? With these knees? Please.

I’m omniscient, but I’m not a creeper.

You can most often find me in the Tangle, the place in the city where paths converge. I ��Dz�’t have to be present at every moment to know what’s going on. People tell me things. I have a trustworthy face.

Step closer. Let me get a good look at you. Knowing who we’re telling the story to is part of the craft: “The storyteller assesses their audience.” Watches the people as they mingle in the Tangle. Notes the dress of the passerby, their manner. A storyteller wouldn’t tell the same story to the lonely child seeking solace in the storyteller’s lap as they would to the bawdy crowd on their way to a fertility show. 

Or at least, I wouldn’t tell it in the same way.

Any decent storyteller has this skill, it’s the same observations about character that we weave into our tales. Is the listener in a rush? Are they looking for escape? Do they need a single golden spiderweb thread to sew together something frayed inside?

Some storytellers tailor their tales to what their listeners want. My training taught me to look for the story the listener didn’t know they needed.

And you. A reader from the tail end of the blip era, what story do you need from me? Am I even able to tell you a story you will understand? You’re most likely steeped in the narrative techniques of the settler literatures of the time. Tricky … but difficult things are not impossible, and I wouldn’t be a storyteller if I didn’t like a challenge. Besides, you’re in luck. Though the story trends popular in the 21^st century have long gone out of style, I just so happen to enjoy experimenting with this outdated form. I’m afraid that most current storytellers have found that the simplistic structures you’re familiar with often fail to capture our children’s imaginations so they’ve largely been left for archival scholars to catalog as a hobby. I have a friend who does this. Winslowe. He finds it relaxing. Hero goes on a journey or A stranger comes to town. His husband Jibril finds it tedious, but I admire people who are passionate about their passions! Whatever makes him happy, we agree. 

___

Let me tell you about their son, Ben. 

Aunties aren’t supposed to have favorites, and they ��Dz�’t. Hierarchical thinking isn’t actually natural to human cognition, and there isn’t any scarcity of resources to compete over. Especially in regards to a person’s capacity for love.

If you ask Auntie Cade though, and I have (storytellers ask the most impertinent questions, get used to it), she was uniquely grateful for Ben. We all were, but part of that was due to Auntie Cade’s … interpretations … as she decoded the intricacies of his language. It turned out to not be a private language, like maybe his parents and peers, cousins, siblings, storytellers, neighbors, and neithers assumed. Ben was in communication with all the unheard and mostly unseen, outside the spectrum of general human understanding. 

I ��Dz�’t want to make this telling of a slight, autistic Black boy to sound unnecessarily mystical or mythical. He’s a person. But sometimes one’s love for a person embellishes their qualities—they swell with our regard, inflating like a generator-blimp before we hoist them high. Once a storyteller gets their hands on a person, they make the character appear larger than life. Is this the mark of fine craftsmanship or a rookie mistake? (You can tell me, it won’t hurt my feelings.) Why shouldn’t the loving renderings of an artist’s brush caress a child, stroke his cheek, and tickle his armpits? 

Ben would hate it, so that’s one reason not to. And the only reason we need.

Of all the children she’d taught and inspired, nurtured and guided and delighted in, Auntie Cade recognized that she’d learned the most from Ben. She told us that Ben showed her things; he’d shown them to all of us, but sometimes it required an auntie’s attention to understand a child.

Our culture puts a lot of weight on a baby’s first word. (See above.) Not so much what the baby says, mostly that the baby says. That they’ve arrived at a phase of language acquisition which marks their inclusion in the community conversation.

Feral cats ��Dz�’t meow. Or so the story goes. 

We talk about everything. People do. The ASL sign for a hearing person is the same as the sign for TALKING. We’re always talking. Especially the people I know. It varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, culture to culture. But for the most part, we’ve evolved, especially since your time—those blip generations when decisions were made by might, hierarchical decree, or just not made at all—we’ve learned how to talk things out.

When there is a problem, we gather. And talk. Not to be heard, but to discuss. We approach the discussion acknowledging that there is a problem, and that the solution is not yet known, because if any one person knew how to solve that problem, it wouldn’t be an issue, now, would it? If it were a problem easily solved, we would’ve made quick work of ensuring it �ɲ�����’t a problem. We would instead be off braiding bread or rinsing the vegetable inks from the pages of a library book and searching the catalog for a new one to print—living our lives. No, if we’re there in that room, in that clearing, filling that field, meeting in a sports arena—then we have a problem so tricky that it needs everyone’s input. Children as young as 6 years old have contributed to civic matters. Do voices get raised? Sure. Do men burst into tears? Quite often. Do passions drown out reasoned accounts? Eh, not as often as you fear. Our children learn to listen at a young age and become adept in the skill as adults. I see it straining your imagination, stranger-comes-to-town, that the opinions of each individual in a mob could be worthy of respect. Do not feel bad about your disability, we see it as a failure of education … one of the many things lost in the blip generations, along with the 83% loss of biodiversity in the sixth mass extinction event you are currently living through.

But we were talking about Ben. How could a culture of loudmouths appreciate a quiet kid? Who grew to be a silent adult? 

Because, unlike the “domesticated” cat, most of the wild creatures we share a planet with didn’t go out of their way to try and learn our language. To vocalize their need, to pitch their voices like a baby’s cry, to trigger a physiological response that requires immediate attention from people who hear it. Feral cats are silent because they ��Dz�’t want to attract attention to themselves or communicate with people. They want to be left the hell alone.

Animals have rich languages of scents and gestures and vocalization patterns. Able to communicate between themselves and with each other, and very few of us have gone out of our way to understand the linguistic complexities of our fellows. Not with the same determination of the cats, at least. “But could those things really be considered language?” I hear one of you say. Your white sciences change the definitions and shift the goal posts every time a community of creatures approximates those arbitrary markers for intelligence, sentience, life. Every time. To ensure that only human people stand in the circle—and terrifyingly often, it’s only the people with similar qualities of those enforcing the definitions who are allowed in. Personally, I tend to wonder if that culture built on exclusion, exhausting itself to enforce artificial borders (or otherwise centering a single person’s narrative thread, consequently relegating the rest to less important supporting characters and background greenery) may have led to the worldview that brought your generation so close to ending the ever-generating world. 

So yes, I say language.

Listen to birdsong as you walk through a place with birds … I was going to say “the woods” but that might be difficult for you to find, presently. Things were dire at the tail end of the blip era, as I understand it, you were so very successful in excluding everything unlike your kind … Anyway, walk among birds. Listen to their trilling call-and-response. You can be sure that they are talking, and I guarantee they are talking about you. You are big news in the woods. They are not quite sure what to make of you. Are you a predator? What have you done to assure the birds that you are not a threat? It’s easy enough to show them. Their birdsong is asking. They are waiting for a reply.

Ben’s first “word” was a reply. Our culture has a parallel language system of gestures; yours might, too. A thumbs-up, a corny salute. A peace sign, a fuck you. Our neighborhood has a gesture of gratitude—two fingers pressed to one’s own lips. Thank you. And one to express a wordless need—hands cupped into an empty bowl. You would probably try to find the words for this feeling … general malaise, vague disappointment, unfulfilled desire, a soft sense of regret. You know the feeling … it’s just a nameless funk. Instead of trying to locate the feeling, to understand it—or jerkily act out in desperation to feel anything else—our people tend to just signal the inner turmoil we’re experiencing by cupping our hands into an empty bowl. Close to the body if we want to be left alone with the feeling, extended out from the body if we need someone to pull us out of it. It’s useful. Easy to communicate. Both for one’s self and to others. The prevalence of tragic instances of ill-advised bang-cutting in our society has diminished, at least.

When Ben was maybe 3—long past the age most expect to welcome their children through the rites of their first word—Auntie Cade was walking alongside Ben during their daily route through the Tangle. She would follow where he led, always close enough should he need her, but never insisting on holding his hand in the crowded public space. He didn’t like for his hand to be held and it’s easy enough to allow small children their autonomy generally, Ben in particular. His morning routine was sacred to him and he was never at risk of running off.

On this day, Auntie Cade witnessed Ben making his quiet wander to his favorite places. He watched the glassblower turn sand into exquisite shapes—mesmerized by the lava blobs birthed in fire and brought to life with breath. The glassblower was a small man with thinning hair and a quiet voice. He did his work, seemingly indifferent to Ben’s constant presence—a feat, since people are otherwise hyper-aware of a 3-year-old in the vicinity of molten stoves and display shelves of delicate glassworks. But the glassblower had come to an agreement with Ben, an arrangement. Each day, the glassmaker dropped a single glass marble into a large, wide bowl just as Ben was ready to leave … in gratitude for the child’s attention and as thanks for him not touching all his stuff or breaking anything. 

Ben listened to the smooth, nearly frictionless vibrations as the marble rolled in a path up the sides of the bowl and around. Ben’s eyes followed the lazy arcs and parabolas, and when it tinkled to a stop in the center, Ben reached in with his small fingers and picked it up. He examined the color and the finish of the marble, weighed it in his hand, and, satisfied after his appraisal, placed the marble he’d carried around all the previous day onto the rim of the bowl and let it circle to rest at the center. Then he left the workshop with the new marble nestled in his palm.

I’d asked the glassblower about this ritual, and about the day it changed. I had to tease the story out of him, slowly, like the expanding bubble of glass. He told me it started as a simple token, the kind he often gave children in gratitude for not touching any of the fragile wares. The first one was rather large—Ben was still small and there were no assurances that he wouldn’t put it in his mouth. (Auntie Cade assures me that he never did, which she found odd, since he put everything else in his mouth at that time—except for a variety of foods she hoped he would like.) Ben carried the fistful of smooth glass cupped in his chubby hand the whole day, and when the glassmaker presented him with a new one the next day, baby Ben deposited the old one and clutched the new. That was what intrigued the glassmaker, he’d assumed Ben would collect them like other children often did. He’d meant for the baby to have both. All of them. 

We ��Dz�’t like to use words like exchange or trade … they’re so rooted in blip characterizations of transactional relationships that we just … find more accurate words. But Ben started this ritual, and each morning, the child plucked the new gift from the bowl, examined it, then returned the one from yesterday before accepting the new one. Until one day, Ben picked up the day’s marble, and for whichever reason, preferred to keep hold of the one he had, and let the new one slide back into the bowl.

The glassmaker was startled, curious, and after the boy left, he picked up the marble and examined it. It was of the same quality as all the other marbles. What inspired the child’s preference for the previous? “There were no imperfections,” the glassblower told me while clipping a molten blob of glass, it curled in on itself like a living larva. “But there was some quality that displeased him, or at least persuaded Ben to keep holding on to the one in his hand.” Here I had to wait some time for the glassblower to roll his rod and use gravity to temper and shape the glob that would become a kind of vase. “That’s when it started. It went from a game, to a challenge, to …” He stared thoughtfully at the fires. “An inspiration. I am so grateful to Ben. His careful regard has inspired the development of my craft to a degree that … no one else would probably notice, but I know that he notices. Propelled by the urge to please him, my craft has been elevated to art and then to an act of devotion. I’m still not sure what the boy is looking for when he makes his assessments. It’s not perfection. Perfection is easy compared to this. I just want to make something that makes him happy. Something he wants to carry around with him each day, every day.”

I’d asked the glassblower if he’d ever felt offended. Refusing a gift can be a sensitive matter. The glassblower was startled, “It never occurred to me to be offended. You know Ben. The social rules of the gift ��Dz�’t apply. It’s just him and me and the day’s marble.”

I later learned that on the day I’m taking my sweet time in telling you about, the moment that Ben joined the extended family of the living world, Ben had been holding on to the same marble for two ten-days. That marble was blue, with cloudy swirls of white and flecks of green-brown. The glassblower had presented him with 20 examples of his refined craft—some vibrantly colored and particularly large or remarkably small, since the glassblower was getting kind of desperate to create something that would win the boy’s favor—and none of them satisfied Ben’s internal matrices of color, feel, and weight that made a gift a pleasure to hold. 

“I still have no idea what it was about that one that appealed to the kid,” he let his sigh shape glass. “It was even slightly misshapen, with a bit of a bulge around the equator. Not at all my best work.”

But this was the one Ben didn’t want to let go of. Come, let’s go catch up with him. You’ll soon realize why I spent a seemingly disproportionate amount of time imbuing so much meaning into a smooth chunk of glass a 3-year-old carried clutched in his grasp. There he is. He’s moved on from the glassblower’s workshop to watch the rivermen unload their shares on the Main Stream docks, with Auntie Cade shadowing alongside him. 

The crew rolled barrels onto shore, tilted them upright in a row. Ben watched them pop the tops off the barrels and plunge their hands elbows-deep into the watery contents. They wrestled strands of kelp from inside and strung them, glistening, up on a line, so the sunshine glinted off the slick surfaces, highlighting the variety of each. The exquisite variations in colors and textures and shapes. 

Red sea kelp, which eases digestion processes in ruminants, decreases the methane content of cow farts, and can also fry up crisp and salty like bacon. Tasty. Exotic sugar kelp harvested from Nordic shores, alongside eelgrass gleaned from local seagrass meadows. Ben silently regarded the hanging kelp strands glittering like festive garlands, their home-waters draining back into the barrels beneath, while people stopped to admire and inquire.

“Pretty big haul today,” Jibril’s voice boomed out, and he rested his big dad hand on Ben’s back. Ben flinched away from the touch. “Oh, sorry, Benevolence.” Jibril apologized and glanced at Auntie Cade. 

She admonished him with a twitch of the corner of her mouth, and nodded encouragement.

Jibril knelt beside his son and lowered his voice. “I thought I’d find you by the boats. You like the boats?” 

Ben didn’t answer or meet his eyes. He poked at one of the slimy air bladders bobbing on the surface in the sea barrel.

Jibril joined him in pinching and stroking the glistening seaweed, and started to make conversation with the rivermen.

“These specimens are a delight,” Jibril said. “I ��Dz�’t think I’ve seen sugar kelp available for some time. Rough seas?”

“No more than usual,” a riverman shrugged as she ladled more seawater on the strung-up strands to keep them glistening and hydrated. “Hydrofoil yacht pirates are always trying to take more than their share, but these beauties came through from the kelp farms of Sør-Trøndelag.”

“They’ve come so far!” Jibril exclaimed, “Ben, this seawater is from the far seas. Incredible.”

Ben continued to poke the air bladders, obviously sharing his dad’s fascination with the seaweed, though maybe not for the same reasons.

Everyone called Winslowe “Ben’s dad” and Jibril “Ben’s big dad” (Ben, of course, didn’t refer to them at all). Jibril was, yes, a hulk of a man, but it was his outgoing personality that gave him his “big dad” stature. He and his mama Kerime kept a community tavern attached to the Archives, where he and Winslowe and Ben had a small living space above the library. “You’re off-loading?” Jibril made note of the number of barrels.

“Most of it. We talked to Lis, who said salvage crew approved a rebuild of the generator serving East Bear cluster, so when needs are met here, we’re taking the river algae to the technicians. They can use their mysterious chemistries to extract materials for self-repairing sail production. You want anything today?”

“No need, no need. Only when I saw you had so much, it inspired me. I have an idea for a new recipe I wouldn’t mind serving up at the tavern today …”

Ben wandered off to his next stop at the witchcrafters while his big dad invited the rivermen over for a hearty meal, whether or not they had sugar kelp to spare. Auntie Cade followed the boy, sure he was eager to play with the puppies Auntie Owen had been bringing to the circle while they all talked story and swapped dyeing methods and stitch techniques. But Auntie Cade soon realized that she’d lost sight of the boy. He had veered off from his usual route and she searched the crowd at knee height, looking for him, fighting back a strange shame—an auntie never loses sight of their child. (Though Auntie Cade is quite extreme in her sense of responsibilities. She doesn’t permit herself to make mistakes, when everyone else knows that aunties are only human.)

Then she saw him. Tottering over to a man she didn’t recognize. Not a neighbor, perhaps a neither. That’s what we call people who we ��Dz�’t yet have a named relationship with. You call them strangers, which … rude. But the man was sitting crouched off to the side with his head down and his cupped hands held out. Ben had noticed him, probably glimpsed between the legs of passersby, and had left his prescribed route to answer him.

Ben slipped his tiny hand into the man’s empty cupped ones.

The man looked up, startled, and opened his hands to find that Ben had placed the glassmaker’s marble there. The colorful work of magic. The cold miniature world.

Tears streamed down Auntie Cade’s cheeks when she saw Ben take the man’s hand, urge him to his feet, and lead him over to the puppies. She knew how Ben felt about holding hands, that he endured his own discomfort to give comfort to another. She hurried the few steps back to Jibril and tearfully recounted what had just happened. How Ben had recognized the man’s need, and he had responded. This was unmistakably a word. Ben’s first.

They embraced and laughed and wove through the crowds to the witchcrafters’ circle. They found Ben silently introducing the man to the squirmy puppies, even then showing his abilities to be attuned to the nonverbal needs of creatures, human and otherwise.

___

I’m sure you know that’s not the end. How could a first word ever be?

But you didn’t need a story about an ending. I saw that right away, the first time we met there in the beginning. Saw how I would have to unspool my narrative thread into loose loops and coils to ensnare you. My needle sharp and glinting to repair the tears. It’s a story, I hope, that will hold to bridge the short century between us. A tightrope that will help you find your way back here.

Even now, you’re wondering how a storyteller from the future could be telling you all this. The, like … mechanics of the thing. See, storytellers are time travelers. Always have been. Or at least they could be, if they understood their true relationship with time. I’m not sure the blip storytellers were able to do this. The records of their stories would read differently if they could … though maybe the ones who understood the weavings of time didn’t get the opportunity to leave records. (I’ll have to talk with Winslowe about that one—archivists aren’t wrong all the time.)

I’m not predicting the future. I’m just telling you what I’ve seen and been told. So the next time you find yourself holding on to an imperfect blue marble, you might have a few ideas about what to do with it.

This story is part of Imagine 2200: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, a climate fiction contest from Grist. Imagine 2200 celebrates stories that offer vivid, hope-filled, diverse visions of climate progress.

On hot summer days, you ��Dz�’t just see but feel the difference. Tucson’s shadeless neighborhoods, which are predominantly low income and Latino, soak up the heat. They swelter at summer temperatures that the city average by 8 degrees Fahrenheit and the Catalina Foothills by 12 degrees. That disparity can be deadly in a city that experienced above 100 degrees last year—heat that’s sure to get worse with climate change. 

The good news is there’s a simple way to cool things down: plant trees. “You’re easily 10 degrees cooler stepping under the shade of a tree,” said Brad Lancaster, an urban forester in Tucson. “It’s dramatically cooler.”

A movement is underway to populate the city’s street corners and vacant lots with groves of trees. Tucson’s city government, which has pledged to plant , recently got $5 million from the Biden administration to spur the effort—a portion of the $1 billion that the U.S. Forest Service committed last fall to urban and small-scale forestry projects across the United States, aiming to make communities more resilient to climate change and extreme heat. 

But in Tucson and many other cities, tree-planting initiatives can tackle a lot more than scorching temperatures. What if Tucson’s million new trees—and the rest of the country’s—didn’t just keep sidewalks cool? What if they helped feed people, too? 

That’s what Brandon Merchant hopes will happen on the shadeless south side of Tucson, a city where about of the population lives more than a mile from a grocery store. He’s working on a project to plant velvet mesquite trees that thrive in the dry Sonoran Desert and have been used for centuries as a food source. The mesquite trees’ seed pods can be ground into a sweet, protein-rich flour used to make bread, cookies, and pancakes. Merchant, who works at the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, sees cultivating mesquite around the city and surrounding areas as an opportunity to ease both heat and hunger. The outcome could be a network of  “food forests,” community spaces where volunteers tend fruit trees and other edible plants for neighbors to forage. 

“Thinking about the root causes of hunger and the root causes of health issues, there are all these things that tie together: lack of green spaces, lack of biodiversity,” Merchant said. (The food bank received half a million dollars from the Biden administration through the Inflation Reduction Act.)

Merchant’s initiative fits into a national trend of combining forestry—and Forest Service funding—with efforts to feed people. Volunteers, school teachers, and urban farmers in cities across the country are planting fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, and other edible plants in public spaces to create shade, provide access to green space, and supply neighbors with free and healthy food. These food forests, forest gardens, and edible parks have sprouted up at churches, schools, empty lots, and street corners in numerous cities, including Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Seattle, and Miami. 

“It’s definitely growing in popularity,” said Cara Rockwell, who researches agroforestry and sustainable food systems at Florida International University. “Food security is one of the huge benefits.” 

There are also numerous environmental benefits: Trees improve air quality, suck carbon from the atmosphere, and create habitat for wildlife, said Mikaela Schmitt-Harsh, an urban forestry expert at James Madison University in Virginia. “I think food forests are gaining popularity alongside other urban green space efforts, community gardens, green rooftops,” she added. “All of those efforts, I think, are moving us in a positive direction.”

Researchers say food forests are unlikely to produce enough food to feed everyone in need of it. But Schmitt-Harsh said they could help supplement diets, especially in neighborhoods that are far from grocery stores. “A lot has to go into the planning of where the food forest is, when the fruits are harvestable, and whether the harvestable fruits are equitably distributed.”

She pointed to the as an emblem of success. That nonprofit has partnered with schools, churches, public recreation centers, and urban farms to oversee some 68 community orchards across the city. Their network of orchards and food forests generated more than 11,000 pounds of fresh produce last year, according to Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the nonprofit.

Some of the sites in Philadelphia have only three or four trees. Others have over 100, said Kim Jordan, the organization’s other executive director. “We’re doing a variety of fruit and nut trees, berry bushes and vines, pollinator plants, ground cover, perennial vegetables—a whole range of things,” Jordan said. 

The community food bank in Tucson started its project in 2021, when it bought six shade huts to shelter saplings. Each hut can house dozens of baby trees, which are grown in bags and irrigated until they become sturdy enough to be planted in the ground. Over the past three years, Merchant has partnered with a high school, a community farm, and the Tohono O’odham tribal nation to nurse, plant, and maintain the trees. So far they’ve only put a few dozen saplings in the ground, and Merchant aims to ramp up efforts with a few hundred more plantings this year. His initial goal, which he described as “lofty and ambitious,” is to plant 20,000 trees by 2030.

The food bank is also organizing workshops on growing, pruning, and harvesting, as well as courses on cooking with mesquite flour. And they’ve hosted community events, where people bring seed pods to pound into flour—a process that requires a big hammer mill that isn’t easy to use on your own, Merchant said. Those events feature a mesquite-pancake cook-off, using the fresh flour.

Merchant is drawing on a that Lancaster, the urban forester, has been pioneering for 30 years in a downtown neighborhood called Dunbar Spring. That area was once as barren as much of southern Tucson, but a group of volunteers led by Lancaster—who started planting velvet mesquite and other native trees in 1996—has built up an impressive canopy. Over three decades, neighborhood foresters have transformed Dunbar Spring’s bald curbsides into lush forests of mesquite, hackberry, cholla and prickly pear cactus, and more—all plants that have edible parts.

“There are over 400 native food plants in the Sonoran Desert, so we tapped into that,” Lancaster said. “That’s what we focused our planting on.” 

The Dunbar Spring food forest is now what Lancaster calls a “.” He told Grist that up to a quarter of the food he eats—and half of what he feeds his Nigerian dwarf goats—is harvested from plants in the neighborhood’s forest. “Those percentages could be much more if I were putting more time into the harvests.” The more than 1,700 trees and shrubs planted by Lancaster’s group have also stored a ton of water—a precious commodity in the Sonoran Desert—by slurping up an estimated 1 million gallons of rainwater that otherwise would have flowed off the pavement into storm drains.  

Another well-established food forest skirts the Old West Church in Boston, where volunteers have spent a decade transforming a city lawn into a grove of apple, pear, and cherry trees hovering over vegetable, pollinator, and herb gardens. Their produce—ranging from tomatoes and eggplants to winter melons—gets donated to Women’s Lunch Place, a local shelter for women without permanent housing, according to Karen Spiller, a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of New Hampshire and a member of Old West Church who helps with the project. 

“It’s open for harvest at any time,” Spiller said. “It’s not, ‘Leave a dollar and pick an apple.’ You can pick your apple and eat your apple.”

Merchant wants to apply the same ethic in Tucson: mesquite pods for all to pick—and free pancakes after a day staying cool in the shade.

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“Our future is our history, and we’ve gone away from that,” he says. “If we’re not self-sufficient, we are gambling with our lives here.” 

Ritte has rebuilt broken undersea walls and gates, removed predatory fish and invasive plants from the lagoon, reintroduced species that once thrived in the area, and monitored water quality. The goal, says Ritte, is to revive Indigenous aquaculture and reverse Hawaiʻi’s dependence on imported food, which makes up nearly 85% of all food on the islands.

But worsening rainstorms have raised worries. When the rain comes, it barrels down, transforming red dirt into mud that slides down the hillside into the sea, filling reefs and fishponds with sludge—including the fishponds Ritte has been trying to revive. As the impacts of climate change intensify, Ritte knows the challenge to revive and preserve Hawaiʻi’s aquaculture traditions will get harder. 

“One of the big reasons why Molokai was known as ʻĀina Momona, which means the ‘fat land,’ is because we had so much protein coming off the reefs,” he says. “All of this is in jeopardy because of a hundred years of excess erosion.”

Indigenous peoples, like Ritte, both bear the weight of climate change’s impacts and carry knowledge that may help lessen its burden. That’s according to the latest National Climate Assessment, published Tuesday—a federal, interagency report published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program every five years. The report’s authors emphasize that American land theft and colonization have made Indigenous peoples more vulnerable to climate change as shrinking coastlines and more frequent extreme weather events threaten historic sites, cultural practices, and food supplies.

“Historical abuses of Indigenous rights have significant responsibility for the heightened severity of climate disruption,” the report concluded. 

The report cites a  that concluded that Indigenous peoples in the United States lost 99% of their territories through colonization, and that the lands that they were forced to move to face higher wildfire risk and worse drought than their traditional homelands. According to the authors, Indigenous peoples across the continental U.S. and its island holdings hail from more than 700 tribes and communities, and while each community has a different relationship with the federal government, all share similar experiences of colonization through stolen land, cultural assimilation, and persistent marginalization. 

For example, the study noted that, on average, relocated Indigenous people endure two extra days of extreme heat. Nearly half saw an increased wildfire risk. ������Ƶ than a third of tribes studied are experiencing more frequent drought than they would if they were still living in their historical homelands. 

������Ƶ flooding is another challenge. According to a 2022 study referenced in the report, 70 out of 200 Alaska Native villages are at risk of “severe impacts” from flooding, erosion, and permafrost melt, according to one 2022 federal report. The problem prompted the Biden administration to  last year to pay tribes to move away from rivers and coastlines threatened by flooding and other climate change effects. 

The report also detailed problems with the , a federal insurance program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helps homeowners insure against the risk of flooding, something that many insurance companies won’t cover. The program is supposed to help communities mitigate flood risk, but the report found that its implementation in Native communities has been flawed and ineffective: The program is mandatory for homeowners who live in flood-risk areas—even if they are Indigenous people who were forcibly moved to a danger zone—and premiums are costly. Tribes end up spending lots of money on floodplain managers and must shoulder the costs of creating and enforcing floodplain management ordinances, the report said. 

“The [National Flood Insurance Program’s] inability to support a diversity of Indigenous jurisdictions and effectively communicate program information inhibits Indigenous peoples’ success as program operators and beneficiaries,” the authors concluded.

Many Indigenous communities also lack data on their flood risk, a problem that reflects broader climate-related data gaps for Native peoples that the report repeatedly noted. Despite the input of hundreds of expert collaborators, the report noted the absence of data on Indigenous peoples, including missing maps of historical ancestral homelands in American Samoa, missing data on wildfire risks to the U.S’s island territories, and a broad lack of environmental data from Indian Country. The absence of data, the authors noted, represents a major systemic obstacle that impedes policymaking. 

Similarly, the report found that local, state, and federal governments often ��Dz�’t do enough to involve Indigenous peoples in climate change response planning. Native communities that pursue such planning themselves are often hampered by lack of funding and staffing. Even when money is available to fund Indigenous-led projects, the money streams may not be constructed in a way to be actually accessible. Renewable energy projects, such as a , for example, have , including inadequate funding, questions about ownership of infrastructure, and bureaucratic hoops.

The report concludes that supporting Indigenous self-determination is necessary to ensure Native communities’ needs are met, but also found that those efforts are undermined by policies and institutions that uphold state, local, or federal policies or prioritize the needs of the private sector.

“The right to self-determination means Indigenous peoples should be in the position to make decisions about how to respond to climate change in ways that meet community-defined needs and aspirations,” the report says.

Nationally, Native people lead more than 1,000 efforts to address climate change, drawing up hundreds of climate change . In Washington state, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community cultivates clam gardens to fight ocean acidification; in California, the Karuk Tribe has fought for their right to conduct prescribed burns.

Walter Ritte says the hot, humid summers are lasting far longer than when the 78-year-old Native Hawaiian activist was a boy on Molokai, and the rainstorms are more erratic, and fierce. Still, he is confident that better land management practices can help restore the fishponds, supporting more nearshore fishing, despite the climate threat. 

“The water is getting warmer and killing the reef, but it’s also the erosion coming from the land, and that we have the ability to mitigate,” he says. “I ��Dz�’t know how to mitigate the temperature of the ocean, but I know how to mitigate the land, because that’s where I’ve lived, and our ancestors did it. So that’s what we hope we’re going to do, what we know we can handle.” 

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission. 

When he picked up the phone, his patient’s wife was on the other end: “He said he’s going to kill himself.”

The climate crisis is wreaking havoc on farms across the United States. Wildfires in California are to a crisp, drought in the Midwest has corn and soybean production, and unseasonal Arctic fronts are killing across the Northeast. 

These impacts are only getting worse. A by the National Young Farmers Coalition found that more than half of young farmers said they experienced climate impacts either very or extremely often. For farmers, wildfires, drought, floods, and pests are not just an inconvenience—they are an existential threat. A published by the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics at the University of California found that extreme heat is “positively associated” with farmer suicide. A by a Colorado-based suicide prevention group found that when drought conditions increased in the state so did the suicide rate among farmers.

It’s a phenomenon occurring around the world, from to .

“This is what climate change is doing,” says Rosmann. “It’s putting people in a place of extreme apprehension, where they feel there is no way out.”

Experts say they have witnessed a rise in farmers struggling with anxiety and depression as climate impacts have worsened in recent years. The run by Farm Aid, for instance, has seen a significant increase of calls from farmers during natural disasters linked to climate change. 

“When climate disaster strikes, or an ongoing disaster such as drought is occurring, the toll on farmer mental health is high,” says Caitlin Arnold-Stephano, a farmer and program manager at Farm Aid. “Often a disaster can push a farmer over the already-thin margin or edge that existed.” 

In recent years, the federal government has woken up to the mental health crisis affecting farmers. The 2018 Farm Bill was the mental health, by providing grants for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN), which connects farmers, ranchers, and agricultural workers with mental health assistance programs and resources.

Advocates hope that the 2023 Farm Bill will offer even more support. Bipartisan legislation, led by Senators Joni Ernst (R–Iowa) and Tammy Baldwin (D–Wisc.), to establish helplines, provide suicide prevention training for farm advocates, and create support groups for farmers and farmworkers. The bill would increase funding for the program, authorizing $15 million per year for the program for the next five years, up from $10 million allocated in the last Farm Bill.

“We need to push for the network to be expanded,” says Rosmann, who helped write the 2018 legislation. “The bill is the major way we can bring about change on this issue.”

Even before climate change began taking its toll, farmers already faced severe mental health issues. The rate of suicide among farmers has historically been three-and-a-half times higher compared to the general population, the National Rural Health Association. Farmers often work under precarious and psychologically taxing conditions due to weather variations, changing policies, and economic tariffs, as well as fluctuating food prices. In the 1980s, American farmers faced an economic crisis that saw a , destroying businesses and decimating rural communities. Yet despite these challenges, farmers are than the general public to have access to mental health services. 

Rosmann, who grew up in Iowa but spent several years studying and practicing psychology out of state, observed this firsthand when he moved back to his home state in the early 1980s. When word got out that he was both a farmer and a psychologist, his phone did not stop ringing. 

“People started calling me at all hours of the day and night,” he says. “There was clearly a need for someone who understands the culture of farming and gets what they are going through.”

Over the past five decades, Rosmann has come to intimately understand the toll farming takes. He has stayed on the phone with a woman who tried to kill herself by swallowing too many pills. He has climbed up a 60-foot ladder in a corncrib to stop a friend from jumping. 

Now, Rosmann says, climate change is exacerbating this crisis. “Practically every farmer is concerned about it,” he says. Some of his patients have lost an entire season’s crop to floods, heat, or other climate-related disasters. In other cases, subtly worsening weather conditions simply means without an increase in pay, resulting in physical and mental exhaustion among farmworkers.

Another stressor is that farmers often feel they are blamed for climate change. 

“Livestock and dairy farmers in particular are often singled out as ‘destroying the planet,’ with their cows being blamed for their methane emissions,” says Greg Mruk, executive director of New York FarmNet, an organization affiliated with Cornell University that offers financial and emotional counseling to farmers. “Yet farmers feel that they are stewards of water, land, and air.” 

Many farmers, however, struggle to access mental health services, which are often not readily accessible in rural areas. And when services are available, they are not always tailored to farmers’ needs. Traditional mental health services to farmers, who sometimes come from communities where mental health is highly stigmatized. 

“To effectively reach farmers, you have to have culturally appropriate care,” Rosmann says. 

Experts say that for mental health interventions to be effective, therapists need to either come from farming communities or be aware of the farming culture. 

“Farming and agricultural culture comes with a lot of ‘boot-strap individualism’ and ‘blue-collar worldview,’ which often includes feelings of power, control, self-reliance, and dominion over the land,” says Krista Bajgier, a therapist in Maryland working on mental health and nature. “When you’re talking about climate change, you’re talking about forces seemingly beyond their control.” Bajgier says that if therapists want to support farmers, understanding this worldview is critical. It helps explain why climate change is not only an economic stress—it’s an existential threat to farmers’ very identities. 

For farmers and workers from marginalized groups, such as Hispanic migrant farmworkers, experts say it is also critical that therapists be from the same cultural background. Organizations running mental health hotlines have found that Hispanic farmers and farmworkers are more likely to call back if their counselor shares the same culture and language. 

Another strategy is to organize group meetings in local community centers, such as churches, where farmers—who often work in isolation—can share their experiences together. Rosmann, who organized these workshops in his hometown, says they are an effective way of teaching people how to ask for help. “These workshops are touching,” he says. “A lot of tears are shed.”

Mental health interventions have increased significantly thanks to the 2018 Farm Bill. Since the legislation was passed, four regional centers established through FRSAN have increased training to recognize signs of depression or anxiety, created support groups, and expanded access to hotlines. 

If passed, the 2023 bill would increase funding available to the program to hire more behavioral health specialists, particularly those trained to work with different farming populations, including veteran farmers and farmers of color. 

But unless the federal government takes action to address the root causes of farmers’ distress—the economic precarity, the lack of support, the increasingly unpredictable weather—many experts are concerned farmers will continue to struggle. 

“The stage is set for another major troublesome era,” says Rosmann. “Farmers are worried about that.”

Farmers say that what they need is not only greater support from the government but more agency and autonomy in developing adaptation strategies to climate change. 

“������Ƶ than anything, farmers want to be given a chance to be part of the solution, a chance to figure it out,” says Mruk. “Let’s not be of the ‘sky is falling’ mindset. We need to take a proactive approach.”

If you or a loved one are struggling, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

This article was originally copublished by Nexus ������Ƶ News with  as part of a series that looks at ways the 2023 Farm Bill can help address the climate crisis.  is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

A single mother of three, including an infant Burks had helped deliver, was facing eviction and scrambling to find a place to weather the storm. 

Burks, who uses they/her pronouns, connected their client with lawyers who could help the mother fight the eviction so she and her family could shelter at home. 

Tifanny Burks is a doula. Part of the job is helping a client through pregnancy and birth, Burks said; the rest is “having those connections and being able to reference people out.” Aside from lawyers, Burks said they have referred clients to therapists and OB-GYNs. 

In the days surrounding the hurricane, parents throughout Miami-Dade County were turning toward doulas for guidance on getting through the storm, according to , another Miami-based doula. 

A changing climate gives them little choice: Doulas are always on call. “We do our work, and the weather is what it is,” McCant said. 

It’s a phenomenon taking place across the country. Doulas, trusted community figures, are increasingly helping their clients weather the climate crisis.

“Traditional providers like OB-GYNs tend to spend far too little time with patients to get into their environmental health risks,” said Skye Wheeler, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Doulas spend much more time with their clients. They’re also great planners and are perfectly placed to help clients think through affordable ways to get ready for heat or hurricanes.”

In Miami, doulas like McCant have organized workshops advising clients on how to stay safe during a heat wave; in New Mexico, they mobilized during wildfires that burned through much of the state earlier this year.

Doulas often come from the same communities as their clients, Wheeler said; that helps build trust and can make them more effective advocates. “They see things from their clients’ point of view, so they understand the importance of a healthy environment for a healthy pregnancy and the ways stress and marginalization [can] undermine that,” she said.

The climate crisis is exacerbating an existing . Extreme heat and air pollution are preterm labor, low birth weight, stillbirth, and other negative pregnancy outcomes. Stress related to wildfires, flooding, and hurricanes—which are becoming —also adversely affects pregnancy outcomes. 

Black and Brown communities—already facing higher rates of maternal mortality, stillbirth, and premature birth—are more likely to live in with , a legacy of , making pregnancy increasingly dangerous.

“If it’s hotter [in those neighborhoods], the people that are going to be struggling the most are those who are living in underserved communities and might not have access to robust AC or are unable to buy different fans to keep cool,” said Burks, who, like many of their clients, is Black. 

“You now see more doulas having conversations about the implications and impact [of climate change],” they added. “A lot of times, people just ��Dz�’t know, and think that [certain stresses] are happening to them and it’s random but ��Dz�’t connect it to a larger issue.”

Doulas, who spend more time with their clients than hospital and clinical staff do, and who are associated with lower rates of cesarean sections, can be a powerful tool in reducing health disparities.

Doulas are unique in that they make home visits, said Jessalyn Ballerano, a doula in Eugene, Oregon. “I’m seeing if air is clean and safe, if there are any dangers, if there is food in the fridge, if they are eating regularly, if they have enough water, if they have easy water access,” she said. “It takes some experience and skills to successfully investigate that in a collaborative way with the family.” 

Ballerano, who previously lived in Oakland, California, said navigating wildfire smoke, air pollution, and risk of evacuation—and understanding how it would affect pregnant people and families—became a part of her life there.

When she gets a new client, Ballerano typically offers them a resource list that includes information on nutrition, support groups, and health care providers. “������Ƶ and more, that resource list is going to include aspects for evacuation, fire safety, food access in case of disaster, and emergency preparedness resources,” she said. Ballerano works at the perinatal health nonprofit Nurturely, where she recently helped organize a in which doulas, climate advocates, and health care workers discussed ways to best assist pregnant people and new parents during wildfires. 

Doulas play a number of roles, said Shonte’ Terhune-Smith, a doula in Flint, Michigan.

“[Doulas] are a labor companion. An educator. A resource. A friend. Emotional and physical support in the prenatal, birthing, and postpartum process,” she said. And that work doesn’t end with the birth of a child. 

In Flint, where tens of thousands of residents were exposed to dangerous levels of lead, Terhune-Smith educated new mothers on the importance of breastfeeding or using bottled water with formula to keep their children safe. 

Doulas aren’t paid to be frontline climate workers. Though they spend countless hours advising clients before, during, and after birth, they’re typically paid a flat fee that from a few hundred dollars to $1,500 per birth.

“Doulas are already getting burned out fighting against the racism and injustice that drives inequitable maternal health and birth outcomes, and they aren’t properly compensated,” said Wheeler. One reason they’re paid so little is that they’re not always covered by insurance and therefore are often .

In April of this year, Democratic lawmakers, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Lauren Underwood, called the , which would, among other things, expand Medicaid to include doula and midwife care. The bill is part of a larger package of legislation aimed at reducing maternal health disparities known as the , which also includes provisions on funding research into the effects of climate change on pregnancy.

Tonni Oberly, a doula and researcher at the , described the legislation as “important steps in the right direction for giving birthing people the support they need and deserve.”

As she sees it, supporting doulas is one way to invest in frontline communities.

“Doulas are part of the community. So what communities face, doulas often face those same challenges,” Oberly said. “If doulas are serving clients in a heat wave or a food desert, then doulas are very well facing a heat wave or experiencing a food apartheid.” 

Back in Miami, Burks is already preparing for the next heat wave and hurricane. They try to stay on top of the latest research examining the connections between extreme weather and maternal health. 

“The more I’m knowledgeable and informed, the more I can inform my clients,” they said.

This article originally appeared in , an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow .

But what sets some landraces in a class of their own—monumentally ahead of commercial rice varieties—is their nutrition profiles. This has been proved by the research of Debal Deb, a farmer and agrarian scientist whose studies have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and books.

In the mid-1960s, with backing from the U.S. government, India’s agricultural policy introduced fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation facilities, and high-yielding varieties of crops under the moniker of a “Green Revolution” to combat hunger. Instead, it began an epidemic of monocultures and ecological destruction.

In the early 1990s, after realizing that more than 90% of India’s native rice varieties had been replaced by a handful of high-yielding varieties through the Green Revolution, Deb began conserving indigenous varieties of rice. Today, on a modest 1.7-acre farm in Odisha, India, Deb cultivates and shares 1,485 of the 6,000 unique landraces estimated to remain in India.

Deb and collaborators have quantified the vitamin, protein, and mineral content in more than 500 of India’s landraces for the first time, in the lab he founded in 2014, Basudha Laboratory for Conservation. In one extraordinary discovery, the team documented 12 native varieties of rice that contain the .

“These varieties provide the essential fatty acids and omega-3 fatty acids that are found in mother’s milk but lacking in any formula foods,” Deb says. “So instead of feeding formula foods to undernourished infants, these rice varieties can offer a far more nutritious option.”

Deb and his team have also documented high levels of antioxidants and several B vitamins in more than 250 landraces of rice. Both of these compounds are essential for the functioning of a healthy human body, Deb says, but are rarely found in modern high-yield varieties.

In Garib-sal, a rice variety from a remote village in West Bengal, Deb and his co-workers discovered the in its grains at 15 parts per million. This may explain why Garib-sal was prescribed in traditional medicine for the treatment of gastroenteric infections, since .

Miraculous as these traits may appear, they are far more than happy accidents of nature. They are the result of a conscious exercise of selective breeding by ancient farmers, whom Deb refers to as “unnamed, unknown scientists.”

“These farmer-scientists did not know anything about DNA, proteins, or enzymes,” he says, “yet they managed to develop novel varieties through generations of selective breeding.”

Deb’s conservation efforts are not to preserve a record of the past, but to help India revive resilient food systems and crop varieties. His vision is to enable present and future agriculturists to better adapt to climate change.

Cultivating Resilience

Deb conserves scores of climate-resilient varieties of rice originally sourced from Indigenous farmers, including 16 drought-tolerant varieties, 20 flood-tolerant varieties, 18 salt-tolerant varieties, and three submergence-tolerant varieties. He shares his varieties freely with hundreds of small farmers for further cultivation, especially those farming in regions prone to these kinds of climate-related calamities. In 2022 alone, Deb has shared his saved seed varieties with more than 1,300 small farmers through direct and indirect seed distribution arrangements in several states of India.

One of these farmers is Shamika Mone. Mone received 24 traditional rice varieties from Deb on behalf of Kerala Organic Farmers Association, along with training on maintaining the purity of the seeds. Now these farmers have expanded their collection, working with other organic farming collectives in the state of Kerala to grow around 250 landraces at two farm sites. While they cultivate most of their varieties for small-scale use and conservation, they also cultivate a few traditional rice varieties for wider production, which yield an average of 1.2 tons per acre compared with the 1 ton per acre of hybrid varieties.

“But that’s only in terms of yield,” Mone says. “We mostly grow these for their nutritional benefits, like higher iron and zinc content, antioxidants, and other trace elements. Some varieties are good for lactating mothers, while some are good for diabetic patients. There are many health benefits.”

These native varieties have proven beneficial in the face of climate change too.

With poor rains in 2016, for example, the traditional folk rice variety Kuruva that Mone had planted turned out to be drought-tolerant and pest-resistant. And in 2018, due to the heavy rains and floods, she lost all crops but one: a folk rice variety called Raktashali that survived underwater for two days.

“They have proven to be lifesavers for us,” Mone says.

With extreme weather events, like droughts, floods, and storm surges, on the rise across the world, small farmers suffer damage to their farms, lose harvests, and go into debt. But small organic farmers incur less debt since they ��Dz�’t depend on expensive inputs.

“About 90% of the overall costs incurred on most organic farms in Kerala are mostly for labor costs, while only around 10% goes on manures and composts, if any,” Mone says.

By expanding the cultivation of resilient crop varieties, an agricultural system can bounce back faster to its original capacity.

“Our emphasis and advice to every farmer in the world would be to foster and nurture diversity at all levels—at the species level, at the crop genetic level, and at the ecosystem level,” Deb says. “The building of complexity and diversity is essential to building resilience.”

The Case for Agroecology

Many fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides (killers of life forms) and, in so doing, decimate the microorganisms in the soil. Soil microorganisms, like mycorrhizal fungi, are recognized as essential to deliver nutrients from the soil to the plants. , plants cannot remain productive, and they become more prone to pest attacks. Thus begins the degenerative cycle of spraying more pesticides while adding more synthetic fertilizers to compensate for the lack of nutrients.

Industrial farming, associated with monocultures and synthetic chemical inputs, leads to the loss of soil fertility year over year and ultimately the collapse of the farm ecosystem. Commercial hybrid seeds, dependent on costly inputs, have also proved to fall behind in climate tolerance.

“We need resilience under uncertainty and hardship,” says Sujatha Rajeswaran, a farmer from Villupuram district, Tamil Nadu, who received seeds and training from Deb. She sells her produce directly to a group of friends and family members.

“Growing traditional varieties coincides with our philosophy for life,” Rajeswaran says. “Just having a lot of money is not enough. We need good physical and mental health. We need good relationships. We need good ecology, not only in a human-centric way, but for all beings to be able to live and thrive.”

Deb asserts that in order to grow resilient and nutritious food sustainably, global food systems must transition to agroecology, which doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals to the environment. and many have also documented agroecology to be more productive than industrial farming, and that it leads to better soil fertility year over year.

“Agroecology is an essential component in the fight against climate change and [greenhouse gas] emissions,” says Steve Gliessman, professor emeritus of agroecology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an international expert with more than 50 years of teaching, research, and production experience in the field of agroecology.

“Agroecology is all about farming practices that capture and hold carbon, but it is also all about how all other parts of the food system contribute to sustainability. This means more local, seasonal, and integrated food systems, where what we call ‘food miles’ are reduced, food waste is reduced, and local food production capacity once again plays an important role.”

Gliessman applauds Deb’s conservation and participatory work with local farmers. “[His work] confronts the modern idea of ‘improved’ seeds when farmers already have the seed knowledge they need in their hands. Deb has rescued this knowledge, codified it, and made it available once again.”

Roadblocks to Implementation

Despite a plethora of reasons to prioritize a transition to agroecology, funding for these open-source solutions is severely lacking. Public institutions and private businesses alike favor putting their money toward patented technologies and seeds.

There are two pathways to adapt agriculture to climate change, according to Rasheed Sulaiman V., director of the Centre for Research on Innovation and Science Policy, a nonprofit organization that promotes research in the area of innovation policy for agriculture and rural development. Pathway 1, he says, is the development and promotion of new climate-resilient, high-yielding varieties of seeds. Pathway 2 is to promote and strengthen in-place conservation of native, climate-resilient varieties by civil society organizations and seed champions like Deb.

in Odisha, Sulaiman says Pathway 2 can help in achieving several more of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals than Pathway 1, without causing adverse impacts to the environment and agro-biodiversity. “Unfortunately,” he says, “almost all science, technology, and innovation support is invested in Pathway 1, and there are practically no resources invested in strengthening Pathway 2.”

Deb documents that many native varieties of crops measure more resilient and nutrient-dense than commercial varieties and patented seeds, even after the billions of dollars that have been invested in agribusinesses. For example, the International Rice Research Institute, an  and training organization that contributed to the Green Revolution, has developed an iron-fortified genetically modified rice variety, IR68144-2B-2-2-3, containing 8.9 ppm of iron. This is meant to be its “high iron” variety. Contrast that with the approximately 80 native varieties of rice Deb has documented that contain between 20 and 152 ppm of iron.

Such knowledge becomes vital in light of government policy that favors food fortification instead of food sovereignty. The Indian government recently mandated that rice supplies be fortified with iron and other supplements in order to tackle malnutrition. This fortification process involves rice being milled into a powder form, fortified with supplements, and reshaped into rice grains. The Mandatory Food Fortification Program is now in effect across four states (Bihar, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand) and counting, and all rice supply in India will need to be .

“According to this fortification mandate, everyone, whether you need it or not, has to consume this fortified rice. What if your child has thalassemia, a condition where excess iron is lethal?” wonders Deb. So far, local news outlets have produced concerning reports: district of Orissa fell ill after consuming the fortified rice in their public school meals. In the state of Punjab, 19 samples of fortified rice out of 22 collected failed national quality control tests.

“Experts are spending billions of dollars to fine-tune genetic engineering, while these nutritious and resilient varieties already exist,” Deb says. “In the name of smarter agriculture, we are losing these climate-smart varieties.”

Small-Scale Solutions

Patented and high-tech solutions have also proven inequitable for small farmers. Deb asserts that these are not for peasant countries like India, where nearly 80% of farmers operate on less than 5 acres of land. High-yielding varieties have raised the input costs (since fertilizers, pesticides, and the seeds themselves have to be bought every year), making farmers increasingly dependent on markets. At the same time, the prices farmers receive for their harvests have fallen with greater market supply.

At times, in the short run, growing fragile, high-yielding varieties can be profitable. But in the long run, only large landholders are able to weather losses thanks to their other asset classes. Small landholders, Rajeswaran says, ��Dz�’t have that cushion. They go into debt and face complete ruin. In fact, today in India, , leading to episodes of farmer suicide.

On the surface, reduced drudgery and more yields may seem worth it, which is why so many farmers opt in. “New varieties are being created for higher yields and process mechanization—for doing well in control environments,” Rajeswaran says. “But the real world is not a controlled environment, although we are constantly trying to make it one.”

Nearly three decades since beginning conservation work, Deb remains motivated. He recognizes that some of the farmers requesting his seeds today are the descendants of his original seed sources. They come to him after losing their seeds to high-yielding varieties.

“These ancient farmers never wrote down their discoveries or patented their work, so we are [wrongly] taught to assume they were unscientific,” Deb says. “Our task is to honor their discoveries by conserving these varieties.”

That shouldn’t be surprising, since , Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister, who were, once upon a time, a priest and a nun, were well-known . I was too young to be a part of the “,” who, at school, practiced hiding from a nuclear attack beneath their desks or heading for local bomb shelters in the basements of churches and town halls.

Born in 1974, I think of myself as a member of  generation, which was instructed to watch that remarkably popular made-for-TV movie in 1983 and report on our observations and feelings. Dramatizing the life of people in a small town in Kansas after a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States, it made a strong (if perhaps unintentional) case that dying in the initial blast would have been better than surviving and facing the nuclear winter and over-armed chaos that followed.

In this Ukraine war era, maybe we could label today’s kids as the Generation Fed Up With Grown-Ups (Gen Fed Up). The members of  are “digital natives,” born with smartphones in their hands and instantly able to spot all the messy seams in, and agendas behind, poorly produced, uninformative Public Service Announcements, like the &�Բ�����;���貹���ٳ���Գ�’s&�Բ�����; recent PSA about what to do in case of—yep, you guessed it!—a nuclear attack: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned. (Sounds pretty close to the poster on my wall growing up, doesn’t it?)

Young people need real information and analysis, survival skills, and resources. Generation Z and the younger Generation Alpha (I have some of both in my family) are growing up in a world torn apart by the selfishness and shortsightedness of earlier generations, including the impact of the never-ending production and “” of nuclear weapons, not to speak of the climate upheaval gripping this planet and all the horrors that go with it, including sea level rise, megadrought, flooding, mass migration, starvation, and on and on and on.

Jornada del Muerto

The nuclear age began during World War II with the July 16, 1945, test of a 6-kilogram plutonium weapon code-named “Trinity” in the Jornada del Muerto Valley in New Mexico. No one bothered to tell the estimated 38,000 people who lived within 60 miles of that atomic test that it was about to take place or that there might be dangerous nuclear fallout following the blast.  The area, whose Spanish name in translation means, appropriately enough, Journey of Death, was rich in Indigenous culture and life, home to 19 American Indian Pueblos, two Apache tribes, and some chapters of the Navajo Nation. Though hardly remembered today, they were the first nuclear casualties of our age. 

That initial test was quickly evaluated as successful and, less than a month later, American war planners considered themselves ready for the ultimate “tests”—the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and Nagasaki three days later. The initial blasts from those back-to-back bombs  on the spot and immediately thereafter, and countless more from radiation sickness and cancer.

Fat Man and Little Boy, as those bombs were bizarrely code-named, should have signaled the end of nuclear war, even of all war. The incineration of so many civilians and the leveling of two major cities should have been motivation enough to put the cork in the deadly power of the atom and consign nuclear weapons to some museum of horrors alongside the guillotine, the rack, and other past devices of obscene torture.

But it would prove to be just the beginning of an arms race and a cheapening of life that goes on to this day. After all, this country  its nuclear arsenal to the tune of trillions of dollars, while Vladimir Putin has  one or more of his vast store of “tactical” nukes, and China is  to catch up. I keep thinking about how 77 years of nuclear brinkmanship and impending doom has taken its global toll, even while making life more precarious and helping render this beautiful and complex planet a garbage can for forever-radioactive waste. (OK, OK, hyperbole alert … it’s not forever, just literally .) 

Some among the duck-and-cover generation feared they wouldn’t live to see adulthood, that there would be no tomorrow. Not surprisingly, too many of them, when they grew up, came to  as if there, indeed, were no tomorrow. And you can see evidence of just that attitude anytime you consider the “prosperity” of the second industrial revolution, with its toxic sludge of fossil fuels, , ,  in paint and gas, and so many plastics. This polluting of our ground, water, and air was all, I suspect, spurred on by a nihilistic nuclearism.

It seems impossible to work so hard to shift from burning carbon to capturing solar or  if there’s a chance it could all go up in a mushroom cloud tomorrow. But there have been some notable efforts from which to draw hope and inspiration as we keep living out those very tomorrows. As environmentalist and futurist Bill McKibben writes in , The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, President Jimmy Carter tried to guide this country to a less-carbon-dependent future—and it cost him the presidency. The  sought to mitigate the damage of the 1979 oil crisis with significant investments in solar power and other green technologies and cutting-edge conservation. Had such policies been allowed to take hold, as McKibben points out, “climate changes would have turned from an existential crisis to a manageable problem on a list of other problems.”

Can you imagine? Carter is now loved for his , moral stamina, and promotion of affordable housing through , but as we doom-scroll the latest news about present and future climate catastrophes, we have to reach back through time to even imagine a healthier tomorrow. Sadly enough, with Carter, we might have been near a turning point, we might have had a chance—but then actor (and huckster) Ronald Reagan rode his 10-gallon cowboy hat into the White House,  the rooftop solar panels the Carters had installed, instituted tax cuts for the very wealthy, and loosened regulations on every type of polluter. President Reagan did that in 1986, only a year or so after  of our era that the planet was cooler than average. 

Tomorrow

1986 seems like just yesterday! Now what? How about tomorrow?

After all, here we are in 2022, about to hit  strong on this planet of ours. And there is, of course, a tomorrow. Hotter and drier, but dawning all the same. Wetter and windier, but coming anyway.

I have three kids, ages 8, 10, and 15, and they anchor me in a troubling and strange, if still ultimately beautiful, reality. This world, however finite, with its increasingly overwhelming problems, is still precious to me and worth a good fight. I ������’t turn away from tomorrow. It’s not an abstraction. The headlines now seem to endlessly scream: We are at a potential tipping point in terms of the climate. Did I say a potential tipping point? I meant to make that plural. In fact, an article in the Sept. 8 issue of The Guardian lists . Sixteen! Imagine that!

Three of the biggest ones that climate scientists agree we’re close to tipping over are:

1. The , which will produce a huge rise in global sea levels.
2. The  in the north Atlantic Ocean, which will further disrupt rainfall and  throughout the world, severely curtailing global food production.
3. The melting of the Arctic’s carbon-rich , releasing staggering amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and so further broiling this planet. (Will it freeze again if we do the right thing? Not likely, as it seems that tipping point has already tipped.)

In the face of all of this, in the age of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and the rest of the crew, how do you change political or corporate behavior to slow, if not reverse, global warming? ������Ƶ than three-quarters of a century of uncertain tomorrows has made the human race—particularly, of course, those in the developed and industrialized world—awful stewards of the future.

“So when we need collective action at the global level, probably more than ever since the second world war, to keep the planet stable, we have an all-time low in terms of our ability to collectively act together. Time is really running out very, very fast.” So said , a scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. As he added tellingly, speaking of the global temperature ceiling set at the Paris Climate Accords in 2015 (and already considered out of date in the ), “I must say, in my professional life as a climate scientist, this is a low point. The window for 1.5C is shutting as I speak, so it’s really tough.”

Dire predictions, reams of science, sober calls to act from climatologists and activists, not to speak of island and coastal communities already being displaced by a fast-warming world. Only recently, two young people from the climate movement  threw mashed potatoes at the glass covering a classic Claude Monet painting in a museum near Berlin in a bid to get attention, while activists from  used tomato soup on the glass of Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London in October. In  were the paintings themselves harmed; in both cases, they have my attention, for what that’s worth.

For striking numbers of climate refugees globally, the point has already tipped, and, given their situations, they might like to have some tomato soup and mashed potatoes—to eat rather than to be flung as protest props. In the longer term, for their children and grandchildren, they need masses of people who live in the biggest greenhouse gas polluters—China and the United States —to radically alter their lifestyles to help protect what’s left of this distinctly finite planet of ours.

Yesterday

Thomas Berrigan, my grandfather, was born in 1879. My grandmother Frida was born in 1886. While they missed the pre-industrial era by more than 100 years, their early lives in the United States were almost carbon-free. They hauled water, chopped wood, and largely ate from a meager garden. As poor people, their carbon footprint remained remarkably small, even as the pace and pollution of life in the United States and the industrialized West picked up.

My father, Philip Berrigan, born in 1923, was the youngest of six brothers. There could have been two more generations of Berrigans between his birth and mine in 1974, but there weren’t. I could have been a grandmother when I gave birth to my last child in 2014, but I �ɲ�����’t. So, in our own way, whether we meant to or not, we slowed down the march of generations, and I’m grateful for the long perspective that gives me.

In her later years, my grandmother marveled at the ways in which a car could bring her back and forth to the city “all in one day.” ������Ƶ recently, her great-grandchildren have found that they could still go to school (after a fashion) thanks to computers during the COVID-19 pandemic, communicating in real time with teachers and classmates scattered elsewhere in our world.

It’s not likely I’ll live until 2079, my grandfather’s 200th birthday, but his great-granddaughter, my daughter Madeline, will just be turning 65 then. If she has my mother’s longevity, she’ll be 86 when . That is the grim milestone (tombstone?) when climate scientists expect we could reach a disastrous global average temperature of 2.1 to 2.9 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Unless. Unless something is done, many somethings are done, to reverse greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, that spells disaster beyond measure for my children’s children. 

When I look at old photos, I see my own face in my mother’s hollowed-out, age-spotted cheeks. And when I look at my daughter’s still-chubby cheeks and the way her eyebrows arch, I see my own younger face (and that of my mother, too).

As far as I’m concerned, the year 2100 is my future, even though I won’t be here to struggle through it with my children and their children. In the meantime, we keep putting one foot in front of the other (walking is better for the environment anyway) and struggling to somehow deal with this beautiful, broken world of ours. One generation cedes to the next, doing its best to impart wisdom and offer lessons without really knowing what tools those who follow us will need to carve a better tomorrow out of a worsening today.

To go back to the beginning, while such a thing is still possible, if nuclear weapons, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, fossil fuels, and apocalyptic fear helped get us to this breaking point, we need something truly different now. We need not war, but peace; not new nukes, but next-generation-level diplomacy; not fossil fuels, but the greenest of powers imaginable. We need a world that Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Elon Musk, and their ilk ������’t even imagine, a world where their kind of power is neither needed nor celebrated. 

We need gratitude, humility, and awe at the deep web of interconnection that undergirds the whole of nature. We need curiosity, joy in discovery, and celebration. And our kids (of Gen Fed Up) can help us access those powers, because they’re inherent in all children. So, no more ducking and covering, no more The Day After, no more staying inside. Let us learn from Generation Z and Generation Alpha and change—and maybe survive.

This article was originally published by . It has been published here with permission.

“The sun just pours in,” he said of his top-floor, west-facing apartment in Harlem, where he has two fans but no air conditioner. Sanchez usually finds a shaded bench in nearby Morningside Park, sees a film, or rides his bike to the beach, returning home after the relentless sun has begun to set. “It’s just dangerous to stay inside,” he said. 

In 2016, Sanchez, who is 67 and works in public media, helped scientists quantify just how dangerous it is to stay inside during a heat wave. That summer, he and 29 of his neighbors placed sensors in their apartments to collect temperature and humidity data as part of the , a collaboration between the City University of New York (CUNY) and local advocacy and media organizations.

Scientists have long sought public participation to monitor and. But as the planet continues to heat up, government agencies and advocacy groups are increasingly turning toward citizen science to guide their climate resilience efforts—and keep residents safe during extreme weather events. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has funded crowdsourced projects in more than 50 cities since 2017, and this August, the Knight Foundation in funding for crowdsourced flood and heat reporting across Miami-Dade County. 

Researchers say community input can be especially valuable in communities like Harlem, where historic disinvestment and racist housing policies, like , have left residents shouldering a disproportionate climate change burden. These neighborhoods are often —areas where building density and the lack of trees can make temperatures 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than surrounding areas. Black New Yorkers are twice as likely as white non-Hispanic New Yorkers to , according to city statistics. 

“The scientific community is leaning into the idea that science can be an ally for justice, and a tool that communities have as they try to repair or address past harms or promote future changes,” said Rajul Pandya, vice president of the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) Thriving Earth Exchange, which connects communities across the globe with scientists for collaborative research. 

Satellite-based estimates of ground-surface temperatures ������’t compete with dozens or hundreds of residents using thermometers and infrared cameras to document heat in their neighborhoods—and inside their homes. Crowdsourcing rainfall measurements during storms can uncover pockets of severe flooding that flood models often miss. Data like this—especially when combined with participants’ testimonies and feedback—can guide more targeted investments and interventions, from subsidized air conditioning to conveniently located cooling centers. 

“The solutions are almost as granular, in some cases, as the threat,” said Julia Kumari Drapkin, CEO and founder of , a community climate and weather platform that was used in the Harlem heat study.

How the Harlem Heat Project Has Heightened Awareness of Heat’s Dangers 

Researchers have long understood that indoor temperatures, especially in buildings lacking adequate air conditioning, can exceed outdoor temperatures during heat waves—a phenomenon that Harlem Heat Project researchers refer to as an . But the Harlem Heat Project quantified the wide variance in how Upper Manhattan’s indoor spaces responded to outdoor conditions, according to Brian Vant-Hull, a research scientist at CUNY’s Remote Sensing Earth System Institute. Using data collected by participants, Vant-Hull and his colleague, Prathap Ramamurthy, created models that showed how factors like surrounding buildings, building story, and window placement affected indoor temperatures. They also measured the duration of indoor heat waves, which tend to lag a day or two behind outdoor heat waves because of the way buildings often trap and amplify heat. 

But the qualitative data, based on participants’ lived experiences, was just as valuable as the quantitative data, according to Kizzy Charles-Guzman, executive director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. 

Charles-Guzman attended community workshops where respondents described secretly installing air conditioners in public housing apartments, which residents extra if they report having AC. They reported not having access to nearby cooling stations, and some said they hesitated to open their windows for relief for fear of letting polluted air into their homes. At the workshops, residents also suggested solutions, such as more accessible cooling spaces in buildings and alerts that would remind people to check on vulnerable neighbors when temperatures peak.

At the time, Charles-Guzman was already developing the city’s first heat-adaptation plan, . The Harlem Heat Project, she said, “validated what we had already learned”—that extreme heat is “a silent killer” that affects people in their homes. But, she added, “those stories, about the lack of access to cooling centers, the lack of money to pay the electricity bill, the fear of being caught by [New York City’s housing authority]—had a face thanks to this project.”

This data and community feedback informed “a massive advocacy effort,” said Annie Carforo, climate justice campaigns manager of WE ACT for Environmental Justice. WE ACT recruited community researchers for the Harlem Heat Project and used the data they provided to advocate for electricity-bill relief and improvements to and to raise awareness of heat as an emergency, among other , Carforo said. 

This year, New York State dropped some eligibility barriers to the (LIHEAP), which provides free air conditioners and installation for low-income households, resulting in a marked increase in . Local organizations, like the Harlem Emergency Network and East Harlem Community Organizations Active in Disaster, added extreme heat to their priorities. 

But data doesn’t always translate into immediate action. Sanchez said his application for utility assistance was rejected last winter, despite income loss he believes should have qualified him for the program. Another study participant, Euline Williams, said she never received a response to her LIHEAP application. Now, the air conditioner in her building’s shared cool space is broken, and the management has yet to repair it. Williams’ nearest cooling center is closed for renovations, so she has to travel about 20 blocks to a library instead. 

Carforo said WE ACT is advocating for more city funding for cooling centers, and for that funding to be codified into the city budget.

Climate Research and Adaptation Steered by Locals 

Pandya, of the AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange, said he’d like to see more communities not just participating in research, but also actually directing it. Last year, Thriving Earth Exchange launched a , which gives money to communities “to enable them to find scientists that they want to work with on the projects that they think are important,” said Pandya.

Through this new initiative, communities in have measured the benefits of using plants to mitigate air pollution, groups in created a community air pollution monitoring network, and people in South Carolina trained families to use native plants for flood protection.

The AGU and several partnering science organizations have also established a that lets researchers receive academic credit not only for community science projects, but also for project outcomes, such as policy changes or green infrastructure projects. For Pandya, the journal represents “an opportunity to push the boundaries of what counts as an output of science.” In its first two issues, the journal has published articles on in research on oceans and human health, and how generational knowledge can further climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Community science is also a valuable public education tool, Charles-Guzman said. put $82 million toward tree plantings in specific neighborhoods, but many New Yorkers didn’t want the hassle and expense of caring for the trees, and some neighborhoods protested new bioswales by filling them with trash, she said. 

“Behavior change is the hardest thing, and government wonks are not the right messengers for that,” she said. “When you do this kind of project across the city, you’re raising awareness, creating educational opportunities, and making people lobby their governments for protective measures.” 

Six years after the Harlem Heat Project, some of the participants are still acting on what they learned. Williams said she tries to join her daughter at the beach when it’s hotter than 90 degrees. And the project has made Sanchez more vigilant about staying cool.

“It gave me concrete information that I now use even without the sensor,” he said. “I know, at two or three o’clock, you really need to get out, especially on very humid days, and you need to have a plan.” 

This article first appeared in  and and was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations. is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. Follow us .

Driving the point home were the seemingly unrelated stories of environmental devastation concurrently unfolding in Jackson, Mississippi, and Puerto Rico. At first glance, they seemed disparate, but my shared identity as an African American from Houston, Texas, and an Afro-Caribbean from Portmore, Jamaica, stitched the two together into a painfully familiar tale of hope amid tragedy.

Amid racialized and climate-based trauma lies similar suffering and also solutions emerging.

Located 1,759 miles (2,830 kilometers) apart, the overseas territory of Puerto Rico and the city of Jackson, Mississippi, do not immediately resemble each other. Jackson exists as a majority-Black community within the state of Mississippi in the American South and has roughly . The Puerto Rican identity, and the unincorporated territory has a population of . Culturally, linguistically, and geographically speaking, the two are far removed from each other, but Black and Brown communities in both endure legacies of disenfranchisement, underinvestment, and discrimination.

The ongoing environmental crises facing both places, I would argue, are linked to their positions as victims of the American imperialist project. The ongoing impacts of colonialism and systemic racism have undone these communities’ abilities to respond to the unfolding climate crisis.

Puerto Rico . Since the storm made landfall in mid-September, it has left much of the island without basic necessities and has darkened close to a million homes. While some of the damage has been, with a . Meanwhile, in Jackson, are still unable to access clean drinking water months after floodwaters destroyed the city’s main water-treatment plant. While chronic underinvestment has made boiling drinking water a way of life in Jackson for decades, the current wave of water insecurity is unfolding across lines of class and color and has .

The parallels between these stories go back centuries, beginning with the residents . Since the days of Spanish colonialism and American slavery, African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the Global South have been subjected to unfair systems of extraction, which served to enrich imperial powers at the expense of the.

African Americans in the Southern states have also had to grapple with the impact of the end of on their developmental trajectory, to fully enfranchise the citizenry. So, too, has American possession of Puerto Rico since the end of the Spanish–American war failed to meaningfully “decolonize” the country, denying yet another minority group the . The grand irony is that not only did these systems serve to to respond to shocks, but also the systems of domination perpetuated by colonialism and slavery for the climate crisis currently unfolding.

Jackson’s Black residents have languished under and that has resulted in racialized access to basic resources.

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico, a can be linked to the ongoing of its people, who are made to wander in a geopolitical wilderness between unabashed colonialism, statehood, and independence. The United States has repeatedly failed to take the necessary steps to regulate the island’s access to resources, instead leaving control over its electrical grid to . Ultimately, the leaves the territory constantly floundering in and crises it is unable to address.

The end result in Puerto Rico and Jackson alike is . Like all forms of , this comes about when individualized acts of racism end up encoded into the underlying structures of society. Black and Brown people are dehumanized to the point that they are unable to respond to the environmental stresses of a climate crisis we did not cause, .

While this seems dire, it also means there is solidarity in their . The Latino community of Puerto Rico and the African American community of Jackson (and the U.S. as a whole) deserve the right to self-determination. By viewing the struggle for climate justice as shared, these disparate communities can achieve it jointly.

Top-down, federal initiatives, such as reparations to both and is essential in the time of climate change. This is a and , in an effort to eradicate systemic racism and shore up resilience in the time of climate change.

Reparations should consist not only of but also as part of deliberate efforts by governments, multinational organizations, and civil society groups to address and eliminate racial and climate-based inequality. They should also include efforts to uproot the and return to its Native people. Additionally, global leaders need to step up and directly intercede on their countries’ behalf, such as in the case of Mia Mottley of Barbados to address her country’s need for debt restructuring.

Mutual aid has long been applied among minority groups as a response to systemic violence, and is becoming increasingly critical in light of climate change. In both Jackson and Puerto Rico, residents have come together to , support each other, and distribute scarce resources. In Puerto Rico, this looks like neighbors for each other where the government does not. In Jackson, this involves and . Local and international in both arenas have used their platforms to speak out as well. 

While these efforts in and of themselves go a long way, there is still work to be done to build the broad coalitions across racial and cultural divides needed to flip the table.

A collaboration between Mississippians and Puerto Ricans wouldn’t be the first time have come together to fight a common enemy in systemic racism. But the climate dimension of the ongoing struggle adds more overlap and urgency than ever.

For some 150 years, authorities managing the region introduced alien species, never consulting the tribal bands who had successfully managed the lake for millennia. Likewise, scientists studying Clear Lake’s toxic mercury levels and harmful algal blooms failed to alert Indigenous communities to the looming threat. Local involvement came only when tribal experts began , , and  to protect native species in the lake. Fish kills on Clear Lake are persistent and frequent, but only the tribal EPA office of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians .

Ignorance of Native science and the centuries of knowledge it represents is hardly limited to Clear Lake. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s historical inability to distinguish among seven separate species of abalone (well known to coastal tribes, including the Chumash, Ohlone, and Yurok) led to successive waves of over-exploitation. All seven species are currently in trouble; the one remaining viable fishery—red abalone—was shut down in 2017 and . In the western United States, which is experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years, government-mandated fire-suppression plans replaced millennia of Indigenous wildland stewardship that included vegetation management and the intentional burning known as “good fire.” Instead, every year, millions of acres burn, homes are annihilated, and people die in catastrophic wildfires that cost billions of dollars.

With climate change escalating superstorms, heat waves, mega-floods, and drought, Indigenous science can no longer be ignored. For almost two millennia, beginning with local inhabitants of the Mediterranean who provided baseline data for the 600 plants described in Dioscorides’  in 77 CE, Indigenous peoples have furnished substantive source material for scientific research. Even the system of scientific nomenclature—categorizing living things by using Latin genus and species names, such as Homo sapiens (human) and Canis lupus (wolf)—is derived from uncredited Indigenous science. The 18th-century Swedish scholar Carl Linnaeus, often referred to as “the father of taxonomy” for his work codifying species classifications, based his taxonomic nomenclature on Indigenous knowledge from the Indonesian–Malaysian archipelago documented by 16th- and 17th-century explorers. In other words, Linnaeus plagiarized the Natives’ naming systems and claimed them for his own when describing “new” botanical specimens. (Side note: The Linnean Society of London now describes Linnaeus as  because he associated positive character traits, such as wisdom and inventiveness, with the “Europaeus” classification of humans, and “monstrous” traits, such as sluggishness and greed, with the “Africanus” and “Asiaticus” groups.)

As it turns out, Indigenous knowledge is exceptionally nuanced and deep. It is cumulative, place-based, and acquired largely through observation and experimentation on both large and small scales. Indigenous science—including contributions highlighted in the  and the —is crowd-sourced citizen science taken to the next level, constructed over multiple generations in close relationship with the species, habitats, bodies of water, weather patterns, and other natural phenomena surrounding the observers. It is not superstition or isolated observation or pseudoscience, all misinterpretations stemming from the racist and classist assumptions of Western explorers and ethnographers starting in the 17th century and persisting to the present day.

The languages of Native peoples overflow with scientific observations. In Northern California,  place names include regok-o-yū u wro, meaning “trout run up a creek,” and tskwe’ges-o-rike’n, translated as “harbor seal where he sits,” describing a rock in a river. The  term for sea lion is �⾱�岹:����’i��-�ٱ�’i��, meaning “coming from downstream—they swim along.” The Tolowa Dee-ni’ name for the California condor translates to “whale lifter,” a nod to the fact that condors sometimes feed on the carcasses of humpback whales. However, because academia relegates Indigenous knowledge to ethnic studies or files it under folklore or legend—thus confining its study to scholars in the humanities—vast reservoirs of historical expertise have remained untapped by the scientific community, especially in the United States.

Last year, a Bishop Paiute elder named Harry Williams, the last living encyclopedia of ancient Paiute hydrological systems in California’s Owens Valley, passed away. Understanding local hydrology is essential to solving critical ecological issues in the region, including mitigating the , saving the endangered Owens Valley pupfish, and protecting native plants that once flourished under Paiute irrigation. Prior to belated efforts to document Williams’ knowledge, the  had been performed by Julian Steward, an ethnographer who spent  interviewing 13 Paiute people in 1927 and 1928.

The disparity between 12 weeks’ research by an outsider and a lifetime of fieldwork by a resident Paiute is immense. Yet a persistent lack of knowledge about—or partnership with—communities whose lands are studied by scientists is commonplace, running rife through the résumés of Euro-American researchers hailed as the founders of science disciplines and conservation programs: , , John Muir. Paraphrasing my colleague and Southeast Asia specialist Roy Ellen, what we now recognize as scientific knowledge of the natural world was constituted largely by researchers absorbing preexisting local folk knowledge while erasing whatever they weren’t interested in or willing to absorb—and, I would add, failing to credit the source of that knowledge.

Indigenous peoples continuously occupying specific ecosystems for centuries or millennia maintain intimate familiarity with how those ecologies function. From the Yanomami in the Amazon to the Iñupiat in the Arctic, Native communities successfully shepherded resources through a combination of deeply held belief systems and sophisticated adaptive management technologies, augmented by the pervasive accumulation, intergenerational transfer, and application of scientific knowledge. This is why Native peoples developed scientific terminology to categorize and characterize species and interspecies relationships—such as birds associated with specific fruiting trees, or the migration patterns of walrus and caribou—long before Western science invented academic fields like agronomy, animal behavior, ecology, climate science, restoration ecology, soil science, and zoology. Traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK, is a scientific term used to acknowledge this wide-ranging body of nature-based expertise.

But a cultural blitzkrieg has tried to wipe that away. The era that saw invasive fish first introduced to Clear Lake was characterized by government-sanctioned massacres of First Peoples and the species most sacred to them. The devastation included rampant slaughter of apex predators (wolves, bears) and ecosystem engineers (bison, beavers, salmon); the enforced servitude of tribal members and the removal of their children to boarding schools; and the “” that criminalized Native beliefs and practices.

Disdain for, and erasure of, Indigenous peoples and their lifeways and culturally significant species paralleled Western myths that Americans of European descent would tame and improve wilderness and wild peoples. This is why national parks were founded and why Indigenous peoples throughout the world are still forbidden from residing, hunting, fishing, or gathering in their ancestral territories that lie squarely within those parks.

When science is dominated by a cultural subset, , influencing which questions are asked, who gets to ask them, how the questions are asked, and where scientific efforts are focused. For example, when I began graduate school in ecology, mutualisms—interspecies relationships in which both species benefit—were considered rare, and my assigned readings focused largely on competition and predation. We learned all about resource scarcity and predator–prey cycles, but nothing about trees sharing metabolic resources or belowground biochemical warning systems (“,” which is widely recognized by Indigenous experts).

Twenty years later, the ubiquity of mutualisms in aquatic and terrestrial systems is widely acknowledged. How did scientists overlook such common ecological phenomena? Retrospective meta-analyses of scientific studies provide a clue: 70% of published studies during the past generation concentrated on  or on , in a field where the overwhelming majority of scientists were males of European ancestry  primarily on Europe and the Americas. Because of who decided which questions to ask, we didn’t investigate the sorts of things, or interact with the sorts of people, that would have enabled us to see and study positive multi-species relationships.

In stark contrast, traditional ecological knowledge and the origin stories of Indigenous peoples are replete with positive multi-species relationships. In Karuk stories, Turtle gave fire to Frog, and Frog took fire underwater before spitting it into willow roots along the river. For Karuk firefighters, this translates into setting up nighttime burns to keep fire in the grasses, protecting turtles nesting in the willows. While the modern world is surprised by  of coyotes and badgers cooperating on hunting expeditions, stories of coyote–badger collaborations have been circulating among , , , and Klamath tribes (among others) for centuries, possibly millennia.

During my career as a university lecturer, whenever scientists in my field alluded to place-based or experiential knowledge, they described it as “anecdotal” or derived from an “informant,” downgrading local expertise as nonscientific or ancillary to “real” science. In every natural resource management agency meeting I attend as a consultant, decisions are ostensibly based on the “best available science.” Translation? Anything written by someone with degrees accompanying their name, even if it was published decades ago or is the sole article on the topic, will take precedence over the unpublished expertise of a Native or local practitioner.

But when we begin our scientific analyses with place-based expertise and TEK, our theoretical world is expanded, enabling richer and more rigorous science. Researchers working in the Peruvian Amazon with the Matsigenka tribe documented  in the traditional Matsigenka classification system; another Amazonian group, the Matsés, recognizes . One team of scientists  that traditional ecological knowledge “represents a vast and underutilized database about habitat diversity, species distributions, ecological interactions among organisms, economically important species and sustainable management practices.”

If we define wealth as the concentration of irreplaceable human and natural capital, then regions with the highest concentrations of languages and species, known as , constitute the richest areas on the planet. Protecting that wealth must be a collaborative effort, beginning with the founders and original cultivators of that wealth, whether we refer to them as First Nations, First Peoples, Aboriginals, Indigenous peoples, or Natives.

As , a Canadian researcher, recently tweeted: “Protip for environmental scientists: when writing about gaps, say ‘nothing/little is published on this topic’ rather than ‘nothing/little is known about this topic’ because it’s almost certain that local people and Indigenous people know.” To this pro tip I would add another suggestion: Say, “We have yet to connect with local experts,” because in most cases, sadly, my fellow researchers ��Dz�’t even think to try.

Why, despite current reckonings with  in the 21st century, does Indigenous science continue to get short shrift? The reason is that what we credit as “science” continues to be embedded within a hierarchy of knowledge produced in the English language by university-educated and -affiliated academics. Anything produced by a European or an American of European descent is automatically awarded a higher status, despite that preference being biased and therefore unscientific.

The world is waking up to the need for change, and the tide is slowly turning. My own doctoral thesis, completed in 2004, focused on Indigenous Indonesian communities with encyclopedic knowledge of thousands of species and farmers who incorporate sophisticated understanding of variations in microclimates, soils, wildlife behavior patterns, and rice genetics to . On the other side of the Pacific, thanks to expert testimony from myself and  before the California Fish and Game Commission, Native science informed the  of marine protected areas and led to the appointment of  at every level of the California Natural Resources Agency.

These examples, alongside the increasing recruitment of Indigenous scholars in universities and research institutions, are spurring paradigm shifts in conservation policies. With the help of tribal co-management, Indigenous conservation practices are now being applied across a  of national, state, and county wildlands, including Canyon de Chelly National Monument in Arizona, Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska, Grand Portage National Monument in Minnesota, Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida, and Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. The same input is helping to conserve culturally significant species, such as .

The natural world is best understood through long-term, repeated, intimate contact with ecosystems and their associated experts, a practice that remains in short supply among most scientists. Local communities and Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, have accumulated generations’ worth of scientific data and expertise, much of it overlooked as ; elders die; ; historical documents languish in rarely consulted microfiche files or white papers; and local experts, fed up with being excluded and ignored, boycott agency meetings.

Environmental problems that took generations to become entrenched cannot be resolved by transient researchers or long-distance government staff. Now is the time for all hands on deck, especially the expert hands (and minds) of Native peoples whose lifeways, cultures, and identities are irrevocably intertwined with their ancestral territories. Enrolling local tribal experts as science advisers, partners, and co-managers in addressing biodiversity loss, climate change, legacy pollutants, and other pernicious issues not only makes sense, but is the only way to effectively turn things around.

This story , a digital magazine tackling science controversies and deceptions. It has been published here with permission.

Before coming to the kitchen, I had checked on our sleeping son. Tripping over a dozen Sandra Boynton books, I held up the orange lantern we use as a nightlight and stared at his peaceful face. Like every night, my heart broke open with love for him. And like every night, it broke again imagining him growing up in this world. My entire life as a mother had been under the Trump administration. Bedtime stories of animal babies cozied up against their mothers morphed for me into images of children torn from their parents, amidst a backdrop of rising seas, wildfires, crop failures, and floods. The wild love I felt cut in so many directions—euphoric joy, pounding fear, and, especially during these nightly checks, a fierce drive to protect him at all costs. But what could it look like to protect my child when his world was falling apart?

Yotam and I looked at each other across the kitchen.

“I think we should still do it,” I said.

“Me too,” Yotam said.

I reached for my phone and started typing an email to our money manager, asking him to move forward with our pre-pandemic plan of taking $35,000 out of our investments, the equivalent of my annual part-time salary. Most of the money would go to the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate organization pushing for a Green New Deal.

Leveraging My Privilege

My maternal grandparents were among the generation of Ashkenazi Jews who were included in White privilege after World War II. Thanks to Pa’s personality, a successful business, the GI Bill, and a progressive tax code, Nana and Pa were able to live very comfortably and set up trust funds for their grandchildren. I was raised with this inherited privilege and security, and I learned fiscal responsibility by watching them spend enough to enjoy life, give generously to those in need, save to have a comfortable retirement, and put money away for the family.  

But after Nana and Pa died in 2010, the era of climate change began in earnest, and formed the grim background to systemic racism, growing wealth inequality, and the weakening of democratic institutions. In a nation with a failing social safety net, I wanted to save enough to meet my and my child’s future needs. But I started to consider that keeping all my significant assets tucked away for the future was fiscally irresponsible. What good are retirement savings if we ��Dz�’t have a livable world to retire in?  

Facing a layoff and uncertain income (my trust fund is not big enough to live off of), Yotam and I did not think of the $35,000 as philanthropy but rather as an investment. The dividends we hoped to receive were not in cash, but in a marginally more livable world for ourselves and our child.

As I typed the numbers into the email, 3-5-0-0-0, I flashed back to the year 2000 when, as a high school senior, I won an award for starting a schoolwide recycling system. A nice feature about me and my friends was in the paper, and I clipped the article for my scrapbook (remember those?). But I was terrified. My line of thought went something like this: If I am getting attention for doing something this basic, then no one else is doing anything, and we are even more screwed than I realized.

Enough with the recycling. The entire economic system was hauling us to hell. I spent the next 20 years looking for a way to take action on the ecological crisis that would compel me by coming close to meeting the scale of the problem, something that would scream to everyone I knew that this was an emergency, that it was an all-hands-on-deck turning point in human history. In 2016, when I began to engage in peaceful civil disobedience against new fossil fuel infrastructure, I finally found what I’d been looking for.

The Birth of a Climate Movement, and My Son

Finishing the email, I thought back over the past three years. A difficult pregnancy and post-partum period slowed and eventually paused my climate activism soon after I had found my stride. I’d felt the pain of this most keenly when my son was 10 months old. I was sitting in our blue nursing chair, reading an email from a group called Sunrise Movement inviting me to Washington, D.C., to help occupy Nancy Pelosi’s office and demand that Democratic leaders take climate change seriously by championing a Green New Deal for America. Barely managing my pulpit job and new motherhood on top of an anxiety disorder, I knew I couldn’t get myself to D.C. Instead, I watched from the sidelines as the movement I’d dreamed of being a part of 20 years ago was born without me.

I needed to do something that would match the urgency I felt about the climate crisis. If not direct action, what?

I pressed send, put my phone on the kitchen floor, and took a deeper breath than I had in days. Maybe years. Another group of young parents we knew had recently raised $250,000 for Sunrise by donating their annual retirement contributions and inviting friends and family to join. Inspired by them and the work of Resource Generation, we too would move a significant-for-us amount of money out of our retirement savings and into the potential of a world worth retiring in. And we too would amplify our own action. To date, we’ve raised more than $22,000 for Sunrise from friends and family, with an ultimate goal of matching our $35,000.

In the two years since the sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office, Sunrise Movement has changed the terms not only of the climate movement, but of climate policy debate nationally and internationally. The founders of Sunrise—college students who studied successful social change movements for a year before launching the organization—did not start it out of altruism, or even a love of nature. They started it because they understood that their lives and futures depend on climate action. The years in the nightmare projections sit squarely in their lifetimes, as they do in my son Abraham’s. Sunrise’s strength stems from this existential desperation.

Sunrise uses a combination of strategies no other climate organization has managed: They use mass protest and targeted civil disobedience to capture media and public attention; they center the climate narrative around its direct impact on the lives of human beings; they put young people front and center (all their leadership is under 35); and, crucially, they get heavily involved in electoral politics, where power lies to address the crisis at scale.

Happily, Sunrise’s model of power building is itself growing. Other climate organizations have begun to do broad movement-building coupled with strategic political action, taking the efforts of previous decades to a new level. (As a rabbi, I’m most moved by the recent launch of Dayenu: A Jewish Call To Climate Action.)

Finding a New Climate Calling

Four months after moving the money, I was sitting at my desk after putting Abraham to sleep. On my computer were 16 muted mouths moving as people spoke to voters in Texas’s 10th district about Mike Siegel, one of Sunrise’s endorsed candidates for Congress. Scroll to the right, and there was another page of volunteers. And another. And another. Zoom told me that180 people were in the phone bank, and I could see that almost all of them were considerably younger than me. As we each made calls through an automated dialer, the Zoom chat box was a constant stream of comments. We were to type an asterisk (*) when we spoke with a supporter, and three asterisks (***) when a voter committed to getting friends and family to vote.

Particularly good stories got dropped in the chat, too: “hahaha just spoke with voter’s ex-wife, and she thought I was his girlfriend!”  and “Just made a voting plan with 18yr old who didn’t even know election was happening!” Phone bank trainers responded to each line of chat with encouragement or praise.

After a few weeks of regular phone banking, I’d begun to look forward to my evenings with these people, laughing aloud as I read the chat, furiously typing my own joys and flops any time I had a moment between automated calls, getting a little spark of pride when a trainer typed my name in all-caps after I posted ***. Phone banking with Sunrise was not just an exercise in building electoral power. It was a balm for pandemic loneliness. It was a way to belong.

Sunrise is, in their own words, “training an army of young people”—empowered, skilled, compassionate, politically active, and strategically savvy young people who are ready to respond and organize no matter what the 21^st century brings. In my darkest moments, when I think we have no chance at stopping runaway climate change, I still believe we can succeed in building a humanity that knows how to organize and take care of each other as hell breaks loose. And I know that is worth investing in.

After an hour of phone banking, I walk downstairs to check on Abraham. Tripping over a handful of children’s books about the Jewish fall holidays, I lift the lantern. While the pandemic and climate change show no signs of relenting, my nighttime checks have become less painful. My heart still breaks out of love and fear, but I can breathe more deeply. Where my mind used to flash to climate disasters and refugees, I now imagine Abraham on the verge of taking his first action with Sunrise or taking shelter with us during a hurricane. I imagine him asking me what Papa and I did when there was still time to do something about climate change.

And for the first time since becoming a mother, I have a start to my answer.

But I really ��Dz�’t have a choice anymore. Contemplating, researching, and protesting ecological destruction are part of my life. Although it sounds depressing, it’s not just about avoiding catastrophe. I’m also actively searching for something I know exists: community.

I didn’t grow up with a lot of community. I think most of us ��Dz�’t. We might have a few friends and family members whom we trust, but we rarely feel true “belonging.”

I was 17 when I first encountered real community. That summer, I was hired by the Minnesota Conservation Corps. Our crew of eight people spent the summer sleeping in tents and doing trail work in the backcountry. On our first day, we packed into a 12-passenger van and left our cellphones, our showers, our whole lives, behind.

It was the best summer of my life.

I remember one day in particular. I was on water duty: I had to carry the pots down to the lake, fill them, and bring them back for purifying. It was a boring chore, yet somehow I appreciated that. While I was crouched at the edge of the lake, filling up pots, I realized I was content in a way I’d never been before.

That surprised me. Here I was, cold and wet much of the time, surrounded by the same seven people every day, doing manual labor—in my rational mind, I should have been sick of it all. Instead, I felt peaceful. I belonged here; I believed in the work I was doing. My life was exactly enough.

The summer eventually ended, and transitioning back to city life was harder than I imagined. Everything felt wrong. Noise poured from cars, machines, and generators. The lights were too bright, the air smelled like smoke, and the airtight buildings made me feel trapped. This couldn’t be the way I was designed to live.

The real shock, however, was the materialism that I was grasping for the first time. For the last several weeks, I had lived out of a backpack. Now, I was surrounded by more possessions than I could keep track of, let alone use.

Everyone I knew, including myself, was stuck in this hamster wheel of accumulating wealth.

It hit home one day when my sibling made an off-hand complaint that “our family is too poor.” I ��Dz�’t remember what it was that we couldn’t afford at the time, but that comment played over and over in my head.

My family �ɲ�����’t poor. In fact, no one I knew was poor. We each slept in our own bed. We had a microwave that cooked our food instantly. We had a car that could travel a mile in two minutes. Whatever poverty was, this �ɲ�����’t it. We had so much stuff.

That experience of culture shock changed my understanding of environmentalism. Once I had seen how my life was saturated with materialism, I couldn’t unsee it. Everyone I knew, including myself, was stuck in this hamster wheel of accumulating wealth. Our greatest fear was finding ourselves without something we thought we needed. Nothing was meaningful in this quest to consume…and our consumption was destroying the planet.

I was disturbed, yet I felt I had an answer: I had experienced a real community. When I was working with my crew in the backcountry, our eight lives merged in a single purpose. It didn’t matter whether we liked each other, or if we had anything in common; we needed each other to survive. The difference between “work” and “life” became insignificant. Even the land was part of our community; we were a piece of a vast ecosystem. The world gave us a place to live, and we, in turn, spent our days laboring to conserve it.

I never felt like I quite fit back in to society after that summer. There was too much that didn’t make sense to me anymore. Without a doubt, I knew: we need to change so much more than our economy. We need a revolution in our concept of community.

The strength of our communities make me believe we will win this fight.

If we cannot take personal responsibility for our own communities, what hope is there to solve massive social issues that affect strangers across the globe? And in our consumer society, where we strive for wealth to make us “independent” and “invulnerable,” what hope is there that any of us could find such a community?

Change takes its first wobbly footsteps within intimate, value-driven communities. If we want to build a better world, we must become dependent on such communities, in which we take care of each other, in which we fight together for the things that matter, in which we rise and fall together.

On the days when I feel too drained to keep fighting, when I want to forget it all and turn off the news, this dream of community brings me back to the cause over and over again. The climate crisis will eventually force us to change our lifestyles, no doubt in a painful way. Yet a return to interwoven communities might be the greatest gift we could receive from this calamity. As we speak out against corrupt politicians and lawless corporations, my generation is discovering that neither far-off governments nor the invisible hand of capitalism will protect us. The future lies in the hands of real communities that will do whatever it takes to ensure a livable future.

Today’s environmental movement is a laboratory for community. Through this movement, we are learning how people can live democratically, with a common purpose, and without leaving anyone behind. We make plenty of mistakes, but something is working. When I am campaigning with other climate activists, I find the type of community that I haven’t experienced since that summer in the woods. We trust each other. There’s no defensiveness or boasting. There is only honest conversation about what really matters. There are no hierarchies, just an attempt to find how everyone’s skills can contribute to the cause. We understand the pain of witnessing our world dying, and we know how much it means for someone to stand next to you and say, “it hurts me, too.”

Although these communities are built from unfortunate necessity, we have discovered that they are beautiful in a way few of us have experienced before.

The strength of our communities make me believe we will win this fight.

The things that our great-grandparents believed in—the free market, personal property, complete individual liberty—have failed to fulfill us. But we have seen that changing the world does fulfill us.

The world may be crumbling, but I am part of a generation—a community—that gets to tackle that problem. We get to take what we’ve been given, and design it in a completely new way. When our fight for the future is finally over, our communities will still be here. It will be a beautiful place to start.

This article was originally published on . It has been published here with permission.

“Climate change, like the loss of parents, necessitates an experience of grieving.”

“I wanted to explore our capacity to experience personal loss—the loss of family, the loss of lovers, the loss of a local landscape, the loss of certainty in the weather—to grieve profoundly while simultaneously not giving in,” Jackson says.

In the opening pages of While Glaciers Slept, Jackson explains that both her parents died of cancer within two years of one another while she was in her twenties. Her experiences of loss, and the despair that followed, is the central current of her book.

“Climate change, like the loss of parents, necessitates an experience of grieving,” the 32-year-old author says. “That also includes picking up the pieces and moving forward into futures that are shapeable and malleable and hinged upon millions of individual imaginations.”

Jackson expertly pairs her loss, grief, and anger with the scientific exploration of our Earth and solar system. When she opens a chapter with learning of her father’s cancer for the first time, readers end up in a discussion about the history of wind power as a human energy source (it starts in seventh century Afghanistan, for the record).

Bill McKibben, who wrote the introduction to While Glaciers Slept, draws on the duality of Jackson’s book by asking if our big human brain “has come attached to a big enough heart to get us out of the trouble we’re in.” Jackson herself hopes blurring the distinction between the heart and the brain will help humans make it through this period.

“My heart tends to filter my mind.”

The jacket of Jackson’s book describes her as an adventurer, and the word seems to fit her well. As a trip leader with the National Geographic Student Expeditions, Jackson takes students on field assignments to study different cultures and the diversity of the natural world. Currently, she’s heading to Iceland, and then Alaska, on a tour of lectures about climate change. Despite her busy schedule, Jackson has managed to find the time to also become a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of Oregon. Once her lecture tour is done, she will head back to Iceland for nine months of doctoral research on the effects of glacial loss on the Icelandic people.

In the midst of her adventuring, I chatted with Jackson over email about her book, the vulnerability of writing about loss, and how she remains hopeful when confronted by the challenge of climate change.

This interview has been lightly edited.

Christopher Zumski Finke: You could have written one book about climate change, and another one about how you’ve coped with the death of your parents. Instead, you combined them into a single book. Why?

M Jackson: After my mother died, I was numb, in shock, and having a difficult time engaging with the world. In many ways, I just turned off. It was too much to handle. But while my heart was in pieces and tucked down in the darkest basement, my mind kept telling me not to stay in that grief-stricken landscape for too long—or I might not come back. So I started writing—because, for me, writing makes me feel like I am participating in the world. I started writing about my mother.

But then my father died, and there I was, numb and in shock again. And my heart was not coming out of that dark basement. Eventually, when my mind piped up and started chatting, it drew analogies between what I was experiencing—the loss of my parents—and what I was researching—climate change. The language for both is quite similar. This is what I focused on.

Zumski Finke: Your book explores the loss you felt, and pairs it with climate change, energy solutions, and scientific discovery. Big heart and big brain, as Bill McKibben puts it in your book’s intro. Are you a heart or head person?

Jackson: I am both a big heart and a big brain person, but I think my heart tends to filter my mind.

Zumski Finke: How does that dynamic influence your thinking about climate change?

Jackson: I think we can create the very best science out there about the problems of climate change, yet if we aren’t filtering that science through our hearts, there remains—as we see today—a disengagement. People intellectually understand climate change; we know “the science” of it. But now, vitally, we need more heart.

Zumski Finke: I want to ask about the section of your book when you’re brought into close contact with the woman driving the car that crashed into your mother and led to the amputation of her leg. In those pages you explore your impulse for violence, and your thoughts wander into cold, alien planets hidden in the cosmos. It’s a beautiful piece of writing. What is it like writing, and sharing, such personal pieces of your experience?

Jackson: Climatic changes are experienced first through the human condition. We are living in this changing world together and subsequently are in many ways responsible to one another for our actions. That’s a really big thing. How do we even start that move forward in a productive manner? If anything, climate change has shined a really bright light on the rampant inequities of the human condition on this planet. Why are we all not angry?

For me, I think that authentically sharing our personal experiences—the good and the bad and everything in the middle—is an excellent place to start, to move forward into our shared future. In the book, I tried to share my experience as I lived it. And there are times when I go back through the pages and certain things catch me. This was a hard book to write, and it makes me vulnerable in a way to the world. But then, we have to be vulnerable. Climate change is made up of millions people, human beings with human lives. My story is your story, and our story.

Zumski Finke: Your book has garnered attention from climate change deniers and trolls. That started even before it was released. How are you handling that?

Jackson: Today, I’m largely ignoring them. I wasn’t at first, and I found the negative attention—let’s call it what it is: hate mail—incredibly hurtful. But that was in the beginning. The thing is, while my heart goes out to the people who think sending bullying, sexualized, and hateful letters is somehow helpful, I do not have time for them.

Climatic change is increasing on our shared planet. I’m interested in moving forward and working on collective and creative methods for living with existing climatic changes and ameliorating further impacts.

Zumski Finke: Are you optimistic about the future of combating climate change?

Jackson: I am not necessarily optimistic about combating climate change—I’m not sure that is the most helpful way to think about the changes that are and will be happening. I am optimistic about slowing and lessening our global greenhouse gas emissions, learning to live with present day climatic changes, and shaping our future and our society’s place within that future.

Climate change is not an enemy to be vanquished; it is a phenomenon deeply tied to our daily lived existence. It is part of the conversation our mixed up, beautiful, contrary, and imaginative people must have about who we are as a people and where we want to go. I am optimistic about peoples’ better selves, and I think right now is an optimistic, hopeful time where we can be bold together.

Zumski Finke: That’s a nicely described vision for climate optimism. How do you manage to stay that way?

Jackson: For me, there isn’t another option. I don’t find terrifying messages of apocalyptic disaster all that helpful, nor the messages about every single thing that wasn’t done perfectly right.

There is no fabled “solution” for climate change. Rather, there are a million and more creative ways to engage at multiple scales across the planet. What works in one place might not translate to another, or up or down a scale of governance. What I have seen are hundreds of thousands of people quietly getting things rolling.

And so each morning, I get out of bed and get excited for the creative things I’ll see that day—the wows and the unthinkables and the quiet smiles—and sometimes, frankly, I go to bed feeling a little down. But each day is different, and each morning is a hopeful one.

I’ve been to that dark place with little hope. That place doesn’t help. My compass can’t just spin and spin on darkness. My compass spins on hope, and points toward an exciting future.

“Lying, destructive, polluting haters should not be allowed to sit at the table while the grown ups are trying to solve problems like the climate crisis.”

It won’t be the first time in the negotiations that big oil has made its voice heard. At the 2013 U.N. climate conference in Warsaw, roamed the halls. And three years earlier, when the conference was in Cancun, representatives from Royal Dutch Shell as a part of the official Nigerian delegation.

Many observers believe the presence of these industries at the talks has helped to stall meaningful action.

“As long as industries like big oil and big coal, whose profits depend on the failure of the talks, are calling the shots,” said Kelle Louaillier, executive director of the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International, “these talks are going nowhere.”

But what if these industries weren’t allowed to attend?

You might call it “The Firewall Strategy”: a plan to break the gridlock in climate negotiations by excluding polluters. Louaillier’s organization began pursuing this strategy with an to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, co-signed by 78 organizations. The letter calls on him to “protect climate policy-making from the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry,” and to look to specific language in an earlier treaty about tobacco as an example.

The group ratcheted up the pressure on September 16 with a new , and they’ll be discussing the idea with many other NGOs this week, including some that have their finger on the pulse of the U.N.’s climate negotiations—officially known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. Through these discussions, Corporate Accountability International aims to build support for a firewall to safeguard policymaking from energy corporations.

Kicking the polluters out of the negotiations may sound like wishful thinking. But there is a precedent: the global effort to regulate the tobacco industry, which led to one of the most widely adopted treaties in the history of the United Nations.

Climate activists believe the Goliath of big oil can be felled.

That treaty is called the ,” which went into effect in 2005. It seeks to protect public health from what it calls a “tobacco epidemic,” and its provisions are legally binding in the 178 countries that ratified it (along with the European Union). The United States signed the tobacco treaty, but has yet to ratify it—and a treaty is only binding once it has been ratified.

The tobacco treaty contains articles prohibiting sales to minors, banning tobacco advertising, and requiring that packaging contain warning labels.

But it also locks big tobacco out of the room when it comes to drafting and influencing health policy. A single sentence in Article 5.3 insists that parties to the treaty “protect” policymaking on health issues from those with “commercial and vested interests of the tobacco industry.”

To clarify what this means in practice, in 2008 the treaty’s ratifiers unanimously adopted a set of for implementation. The guidelines point out that there are “irreconcilable conflicts” between the interests of the tobacco companies and public health. To avoid these conflicts, the guidelines prohibit tobacco industry employees from serving as delegates, ban policymakers from accepting gifts from tobacco companies, and insist that interactions between policymakers and the tobacco industry be transparent to the public.

These guidelines have allowed officials to create strong laws regulating tobacco in countries from the to , despite industry opposition. And when the European Union tried to appoint a lawyer who previously represented tobacco giant Phillip Morris to the ethics committee that oversees conflicts of interest, NGOs pointed to Article 5.3 in a and got him removed from the committee.

Could lawyers connected to Exxon Mobil be excluded from climate summits in the same way? Satu Hassi, a member of the European Parliament from Finland’s Green Party, believes so—and commissioned a by advocacy group Corporate Europe Observatory to outline the lessons and how to apply them.

Others in the climate movement have recognized the potential of the strategy. 350.org sees the firewall strategy as part of a wider array of tactics.

“Strategies like divestment, or banning industry from a sensitive treaty-making processes … are both important and effective,” Jamie Henn, communications director of 350.org, told YES.

Drew Hudson, executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Action, said he sees the work of advocating a “firewall strategy” as important because “lying, destructive, polluting haters should not be allowed to sit at the table while the grown ups are trying to solve problems like the climate crisis.”

You might call it “The Firewall Strategy”: a plan to break the gridlock in climate negotiations by excluding polluters.

But barriers remain: Nearly 17 years after the Kyoto protocol was signed, the international community is still no closer to a new climate treaty. And many climate negotiators still see the energy industry as an acceptable partner.

Supporters of a firewall strategy also acknowledge there are differences between big tobacco and big oil—specifically, the fact that big oil is even bigger than big tobacco ever was.

“[W]e should be honest about the power of our opposition,” Hudson told YES. “We’re talking about excluding the richest, most politically powerful set of corporations in history.”

But Corporate Accountability International and its partners are undeterred: “Twenty years ago, people thought big tobacco was too powerful and the political will didn’t exist to exclude it from the treaty negotiations,” Louaillier said. Yet they won anyway though organizing, a “perfect storm of global grassroots support,” and political support from the countries suffering the most from the tobacco epidemic.

To further their cause, Corporate Accountability International has launched a calling on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres to “keep big energy out of these historic talks and create meaningful global policies free from corporate influence.”

Big oil may be an even mightier foe than the tobacco industry was in the face of regulation. But given how this new strategy works together with existing efforts to stigmatize the oil and gas industry, from a divestment approach to a treaty-based one, climate activists believe the Goliath of big oil can be felled.

Even though not everyone in the crowd of around 30 people knew Spanish, the message transcended language: protect the most vulnerable from the effects of climate change.

“We want to make sure that our leaders are hearing us.”

After the June 18 release of “Laudato Si,” Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment and humanity’s responsibility to protect it, young Catholics decided to host a rally to spread awareness of climate change’s effect on the poor, particularly Latinos in Southern California. Some Catholics are hopeful that events like this, inspired by the encyclical, will spread and lead to a new emphasis on climate action within the faith.

Members of the youth group Pastoral Juvenil of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles gathered in front of St. Basil on the morning of June 27 to share what was written in the encyclical and encourage onlookers to participate.

“When I started working on the issue of environmental protection at Holy Family Church in South Pasadena, it did not stir the emotions as it does now,” says Allis Druffel, who spoke at the rally. “It is the hope of my colleagues and myself that Los Angeles Catholic churches and households will become real leaders in what Pope Francis is calling for in ‘Laudato Si’—to tackle the injustices of poverty, poor health, and poor economic situations while caring for all of creation, both of which go hand in hand.”

Juana Torres, a 33-year-old volunteer at Pastoral Juvenil and one of the organizers of the rally, spent much of the day passing out petitions with demands she hopes can be addressed at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at the end of the year. For example, the petition called for nations to lower their carbon emissions and provide funding to protect people vulnerable to climate-related disaster such as storms, droughts, and floods. Every person at the rally committed to gathering at least 20 signatures.

“We want to make sure that our leaders are hearing us,” says Torres, who believes that climate change is near and dear to the hearts of many young Hispanics.

“A lot of us come from immigrant families, and a lot of families had to migrate in the first place because of the effect climate change has had in poor communities and keeping people in a cycle of poverty,” she said, referring to the impact climate change has had on farms and urban areas of Latin America.

St. Basil is not the only Catholic church in southern Los Angeles taking the Pope’s encyclical seriously. About 15 miles south, St. Emydius Roman Catholic Church stands around the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Cesar Chavez Middle School—names associated with civil and minority rights.

But within a 5-mile radius of the church, dozens of small factories contribute to making this part of Los Angeles home to some of the most polluted neighborhoods in the country.

This worries Father Juan Ochoa, a priest at St. Emydius, who says the pollutants in the area can harm children and pregnant women. It’s for that reason that Ochoa plans to share Pope Francis’ “Laudato Si” with his parish as soon as he can.

“Now that the document has been written, we have to put it into practice,” says Ochoa. “We have to discuss this as a parish and then change can take place.”

“I think our problem as priests is we haven’t discussed it with our parish.”

The Pope’s encyclical has reignited several political debates: science versus religion, left versus right, climate change doubters versus believers. It enters a political context where international negotiations on climate change seem to be unable to arrive at a binding agreement. It’s possible that the Pope’s encyclical will push some Catholics to demand greater action, like the members of Pastoral Juvenil. But at St. Emydius, where around 20,000 families are registered, that discussion hasn’t yet taken place.

Ochoa says the encyclical is not a political document and is worried that many in his parish think it is.

“Most people, what they hear is just what’s in the news, and what’s being reported in the media is political,” he says. “The Pope isn’t making a political statement and he isn’t getting involved in American politics. This encyclical was addressed to the entire world.”

According to a recent , 71 percent of U.S. Catholics believe the Earth is warming, but only 47 percent believe it is a result of human activity.

The Pope’s encyclical contradicts that belief directly, claiming that humanity’s greed and violence has led to pollution and altered the climate.

“The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life,” Pope Francis writes.

A moment of hope

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, southern Los Angeles has some of the highest levels of pollutants in the country. Since these areas are largely home to black and Latino people, the burden of this pollution tends to be carried by minority groups.

“I hope and pray that Catholics will take a look at the encyclical.”

And it’s not just Southern California where the pollution that troubles Pope Francis disproportionately affects communities of color: in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Miami, Phoenix, Atlanta, and many other cities.

These environmental problems have many health consequences and lead to asthma, cancers, and learning disabilities, according to Patricia Juarez, an anthropology professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Juarez teaches a course on environmental justice in minority communities.

“The development issues that result from pollutants often keep people in a cycle of poverty, keep them out of school or keep them isolated,” she says.

Juarez is optimistic that the Pope’s encyclical will encourage climate change doubters to look for more information, and applauds the Vatican for leading the effort.

Patrick Carolan, co-founder of the Global Catholic Climate Movement, an international coalition of Catholic organizations, agrees. “I hope and pray that Catholics will take a look at the encyclical and read it with an open mind and put aside any biases,” he says.

Ochoa at St. Emydius says he is praying for the same thing. He hopes that his parish can become more engaged in the discussion about climate change and wants to discuss a step-by-step plan at the next pastoral meeting, which the church will hold in July.

“I think our problem as priests is we haven’t discussed it with our parish,” he says. “It starts with us.”

But long before Pope Francis’ encyclical was released, Torres was already working with Pastoral Juvenil to engage young Latinos in the climate justice movement. She teaches a class on faith and ecology and often leads hikes where people pray in nature, for nature.

“For us, there’s no debate,” she says. “Pope Francis’ encyclical only validates the work we’ve been doing.”

Carolan thinks hope for the climate justice movement can be found in the newer generations.

“I think Pope Francis has already engaged younger people,” he says. “He’s helped a lot of young people connect with their spirituality, and sustainability is just one more way for young people to connect with their faith.”

Along the Pipeline can be seen as an attempt to bring  excluded voices back into the debate.

Over the course of several months, van Waarden drove all 2,800 miles of the proposed pipeline route across Canada, from Hardisty, Alberta, to the eastern terminus at St. John, New Brunswick. Using an old 4×5 film camera from the early ’70s—the kind where you put a cloth over your head—he made portraits of the people he met on the way, and recorded their words. The result was , a collective portrait of more than 70 indigenous people, farmers, fishermen, artists, and business owners. He wanted to know how they felt about the pipeline, the environment, and Canada’s economic future. He spent time in their homes, camped in their backyards, cooked with them in their kitchens.