WINTER WAS COMING IN NEW YORK WHEN WE GOT THE NEWS about Hurricane Sandy. The storm, as it moved north, had been caught up in an unusual weather pattern; in the words of one Weather Channel hurricane expert, it was becoming “a monstrous hybrid vortex. A combination of a hurricane and a nor’easter.” Somewhere along the line, it was dubbed “Superstorm Sandy.” We didn’t know how bad it would be, only that we’d never seen anything like it.1
It was the end of October 2012, just after the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, and later than usual for hurricanes, but climate scientists had warned that warmer waters and a higher sea level had put New York City and its environs at risk of record storm surges. I stocked up on nonperishable goods; a friend of mine who lived out in Coney Island came to stay with me at my Crown Heights apartment, well away from the flood zone. That night, we sat and watched TV and checked Twitter for updates. That was where we saw the video of the water rushing into the subways.2
That was also where I saw the first hints of something else happening. People I followed from the Occupy days were starting to talk to each other about what they could do to help. They had come together in response to the financial crisis; now they were preparing to deal with a very different crisis.
Julieta Salgado, an organizer with the Occupy-related Free University, said it began with a group text: “Let’s get on our bikes and go see what we can do.” Someone suggested heading to the Red Hook Initiative, a community center in the waterfront Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook. Salgado and Emma Francis walked from their Bedford-Stuyvesant home. From there, they decided to knock on doors and collect donations.
In Carroll Gardens, a wealthy neighborhood nearby but outside of the flood zone, the group went door to door, asking for anything people could give—blankets, candles, food. “No one turned us down,” Salgado said. The next day, when she returned to the Red Hook Initiative, she saw people who’d given her supplies the night before: they had come to help.
People in the gentrified parts of Brooklyn were happy to donate, but nonetheless, Salgado said, it was already obvious that the storm had not hit everyone equally. Red Hook was a long walk from the nearest subway, and although it had become desirable real estate for reasonably well-off, artsy types, it was also the site of high-rise public housing. Without power, and with stores in their neighborhoods closed, it was the people who were already poor who were left struggling up and down stairs in search of help. A few days later, I joined up with two friends and walked from Crown Heights to Red Hook. I’d already heard reports that the Red Cross was conspicuously absent in the storm-ravaged areas, and that community groups and Occupy activists had stepped in to fill the vacant space. The hashtag #OccupySandy had spread across Twitter; the old networks were moving.
At the Red Hook Initiative, we found a well-oiled volunteer machine distributing food, diapers, clothing, blankets, and other needed items to lines of people. It was days after the hurricane had hit, and people told us that they still had no power. Familiar faces from Occupy eventually directed us to another Occupy Sandy hub further south, because there were so many volunteers in Red Hook that they didn’t know what to do with us. In Sunset Park, at St. Jacobi Church, the division of labor that had created the Kitchen and Comfort and Medic stations in Zuccotti Park was at work once again as occupiers cooked hot meals and packed donations into bags to be loaded into cars headed for Coney Island or the Rockaway Peninsula.
“It’s amazing how organized we are,” said Michael Premo, one of the Occupy organizers in Sunset Park. Added Salgado, “The joke is on [Mayor] Bloomberg. The people you spent $60 million trying to destroy, we’re the first people on the ground.”
The next day, I joined organizer Desean Burrus from New York Communities for Change as he canvassed in the Rockaways to see what people needed. “You from FEMA?” people asked us over and over again, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had yet to be spotted. We saw one Red Cross truck, but quite a few police cars. “All I see is cops, and they’re still harassing us,” said Kenyatta Hutchinson, who stood by the floodline on his neighbor’s house, which was above his head. The police didn’t respond to requests for help, he said, but he was afraid to take his things out of his house, worried he’d be accused of looting. The people in this working-class, mostly black neighborhood were used to being left behind and overpoliced, but after the storm had wiped out their homes, the presence of security before aid was heaping insult on very real injury.
“This whole system is built around punishment and prevention of abuse instead of providing service,” said Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, an emergency-room nurse and at the time vice president of the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA). After spending a few days volunteering in the Rockaways, she had quickly realized that Occupy Sandy was “the organization that was willing to do whatever was needed.” She had tried to work with the Red Cross, with FEMA, or the New York Department of Health, but there was so much bureaucracy that nothing was getting done. “There was no public health infrastructure preparation at all,” she said.
It was a story I heard over and over again, even though the big organizations were raking in the donations. The Red Cross eventually raised over $300 million, but its spokespeople argued that disclosing how that money was spent was a “trade secret.” Doctors Without Borders workers were there, running their first US relief operation in forty years; they benefited enormously from activists and organizers connecting them to local groups. Nastaran Mohit, a petite labor organizer with a commanding presence, was one of the Occupy veterans who headed to the Rockaways. Her father had been a doctor and her mother a psychiatric nurse, so when she arrived at the Rockaways hub, health care was on her mind. She connected Doctors Without Borders to the Rockaway Youth Task Force, who took the doctors into the high-rise public housing buildings that were still without power. There, they were able to offer help to anyone with health issues.3
Mohit put out a call for medical and mental health professionals and was overwhelmed by the response. Doctors Without Borders couldn’t manage all the volunteers, so Mohit began to search for a medical clinic that might be able to serve as a hub for medical aid. There was almost nothing open. She wound up at You Are Never Alone (YANA), a new community space, and with the help of YANA’s founder, Sal Lopizzo, created a clinic. “Every day I was hoping that some amazing doctor was going to walk in and say, ‘I’ve done this before, I’ll take this over,’ or FEMA would come in,” she said. “Then we found out FEMA was referring people at their tents to YANA medical clinic for medical attention, and we had St. John’s [Episcopal] Hospital referring people to YANA medical clinic for medical care, and I’m like, ‘I’m a labor organizer! This isn’t supposed to be happening!’”
Mohit found herself juggling patient files, trying to get prescriptions filled, and passing patients from volunteer to volunteer. “I would say every single day, ‘If this is not the strongest case for a universal health-care system I don’t know what is,’” she said. “You already have a strained system and now we’re in a disaster and these basic prescriptions that you could get in any other country, you cannot access in the richest city in the richest country in the world.”
When she wasn’t providing direct care, Sheridan-Gonzalez was busy coordinating with other activist groups, both to provide aid and to pressure the city to do better. “It was very unclear to us what the hell people were doing,” she said. “What we found, aside from the fact that residents were totally devastated—we also found that most of them weren’t getting good health care anyway. With flashlights and a stethoscope we provided more information and care to people than they had probably ever gotten.”
Pat Kane, also a NYSNA officer, had spent the hurricane at work at Staten Island University Hospital. Once she was able to leave the hospital, she and some of her NYSNA colleagues took the union’s RV down to Miller Field on Staten Island, where FEMA and the Red Cross were by then set up. “Every day,” she told me, “we’d talk to the FEMA ambulances that were being deployed to Staten Island. Their orders were to stand by at Miller Field, and every day we would more or less convince those ambulance drivers to take us out into the community. We found everything from people that were still stuck on the second floor of their homes to families living in cars to ten people living in one room with no food and no water.” Eventually, the mayor’s office gave them official permission, she said, for what they were already doing.
The mayor attended a rosy opening ceremony for the New York Stock Exchange just two days after the storm. Although the financial district had also flooded and lost power, big banks like Goldman Sachs had independent generators powering their buildings and remained open, beacons of light in the dark. The signal was clear—the important parts of the city were functioning, the financial capital was back in action, despite the rescue efforts still underway, led mostly by volunteers, in the outer boroughs. “There’s this disconnect between how [the wealthy] live and how regular people live,” Mohit said. Residents, she explained, “know what’s happening to them, they know that people of color and immigrant communities always come last, poor folks always come last, and the same applies for disaster response.”
The city’s push to move away from the acute response to the recovery, closing down Miller Field and other aid hubs, only exacerbated frustrations. The Occupy organizers had already been motivated to battle inequality, and the NYSNA nurses were used to seeing the results of poverty and the disparities in health-care access. But what they were seeing after Sandy was on another level: “It’s scary when you’re in the middle of the disaster, you see what the conditions are, and then you see FEMA saying return to normal, we’re pulling out, all services have been restored,” Kane said. “Where?” The people on Staten Island, she said, were hearing the stories about the money that had been raised by the big agencies and wondered why it wasn’t going to them.
The nurses pulled together a rally on the steps of City Hall when their demands for increased state and federal investment in disaster relief and care were not met, and they managed to get some response from the administration. But the whole situation exposed deeper political problems. Sheridan-Gonzalez likened it to being at a pool, and seeing a drowning person. If the lifeguard isn’t jumping in, you’re going to jump in and save them; but eventually, if the lifeguard continues to ignore drowning people, what do you do? She felt torn between wanting to do the hands-on volunteer work—which, in a way, made it easy for the city to wash its hands of the job—and wanting to do the political organizing to demand that the city, state, and federal government do their jobs. For much of the time, the political demands came second to the volunteer work, and the mayor continued to pretend everything was fine.
“I think we should applaud ourselves at Occupy Sandy that we’ve done such a great job, but this is not our job,” Mohit said. When some Occupy organizers began using the Twitter hashtag #WeGotThis, she and others jumped to say, no, we don’t and we shouldn’t. The ongoing attempts to privatize what’s left of the social safety net rely on the argument that the private sector can do better than the government. When government services are sliced back, as they often were in the name of austerity after the financial crisis pressed state budgets, they fail when they are needed, which provides another excuse to cut them further. But as inevitably happens after a disaster, the private donations eventually dry up (Occupy Sandy raised and spent or disbursed over $1 million, most of which came in the month after the storm), and the volunteers have to return to their day jobs. Without a state response, people are left stranded with nothing. The second-costliest hurricane in US history, Sandy had wiped out 305,000 units of housing—homes or apartments—in New York state alone. Over a year after the storm, more than 30,000 people remained displaced. The New York Times calculated in 2013 that less than half the people who applied for government aid after the storm received it, meaning that many people were left on their own to rebuild, a hard enough task when you have resources, but an impossible one for families surviving paycheck to paycheck. Without long-term funding and support, the occupiers could not substitute for a functional federal disaster response, though they managed, with a tiny fraction of the Red Cross’s budget, to do better immediate relief than the major nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).4
The hurricane and the movement around it changed New York politics. Mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio, a centrist Democrat with ties to the Clintons, picked up the demands of Occupy, the low-wage workers’ movement, and the movement against stop-and-frisk to make inequality central to his campaign, outflanking Bloomberg’s chosen successor. He also took aim at Bloomberg’s response to the disaster and joined the NYSNA nurses in protesting hospital closures in the Rockaways and near Red Hook. After he won the 2013 election, however, those fights faded to the background. The hospitals closed anyway, and the rebuilding plan still allowed for gentrification of formerly working-class neighborhoods. Most occupiers avoided electoral politics, but community groups—and eventually NYSNA—had endorsed de Blasio and then were caught between wanting to keep an ally and wanting to hold him to his campaign promises.
Mohit was frustrated by the struggles of the movement to agitate for change with a new, supposedly friendlier administration. Organizations were overstretched, trying to meet the next crisis, and deal with the next closing hospital, the next foreclosure, the next budget cut. “We’re all struggling to serve our communities, and on top of that what time are we carving out to actually address these massive structural issues?” she said. “If we don’t learn lessons from these disasters, they’re going to continue to happen. As climate change blazes on forward, the disasters are going to be far greater and more catastrophic, and we still will not have a structure in place that actually meets the needs of these people.”
Occupy organizers believed in mutual aid rather than charity—in acting in solidarity with the community members, making decisions collaboratively, getting help as they gave it. “There was certainly a struggle within Occupy Sandy about the differences between charity and organizing social justice work,” said Occupy organizer Andy Smith. “Where are our resources most useful: in really deep community organizing, or to be doled out one by one?” Despite these intentions, it was hard to demand that people who were traumatized participate in anything they didn’t feel inclined to participate in. In the end, Smith conceded, “Occupy Sandy did a whole bunch of charity. Which is fine.”
Existing community groups and occupiers with organizing backgrounds, though, were able to do some work moving from aid to action. New York Communities for Change, Make the Road New York, and Voices of Community Activists and Leaders of New York (VOCAL-NY) developed deeper bases. They began to bring climate change into their political analysis. “Now is the time to marry climate and economic justice,” said Jeremy Saunders, lead organizer at VOCAL-NY. “Poor people across the world unfortunately have become aware that this is life and death for them.” Though it is difficult to say to what degree climate change causes any one storm, what is not in dispute is that as the oceans warm and temperatures change, there will be more “natural” disasters.
“This is the time for poor and working people and the organizations and unions that represent them to say, we want to rebuild, but we want to rebuild in a way that starts to address the long-term implications of what’s driving these storms,” Saunders said.
Yotam Marom had been considering how to move forward after Occupy Wall Street when Sandy hit and wiped out his own New Jersey apartment. When he was able to leave, he began to do political trainings to help volunteers understand the communities they would be walking into and to give the people in the hardest-hit communities some answers for why the system was failing them. Occupy Wall Street had been in the center of the richest part of New York City, but Sandy brought the organizers to the communities that had already experienced the worst of capitalism’s crises—unemployment, foreclosure, homelessness, incarceration, and untreated illness. Political organizing in that space took on a different tenor.
“An organized community is a resilient community,” Andy Smith said. “An organized community responds to disasters of all types. Organizing is where folks in the community learn how to take actionable steps against climate change, which is an incredibly complex undertaking.” In the Rockaways, that organizing became Rockaway Wildfire, a group that turned its attention to challenging the gentrification of storm-damaged neighborhoods, where developers were swooping in to build luxury condos on storm-destroyed beachfront property. And Marom began to work on building a broader movement infrastructure.
To Nastaran Mohit, Sandy felt like an inflection point, a moment that could open the door to big changes. “I think for so many of us who are trying to build a more just world, when we say another world is possible, there were so many glimmers in this relief process that gave us a glimpse into what this world could look like. What if we did have a community clinic, what if we did have a system of mutual aid where we’re taking care of one another, not based on profit?”
The disaster helped the NYSNA nurses see their union as a force for social change beyond the bargaining table, Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez said. It allowed them to link workplace struggles like the cutback on training and disaster preparedness on the job—anything, she said, that was considered “nonproductive time,” that doesn’t make money—to the failure of the health-care system and the political system to save lives and serve people after the storm. They made the connection between the pressure to work more and harder for lower wages and the limited amount of time people had to volunteer, and they watched as owners of small businesses began to reopen, struggling to sell products in a devastated community. “You have to start taking a look at the bigger picture, because how do you make sense of that? How do you deal with that contradiction of a little mom-and-pop business that survived by selling food in their little deli, and then a block away there’s a soup kitchen providing food?” Sheridan-Gonzalez said. “This disaster has really forced people to come face to face with looking at this contradiction. It created so many questions in people’s minds about how things should be. Most people don’t think about the kind of society they want to have.”
I BEGAN THIS BOOK WITH THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS, BUT IN TRUTH, there was more than one cataclysm that kicked off the years of unrest that we have seen recently. I could also have begun in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina breached New Orleans’s levees and permanently altered one of the world’s most remarkable cities. Katrina, like Sandy, was a “natural” disaster made many times worse by the failure of human systems, and it opened the eyes of many to the harshest realities of racial and economic inequality. The people who were displaced and homeless, the thousands who were trapped without food or water in the Superdome, or waiting for help on the roofs of houses, were mostly black, and mostly poor. Many who evacuated still have not returned to their city.
New Orleans post-Katrina was where Naomi Klein formulated her famous theory of disaster capitalism. It was where we first learned of private security firm Blackwater, which had guards patrolling the streets. It was where the public schools were shuttered and replaced with privately run charters, and where 7,000 teachers—the majority of them black women—were fired. Housing projects that were structurally sound were bulldozed to make way for new developments of mixed-income housing, their former residents pushed out of the center of a city where many don’t own cars (one of the reasons the storm was so deadly in the first place). Elections were held just three months after Katrina, with 80 percent of the city’s residents still displaced. The areas hit worst by the storm, the Lower Ninth Ward in particular, were the city’s poorest, their residents almost all black. When I was an undergraduate in New Orleans in 1998, I heard the rumor that the city had rigged the levees to fail, in case of a storm, in the commercially unimportant parts of the city, the poor black neighborhoods, to save the French Quarter. Untrue, of course, but shaded with the truth of the way the disaster relief and recovery would go.5
Those neighborhoods were also where former Black Panther Malik Rahim and a small group of volunteers from the community created the Common Ground Collective. Inspired by the mutual aid programs—free breakfast, free clothing—of the Black Panthers, of which Rahim had been a member, Common Ground was built on an ethic of “solidarity, not charity,” the same ethic that inspired many Sandy organizers. The state failure in New Orleans was obvious to observers from around the world, and Common Ground was certainly unable to fill in all the gaps—Rahim would be the first to note that the city was still suffering more than ten years later. But their little collective survived even attempts to infiltrate the organization by the FBI, which was concerned about its political activities. As they had with the Black Panthers, officials considered political organizing alongside direct aid a threat.6
Disasters can sweep away the myths under which we live to display the kindness and solidarity that people are willing to show to complete strangers. They can also reveal the truth of who is seen to matter and who is not, in all its ugliness. The fossil-fuel industry, in particular, has a long history of disasters that have showcased the horrors of extraction to the people who don’t live them every day. The people most affected by the hazards of coal, gas, and oil production are usually those already left behind or broken by the daily crises of an unequal political and economic system.7
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast had been hit hard enough for a lifetime by Katrina, and then, in 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing eleven rig workers and sending oil billowing into the water. Oil workers who had tried to organize for safer conditions had been fired. An underwater camera provided obscene fascination as people around the country watched over 4 million barrels of oil pumping into the Gulf. It took eighty-seven days for BP to cap the well.8
Just a few weeks prior, a methane explosion had killed twenty-nine miners in West Virginia at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch coal mine, in the worst coal-mining disaster since 1970. A supervisor had demanded that a methane monitor be disabled because it kept going off. Two of the miners who confirmed the disabling of the monitor refused to give their names, in fear for their jobs. When coal or oil is the only game in town, as it certainly is in swaths of West Virginia and along the Gulf Coast, you might blow the whistle, but you still need to work, even if your boss is deliberately putting you in danger. Even if the company that employs you is one of those responsible for what’s known as “Cancer Alley,” where over 130 petrochemical plants and six oil refineries line the waterfront in Louisiana, and for the climate change that makes Katrina-like storms more likely.9
When protests against fossil fuels arise, companies raise the specter of job loss to keep workers in line. When there is new drilling to be done, or there are new pipelines to be built, the possibility of jobs is dangled like a carrot in front of already-impoverished communities. The risk of a disaster may seem worth taking to avert the quieter disaster of poverty, since a society that so often fails to provide aid, even after the most spectacular disasters, has also already cut its supports for everyday troubles to the bone. That the mine owners and oil CEOs pocketing millions each year—Massey’s Don Blankenship made $17.8 million in 2009—remain sheltered from the ill effects of their dirty business does not change the fact that workers need to work in order to eat.10
Trish Kahle, an environmental and labor historian and member of the Fight for $15 campaign in Chicago, saw some hope in the 2015 strike of oil refinery workers—the first major oil strike since 1980—for a climate movement based on solidarity between extraction workers and the extractive industry’s victims. The United Steelworkers union reached out to environmental organizations like the Sierra Club for support in the strike, highlighting the role that the refinery workers played in preventing disasters and keeping their communities safe. Safety, in the extractive industries, Kahle noted, is inherently an environmental concern—the workers on the front lines are also the ones whose children play within sight of the refinery, who breathe its air and will be vulnerable to a spill or explosion. The agreement reached to end the strike included attention to the workers’ demands around safety and staffing along with a modest wage increase. One strike leader later joined a protest against a new oil pipeline, speaking to the protesters about her workplace issues and the damage caused by a nearby oil spill.
As many realized after the 2015 strike, the workers on the supply chain hold a lot of power over the industries, but they need to be willing to press the leverage that strikes provide them. After all, strikes that actually halt production are harder to shrug off than simple protests. They challenge the mindset that says we should all be out for our own short-term gain at the risk of hurting others, and point to another structure for society itself that is built on the kind of caring work that has been undervalued or ignored by capitalism. And it helps people realize that the oil company that is found to be grossly negligent when it comes to their safety also considers occasional spills the cost of doing business, all the while lobbying against legislation that would slow the progress of climate change. It is not surprising that nurses were central to the Sandy response, or that National Nurses United has become a leader in the labor movement on the issue of climate change. With more disasters on the way, a society based on caring for people, rather than ensuring continued profits, may be our best hope for the future.
MAKING THIS SOCIETY A REALITY, THOUGH, WILL REQUIRE A BREAK from a long history of capitalism’s abuse of the environment—and of the workers whose exploitation has gone hand in hand with the pillaging of the earth.
Modern capitalism was born out of and then fueled by slave labor and then by coal, coal, more coal, and oil. Indeed, the sweat and strain of enslaved people served as substitute for fossil fuels in the American South, part of the reason that the South industrialized so much later than the North. Black people, wrenched from their birthplaces to labor at the end of a whip, were a reliable power source for hundreds of years before slavery was eliminated—and in England, when it was eliminated, reparations were paid not to former slaves but to the people who had owned them. That money was pumped back into the coal-fired plants that made the industrial revolution possible. Meanwhile, the removal of Native American people from the land—through forced migration or just plain killings—allowed settlers full access to a wealth of natural resources, including the coal and oil underneath the Native lands.11
Slavery in the United States ended with the Civil War, but the people who worked in coal-powered factories or dug the coal out of the ground continued to face the brunt of the abuses of the industries. Coal miners formed some of the most militant early unions; it is no coincidence, Trish Kahle noted, that many of the labor songs we remember today came from the coalfields, where workplace struggles were often a matter of life or death. What is today called “extractivism”—the mindset that sees workers’ bodies and the environment simply as resources to be plundered to exhaustion—was in full force in those days, the era of unregulated capitalism.
The Progressive era saw the growth of some concern over the fate of the environment alongside concern for workers, though the high-minded ideals of white middle-class reformers presaged an environmental movement that would largely ignore the demands for structural change that working people were making. Theodore Roosevelt created the US Forest Service and preserved national forests and parks through the 1906 American Antiquities Act—but mostly to keep some pristine lands for the enjoyment of people like him. Similarly, the Sierra Club had its roots, in the words of historian Adam Rome, in “well-to-do San Franciscans who liked to go out hiking.” In the cities, meanwhile, reformers challenged the factories that were belching smoke into the air, demanding some restrictions on what corporate polluters could emit. The second President Roosevelt built on this legacy with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a works program during the Depression that linked the need for jobs to the desire to preserve natural resources, something echoed in today’s calls for “green jobs.”12
What we think of today as the environmental movement developed in the 1960s and 1970s with a renewed interest in cleaning up pollution and saving endangered animals. Historian Erik Loomis has linked this renewed interest to the fact that inequality was lower in the 1960s than it had been in earlier decades. Thanks to the labor movement, he said, more Americans than ever had free time and the disposable income to enjoy wild spaces. By 1970, the year the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created to administer federal environmental regulations, Loomis wrote, 69 percent of Americans expressed some concern about air pollution. Today, we remember that conservative Richard Nixon signed a raft of environmental legislation, but much less about the pressure that was on him to do so. Organizations like Greenpeace, founded in the 1970s, connected environmental conservation to the fight to end nuclear weapons, calling for a more peaceful, greener future. The 1970s also saw the first warnings about global warming as well as the first real oil crises, when oil-exporting countries turned off the spigot and left the United States questioning its reliance on fossil fuels. President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House in 1979; Ronald Reagan, under the influence of the growing “drill, baby, drill” ideology, scrapped them in 1986, along with federal funding for wind and other renewable energy sources.13
At the same time, the labor movement, particularly in the extractive industries, was undergoing upheaval. Rank-and-file movements in the United Mine Workers and the United Steelworkers challenged leadership that they saw as too eager to collaborate with the bosses. They also began to question whether the jobs for which they were supposed to be grateful were worth the degradation they entailed. Kahle noted that these struggles arose at the same time as the modern energy conglomerate—massive corporations with interests in coal, oil, even nuclear power. These firms consolidated different kinds of energy work under one corporate name and one boss. “It suddenly made the inter-industrial connections between uranium workers, coal workers, oil workers that simply hadn’t existed before,” she said.
The Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union (OCAW) went on strike in 1973, demanding better safety and health protections, and stressed the connection between their working environment and the broader environment. The reform group Miners for Democracy demanded that mine companies repair the lands they destroyed, an investment they saw as potentially producing more and better jobs than mining itself, and briefly won power in United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) in 1972 following a bitter struggle that saw its leader, Jock Yablonski, and his wife and daughter murdered. Edward Sadlowski of the reform caucus Steelworkers Fight Back argued, “With technology, the ultimate goal of organized labor is for no man to have to go down into the bowels of the earth and dig coal. No man will have to be subjected to the blast furnace.”14
There was potential, then, for a real worker-led movement that challenged the energy industries, but we already know what happened next: deindustrialization, as companies simply packed up and left the United States, its demanding workers, and its new environmental protections behind to start over again in less-developed countries without so many pesky laws. With fewer jobs to go around, it was harder than ever for workers to refuse labor in dirty industries.
That outsourcing to poorer countries mirrored a trend that had long existed within the United States: the location of extraction, factories, and pollution in the poorest parts of the country, where people of color were most likely to breathe the air and drink the water. The environmental justice movement was a grassroots response to what scholar Robert D. Bullard dubbed “environmental racism,” the intentional location of hazardous manufacturing, chemical production, or energy extraction in locations where people of color make up most of the population. Those locations, often called “sacrifice zones,” are considered expendable, to be destroyed for the benefit of people who live far away and never see the destruction that makes their lifestyle possible. Faced with a mainstream environmental movement that was mostly white and centered on lobbying, environmental justice activists moved to make those sacrifice zones visible to all, and force companies to clean up their messes. In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order making environmental justice a priority under federal law, but the sacrifice zones persist, from Louisiana’s Cancer Alley to the South Bronx.15
As climate change became the major focus of the environmental movement, the tensions between the so-called Big Green groups and more militant grassroots activists came to the surface. In 1990, on the day after Earth Day, activists disrupted the New York and Pacific stock exchanges, challenging the logic of working hand in hand with the biggest polluters and their funders to try to solve environmental crises. But the green movement mostly retained an image as a hobby for the wealthy, more concerned with saving polar bears than with the people who faced intertwined economic and environmental crises.
THE WORLD BEGAN TO SERIOUSLY CONSIDER THE NEED FOR ACTION on climate, and to negotiate toward a major climate treaty, at the same time that the Berlin Wall was coming down and the world was hailing the triumph of capitalism. There was, we were hearing, no alternative. And so even as dignitaries met to discuss the sobering realities of a warming planet, container ships were chugging across the oceans on global trade routes, spewing carbon into the air as they brought cheap consumer goods from Asian factories to Walmart’s shelves. Capitalism was ascendant, and any solutions to the climate crisis that might be considered had to suit its imperatives for growing profit.16
We were told to switch to greener lightbulbs, taught to calculate our individual carbon footprint. The world could be saved, we heard, if we just modified our behavior a little bit. That the biggest polluters kept right on polluting was just something we were supposed to ignore in our virtuous attempts to buy the right thing. Carbon trading, a plan to allow countries or companies to buy credits that allowed them to pollute more from those that were not polluting up to their level, was supposed to use the magic of the market to incentivize a green transition. Carbon markets were established, in theory, in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but they have failed to produce measurable results. And yet even a basic carbon tax was too close to communism; markets were the way and the truth.17
We might have realized that expecting financial markets to regulate anything was a fool’s errand when the financial markets imploded in 2008, the super-smart market whizzes we were supposed to trust with the planet having failed to see that they’d built a house of cards that was bound to collapse. In the wake of that crisis, while some argued for a “green New Deal”—pumping money into creating a new, sustainable infrastructure and putting the unemployed to work to create a just transition—others insisted that the only thing that mattered was the economy, that the best way forward was to “drill, baby, drill”: in particular, to drill for natural gas through the new process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” underground shale rock to loose the gas within. When the share prices of energy companies plummeted, losing almost 80 percent of their market value, they began to look desperately for a sure thing, and the Marcellus Shale, beneath Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, and Ohio, where companies had already been leasing mineral rights, seemed to be it.18
The new unconventional or “extreme” energy extraction boom was underway. Fracking quadrupled between 2010 and 2014, turning the United States into the world’s largest producer of natural gas—the fuel once touted even by several “big green” groups as a potential bridge from carbon-based energy to renewables. Meanwhile, oil drilling, including from offshore rigs like the Deepwater Horizon, was also on the rise. The process of building the Keystone XL Pipeline, designed to carry oil from Canada’s tar sands across the United States to Texas, began. Politicians who had once expressed concern about global warming now openly denied it and cheered any and all drilling and pipelines, in terms nearly as breathless as Sarah Palin’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric on the campaign trail.19
There was always an undercurrent of recognition that we could not buy our way out of climate change—that no amount of gas-company-sponsored Earth Days or energy-efficient lightbulbs or hybrid cars could make up for the damage done on an industrial level. But for many activists, it was the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen, and its failure to produce anything close to meaningful change, where they realized, as Naomi Klein wrote, “that no one was coming to save us.” The elites, both the elected officials and the supposed movement leaders, had failed, and something new was needed.20
It wasn’t just that the leaders we had counted on to solve the problem, to sit down around a table like adults and make a deal, had decided to fiddle while the world burned. No, the big energy companies, along with some of the biggest consumers of all that coal, oil, and gas, had put a lot of money—something on the order of $900 million a year, according to one study—into ensuring that no real dent would be made in their profits. When you consider that the value of the fossil-fuel reserves not yet extracted could be as high as $20 trillion, the spending begins to make sense. Debbie Dooley, president of the Green Tea Coalition of Tea Party activists for renewable energy, pointed out that wealthy Tea Party backers like the Koch brothers have fortunes largely drawn from fossil fuels, and they’ve poured money into fighting solar—particularly, she said, in so-called “red” states. Americans for Prosperity and the Heartland Institute, among other groups associated with the Tea Party, she said, “are looking out for the financial interest of their donors.”21
There are, of course, capitalists who don’t deny that climate change is a problem and indeed are looking forward to profiting from greener energy, electric cars, solar panels, and the like, or even touting schemes for “geoengineering” a functional climate. But in general, even as they fund environmental organizations, billionaires like the Walton family or Michael Bloomberg or the bankers at J. P. Morgan continue to invest in fossil fuels and to draw their money from polluting industries. The same elites that crashed the financial system, that cracked down on protesters, that created a low-wage economy, are not likely to create a livable planet for all of us. Instead, it’s more likely that they will count on their wealth to insulate them from the brunt of climate change, just as it did when Sandy hit New York.22
After the financial crisis, George Goehl, director of National People’s Action, had felt unprepared, as though groups like his should have done a better job of putting forward big ideas for changing the economic system and breaking up the concentrated power within the financial industry. As the realities of climate change created openings to challenge the power of the energy industry, NPA was aiming to do things differently. It was planning actions around the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which requires each state to come up with a plan to cut carbon emissions. The climate crisis, in other words, provided an opening for the group to use the knowledge—and the new membership base—it had gained since 2008 to try to really change the distribution of power.
It had been too easy for the victims of the 2008 crisis to feel like their problems were deeply individual, deeply private, as if they were their own fault. Everyone feels like a failure when they’ve lost their job. The challenge that activists faced was getting people to understand that it was the actions at the top levels of business and government that had caused the Great Recession. Climate change can have an almost opposite effect—it can be easy to forget about, until a superstorm comes through your city, sending water pouring into subway tunnels and up through the floors, and there is no one to help you when your power is out.
But after Sandy, the connections between the manmade economic crisis and the manmade climate crisis seemed more obvious—especially when some of the same names and structures kept popping up to profit off the wreckage the storm had left. Mayor Bloomberg appointed a Goldman Sachs executive to the team overseeing the recovery. A report from the Occupy offshoot Strike Debt found that people who had lost their homes or belongings were being pushed into “aid” that, like much student aid, in fact required them to take on more debt. Many of them were already suffering from lost home equity after the financial crisis, which had left their homes underwater financially long after the floodwaters receded.23
Many of those affected by climate change, however, argue that it is not they but the polluters who are in debt. The theory of climate or ecological debt is that the wealthy countries that created the problem owe some sort of payment for the destruction that their burning of fossil fuels has wreaked on the less-developed nations, who, after all, share the same atmosphere, often face even greater risks from rising sea levels, and are already feeling the force of storms, floods, and droughts. Climate debt has been a non-starter at the major climate talks, however, for the wealthy nations prefer to consider any payments to poorer countries as aid, as charity given out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than a debt owed or a form of reparations for past crimes. Like the activists after Sandy and Katrina, the victims of climate change call for solidarity, not charity.24
Such debt can also be considered within US borders, with the residents of sacrifice zones in Appalachia’s coal country or New York’s South Bronx the creditors and the fossil-fuel companies on the hook for payments. Such a debt, some have argued, could be paid by instituting a carbon tax, the results of which could be paid out as a basic income, something like a broader form of Alaska’s oil dividend, the annual payment drawn from taxes on the state’s oil industry that is given to every resident of Alaska—or what some commentators have jokingly called Sarah Palin’s socialism.25
Naomi Klein has laid out the argument that fighting climate change will require moving beyond capitalism: that the economic system itself is responsible for the looming disaster we face and will not be able to solve it. After the release of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, she told me, few journalists questioned her conclusions, but almost all of her interlocutors questioned whether such a thing was possible. Literary critic and Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson famously said it was easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Climate change and the increased frequency of environmental disasters force us to grapple with the possibility of the end of the world as we know it, and invite us to see what else, then, we can imagine. Climate change requires us to think about the future and consider what we want it to look like, because the possibility of maintaining the status quo—the insistence that there is no alternative to continuing on the way we have been—is simply no longer possible. It is, in this way, the ultimate intersectional issue, the one that makes us really consider what and who we value and how we want to live. And around the country, activists are using it to bring disparate groups of people together.
WHEN KIRIN KANAKKANATT FIRST BECAME A CLIMATE ACTIVIST, SHE often found herself one of the only people of color in a room—sometimes, in a very large room. She was nineteen, it was the middle of the 2008 presidential election, and she was in college in Athens, Ohio, unsure of what she was doing, when she was invited to a Sierra Club meeting. From there, she threw herself into the movement. But she still felt that something was missing. “It never had a class analysis,” she said. “The reason why black and brown people, poor people in Appalachia need to lead this is that they understand power.” To tell people who are suffering daily that they need to save the planet misses the fact, she noted, that for many of them, if saving the planet doesn’t include changing their lives, “a lot of us don’t even want to live on the planet even if we could save it.”
The People’s Climate March on Sunday, September 21, 2014, was designed with that lesson in mind. A massive march through New York City, with the frontline communities marching in the lead—First Nations people from Canada who had been battling the tar sands, community groups from Sandy-ravaged neighborhoods, delegations from around the world—it was supposed to send a signal that the people of the world were tired of waiting for elite leaders to act. The march was backed by Bill McKibben’s 350.org and a host of other organizations, with buy-in from labor unions, and estimates put the number of participants at well over 100,000.
But to get that many people at a march, noted Colin Kinniburgh, an organizer with System Change Not Climate Change and an editor at Dissent magazine, the organizers diffused the message. Many of the signs at the march were aimed at specific polluters, calling for bans on fracking or drilling, but the march overall did not make specific demands. There were thousands in town for the march, though, and organizers took advantage of that to bring a deeper analysis of the situation to the fore as well as to take more radical action. System Change Not Climate Change organized a convergence, a day of panels and workshops. They featured Kshama Sawant, Jill Stein of the Green Party, and others digging into the politics of climate justice.
Then, Monday morning, a crowd of people poured into Battery Park, most of them dressed in blue, for “Flood Wall Street,” an action planned to disrupt the financial district and put out the message, as one massive banner read, that “Capitalism = Climate Chaos.” Many of the organizers were former occupiers—some of whom had also been paid organizers on the official People’s Climate March—and were willing to face arrest to demonstrate the need for serious action on climate change. In Battery Park, they went through a brief direct-action training and scribbled the National Lawyers Guild phone number on body parts. Then they took the streets.
“There was this incredible energy as we poured out into the streets, because everyone thought we were immediately going to be battling with the cops,” Kinniburgh said. But instead, the police let them take the street and penned them in at the intersection around the Wall Street Bull. “It very quickly turned into this carnival,” Kinniburgh said. There was singing, dancing, and an impromptu speak-out as the day stretched on. A group of protesters, including student organizer Biola Jeje, climbed onto a double-decker tourist bus and rode it around, waving a blue flag. A giant inflatable “carbon bubble” that had been prepared by demonstrators for the climate march was passed across the crowd; it was eventually popped by police. “We didn’t know how to escalate because we’d already done the thing that we thought was going to get us arrested!” Kinniburgh laughed. At the end of the day, though, he was part of a group of over one hundred people who took arrest rather than leave the streets.
For the members of People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) Buffalo, the People’s Climate March was an opportunity to take their place in the climate movement. “In our view, climate injustice is a function of a power structure that is intersectional, and racism, classism, and economic exploitation are the other side of the coin of resource extraction,” said Aaron Bartley, PUSH’s cofounder and head. PUSH Buffalo, which is affiliated with National People’s Action, began its work on housing access, but to think about housing in a city like Buffalo, with its bitter winters, is to think about energy. “When we started here on the west side of Buffalo, a good half of the homes were paying more in utilities for six months of the year than they were in rent,” Bartley said. The energy utility, National Fuel, had fracking interests, and its CEO was the highest-paid person in the western half of New York. When PUSH began to scrutinize the energy bills of its members, it found extra charges for “conservation,” but could not find out where that money was going.
Lonnie Barlow was an organizer on the campaign that PUSH built around National Fuel. “It was a learning experience for us,” he said. “We learned a lot about the makings of what an energy campaign looks like, and we evolved to energy democracy stuff that we’re working on now.” They zeroed in on National Fuel, holding protests outside its office that culminated in a campout in July 2012. They brought tents, signs, even had a small kitchen, all set up on public land right on the edge of National Fuel’s property. Eventually the company and the state conceded, and millions of dollars from those “conservation” fees were put into weatherization programs for low-income residents. Through the energy campaigns, they created PUSH Green, a community energy-efficiency initiative that is pushing, among other things, for access to solar power for working-class communities.
The argument for energy democracy that Bartley and Barlow made to me—that people should be able to control their own power sources, rather than being forced to support massive corporations with overpaid executives—was strikingly similar to the one that Debbie Dooley of the Green Tea Coalition had laid out. “The average person cannot go out and construct a power plant, but they could put solar panels on their rooftop,” Dooley said. She had become involved in energy advocacy after finding out that her state, Georgia, had passed legislation allowing Georgia Power to bill rate-payers in advance for new nuclear reactors. When she did further research, she learned that nuclear and fossil fuels still received massive subsidies from the federal and state governments, and that meanwhile, the cost of solar panels had fallen dramatically. She butted heads with Americans for Prosperity and other fossil-fuel-funded Tea Party groups, who supported laws that made solar power more difficult for the average person to access, and she reached out to environmental and pro-solar groups to join the fight. She had even spoken on panels with former vice president Al Gore. “I care about the environment. I believe that we should be good stewards of the environment God gave us,” she said. “I have a grandson and I want him to have a clean world and clean air and energy freedom and energy choice.”
Both Dooley and National People’s Action affiliates want an energy system that is decentralized, one that reverses the concentration in the industry that pools too much power and money in too few hands. It’s not enough, said George Goehl of NPA, just to reduce carbon emissions, or even to move some jobs and funds to communities of color and low-income communities, if “at the end of the day [we] still transition from ten dirty energy CEOs to ten clean energy CEOs and not address the underlying structures of who has power and control.”
Without some form of democracy in the energy system, the benefits and side effects will continue to be unequally distributed. In October 2015, I took a ride through one neighborhood that continues to feel the ill effects of fossil fuels. My tour guide to the South Bronx was Mychal Johnson of South Bronx Unite, a group that has been fighting the location of diesel-truck-heavy businesses, power plants, and waste disposal in the neighborhood for several years.
Environmental racism, to Johnson, meant that “people of color breathe different types of air and have different types of health outcomes due to the living environment around them.” In the South Bronx, he noted, one in four children has asthma, and asthma hospitalization rates are eight times the national average. Their life expectancy is nearly ten years lower than people just across the river on the Upper East Side. They have almost no green space, besides the community gardens that Johnson and his neighbors have fought to cultivate, but they do have four power plants—of the ten sited across the state under Governor George Pataki years ago, Johnson noted, nearly half were in the South Bronx. Without some power over where the power plants go, the poor and people of color will continue to live in sacrifice zones.26
“We’re only fighting for the right to breathe,” Johnson said. “The first effect of carbon emission is your ability to breathe.” Black and Latino New Yorkers, he said, understand the connections between the injustices they face, the slow violence of pollution, and the quick violence of the policeman’s bullet—or his arm. Eric Garner, killed in 2014 when a New York City police officer put him in a chokehold, had grown up near the Superfund site of Gowanus Canal, and suffered from asthma. Johnson and his neighbors tweaked the Twitter hashtag that sprang up through the protests at Garner’s death, adopting #WeCantBreathe as a slogan.
Areas like the South Bronx become sacrifice zones because the people there are considered expendable. But as the extreme energy boom heated up, the gas was where it was, and the gas companies went to it, regardless of who lived there. To them, everywhere is a potential sacrifice zone.
When the gas company first showed up to Eileen Hamlin’s home in New York’s southern tier, wanting to lease her land for fracking, she thought, “Isn’t this wonderful? I will be able to make back the money that we lost in the crash.” She and her husband were retired, and they had twenty-six acres of suddenly desirable land. But Hamlin, an activist with Citizen Action and an early member of the Working Families Party, lived within sight of heavily fracked parts of Pennsylvania, and she could see flaring wells across the river from her home. Even if it would bring in needed money, she began to wonder if fracking her land was worth the payoff.
Isaac Silberman-Gorn was studying environmental science at the State University of New York in Binghamton when Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed fracking in the southern tier. “I realized pretty early on that this was going to be the environmental site that was going to define what the movement looks like for years to come,” he said. “I knew I had to get involved.” Citizen Action brought in speakers, scientists, and doctors and talked to people from the fracked parts of Pennsylvania; they heard about proprietary chemical blends—the contents of which gas companies refused to disclose—about cracked cement well linings leaking gas into the water supply, and about earthquakes and health complaints. Eileen Hamlin’s neighbors were still ready to sign leases, but she became involved in the movement to fight fracking. “There is just no free stuff. There is a price to be paid for it,” she said. “We suffer the health consequences, so that a few people can have a few jobs for a short period of time. We need to find a better way than fracking to provide people with jobs.”
Hamlin joined New Yorkers Against Fracking, which aimed for a total fracking ban in the state. “We zeroed in on Governor Cuomo and followed him around the state,” Silberman-Gorn said. “Every single public event that he was at, we had people tailing him.” At the same time, they put together a template for a municipal ban on fracking, one that would be passed in Binghamton and eventually in more than two hundred municipalities across New York State. It was supported by residents across the political spectrum, who began to branch out into other forms of activism. “In every single one of those towns you had groups of people organizing, going to these board meetings, winning elections on a municipal level on this issue specifically and passing legislation,” Silberman-Gorn said. “I am still inspired by watching people who got into activism because of fracking, upper-middle-class white people who are standing with Black Lives Matter activists. That kind of cross-fertilization, realizing it is all part of the same struggle.”
It wasn’t always easy, Hamlin added. “These people around here are so poor that they see it as something that will make them rich,” she said. But the example of Pennsylvania across the border provided more than dramatic visuals—there were hard numbers, and the money just wasn’t panning out like the gas companies had promised. The global energy market, too, had changed, making fracking less profitable and making the potential for short-term gains from a compromise seem riskier. The damage, Pennsylvania’s example showed, was real, and the possible benefits were dependent on the same fickle markets and corporate titans who had already crashed the economy just a few years earlier.
There was the labor question, too. Fracking jobs have been hard, dirty, and temporary, and so while some unions have endorsed fracking, the Working Families Party and other labor-affiliated groups were willing to come out and oppose it. Finally, in December 2014, Governor Cuomo announced that New York would not allow fracking.
Illinois People’s Action (IPA), a faith- and community-based economic justice group affiliated with National People’s Action, also waded into the fracking fight. When its Bloomington-Normal chapter put together a meeting to gauge interest on the issue, Dawn Dannenbring, an IPA organizer, was surprised when two hundred people turned up. IPA decided to demand a ban, not the compromise regulation that ultimately passed. From there, IPA members put pressure on the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, writing comments on what was wrong with the bill and how it would not protect the residents of the state. By the end of the comment period, they “had generated 36,000 comments,” Dannenbring said. “By law the department was required to respond to every single comment that it got, so our goal wasn’t just to get things addressed, we wanted to bog the process down.” They managed to do so for four hundred days, creating an effective moratorium.
They also embraced disruption. IPA members occupied the offices of the Illinois Coal Association and the Illinois Gas Association. In 2014, when the McLean County Board heard an oil company’s request to drill test wells, IPA and its allies packed the hearing room night after night. On the last night of testimony, Dannenbring said, members came with pictures of their children and grandchildren. As the board members spoke about their votes, one thanked the protesters who had testified against the drilling, and two others cited their grandchildren as reasons to vote no. The vote was 15–3 against drilling.27
Environmentalists have been decried for decades as elite “NIMBYs,” short for “not in my backyard,” people who are happy if a polluter is located somewhere else, out of sight. But what the anti-fracking movement and its connection to the broader climate justice movement has shown is that people who get motivated to act because of something in their backyards can put forth demands that are bigger and more holistic—because there is no safe location for fossil-fuel extraction if global warming is to be held below catastrophic levels. It is people like Mychal Johnson and South Bronx Unite who show that fighting fossil fuels isn’t just about a faraway future, but about the air they breathe right now. Today’s climate movement is about people taking action in their backyards, metaphorically or literally, actions that add up to an impact on the entire planet. And the influence of groups like IPA, which have brought direct-action tactics from their other organizing to the climate, is pulling normally staid green groups toward more militancy.
Before Mike O’Brien was elected to the Seattle City Council, he was a Sierra Club volunteer. It was as an activist that he got involved in the fight against Shell Oil’s Arctic drilling endeavor. In January 2015, he learned that the Port of Seattle planned to lease a terminal to Shell as its home port. From there, Shell would send ships to probe Arctic waters for oil. At first, he told me, green groups simply said, “We object.” But press conferences weren’t going to be enough, and local activists wanted to do more. The “Shell No!” campaign came together, he said, almost organically, to the point that he couldn’t even remember details. The idea of blocking the port in kayaks, he said, had begun almost as a joke, a reaction to the cynicism of those on the other side, which was “like, what are you going to do about it?”
The “kayaktivists” began to train on the water, though, and started to plan actions designed to physically block the ship’s departure as well as events that people who didn’t want to risk arrest could join. O’Brien was torn as to whether he should join the main action. Could he lose his job? What did it mean for a City Council member to take direct action? He’d never been arrested before and had never done anything like what he was considering. But in a conversation with a Greenpeace organizer, he said, he began to think about the position that he was in, and he decided that he could take these risks for others who couldn’t.
Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune was arrested outside the White House protesting TransCanada’s Keystone XL Pipeline. (I had first encountered Brune at the Walmart shareholders’ meeting, when he had read a statement in favor of a resolution calling on Walmart to reduce its emissions, which in turn had been introduced by OUR Walmart member Mary Pat Tifft.) It was time, Brune wrote of the club’s decision to officially take part in civil disobedience over climate issues, to change the rules, to take a few risks. O’Brien agreed and decided to join the Port of Seattle blockade.28
Being on the water, O’Brien said, was a powerful experience, even if the ship eventually got past them. On the morning of September 28, when he read the news that Shell was abandoning its Arctic drilling efforts because of “costs,” he was even more thrilled. And then the Obama administration followed it up by canceling more lease sales for drilling rights, and weeks later, rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline. “Maybe once in a lifetime you’re involved with something like this, where everything comes together in a way—the energy is there, the timing is right, everything happens better than you expected, and it works,” he said. “But that one time is built on so many other attempts.” It was all the earlier attempts, the ones that felt like failures, that built energy to a point where they could win.29