Whatever is in the way of change, it isn’t just about individual denial. American paralysis on climate change is something that trickles down from the very top of the nation’s leadership. To an extent, I already know that. But the reasons why don’t crystalize until I climb into the car with Jayden Foytlin—the plaintiff whose home has flooded twice thanks to climate change in what were both, ironically, dubbed thousand-year floods—and her mother, Cherri. From Rayne, Louisiana, about 18 miles west of Lafayette, we drive down the highway east into the swamp, following a pickup towing an aluminum skiff.
It’s three weeks before trial and Jayden’s in the back seat in jeans and a blue windbreaker, quiet with her gaze set out the window. We stop for gas and bathrooms at a place with jojos and fried chicken under heat lamps. Cherri visits a nearby bakery—they make the best apple fritters in the world, she says—and we drive south along a long, straight gravel road somewhere in the Atchafalaya Basin, the largest wetland swamp in America. There’s water on both sides and a mound of land piled up between lanes. Cherri drives swiftly over the gravel as the landscape gets increasingly boggy. Her arm rests on the steering wheel, sporting a tattoo: L’eau Est La Vie. Water is life.
We arrive at a boat launch, a spot of dirt with a ramp at the water’s edge, and with the people in the pickup—a pilot and two activists—we drop the skiff quickly, then get inside and go. It’s an overcast morning, warm and thick with clouds, but the water is kind, flat, calm. All around it, the bayou is nature like I have never seen. Cypress dripping moss in the cool muddy water, the riverside washed in rich green. A house here and there, the clapboard weathered and sliding. Logs floating on a soft current. Jayden’s hair blows while the boat picks up speed. She has a hibiscus flower tucked into her muddy boot, a gift from her mom, its white petals softly ringing burgundy, white filaments. At the bow, the two activists use arm signals and shout to direct the pilot around floating branches. It’s beautiful and—except for the noise of the motor—quiet, until we come around a bend and descend into a pile of tugboats and a barge full of pipes. I can hardly believe it. Orange-clad workers in hard hats are everywhere.
The pipes on the barge are wrapped in giant rounds of weighted concrete, waiting to be sunk into the swamp. This is construction for the Bayou Bridge Pipeline—the terminus of the oil-ferrying Dakota Access Pipeline—and it crosses right through this pristine landscape. It isn’t just the stark incongruity that strikes me, construction in such an unspoiled place, or the hideous rift it will make in primeval water, but something else: there on the dock is the sheriff’s lieutenant, arms folded, providing security for the workers. Cherri has been arrested once for protesting this project. She tells me clashes are typical among activists, workers, and police.
This realization is sudden for an outsider like me. That in this place, to dissent is to fight. The families here wonder if their men will come home at night, and there are stories of how when things go wrong on the oil rigs and people jump off, they cross their legs and hope for the best, despite the pods that are supposed to keep them safe in such emergencies. If you do it wrong you’re dead, they say about this leaping. But then again, if you’re doing it you’re probably dead anyway. Still, oil is the law of this land. It is its own order. The sheriff is just the sheriff. And this is what the Juliana plaintiffs seek to dismantle—an order as old as the Rockefellers, one that stretches from the stock exchange to the Louisiana swamp.
Jayden is next to me in the boat while all this sinks in. We’ve hightailed it around, and her long, dark hair is blowing on the wind again as the rain starts to fall. Her expression is a mix of emotion and resignation.
“What do you think when you see that?” I ask her.
Her words come slow, measured. She says, “I’m very upset and kind of frustrated about it. It’s really gross and disgusting just to see it, and especially to see the workers just working on it as if it’s nothing.”
I ask her if it’s just this pipeline that bothers her or if it makes her think of other things.
“This isn’t the only pipeline,” she says. “The same company is doing it in other places. The Dakota Access Pipeline? Same company. They know they’re putting it in very sensitive parts of Louisiana. Our rivers and bayous are at risk, and they know that. They’re doing that but they’re like, ‘Well, you gotta make money.’ But most of these aren’t even permanent jobs.” The workers, she says, mostly come from Texas.
She’s right. The pipeline is 162 miles long, connecting oil refineries in Louisiana to an oil and gas hub owned by Sunoco Logistics and Phillips 66 in Texas. In between, it bisects the Atchafalaya Basin. Its cargo—crude oil—is intended to complement the two pipelines carrying Bakken crude to the Gulf Coast from the north: the Trunkline Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, famed for spurring the Standing Rock protests in which other Native American resisters were attacked with water cannons and dogs.
I’m surprised that Jayden knows all of this. She’s fifteen, after all. But then again, there’s a Standing Rock resister spotting on the hull of this boat. And I’m consistently surprised by how much the plaintiffs do know about the fossil fuel industry. When I ask them what strikes them most about their co-plaintiffs, almost everyone who isn’t Jayden talks about Jayden. About how hard it must be to be a plaintiff in this lawsuit and live in Louisiana. To be in high school, have a dad who once worked the oil fields, and be the kid that doesn’t go in for this culture—the strength it must take.
Despite the impact of climate change on her community—torrential rain and rising waters have flooded the region and other parts of Louisiana—and that pipeline construction degrades the wetlands designed to absorb the water, Jayden has been derided for her role in the Juliana case. When her best friend’s parents found out about the lawsuit, Jayden says, she lost her best friend. Kids heckled her at school. One joked that she didn’t have to do her homework because she was suing the federal government. People gossiped about her in the cafeteria, made fun of her, called her brainwashed and part of the liberal agenda. Some asked her what was wrong with her. One boy made comments about her mother. Jayden thought that was off-limits—talking about somebody’s mother.
“I didn’t want people to know,” Jayden says, adding that kids learned she was a Juliana plaintiff from an interview. “I was right when I said I didn’t want people to know, because it ended up this whole big thing of people—like, the conservative students or people that had that mindset—would challenge me in the middle of classes with political debates. And I’m just trying to do my science work. I don’t need all of this.”
In this way, Jayden’s story is a microcosm of what’s stifling change in America. Like the story of the Juliana case so far, it makes clear how deeply the fossil fuel industry is entrenched in our communities and economies, and thus our government too.
———
In the morning, I’d first encountered Jayden in her bedroom—purple—after I found my way down a dark hall of her pink house. Jayden’s older sister Erin, a few minutes awake, was flopped on the bed under a pastel comforter, and Jayden was at her desk, the wall above it covered in watercolors and drawings. Jayden was friendly and talked about her activism and her art and her love for aeronautics. Told me how captivated she is by planets and how she hopes to one day study science. She said the planets that used to adorn her room were still put away. The reference was to the flooding that figured large in her pleadings. So I asked Jayden to tell me about the floods, especially the flood in 2016, and her expression darkened.
Here’s what she said: “I woke up at like three, somewhere in the a.m., because . . . my older sisters Erin and Grace were knocking on my door and telling me to ‘Wake up! Wake up!’ and that water was coming through the house. Of course, I thought I was dreaming because I was like, Why the hell would water be coming through? . . . I was kind of thinking . . . What do they want? I thought they were just trying to make me come out of my bed with some excuse or something.”
They weren’t. Jayden sat up. She swung her legs to the floor and stepped into water up to her ankles. The house was a ranch on a slab, an L-shaped building with the longest length reaching deep into the backyard. Jayden was at the end of this stretch, in a room with a door to the yard, and outside it was raining hard. She walked toward her sisters’ voices in the hallway, opened the door to find them there. And as she did this—pulled the door toward her—water rushed from her room into the rest of her home.
“I was like, Oh that’s my fault . . . oh my God, why did I open the door?” she said.
Elsewhere water had been rising through the cracks in the foundation, soaking the carpeting. Sewage and old water rose in the toilets and in the bathtubs. But until then, most of it was in Jayden’s bedroom with Jayden, slowly leaking in from under the door.
The sewage “had the worst smell in the world. It was so nasty,” she said. “My family ended up getting sick. A lot of my neighbors ended up getting sick.”
Jayden’s brother, Dylan, her sister Grace, and Grace’s boyfriend went to the police station, but no one could help much, just gave them a few sandbags to block the doors while the water rose. It wasn’t enough. So next they used all the blankets. Then the towels. So much water, they were no match for it. They gave up and focused on the electronics, on unplugging everything, worried about electrocution, and trying to save what could be saved. Drawings and photos were lost anyway. Jayden’s bedframe dissolved in the lake of her room. Her brother’s toys were next. When I asked how high the water rose, she pointed to a watermark on the wall about 2 feet above the floor.
“I hate that flood so much,” she said.
Sometimes when Jayden talks, her arms and hands move in a way that could pass for dance but really is just pent-up energy that leaves her through her hands. She did this as she told this story, moved her hands. Trauma looking for a way out.
Erin threw up for two months. Both girls are Diné and Latinx, with some German and Cajun mixed in, and Jayden said Erin went whiter than her skin ever was. When they took her to the doctor, the doctor seemed overwhelmed. So did the FEMA workers who arrived to inspect things later and to cut a hole in the wall to check for mold. There was a lot of it, and it cost Jayden’s family a bathroom. They threw out their furniture, the carpet too. And when the subfloor started to peel, its tentacles threatening their feet, they stripped that also, set up house again on top of the bare concrete. Two years later, they are still living on the slab, slowly reclaiming the house with the piecemeal paint and fixes they can afford after FEMA money only paid to remove the hazards. They didn’t realize they didn’t have flood insurance until they needed it; floods used to be unlikely where they live.
Ever since, Jayden said, she worries when it rains. “I don’t want my room to be ruined again because it’s still not even fixed,” she said. She still needs a bedframe.
The torrential downpour that flooded her home turned out to be the nation’s worst natural disaster since Sandy, dumping more than 7 trillion gallons of water—three times the amount of rain that fell during Katrina—and flooding about sixty thousand properties in all. Scientists quickly tethered the unusual rains to climate change, finding that rising temperatures likely increased the storm’s rainfall by 20 percent. They also warned that the Gulf Coast conceivably faces a future of “nonhurricane-related, warm season extreme precipitation.”
This kind of rain plus coastal flooding has been ongoing since. But while we drive home from the swamp, Cherri tells me that despite the flooding, the people here don’t take issue with climate change. They take issue with the Army Corps of Engineers—the government entity that’s supposed to manage the water—and with local officials. And indeed, in online forums, there are calls to dredge rivers, shore up levees, curb development. Jayden was already a plaintiff in the lawsuit when the flood hit; she joined after meeting one of the attorneys at an action for hurricane relief for Florida. Now the floods—this one and another a year later—strengthen her case.
“Some people said, ‘Yo, that’s really cool.’ But there’s a lot of people that were like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ ‘You’re being brainwashed,’ and stuff like that,” Jayden says. “I don’t even identify as liberal.”
Later, Jayden’s mother, Cherri, a longtime activist and the director of Louisiana Rising, says the way Jayden has been treated is indicative of how righteous people feel in the farthest reaches of polarized politics. And how justified they feel, too, in directing their aggression at anyone who doesn’t share their views.
“She’s just a little girl. People feel so okay . . . with like going after and talking that way about a little girl,” says Cherri. “That’s how safe they feel in their opposition and in being ugly.”
———
It’s not surprising that Jayden’s community is frightened by her lawsuit. What a Juliana victory would entail—a restructuring of the way oil and gas development is authorized, permitted, and subsidized in the United States—threatens the bedrock of the Louisiana economy.
This culture, the one in which oil is Louisiana and Louisiana is oil, runs nearly as deep as the history of humans and oil itself. Like a lot of stories about the industry, it involves a drill, a gusher that rained oil, and a field of ruined crops. It dates back to 1901, when an intrepid twenty-something named W. Scott Heywood dared drill a well deeper than any other, having calmed a nervous rice farmer named Jules Clement enough to secure access to his land. Ninety miles away near Beaumont, Texas, and nine months earlier, Heywood had drilled wells at Spindletop, the legendary geyser that seeded commercial oil in Texas. The Louisiana well he drilled that soon struck oil, thereafter known as Clement No. 1, was unlike Spindletop in one important way: it was drilled in what industry lingo calls an anticlinal trap, a spot where nonporous rock lay over where oil and gas and water stewed. Which meant the Clement No. 1 well tapped a reservoir of oil, not a small pool, realizing the vast reserves of fossil fuels undergirding much of Louisiana.
The Clement No. 1 well became just one well in the Jennings oil field soon after. Located in Acadia Parish, where Jayden lives, it was a harbinger of things to come. Within a decade, a federal report on the oil bounty in Louisiana numbered 215 pages, stuffed with accounts from every parish. Jennings, by then, was producing so much oil from so many wells, a map of the site looked like a dense dot matrix, if a bit off alignment.
The oil field peaked in 1906 at 9 million barrels, enough energy to power the average American home for 550,000 years or fly from London to Louisiana more than 1.7 million times. The surrounding land, described then by federal officials as “monotonously flat . . . a portion of the Gulf floor that has been raised . . . and is now slightly dissected by sluggish meandering streams,” was basically pay dirt. That it all used to be underwater, part of a wide swath that stretched north from today’s Gulf Coast into a triangle to Illinois, made Louisiana’s fortune. Beneath it were the classic geologic features of oil beds: Quaternary and Miocene sands that inevitably fossilized a sea of algae and zooplankton.
Through this luck of natural resources, Louisiana is today the number two producer of crude oil and the number four producer of natural gas in the United States. It ranks second in the nation in petroleum refining capacity, with eighteen oil refineries. The state itself and the waters off its shore are crisscrossed by more than 92,000 miles of pipeline. And this trifecta of wells, refineries, and pipelines supported $72.8 billion in sales in 2015, along with $19.2 billion in household income and 262,420 jobs. In Acadia Parish, the energy industry paid nearly 12 percent of the property taxes collected there and more than $22 million in local wages the year before the flood that inundated Jayden’s room.
This relationship between the economy and the oil is older than anyone alive in Acadia Parish can even remember. So, too, the relationship between the oil and its investors. When the Clement No. 1 well struck oil in 1901, investors who’d bought in at $1 a share and held on made huge profits, having gambled better than those who lost confidence and sold for 25 cents a share along the way. Today, oil and gas are still the primary energy sources powering the world, and thus, still largely powering the US stock market. If you look at the total market value of the companies included in the S&P 500, 11 percent of that value comes from the energy sector.
But it isn’t just the stock market that matters in explaining why fossil fuels have such a stranglehold on America today. It’s that somewhere along the way, after the United States fueled its allies through two world wars, built the most technologically sophisticated military on the globe, and powered its own massive economic growth on cheap oil, it developed a habit it couldn’t break. Postwar prosperity brought cars and roads and plastic to a world economy in which Americans rode the crest of a wave. The only thing our nation lacked was enough oil to keep it all going. Which explains why the United States swaggered its way into midcentury deals with Saudi oilmen and assumed the inevitable peacekeeping (or was it oil-securing?) missions in the Middle East that came later.
Once America’s dependence on Mideast oil took hold and a certain global order followed, the United States became a kind of de facto global police force in exchange for its access to oil. No one explains the delicate geopolitical dance it takes to maintain this order better than Paul Roberts in his 2004 book, The End of Oil, which remains a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how a pampered Saudi prince could be responsible for the killing of a US-based journalist and walk it off with barely a public dressing-down in 2018. It is through these geopolitical arrangements, and a certain neoconservative ideology fostered by two Bush presidencies, that an attachment to oil set deep roots in our nation’s culture. But more critically, it is through these arrangements that America’s place at the top of the world order is held secure. To believe in a world without that order is not only to relinquish power but also to believe that peace is possible when we are not in charge and when we are not the richest nation in the world. It’s a tough sell at a time when world resources are only getting scarcer and when conservative values trend toward self-protectionism. Viewed through the lens of the breakdown of world order, climate change is the more distant threat.
———
This helps explain why in Louisiana, maintaining that order is synonymous with maintaining the oil and gas industry. And how difficult it can be for someone like Jayden to stick her neck out, and what she and other people who oppose fossil fuel development are really up against.
When Energy Transfer Partners, the pipeline company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, came to the state to build the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, regulators refused to permit its usual security detail, a company called TigerSwan. The decision was supposed to promote the peace. It was TigerSwan that was responsible for using attack dogs and spraying protestors with water cannons at Standing Rock, tipping the resistance effort into a full-tilt civil rights standoff, one that galvanized people all over the world. But instead of hiring another security company, Energy Transfer Partners let a passel of security contracts to local law enforcement, setting off a civil rights issue of another kind when officers blurred the lines between the job of protecting the public and the job of protecting the pipeline. State patrol and probation officers, local law enforcement in St. Martin Parish, the place where the pipeline crossed the swamp, showed up to these off-duty second jobs in pipeline security in marked patrol cars wearing police uniforms and carrying service weapons.
Thirteen protestors were ultimately arrested. They included Jayden’s mother, Cherri, who by then had founded L’eau Est La Vie, a camp for resisters, and was leading activities as apparently subversive as performances of Crawfish: The Musical at construction sites. Those arrested said they often weren’t clear why they were arrested or by what agency. Some say they were dragged from the water—which is a public right-of-way—onto construction sites, then charged with trespassing. Some landowners had given permission for resisters to be on their land. Ironically, several had never sold their land to Energy Transfer Partners for the pipeline, but construction crews marched forth anyway, digging trenches and burying pipes.
After arrests, at least one police department posted photos of the protestors on Facebook and other social media, making them ready targets for single-minded trolls who threatened their lives, their loved ones, and their homes, among other things. When they targeted Cherri, she received threats that her daughters would be raped and that friends staying in her home would be killed in her front yard.
This intolerance and speech squashing is true all over America. Twenty-one states have adopted or considered legislation to worsen penalties for those who protest “critical”—as in “fossil fuel”—infrastructure. Only five states have rejected such proposals. The Trump administration has proffered similar federal legislation that makes protesting, or “inhibiting” or “disrupting,” infrastructure, or attempting to inhibit or disrupt infrastructure, a felony punishable by twenty years in prison. Louisiana was among the states to adopt such legislation.
Elly Page, a legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, says the legislation seems intended to have a chilling effect on pipeline protests. Many of the bills significantly heighten penalties for conduct such as trespass onto pipeline property or interference with pipeline construction. The penalties are in some cases draconian, she says—under North Dakota’s “critical infrastructure” law, for instance, interfering with pipeline construction is a Class C felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Hypothetically this could capture, for instance, a protest that blocked an access road to a construction site, Page notes. And almost all the proposed and enacted laws penalize not only individual conduct but also the people and organizations that support that conduct. “In effect, these laws dramatically raise the stakes for individuals involved in protest activity,” Page says. “People who want to exercise their First Amendment rights now have to fear being caught up in these overbroad and vague laws with extreme penalties, and they may decide that it’s not worth the risk.”
Cherri summarizes the status such legislation gives to corporations: “It’s not a felony for me to go to the White House and to protest there. So what they’re doing is they’re even openly, by law, even putting these oil companies above the entire United States of America in the amount of protections that they have,” she says. Criminalizing the opposition makes it easier to throw its members—and its message—in jail, shut them up. “People will only let that go down if there’s a criminal element there and if the police are able to come out and say, ‘Oh yes, those are criminals.’ Then nine times out of ten, the public, in their ignorance and tomfoolery, will just sit back and say, ‘Oh, okay. Well then they probably deserve that.’”
In summary, she says, “You don’t have the right to tell an oil company no in 2018.”
———
On the ride back from the swamp, Jayden sacks out. She puts her headphones on and stares out the window until she is lying down and if not sleeping, close. It was an early morning, and owing to the day’s jelly beans, a sugar crash is probably imminent. Jayden strikes me as being this way: two speeds. When she is into a thing, she is animated and talks fast. But when she’s not, she’s quiet. Watching and thoughtful. She listens to music, probably K-pop, and watches the live oaks and the dry lawns go by, maybe one ear open while Cherri and I talk up front.
Two days earlier I’d driven these roads outside Rayne in search of where the land meets the sea, south of Jayden’s hometown and into the White Lake Wetlands, trying to understand the rising waters by finding the edge of the land. That’s what I’m used to, after all: an edge of the land. A place that ends in beach or rock or sometimes both. A habitat between civilization and water. A boardwalk, a cityscape. But that doesn’t exist here.
Instead I drove through land so flat it seemed to bend the curve of the horizon upward. Past the signs for po’boys and zydeco dance and the tractors for sale and the sugarcane fields. Past the billboard with the towering cutout of a lawyer in a suit, promising payouts for oil rig accidents. I drove until the dragonflies got so big I flinched when they neared the windshield.
Along the way, I learned things. Like how the storm clouds gather at noon and sometimes issue only hollow threats but other times break open so a massive amount of water falls out. And how afterward there are a few minutes of reprieve, but otherwise the air is unceasingly sticky hot. And how people jaywalk as if there’s no time to spare before melting. And drivers speed madly down seven lanes, sequestered in their air-conditioning until they can park and dash to the other air-conditioning. Grocery store, pharmacy. Many of these places smell submerged, as if they’ve been dredged out of a fish tank.
I drove until the horizon further inverted itself and fuzzy little trees dotted the line between land and sky. I drove until the Sultans play Creole and the buildings started to rise up on stilts. To where irrigation ditches were full and there was moss growing inside and dikes were required and cattle were nosing around in between. Past a cemetery where people get buried above the ground, and flagpoles, too, along the way. But I never reached the end. Never a rocky outcrop or that patch of sand. Just a steady negotiation between land and water until the water started to lap at the sides of the road.
East of the wetlands, there were turnouts now and then, short dirt roads on levees between water and farms, the occasional boat launch into a canal. One after another, these roads were full of garbage. Gatorade bottles and plastic bags. Glass and cans rolling on the ground. No one to come and clean them, it seemed. Which speaks to how these wilds are held. Farm gate, cow, trash pile, crop. Utility poles riding off into the distance. All the while the radio told a story about a haggard man come into church, the devil inside him, until Jesus commanded and the demon threw the man away. It all went on long enough that the landscape started to blur into American flags, mythic evil, and garbage. Soon the birds and the bugs came to take it all. Ibis and cormorants, vireos and wrens, the ever-larger dragonflies riding on the wind.
Eventually I reached a place called Pecan Island, found a trailer on pilings, then a house on 10 feet of stilt. There was a gas facility near where it all just sank into the sea. Kinetica’s barge terminal for liquefied natural gas. A few miles west, a preserve named for the Rockefellers.
Cherri asks me about the case. If I know what will change now that Kavanaugh is about to be appointed to the Supreme Court. If I think a conservative court will affect Juliana and its trial date in three weeks. This is a question a lot of people are asking lately, but I don’t know the answer to it. No one really does. Kavanaugh has just undergone the first days of his confirmation hearings, and Cherri says the politics of his confirmation make her mad, that it is especially intolerable to watch mothers of daughters reflexively defend him just because he was picked by a red president. Now another thing to protect with all the rest: her daughters’ sense of being girls.
We pass a campaign sign for Brian Douglas Theriot, who is running for sheriff. Cherri says there are only two things you need three names for: being a serial killer and running for office in south Louisiana.
———
The route back takes us to the L’eau Est La Vie camp, where it is immediately clear the effect that all this downward pressure from industry has on the people resisting it. And how Jayden finds a home as a lone teen oppositionist.
On this patch of land in the Cajun prairie, only a row of tents, two metal-roofed structures, and an inflatable swimming pool seem to fend off the heat. Cherri pulls the car into a muddy parking lot past a steel gate. The pipeline was supposed to go through this land, but it won’t now. Rather than fight the camp, Energy Transfer Partners went around. By the gate, I see a handmade catapult on a wooden frame, built from rubber cords and what looks like a hefty colander, used for launching projectiles amid hostilities with construction workers.
People are cautious when I turn up, trailing Cherri and Jayden along a muddy path to the larger metal-roofed hangar. Roughly a dozen people are around, one making a meal at a camp kitchen, some painting banners, and others sitting in a circle of chairs, the conversation stalled in the chill I seem to have brought. I don’t get the stink eye, but there are sideways looks and a lot of quiet. I can read the collective thought—reporter in the house—and it is clear how nervous I am making them. High up on a wall is a list of rules that define the social order, a list that also makes obvious how much the usual civic order is not welcome here. No calling the police, for example. No unauthorized guests or photos. No saying who else is here. There are details of a tribunal for hearing crime reports, instructions for a security system that amounts to a patrol, and rules for interacting with the press.
Jayden finds a chair and settles in. This is our second visit of the day, and earlier she’d grabbed a plate of eggs and a cup of coffee with flavored milk and whipped cream. Now, she chats easily with the folks in the camp, so it’s clear that she fits in, knows some of the people here. But most of the conversation is adult conversation to which Jayden is privy and listens quietly, Jayden-style. She crosses her legs and leans back, denim and T-shirt in the sticky sun, seemingly indifferent to the heat.
The group is a collection of shaved heads and curly hair, funny T-shirts and phone fiddling, cutoffs and busy dresses, fitness and wild beards. Only two decide they are comfortable enough to tell me their names. Some go by alt names, like the guy with the funny T-shirt who gives me the name of an animal in place of his own. Their conversation tells me they are hobbled for cash, only rarely find a bed, and that separate from their ongoing efforts to resist fossil fuels, they are locked in a second battle with the mosquitos that overtake them in the night.
The room around us is divided into quadrants, and we are in one of them in a circle composed of mostly camping chairs. The next is a kitchen sporting two huge burners on propane tanks, a hotplate, a coffee pot, a mini fridge, plus a dish station with three tubs. The third is just stuff. The fourth includes tents where people sleep in mosquito nets and a speaker that’s been playing someone’s playlist, first Amy Winehouse, then Paula Fuga.
A guy with curly hair has a question: Does anyone have PayPal or Venmo? He wants to know whether anyone has a way to accept electronic money, if they feel comfortable putting themselves on the grid in that way. He says a guy he knows wants to rent him a hotel room, but he doesn’t want to deal with the electronic side of that. There are suggestions and debate. Then Curly Hair says his girlfriend is upset about the vagaries of his schedule. He says he has a three-day window during which he can account for himself. And that he doesn’t want to have to plan farther ahead than that. He might need to move, to beat feet from this camp or another, so it doesn’t make sense for him to commit to more. A woman says she would have a problem with that if she were the girlfriend. She wants to know whether this is about the scheduling or the commitment. Curly Hair is momentarily stumped.
Outside the door—one that rolls up like a garage door—is a rain barrel with a tray of seedlings on it. Behind that is a wooden house tucked into the prairie like a photograph I will never take—no photos allowed.
A small group is painting a banner. I pick up on the details of an upcoming action but no one wants to provide me with the broad strokes. Above it all are banners with frogs and turtles that work as a kind of radical decor. When I ask what the camp is for, what the campers do there, people shake their heads or refer me to Cherri.
In the lawsuit’s early days, it was mostly Big Oil that stood in the way of Juliana v. United States, stood in the way of an American plan to reduce global warming, much like it stands in the way of these resisters now. When the case was filed in 2015 and Obama held the White House, he had already given the State of the Union Address in which he called climate change “the greatest threat to future generations” and signaled his intent to sign the Paris Accord.
By then, Obama had spent $92 billion in stimulus money seeding an alternative fuel industry in America. So the fossil fuel industry did not test whether the Obama administration would defend the nation against the Juliana plaintiffs. Obama was a president who had opened vast public lands to windmills and solar panels, set goals for renewable energy development and alternative fuel standards for cars. He’d also protected huge swaths of ocean in part for carbon sequestration, was slashing carbon emissions from power plants, and in doing so, squeezing coal hard. Though Obama also supported fossil fuels, spurring massive upticks in domestic oil and gas production, industry leaders did not wait to see whether Obama’s Department of Justice would defend it against the Juliana twenty-one.
Under Obama, the Department of Justice did defend against Juliana, and with many of the same legal roadblocks later deployed by the Trump administration—filing motions to dismiss it on the same constitutional grounds that the Trump administration would also pursue. But with Obama at the helm of the nation, it was the fossil fuel industry that fought the Juliana case hardest, taking aim like a bull at a toreador. Beginning in 2015, fossil fuel corporations sought to become defendants in the case and did. Then they filed brief after brief challenging the merits of the litigation. For the next two years plus, industry attorneys waged a furious paper war. It was straight out of the Big Oil playbook. Where they could not outlitigate, they could outspend, harass, wear down. The American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers led the charge with the American Petroleum Institute, representing the biggest of them: Citgo, Chevron, Phillips, and ExxonMobil, to name a few, the latter having spent heavily—along with the Koch brothers—on seeding climate-change denial, not to mention having ties to nine out of ten of the most prolific authors casting doubt on climate change.
The list of fossil fuel companies that stepped out to battle Juliana reads like an S&P industry index. Led by their trade groups, they sought pretrial appeals, attempting to get the case dismissed, and filed objections to the production of documents and to shield former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who at the time was serving as secretary of state, from being deposed. Then, when Trump assumed office, they stopped. There was a question about whether the companies would have to produce documents if they stayed in the case. And Trump’s cabinet represented them well enough without the added expense of their own attorneys. Trump soon proved as much by nominating a former BP attorney to head his administration’s defense of environmental matters, including the Juliana case. With Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke, and Mike Pompeo at the helm of environmental policy, and their deputies, too, the fossil fuel industry was enjoying a nepotistic heyday it had not had since the golden Bush years. Many of these gains included supplanting departmental deputies with industry lobbyists. Seemingly overnight, they slipped under the door of the EPA and the Department of the Interior too. David Bernhardt. Frank Fannon. Mike Catanzaro. Sean Cunningham. Too many to list. All were disciples of the same corporate complex that had vigorously battled Juliana when the case was first brought.
It was fitting in a way, then, that Trump’s ascension to the White House coincided with a universal withdrawal from the Juliana case on the part of the fossil fuel industry. ExxonMobil was, after all, among the last vestiges of the old Standard Oil Company. In other words, the last vestiges of Rockefeller money. Who better to defend a Rockefeller than a Trump? Even in the days when the Rockefellers had started embracing the climate cause, it was a moment among many to illustrate that the rich were still in charge. And to demonstrate who many of them were: oil barons and natural gas tycoons.
I take a walk to a porta-potty and leave the boots I borrowed in the other hangar on the way. It’s a big enough space for a skiff to fill half of it. On the other side is an inflatable pool, empty today, and behind it a clothesline full of odds and ends of fabric and clothes.
I don’t know what happens in this camp. I don’t know whether any of the direct action against the oil and gas industry is illegal. But after I leave, I never hear any news from Louisiana that makes me think so. What I see instead are mostly innocent things like banners, and the strongest claim that can be made about any of it later is the claim of trespassing and work slowdowns because of things like Crawfish: The Musical. Which makes it that much clearer that in this environment, where one’s biggest subversion is to dress like a crustacean and dance in front of a bunch of bulldozers, even an act as benign as a theatrical protest—one that would fly easily and regularly in a place like Eugene, Oregon—feels dangerous enough that the performers take care not to speak one another’s names, and hide out for the time it takes to prepare for such a thing.
For all the opposition to the opposition, by the time this pipeline is complete, there will never have been destruction of property here, nothing more unsavory than a few projectiles between camps and some extended Facebook Live events starring people costumed as swamp creatures, their faces masked with bandanas. For that little bit of speech to inspire this kind of cloistering, of fear, is a fright all by itself.
An eager puppy greets me, and somehow Jayden and I end up standing in the mud of the parking lot, talking about boys and friends. Her new best friend is Miko, another plaintiff in the case, and in this moment like the rest of the day when she’s talked about her co-plaintiffs, she runs through reasons why each is special and unique. Many are good speakers, she says, which she envies because she often lapses into slang and has to focus on not swearing. With these plaintiffs, though, Jayden, like Alex, describes a comfort and a peace she doesn’t feel with many other people. She tells me about a camping retreat in Oregon some months back, a deeply bonding experience to prep the plaintiffs for trial. They saw a meteor shower from the Oregon wilderness, something she can’t see from the light-polluted Rayne sky.
“It was so cool,” Jayden says. “You can see the ring of the galaxy above us and there’s so many stars.” She is looking forward to spending time in Oregon for the trial in three weeks, for the trial itself and for the opportunity to see such a sky. She’s not sure what kind of science she wants to study at college, but she is thinking about astrophysics. And art too.
When she met the other Juliana plaintiffs for the first time, Jayden says, “I was a really, really shy kid. . . . I was so scared. I was just extremely scared. But now I’m way more confident in myself. Which is really good. I’m not just more confident in myself but also in the work I did. At the time I thought, ‘What if the other plaintiffs don’t like me?’” All that self-doubt, that has changed.
Jayden believes in the lawsuit, but there is more in it for her. She finds a sense of community in it, and in knowing there are other young people like her, people who want the world to change. To see herself move from that shy girl who couldn’t talk, the one who used to be heckled in school, to the one who knows she belongs, who handled her deposition like a pro, who is proud of herself and of her activism and lives with purpose and a sense of belonging—it is its own return, immeasurable.
Lately it feels like power to stand up. Against Big Oil and against that flood that she hates so much. For her damaged room, her gone bed, her brother’s toys, and her sister made sick by it all. For the camp. For the people who stand with her.